I remeber a study I read in college sociology. Sociologists took a grammar school class and separated them into two random groups. THey then put red stickers on the shirts of one group and green on the shirts of the other. Byt the end of the day the reds hated the greens and the greens hated the reds.
Humans have some built in quality that makes them dislike others who are of a different group. I believe that it is our natural tribal tendency which is a result of scarcity of resources.
Like other vestiges of our past, it can be overcome through societal values, mores and pressures. However, I truly believe that were we to suffer a depression or were society to go through some great stress (such as mass immigration, war, etc.) racism could easily become much worse.
The reference to the red shirt/green shirt experience was interesting because I remember reading an article many, many years ago about a teacher who did a similar experiment with her classroom. She separated the students into brown eyed and not brown eyed groups, and pronounced the brown eyed students as the superior ones. I liked that she used the eye color - she wanted to emphasize that people cannot control what color eyes they are born with, just as they can’t control the color of their skin. I think the article I read was in the Reader’s Digest, I don’t know what the original source was.
“fact: there is no racism on the internet, we are all faceless here.”
fact? I don’t think so. More like a dream…a nice thought…an illusion. Heck, read some of the threads on this board - you will see that racism is indedd alive and kicking on the internet. If you still doubt it, I’ll post some really disturbing URLs for you.
