Is racism natural? Are we born racist?

[Jamie in Chile]

This may be a little controversial, but I want to see what some of you think about whether racism is natural.

This is certainly not the conventional viewpoint. People tend to believe that most people are not racist at all, and that a few people are racist, and that they are terrible, and should be ostracised. I suspect this is because we want to believe that "natural" is "good" and the idea that people might be fundamentally racist is too bad to contemplate. Since we don't want to believe it, we don't believe it. Popular comments like "children just don't grow up racist" imply that we start off totally un-racist, and only the exposure to other racists can mean people themselves become racist. But if you think about it, this attitude is promoted by facebook memes and tweets and offhand comments; nothing of any real substance ever backs any of it up.

Many vegans and ethical vegetarians have already managed to reject the nature = good belief, so maybe you have a better chance of approaching this with an open mind.

There is a logical reason why in evolution we might be born racist, as a defence mechanism. If a person of different skin tone appears next to you it may indicate danger in the sense of a neighbouring tribe (for this to be true, we must assume that early people were warlike savages rather than friendly). Try to imagine how you would feel if late at night you were walking down the street and suddenly a person with green skin appeared out of the gloom. Can you honestly say you would react exactly the same as if the person were the same ethnicity as you, or a well known ethnicity. Or might you have just a slightly more fearful reaction, at least for a split second? Different is scary.

There is also support for the idea that racism is natural in scientific studies. This article http://nationalpost.com/news/world/...rong-research-shows-babies-are-totally-racist explains tests that showed that older babies and younger children and more drawn to people of the same ethnicity, even at a young age when cultural factors (bias from family and society) probably cannot be influencing them. In fact a similar study from Birgitte Vitttrup, documented in the book Nurtureshock explicitly controlled for this (or tried to) by asking children what they thought about white and black people and what their parents thought, and finding children expressing racist opinions that their parents didn't have, or stating that they didn't know their parents opinions. Other studies that put children of different ethnicities together at a very young age found the children played more with children of the same ethnicity. I have found a smaller number of studies which drew opposite conclusions, but they seemed less convincing to me.

One of the reasons that it's popular to believe that children are born without racism may be that people want to believe this because then parents can avoid awkward conversations with their kids. The important point is that if I'm right, children are being brought up with no racial related education, when they might really benefit from it. Instead of the conventional wisdom being true - i.e. that a tiny minority of people are racist and everyone else not at all - it may be closer to the truth to say that most people are to a greater or lesser extent at least slightly racist (at least to start with) and there is actually a continuum from not racist at all to very racist.

 

[Mischief]

This may be a little controversial, but I want to see what some of you think about whether racism is natural.

This is certainly not the conventional viewpoint. People tend to believe that most people are not racist at all, and that a few people are racist, and that they are terrible, and should be ostracised. I suspect this is because we want to believe that "natural" is "good" and the idea that people might be fundamentally racist is too bad to contemplate. Since we don't want to believe it, we don't believe it. Popular comments like "children just don't grow up racist" imply that we start off totally un-racist, and only the exposure to other racists can mean people themselves become racist. But if you think about it, this attitude is promoted by facebook memes and tweets and offhand comments; nothing of any real substance ever backs any of it up.

Many vegans and ethical vegetarians have already managed to reject the nature = good belief, so maybe you have a better chance of approaching this with an open mind.

There is a logical reason why in evolution we might be born racist, as a defence mechanism. If a person of different skin tone appears next to you it may indicate danger in the sense of a neighbouring tribe (for this to be true, we must assume that early people were warlike savages rather than friendly). Try to imagine how you would feel if late at night you were walking down the street and suddenly a person with green skin appeared out of the gloom. Can you honestly say you would react exactly the same as if the person were the same ethnicity as you, or a well known ethnicity. Or might you have just a slightly more fearful reaction, at least for a split second? Different is scary.

There is also support for the idea that racism is natural in scientific studies. This article http://nationalpost.com/news/world/...rong-research-shows-babies-are-totally-racist explains tests that showed that older babies and younger children and more drawn to people of the same ethnicity, even at a young age when cultural factors (bias from family and society) probably cannot be influencing them. In fact a similar study from Birgitte Vitttrup, documented in the book Nurtureshock explicitly controlled for this (or tried to) by asking children what they thought about white and black people and what their parents thought, and finding children expressing racist opinions that their parents didn't have, or stating that they didn't know their parents opinions. Other studies that put children of different ethnicities together at a very young age found the children played more with children of the same ethnicity. I have found a smaller number of studies which drew opposite conclusions, but they seemed less convincing to me.

One of the reasons that it's popular to believe that children are born without racism may be that people want to believe this because then parents can avoid awkward conversations with their kids. The important point is that if I'm right, children are being brought up with no racial related education, when they might really benefit from it. Instead of the conventional wisdom being true - i.e. that a tiny minority of people are racist and everyone else not at all - it may be closer to the truth to say that most people are to a greater or lesser extent at least slightly racist (at least to start with) and there is actually a continuum from not racist at all to very racist.

I think that, on the whole, humans tend to be most comfortable with people who look/act/think like themselves, and are often afraid and therefore hate those whom we consider alien to us. In this, we are like much of the rest of the animal world.

I' ve never agreed with the statement that children have to be taught to be racist. I think that humans have much more of a flock/herd mentality than we like to think. There's a strong urge in humans to create a hierarchy (pecking order) within any group, and to denigrate others in order to feel better about ourselves. When one pecking order collapses, another one takes its place. The tribalism in eastern Europe that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union is a prime example of this, as is the sectarian violence that followed the removal of Saddam Hussein.

However, we happen to have big brains that, among other things, let us create a concept of right and wrong and govern our actions accordingly, so while it's instructional to try to understand the baser tendencies of the human psyche, those baser tendencies, however "natural", don't excuse our actions.

 

[Second Summer]

There is a logical reason why in evolution we might be born racist, as a defence mechanism. If a person of different skin tone appears next to you it may indicate danger in the sense of a neighbouring tribe (for this to be true, we must assume that early people were warlike savages rather than friendly). Try to imagine how you would feel if late at night you were walking down the street and suddenly a person with green skin appeared out of the gloom. Can you honestly say you would react exactly the same as if the person were the same ethnicity as you, or a well known ethnicity. Or might you have just a slightly more fearful reaction, at least for a split second? Different is scary.

A well written post, thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. I think I agree with a lot of what you said. Regarding the quoted part above, I wanted to add that evolution may also pull us in a different direction, namely towards cooperation, joining forces, exchanging technologies, and peaceful coexistence with other groups in order for the groups to reap mutual benefits, achieve advances and overcome problems each group couldn't on their own. Historians tend to write about war and conflict, perhaps because it makes better stories, but looking at the world today, we're clearly no longer separate tribes living in camps or villages: Smaller groups have melted together into larger ones, tribes have become peoples and nations, in Europe we even talk about a European identity (championed by the EU), and pan-Africanism and the African Union may become a similar phenomenon in Africa and among people of African descent.

Science is perhaps the field where we see most clearly how much we've benefited from cooperation.

Genetically, it can also be advantageous for a population to not be so homogeneous, as a homogeneous population is more vulnerable to the effect of a single disease which could perhaps wipe out large numbers of people.

 

[Jamie in Chile]

I'm not saying nature (rather than nurture) might be responsible for most or all of racism, but perhaps a part of it. I don't see any evidence or strong argument to say which of the two, nature and nurture, is more important. I'm open minded, although I suspect both have a part to play.

It's also quite possible that the natural racism of young children will naturally fall away quite easily during childhood as most people grow into adults, whether due to exposure to other ethnicities, or just naturally, or as a result of education or experience. However I'd lean towards educating our children about racism and related issues, unless someone could strongly prove otherwise.

A possible explanation of the difference between a nazi/white supremacist and a normal person could be that they both start with a slight instinctive racism at a young age. The normal person quickly loses it for whatever reason, and the (future) nazi is neither smart enough to figure that out for themself, nor educated by anyone else not to do so, and perhaps doesn't have a wide enough exposure to the ethnicity they are later hating on. So that very slight natural racism combines with their other issues, like lack of basic ethics, intelligence, lack of self esteem and becomes somewhere to project the hate they feel. Just being very speculative here. It is just a possibility I'm suggesting. It may not be right.

 

[silva]

In my personal experience it's was my surroundings that were my norm and nature, not some kind of innate feeling of whiteness compared to everyone else. I've seen the same normalcy in other babies/children that were exposed to other races. Seems like it's when you're only around sameness that you develop aversion to differences.
What does your theory say about mixed races?

 

[Andy_T]

OK, I finally find the time to come back to this thread.

Can we really live our lives without being "educated" and "imprinted" by our environment? I highly doubt that!!!

We learn a language, learn to use the toilet, learn to eat with eating implements based on our surroundings (knive/fork or chopsticks, depending on where we are, or just our clean hands), learn to read or write, get taught to pray (or not) to some supreme being, and look left (or right, depending on the country) when crossing a street. Little of what we do or say in a day of our adult life is not influenced by the environment we have been brought up in.

I remember having heard of cases of so-called "wolf children" a famous one of these being Kaspar Hauser, who had reportedly grown up with minimal intervention by the environment, thus claiming to provide a glimpse of a human "as nature intended them to be" - but unless I am mistaken, none of those lived to old age, thus suggesting that people are not really "viable" unless they are socialized.

So, in my opinion, the behavior we display as infants is not necessarily indicative of the behavior we will show as adults.

My personal guess is that a person who grows up in a racist household has a higher tendency to become a racist themselves - but of course there are also cases where people do something that is diametrically opposed to what their parents would do, for a number of reasons (rebellion, realization of error, shame, whatever). I am personally convinced that most racist persons can be taught to be less racist, by example or by compulsion, but quite likely there are also many who are beyond redemption.

IMO society - especially school - has a very important function here, to make sure a "moral baseline" is created in society.

I am pretty sure most people who were alive in 1900 - even the "best" of people - would be considered to be horrible racists nowadays. There has been a lot of criticism of people being devoted to Winston Churchill, who in most people's eyes is a rather very controversial being who did a lot, some of it good, some of it quite bad, and a little less of people pointing out that Gandhi, who, by all accounts, was a rather decent person, also acted quite racist when he was living in South Africa in his youth. Of course, by 1900 standards, they would have been considered "normal" people, today we would try to teach them to behave differently.

Or at least that was my impression and hope, before Mango Mussolini became the latest president...

 

[Skylark]

We have a racist system, and it benefits some of us more than others. By the structural definition of racism, it's reasonable to say that the people who benefit from this system are themselves racist. Yes, even if it wasn't their conscious choice. In fact, all systems of privilege and oppression are designed to look invisible to the people on top. They don't have to choose it. It's just there, it props them up, and their lives stay comparatively easy. Privileged people who start to resist the system aren't heroes; they're decent people.