Jamie in Chile
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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 Obama’s viral tweet is wrong: 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.
MOD EDIT: This post has been copied to a new thread, please continue this discussion there: Is racism natural? Are we born racist?
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 Obama’s viral tweet is wrong: 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.
MOD EDIT: This post has been copied to a new thread, please continue this discussion there: Is racism natural? Are we born racist?
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No words....
