Racism seems to be making a comeback. It has been prominently featured in the recent American election, as well as in recent, scattered episodes of racial intolerance in Britain and continental Europe. We have become familiar with such terms as “White Nationalism” and “White Supremacism”, and of course, old-fashioned 20th century terms like “Neo-fascism” and “Neo-nazism” have never really disappeared. We have witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of a group of American Neo-nazis shouting racist slogans, in German no less, on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Less than a century after the USA saved the world from Nazism, Nazi symbols and ideas were prominently featured in the “capital of the free world”. Apparently, these 21st century epigones of the Third Reich fear that “the white race” is losing control of North America, which they believe they have a right to dominate, and therefore it must engage in racial warfare to protect itself.
It had seemed that the 20th century had finally consigned racism to the proverbial dustbin of history. The end of colonialism, the Civil Rights movement in America, and the end of apartheid in South Africa were hopeful signs that the notion of racial antagonism was disappearing from the human psyche. Apparently, such optimism was premature. At this juncture in history, we are justified in asking ourselves whether racism will ever disappear, and why is it so hard to eradicate.
Racism persists because it comes naturally to us. It is easier for humans to slide into racism than to overcome it. Racism is a cultural phenomenon, but it has deep roots in human biology. Humans are pack animals, and during the approximately 3 million years preceding the common era, conflict between bands of hominins, hominids and eventually, humans was the norm. Judging from the behavior of primitive tribes that survive to this day, racism is a natural attitude among humans. It is not uncommon for such tribes to refer to themselves as “the [only] people”, as opposed to other tribes that are characterized as sub-human and similar to prey animals that can be killed without remorse. Native American tribes throughout the New World were engaged in constant warfare, and vanquished enemies were often humiliated, tortured or sacrificed. Our closest cousins, Pan troglodytes (common chimpanzees) form bands characterized by internal cooperation and brutal conflict with other bands. They even have rudimentary “battles” using sticks and projectiles. Even supposedly civilized modern humans readily form tribal loyalties and deep-seated rivalries around such inconsequential identifiers as sports teams or alma maters. Humans have often killed other humans over sports team loyalties.
We are genetically programmed to form close-knit groups that antagonize other groups, and identify themselves as “different” from competing groups. Skin color is only one of many possible tribal identifiers. Religion, language, geographic origins and other characteristics can easily provide a basis for tribalism. It is natural for humans to identify with a group (linguistic, religious or cultural) who see themselves as competing with other groups for vital resources. In a sense, racism is a limitation inherent in our social nature. We are highly social animals, but our innate capacity for loyalty is limited to relatively small groups, clearly identified by common characteristics and distinct from competing groups. We are ready to accept fellow members of our identity groups, and just as ready to reject “aliens” whom we don’t recognize as part of our tribes.
“Races” as defined by popular culture are not discrete biological entities, but self-identifying groups. It is possible to estimate the fraction of DNA in someone’s genome that originated in a given geographical area. Persons with widely variable genetic ancestries identify themselves as the same “race”. The notion that a human “race” is somehow superior to another is scientifically nonsense. Yet, this doesn’t stop people who strongly identify with a particular race from ostracizing and antagonizing others they see as “inferior”. This behavior is not different from that of primitive tribes dehumanizing their enemies, and it’s not limited to whites. Relatively homogeneous societies like Japan are notoriously unwelcoming to people of different races.
How did this behavior evolve? Evolutionary biologists are divided on whether “group selection” is a valid notion. This would imply that groups consisting of cooperating individuals were directly subject to natural selection. Without wading into that controversy, it is fairly intuitive that social cooperation was an evolutionary advantage for early hominins. Individuals who had the ability to form groups able to successfully compete with other groups must have had a survival advantage during our prehistoric past. This means that tribalism is likely to be engraved in our DNA. Racism is simply a form of tribalism.
Is there no hope, then? Are we doomed to constantly fall back into barbaric racial conflicts fueled by pestilential ideologies? I don’t believe this is the case. While it is true that tribalism is an innate tendency for humans, pack animals like us also have innate solidarity and empathy. This is necessary to maintain group cohesion and cooperation. Intelligent pack animals, such as dogs and dolphins, have acquired the ability to learn behaviors that give them broad flexibility beyond the basic drives encoded by their DNAs. This is why it is relatively easy to train dogs, dolphins or horses to do things that are contrary to their basic instincts. Lay a juicy piece of food in front of a dog. His instinctive response will be to eat it as quickly as possible, and demonstrate aggression towards anyone who may try to take it away. Yet, it is possible to train dogs to stand still in front of a juicy tidbit, and only eat it on command. It is even possible to train them to voluntarily surrender their treats. Horses are prey animals whose survival in the wild depends on flight. Yet, they can be trained to calmly tolerate situations that would terrify an untrained animal. Humans have comparable behavioral flexibility, provided they are trained to exercise it.
Instinctive behavior, when taken into a context in which it did not evolve, can be maladaptive. Insects that did not evolve with artificial light are disoriented by it, and often die as a result. Nocturnal animals that did not evolve with automobiles in their environment find it difficult to avoid being run over. A dog that bites a harmless house guest is following innate instincts but is maladapted to his modern environment. Similarly, humans who act out tribal instincts we inherited from our pre-human ancestors risk causing devastating conflicts that can only hurt our species. Nightmare scenarios of racial and religious wars, ethnic cleansing and genocide can and do easily result from humans giving in to their worst instincts. The Bosnian war and the Rwandan genocide are recent examples of what can happen when humans give in to their innate tribalism.
Genetic evolution produced the physiological hardware onto which cultural software runs. Unfortunately, genetic evolution is much slower than cultural evolution. The hardware of the human brain has not changed appreciably since the stone age. In the absence of natural selection, humans may never become innately unable to experience racism. But our culture needs to change, as our circumstances are rapidly changing.
Another product of evolution, reason, allows us to see that tribal conflict would only be counterproductive in a world where humanity faces planetary challenges such as environmental degradation. Broad cooperation is essential to our future survival. The challenges facing humanity are beyond the capabilities of single individuals or even individual nations. Contemporary scientific research, the source of discoveries and inventions that can improve our lives and save our environment, is a completely cosmopolitan enterprise where race, nationality and cultural origin are irrelevant. Team science is humanity at its best. Genocidal racism is humanity at its worst.
Early upbringing and education can expand human behavior beyond the limits imposed by our innate instincts. Rather than succumbing to these instincts, now more than ever we must exercise our equally innate ability to raise above them. We must raise the next generation to see humanity as its only tribe. The future of human civilization may well depend on this.
I agree largely with what you are saying here, but I have a few qualifiers to add.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, I'm not totally convinced Trump is racist in the overt sense of the term. He is almost certainly exploiting others' racism for his own benefit, but most of his racist comments actually just reveal general insensitivity, ignorance, and boorishness. For example, saying that a Mexican judge may not be totally impartial in a ruling on Trump University because of the Mexican wall policy isn't obviously ridiculous. It is like questioning the impartiality of an African American judge on a ruling on affirmative action, or the impartiality of a white judge in Alabama on a ruling concerning the Confederate flag. I'm sure the great majority of judges, even in these cases, are perfectly capable of keeping their biases in check, but asking the question doesn't mean that you are a racist. It also isn't obviously ridiculous to want to tighten border security, if you care about that sort of thing, or to worry about violent criminals coming across the border. What is ridiculous is that building a massive wall, and somehow forcing Mexico to pay for it, or conducting massive deportation campaigns, are wise uses of our limited resources, given that immigration from Mexico has slowed to a trickle (it may even have reversed) and illegal immigrants are actually less likely to commit violent crimes than natives, as reported by the WSJ. Many of the other things that liberals use to say that Trump is racist are also less than clear. For example, that the Justice Department has sued Trump for discriminating against blacks in renting homes does not mean that he is necessarily racist. It may be that his potential renters are racist, and the smart (albeit highly cynical) business decision is to turn away black people to keep your property values high. In the 80s and 90s, several people have said that Trump acted personally racist. That evidence is a little more compelling, but things were a little different 20-30 years ago, and I'm inclined to say it's at least possible he has become less racist since then. Trump has condemned the white nationalist groups that support him several times. The birther scandal: again, it is possible he simply made a comment questioning Obama's heritage, and when he noticed that it got him headlines, he ran with it.
ReplyDeleteNeedless to say, he is awful. But I am skeptical that he is personally racist, rather than merely exploiting his base's racism. And that is a terrible thing to do in its own right, but we liberals should be more careful about throwing around the word "racist" because we are in danger of being the boy who cried wolf. No doubt many people who voted for Trump resented how they couldn't question affirmative action, or point out that black people really ARE more violent in America, without being called racist. Trump, though he is factually incorrect about many things (one is tempted to say everything), at least did not call them racists for disagreeing with Black Lives Matter. Sometimes all it takes to get your vote is make you feel like you belong, like you aren't being judged.
I might be a lot more optimistic about humanity's ability to transcend our racism. In the 1950s, a majority of white Americans said they would move out if a black family moved in next door. We also had Jim Crowe. Now a large subsection of the culture concerns itself with "microaggressions" against minorities, like clutching your purse a little tighter when a black person walks by. Though in some instances we've gone too far into the realm of political correctness, that we have come so far in just a few short decades is incredible. Teenagers today in many parts of the country would not meet a racist comment with laughter or even hostility, but with puzzlement.
I don't think we are seeing a "comeback" of racism. The racism, such as it is, was always there. The social media and fake news phenomena, however, are new, and the rise of Donald Trump has finally exposed the darker parts of American society. We shouldn't let it go unnoticed, too, that some people switched to voting for Trump when Bernie lost the Democratic nomination. A similar sort of dissatisfaction with our institutions is present on the left too.
One last thing. It is well and good to talk about racism when conversing with people who already agree with you on the topic. But we should accept that calling other people racist is no way to win them to your side. We have to listen to the other side and take them seriously, even if our brains are wired to view them as evil. Jonathan Haidt describes in his book how experimenters asked liberals and conservatives to take questionnaires as if they were on the other side of the ideological spectrum. Conservatives were fairly good at guessing how a liberal would answer a question, and liberals were significantly worse at guessing how a conservative would answer a question. Liberals, who are much more likely to call themselves "good listeners," "empathetic," and "open-minded," turn out to be less so than their opponents. Let's not make the same mistake.
I agree. What has been exposed was always there...That's why I started with "seems" to be making a comeback. In surgery, a purulent abscess must be exposed and opened in order to heal. My hope is that once the darkest side of our society is exposed, we may be horrified enough by it that we will be immunized against it, as Germans were after World War 2. I do agree that we must listen to the other side, and I make every effort to do, unpleasant though it might be. However, where I draw the line is alternate reality. When someone lives in a completely different universe, communication is very difficult. It's hard to tell someone "I believe you are living in a completely fictional reality" without offending them...
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