What’s Learned Is NOT Being Racist.
It’s been said countless times before; the secret to good writing is ruthless editing. Often, there’ll be a thousand different tangents I want to explore in an article, some of which I desperately want to include, but I force myself to pare it all down until only the most worthwhile ideas remain.
If an idea doesn’t add to the piece, it won’t make it through the editing process. But if there’s something I really can’t bear to cut, I’ll sneak in a link.
In my article, The Unspoken Evils of Whiteness, I snuck in a line about “the invention of racism”, and linked to this article that explores how the concept of black and white “races” came to be. Even though it wasn’t the main topic, I figured the more people who know that unlike some other forms of bias, racism is an invention whose purpose was to justify slavery, the better.
Will didn’t feel like a history lesson:
Will:
Racism isn’t invented. Humans have in-group preference and out-group hostility. Even bonobo chimps have it. It’s a natural human survival instinct, quite possibly due to fear of disease, and it’s very well-documented. What’s learned is NOT being racist. Which kind of puts things into perspective.
Steve QJ:
Humans have in-group preference and out-group hostility.
Yes, this is true. And this isn't racism. I'll say what I said to the two other people who contested this claim, read the link that accompanies the line. I put it there for a reason. Racism was consciously invented as a way to justify keeping slaves.
Bias, or ingroup preference as you say, is a completely natural part of being a human being. We have it for height and left-handedness and nationality and hair colour and all kinds of things that don't (usually) lead to hatred and certainly not legalised oppression of that group.
To take the example of left-handedness, there was a time when being left-handed carried a significant stigma which today it doesn't. People were killed for being left-handed! But we grew out of it. To pretend that we can't by equating us with primates is bizarre.
We are not chimps (at least most of us aren't). What separates us from animals is the ability to use our higher order thinking to examine our behaviour. Bias? Sure, we'll never completely eliminate that, nor do we need to. But racism? Bigotry and hatred? No. These are learned. Ask any three year old if they hate black people or Jews or foreigners
Will:
These are learned. Ask any three year old if they hate black people or Jews or foreigners
Your evidence doesn’t prove your claim. Ask most three year olds whether they think governments should prioritize redistribution and they won’t know how to answer, but it has been fairly thoroughly proven that your personality traits condition your voting preference, i.e. open people tend to vote left, conscientious people tend to vote right, and those traits are mostly innate.
In the same vein, open people tend to be more accepting of the out-group, while more disgust-prone people tend to fear the out-group. All you have to do is leave that fear unchecked and it will turn into hatred. That’s not learned. As you said, we’re not chimps, and the only reason we’re not is because we communicate. That means LEARNING that the out-group aren’t scary, to be mistrusted, to be feared and hated.
Hatred is a perfectly natural human emotion in reaction to fear. The fear is natural, so the hatred is natural too. I know that goes against socialist ideology, but it doesn’t go against the evidence.
I want to stress that I’m not criticizing the main argument you’re making here. It simply believe it is important to correctly identify a problem in order to fix it. We all agree that racism needs fixing, so let’s make sure we’re not chasing a red herring.
Steve QJ:
Ask most three year olds whether they think governments should prioritize redistribution and they won’t know how to answer,
No, they have to learn this too 😄. But of course I agree that there are innate qualities that guide behaviour. I do see the argument you're making. The reason I think you're wrong is that I think you're mistaking what is for what inevitably must be.
There was a time you'd have thought it was inevitable that we'd hate left-handed people and would have to learn not to. There was a time you'd have thought it was inevitable that we'd hate gay people or Jews or witches or whoever it is, and we'd have to learn not to.
But having grown up in a society that's already (mostly) freed itself from these bigotries, we can see that they're not innate at all. We'd have to go about re-learning them if we wanted to consider them natural.
I see no reason at all to believe that racism (and all bigotry) isn't the same. And in fact, the link in the article (and many other historical sources) pinpoints the exact time when this idea about race (by which we really mean skin colour, which is itself a genetically nonsensical way of classifying humans) came into being and how people were more likely to classify themselves before it.
Certainly the idea that one "race" is superior/inferior to another is learned. And not even learned in the classical sense. Scientific evidence runs completely counter to this idea.
We've grown up in a society where racial bigotry still hasn't been unlearned. So it seems natural or inevitable to some. Some, as I point out in the article, even subconsciously support racist ideas when they're the target of them. But this is a sign of our almost limitless capacity to be confused. Not of our innate nature.
Will:
Certainly the idea that one "race" is superior/inferior to another is learned.
This is of course true. It’s a classic case of rationalization of innate bias. It is also not the point of contention here.
Your statement that we as a society have “moved on” from racism is true, but it actually argues against your idea that hatred is learned. We teach our children to get over their innate biases. Social norms lead us to teach our children to trust, not to fear, and not to hate. It is the LACK of fear and hatred that is learned, not the reverse, and it is the failure (whether intentional or otherwise) to do so which leads to racist behaviours which, like you said with the superiority concept, are rationalized after the fact into “opinions”.
Steve QJ:
Your statement that we as a society have “moved on” from racism is true, but it actually argues against your idea that hatred is learned.
Haha, it might, but I said that racism hasn't been unlearned by our society. It's possible it seems that society has moved on to you, but ask any black person if racism still exists and they'll assure you that it does (I think we also need to be clear about the difference between innate bias and racism here, you seem to be conflating the two).
It's not, for the most part, parents teaching their children not to be racist (after all, why would a racist parent even want to do this?). It's children being given the opportunity to see through the fear and ignorance of their parents, because they're growing up in a more diverse society.
90% of bigotry is simple ignorance and the desire for the familiar not to change. But children born into that change aren't threatened by it. Ipso facto, they're less bigoted.
Will:
Society has moved on in that it is (in most places, and certainly nationally) not socially acceptable to be racist. That is not to say that racism doesn’t exist, but if eliminating racism is your goal, good luck, it’s never as gonna happen unless you start killing racists.
I’m not conflating the two: racism is the rationalization of innate bias. It’s what happens when you allow innate bias to flourish as opposed to dealing with it.
Bigotry isn’t ignorance, although it is based in ignorance. It is ignorance which has lead to fear (generally in people who are disgust-prone) which has been rationalized and become a part of someone’s personality. You are correct that children who grow up in more diverse times tend to be less hateful, but it isn’t because of some high-mindedness on their part: it is because they do not fear what they know.Innate bias can either be dealt with or allowed to fester. In demographically homogenous areas, especially in rural communities where distrust of outsiders is strong (often because the sense of community is strong), it is allowed to fester.
Saying racism is natural isn’t the same as saying it’s ok. Eating meat raw and shitting out of trees is also natural. Solving the problem starts with identifying it. I would argue that today’s radical left has drastically misidentified the problem and will only make it worse with their proposed solutions. I pick out the left because they’re the ones claiming they want to help AND that theirs is the only solution.Anyway, getting off topic there. The tldr version of my view is racism is neither invented nor learned, it is the natural conclusion of unchallenged innate bias. And we should work hard to challenge that bias wherever we can to minimize racism.
What we shouldn’t do (which I believe is where we agree) is tell white people they’re evil because they’re white, or that “whiteness” or “white privilege” or “white fragility” deserve the word “white” in there, just as “black gangs” and “black criminals” don’t deserve the word black.
Steve QJ:
if eliminating racism is your goal, good luck, it’s never as gonna happen unless you start killing racists.
Again, at one point, the same thing would have been said about witch trials and gay marriage and tying left-handed people's dominant hand behind their backs. Maybe neither of us will be alive to see who's right. But even if I'm wrong, I'd rather be trying to do something about it that throwing up my hands and asserting, despite all evidence to the contrary, that it's “never gonna happen”.
Most of the rest of this is arguing with things I haven't said. Or at least is needlessly pedantic readings of what I wrote.
Yes, bigotry is 90% based on ignorance. It's not literally equivalent to ignorance. Did you really think I was saying there's no difference??
Yes, the "radical left" 🙄 is doing a terrible job of identifying and fixing the problem. We would probably agree substantially on the problems with identity pollitics.
And I didn't say that saying racism is natural is saying it's okay. I'm just saying it isn't natural. I've given you numerous examples of why I think that. But if you take the attitude of "there's nothing that can be done about racism," especially when history shows very clearly that there is , you give yourself permission to do nothing.
You and I do agree that we shouldn't tell white people that they're evil because they're white. I mean, I just wrote an article saying so. But hey, maybe it's just a "natural consequence of innate biases" (including the white people who have learned to...uh, I mean who innately say these things about themselves). Maybe there's nothing that can ever be done about it and I should stop bothering to try. Or maybe you're more able to see the need for proactive efforts to change people's thinking when the flaws in that thinking affect you.
I speak to people like Will on a fairly regular basis. They love it when I confront racism against white people, but will insist it’s waste of time to confront racism against any other group. And what people like him don’t realise is that these are the same thing.
The same stupidity that allows some black people to hate white people for the colour of their skin, allows some white people to hate black people for the colour of theirs.
The same distrust and resentment that past generations of white people fomented in black people with their cruelty and indifference, leads some of the current generation of black people to say white people are “evil”.
The same violence that Dylan Roof committed against black churchgoers inspired Emanuel Samson to murder white churchgoers. On and on.
You can’t fix only one half of racism. You can’t focus only on the bits that affect you and ignore everything else. You have to ruthlessly edit every last selfish, lazy, ignorant idea. And in the case of racism, you’re not even allowed to sneak in a link.
I find truth and some confusion in both sides of this exchange.
1. I do think that a lot of what is ascribed to "racism" today, but certainly not all, is better described as either familiarity bias, or as in-group bias, so it's valuable to make that distinction if one wishes to understand rather than just to "reinforce the narrative" (which I consider the Prime Directive of neo-progressivism).
2. The distinctions held to be salient in defining an in-group vs out-group vary between cultures as well as between eras. The proclivity may be innate, but the specifics of what factors determine the group boundaries evolve.
3. Skin color and various other visible features have likely been used countless times in determining "who is like us who is not" (by different sides), over the course of history and pre-history. This should not be any surprise - ANY highly visible signal is likely to be adopted at one time or another, even ones that are cultural and not innate. There is evidence, for example, that it factored into Roman attitudes.
4. The modern conception of 4 (or 5) vaguely continental "races", and the creation of a hierarchy, was indeed one of those examples; and it was used to rationalize heirarchical societal arrangements. This was not the invention of a new fundamental concept, just one of many in-group/out-group distinctions being weaponized by an ideology. Put another way, it was an invented instantiation of a much broader, universal proclivity.
As another example, as far as I know, all cultures have incest taboos. However, which relationships are taboo varies by cultures, and a powerful group within a culture could change the accepted understanding of which cases are considered taboo. That's not inventing a new dynamic, it's harnessing an existing dynamic with edited trigger criteria.
5. So yes, I'm suggesting that the invention of race was intended to be a new instance of long standing in-group/out-group dynamics. Without in/out bias, that racialized division would not have worked (some other species?) Other cultures might use religion or hair styles. One of the "moral foundations" handy for instantiating this bias is "disgust", as your correspondent suggests.
6. It's unlikely that humans will ever fully eliminate in-group bias; it had enough evolutionary payoff to likely be genetically encoded. But human culture can influence when it comes into play - both how often and on what basis it occurs. What are the limits of our ability to do that? I'm not sure yet.
7. One of the historic trends, with advances and backtracking, has been towards ideologies stressing a larger "us". That is, increasing our affective domains to include more people who were formerly conceived of as "unlike us". We likely started with bands of 50-100 people, expanding to larger tribes, city-states, fiefdoms, ethnic groups, nations and empires, multi-national ensembles, and by the 20th century beginning to move towards planetary identification including our whole species. This shift in the us/them boundary accounts for many of the ways in which we have had some success in reducing the in-group preference bias - perceiving a larger "us" with whom we can have relatively more empathy and less prejudice.
8. The neo-progressive fixation on identity politics and culture is corroding the 'bigger us' perspective, instead substituting tribes and tribal conflict as the core vehicle by which to achieve a better society. Identity politics divides us into warring tribes motivated largely by trying to optimise the outcomes for the tribes on our side, in a moral struggle for power, within the framing of a conceptual zero-sum game. In this tribalized struggle, the strategy of the "oppressed" tribes is to paralyze "oppressor" tribes from perceiving their self interest through guilt, so that the unrestrained self interest of "our side" can prevail, whether they have the numbers or power to do so if the gloves really all came off. That is, "we don't have any empathy for you oppressors or respect for any of your legitimate needs - but it's obligatory that you defer to our perspective and act caringly towards us (on our terms)".
I do not see that strategy ending well. The paralysis is only partial (concerntraed among neo-progressives, with lesser amounts among liberals and still less among concervatives), and even there the paralysis can be shaken if things get bad enough.
To some limited degree that's happening now, as people in the most liberal regions of Virginia get upset when neo-progressives start coming for their kids. It's on thing to confess your white privilege on Medium or in the workplace, and another to see your kids self-image and worldview being sabotaged.
I much prefer to return to expanding the "us" and emphasizing the common values and humanity which incentivize us to seek compromise and connection over warfare. Of course there are problems which need to be given more emphasis, and there will still be conflicts of ideas and perceived self interest, but if the core ideology is about the bigger us, then we don't need to hate each other as much.
Today, the largest tribal animosity is between conservatives and liberals, each of whom routinely demonizes the other, and turns "I disagree" into "I despise". The portion of the population who would be upset if their kid married somebody of the other party now exceeds the number who would be upset about race.
The escalating reliance upon an us/them tribal division in race relations has to be seen in the larger context of this escalating polarization - it helps fuel the latter, but the latter also reframes the racial divide in ways that make any compromise or win/win steps (much less outcomes) less feasible. Too many people on both sides feel that you can't compromise with the devil and the other half the country is demonic.
From this perspective, I find partial agreement with each of you - and I think part of it may be more like each seeing one facet of the whole - and unfortunately feeling somewhat as if you have to discount the facet that the other is seeing.
Still, I feel there is some mutual respect in your exchange, and it's refreshing to see people actually seeking a nuanced truth - in this case through bouncing arguments off another mind, trying to make your best case (rather than play framing and definition gains in seeking the moral high ground from which to discredit your opponent without engaging with their ideas). Shocking! Given human nature, neither is likely to concede this issue, but either or both of you may nevertheless be influenced by the ideas of the other, in ways that could manifest in a completely different discussion a year from now. As a bystander, I learn from each of your perspectives. And I've offered my own reflections to the mix, along with other readers. Thank you.
Year ago, I asked a man why he was so opposed to school integration. He said if you let the children be together when they are young, they'll think they are the same and like each other. He was an honest racist. They must be "taught" because racism isn't the default state of small children. He knew that quite well.