Racism = Ignorance

Great Debates
1

Watching John Cleese on The Human Face last night, the point was made that we (our brains) tend to economize on the available data when looking at new faces. Only “basic” data is acknowledged like color, over all shape, presence (or lack thereof) of hair, etc. Anecdotally, they offer the case of a woman who was raped by a man who’s face she claimed to have “thoroughly studied” while he was raping her (link to story). As a result, Ronald Cotton was wrongly imprisoned for 11 years. Even when the real rapist was placed in a lineup next to Cotton, the victim still identified Cotton beyond the shadow of any doubt. Cotton, it seems, was the victim of the “they all look alike to me” syndrome. This hard-wired tendency to classify strangers’ faces into broad, generic groups seems to me to be the single biggest hurdle in overcoming anybody’s natural tendency to be a racist.

And I mean “racist” in the sense of “so-and-so’s facial structure fits into racial group x”. If this is the manner in which our brains try to collect and organize data, that (to me) seems to be the biggest obstacle in the fight against overcoming racism in the sense of “race x is inferior to race y”. Our hardware (brain, R-complex, etc.) tells us to be racist, and hopefully our software (intellect) prevents us from acting on the impulses of racism.

So to get a better idea of what people really look like, I guess it’s necessary to stare at them. This is a classic no-no that mother always taught. Don’t stare at so-and-so; it’s not nice! But if we don’t stare, our data collection suffers and we fall back on size/shape/color as a crude method of remembering who we were looking at just now.

So can we go back to staring at each other without being offended please or is this still not acceptable? My brain is simply collecting data on what you look like. And if you happen to be in a wheelchair or have an eye patch, is it so bad that our brains find this to be a little more visually interesting and devote more data collection resources to studying you?

We have two high hurdles to overcome. First, we need to be intelligent enough to look past the outward appearance of generic packaging. If we can’t do that, then racism really does equal ignorance. Second, permit others to study us with their senses and set aside our fear of consequences.

Thoughts?

2

The danger of racism is not the “they all look alike to me syndrome”, it’s the negative connotations which people are taught to associate with certain groups, and often the stereotypical, if not negative associations. For example it is not racist, but as the article suggests, human nature, for someone who has not been exposed to Asian people to have trouble sorting out who is who in a group of Asians. It is however ignorant to deem all Asians as inscrutable, short, Chinese, smart, etc.

The difficulty in discerning differences in people problem can lead to the second, but does not necessarily. It when the first problem leads to the second assumption where you get problems