Our species originated in Africa. At the time, there was no way for our ancestors to evolve a dislike for people from other continents, because there were no people from other continents.
Racism is xenophobia connected to physical features of people from different continents. Imperialism and colonialism depended on the colonial governments writing different laws for different groups of people, which gave the colonizers the right to take land and resources from the people they were colonizing. Slavery was another way that laws gave different groups of people different sets of rights.
Those different sets of laws created different environments for people who lived on the same land. Our cultures evolve to fit the environments we live in. A big part of racism now is xenophobia against people’s cultures.
ACT I
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[106 bpm]
I’ve talked about race a lot in this series because it’s the biggest example we have where humans use abilities that are essentially equal in different environments and get results that look a lot different.
Many forms of discrimination among people, whether it’s sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, and many forms of ablism, start with people actually thinking differently somehow. But race is just ethnicity on a bigger scale.
What if there wasn’t any Mediterranean Sea? What if Africa and Europe were all one continent called Europe? That would make Black people people of southern European descent.
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The history of racism is a good way to see v = aei play out.
We all value the same things in life, we use our abilities in our environments to live our lives, and we think of ideas in the process.
Between individuals, and between groups of people that are somehow defined by their abilities, a is a variable.
Between groups of people that are in no way defined by abilities, like, the people of one continent versus the people of another continent, a isn’t a variable. But every argument that’s been made in favor of racism assumes a is a variable.
Assumptions about racial superiority and inferiority assume a connection between physical characteristics and mental activity. If you assume that the people of another group are less intelligent than you, less moral, or make worse decisions than you for any other reason, one way or another you’re assuming that their mental activity is inferior to yours.
The illusion of racial superiority is caused by people not understanding the environmental factors in human behavior. People saw that Europeans reached higher technological levels than anyone else, and they assumed that was all because of intelligence. They didn’t notice how the availability of materials in different parts of the world contributed to technological development.
That was the illusion that Jared Diamond shattered with Guns, Germs, and Steel.
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Many evolutionary psychologists and historians have traced the origins and evolution of racism as it relates to their fields. Those two stories combine to tell a bigger, very useful story.
Let’s start with the assumption that race means continent of ancestral origin. Is racism inherent to our species?
For it to be inherent to our species it would have to be a trait. That means genetic. But how would evolution turn racism into a genetic trait?
The first behaviorally modern humans all lived in Africa. And the only way they had to travel was on foot. So there was no way for humans to evolve a dislike for humans from other continents.
At first there weren’t any humans from other continents. Then when people did move onto other continents, they almost never saw each other again.
What we have instead is xenophobia. We could also call that in groups and out groups.
Our social instincts make us live in groups for our mutual benefit. That makes recognizing whether people are part of our group or not part of it important to us. It also makes people who we think of as part of our group seem more trustworthy and otherwise more valuable to us than people outside our groups.
What we call racism is xenophobia based on physical characteristics associated with continent of ancestral origin.
ACT II
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The term “race” came from farming. It meant “breed”.
People talked about races of dogs and horses and apples. If you read books from as recent as the late19th century, by authors like Jack London and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, you see them refer to people of the Irish race or the Nordic race or the Slavic race. What they mean is that people could be identified with a part of the world by their physical features.
People didn’t start using the idea of race to lump people together by continent until Europeans started colonizing other continents. The way the Europeans and their descendants waged their colonial wars in the Americas, Australia, and parts of Africa and Asia was essentially the same way people had been fighting wars against each other in Europe, the Middle East, and China since the beginning of recorded history.
The goal was to plunder resources, annex land, and kill or subjugate the people who lived on the land, to add to the wealth and power of their kingdom. The big difference now was the mismatch in technology let the Europeans and their descendants win almost all the time.
Incidentally, the Europeans also carried diseases that had ravaged Europe centuries before, which they had resistances to, but the people of other continents didn’t.
Racism as we know it today was invented then, to justify Europeans defeating the people of other continents as badly as they did.
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Racism served a specific purpose in the European legal systems of the time. For Europeans to move to other continents and take land from people who already lived on it, by force if necessary or convenient, depended on a political system that recognized the colonizers as having a different legal status from the indigenous people.
Giving Europeans a different legal status from indigenous people depended on the creation of a set of morals and cultural values that supported it. By legally categorizing people of other continents as inferior, and by convincing people that it was true, the Europeans gave themselves the legal justification to take whatever they wanted from people of other continents.
In the 1600s that strategy was expanded to include enslaving Africans.
ACT III
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Now it’s easy to look at a specific example of how this general pattern worked.
Slaves in the United States had the legal status of farm animals.
Slavery depended on a lot of force to try to keep Black people from running away or rebelling. That meant it depended on a lot of hate from White people toward Black people to make them feel that they deserved to have that much force used on them.
Most people don’t hate anyone that much. For most people, if they spend enough time around other people, their mirror neurons make them empathize with them.
At that point, slavery was an 8,000 year old tradition. It’s referred to repeatedly in The Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments, as an ordinary fact of life.
But the United States was a new form of government and society, built on ideals of freedom, reason, and the separation of church and state. To make the ancient institution of slavery continue to function in the new society the people who wanted slavery needed new strategies.
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First, by writing laws that made brown people slaves and pink people free, the lawmakers made it easy for everyone to tell who was a slave and who wasn’t from a distance.
If you judge another person on their role in society as soon as you see the color of their face, you bypass your mirror neurons and short-circuit your empathy. By the time you get close enough to them to see the expression on their face you’ve already decided most of how you feel about them.
If you judge someone as free or a slave the instant you see the color of their skin, by the time you get to talking to them, you’ve already decided whether to talk to them as if they’re free or a slave.
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Next, slavery in what’s now the US lasted from 1619 to 1865. Generations of White children lived around slaves and grew up to be adults who made the slavery system continue to function.
Now think about how children learn about the world. Beginning in 1619 there were laws about what White people could do, and separate laws about what Black people could do. To start with, White people could quit their jobs and move somewhere else if they wanted, and Black people couldn’t. But what do three- and four-year-old children know about laws?
When they saw Black people, they saw people who always worked in manual labor, who were usually dirty, who always wore simple clothes, and who lived in small, decrepit houses. When they saw White people they saw people who had all the intellectual jobs, who were more often clean, who wore fancier clothes, and who lived in bigger and better houses.
The two sets of laws created two separate environments for people in the same geographical area, and those laws gave all the most visible signs of intelligence to the White people. So anyone, including children, who saw the signs of intelligence and didn’t know how laws created that, would assume White people were smarter than Black people.
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We learn more easily as children than we do as adults because our brains are still growing and developing. We also remember better things we learn as children than things we learn as adults.
Whenever we learn anything we form new neural pathways in our brains that connect ideas. Since our brains are still growing and developing when we’re children, they grow and develop around the neural pathways we form.
That makes ideas we learn as children hard, or impossible, to unlearn as adults.
That means that when children grew up feeling from a young age that Black people were less intelligent than White people, and didn’t find out about the different sets of laws for White and Black people until much later, most people confused their sequence of learning the ideas with the sequence of events.
First they felt that Black people weren’t as smart as White people and then they found out about the separate sets of laws. So it seemed to them like Black people weren’t as smart as White people, so White people needed to write separate sets of laws. They didn’t realize that White people wrote the laws first, and that’s what kept Black people from having any easy way to show their intelligence.
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Slavery was abolished in the US in 1865. But those separate sets of laws for White people and Black people lasted until 1964, when we passed the Equal Rights Act.
That was more than 50 years ago. But racism hasn’t ended completely. Some people still hate, dislike, or distrust other people for their skin color. For other people racism has evolved.
If you don’t hate people for their skin color but still hate people for things that are associated with skin color, like where they live, where they’re from, their accents, their languages, their religions, their music styles, hair styles, or clothing styles, you’re not really trying to overcome racism. You’re just trying to find a better way to be a racist.
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Even if you feel that people of different races are equal, but you relate to people of your own race best because of your shared history, and that makes you feel like you’re more dependable to each other, and therefore more valuable to each other, and you expect everyone else to feel the same way, that’s still the original problem of racialized xenophobia.
Xenophobia is as old as our species.
If you look at some moments from someone else’s life and compare them to everything you know about your entire life, it’s easy to not see aei = aei.
If what you see of their life makes you feel like they don’t make as good of decisions as you do, because you don’t know enough about their life to see how they’re using their abilities, environment, and ideas to pursue their motivations, you’ll jump to the conclusion that they just aren’t as smart as you.
ACT IV
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The way out of this trap is to not be judgmental.
There is no way for any one person to have all the best ideas, because there’s no way for any one person to have every life experience. Everyone has seen parts of life that you haven’t.
Wherever a group of people have faced and dealt with a situation that has affected them for a long time, they’ve put a lot of thought into what to do about it. If you think of everyone as someone like yourself, you can learn a lot from other people.
If you think of other people as inferior to yourself, you won’t learn nearly as much from them. Because you’ll assume you already know the most about the most important ideas.
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The easiest way to see how arbitrary people’s assumptions about race really are is to look at biracial people. Here are five examples just from people I know.
Imagine you meet a White girl at school. She’s really pretty, with long honey blonde hair that’s really, really curly, a short nose that’s kind of wide, and luscious full lips. When she smiles she looks really smart.
So you make friends with her and start hanging out with her after school.
You go over to her house and meet her mom. Her mom’s blonde, and even though her hair is lighter than your friend’s, you see where she gets her hair color.
You start hanging out at her house in the afternoons a couple times a week.
Then one afternoon, her dad comes home from work early. When you see him, you realize he’s half White and half Black.
Is your friend still White?
* * *
Racially ambiguous people are biracial people who can look like either race depending on how they dress.
Imagine making friends with a Black girl and then friending her on FaceBook.
Then you’re looking for a job. So you set up a profile on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn sends you contact recommendations. You see she has a profile there, so you click on it.
Suddenly you realize that she’s Black on FaceBook, but White on LinkedIn.
* * *
Imagine a racially ambiguous White and Native American man and woman. They live on a reservation.
They get married and have three children. One is racially ambiguous. One looks Native. The other looks White.
What do you call the White looking one?
You might say the White looking one is White, in the sense that she won’t be directly affected by White people’s racism in the same way her Native looking brother will.
But to call the child of Native parents White is really a form of genocide. Because you’re trying to reduce the number of Natives in America, and increase the number of White people. You’re using words to try to abduct the child from her parents, by talking about her as if her parents aren’t really her parents.
In order to formulate the sentence: “The White looking child of Native American parents is a Native American,” you have define race as a person’s continent of ancestral origin, combined with a cultural background they practice.
* * *
But how much ancestry do they need? And how much of their culture do they need?
What if it was only a racially ambiguous woman who married a White man, they didn’t live on a reservation, and their two children both looked White?
If you call those children White, you’re still using words to try to abduct them from their mother.
* * *
What if you’re White, you start researching your geneology, and you discover that one of your great grandparents was a Native?
Now that you can prove that you’re 1/8 Native, you legally qualify for certain things. You can get college scholarships that way, and buy land on that nation’s reservation.
But if that’s the only connection you have to your Native ancestry, are you really a Native?
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If you want to see what America would be like without racism, watch some 4 and 5 year old kids of different races playing together on a playground.
They don’t know what race is. They don’t know what history is. They don’t know what laws and governments and money are. If they’ve grown up in similar home environments and with similar ideas, they all act the same.
Four year olds all belong to the race of freaky, wacky, shrieking kids who love to run around and have fun on a playground. As far as they can tell, people being different colors means the same thing as cats and dogs being different colors.
What would happen if we put the future of racism up to a vote among 4 year olds? What do you think they would say if you asked them,
“Do you want to keep playing and having fun all together, or would it be better if you only play and have fun with kids who are the same color as you?”
They wouldn’t even understand why you were asking them that.
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In 1491, there was nothing about the fact that our ancestors lived on different continents that made it impossible for someone to throw a giant party and invite everyone.
But that’s not what happened. Other people got there first, and used a lot of hate to divide us.
Back in 1492, when people knew a lot less about human evolution, environments, and how human psychology makes people think of ideas, people’s differences seemed to be caused by some really powerful mysterious thing. People made a lot of wrong assumptions about what that thing was. Many people still believe in some of those things, or new versions of them, to try to make our history make sense.
We can still throw that giant party and invite everyone. But race has gotten a lot more complicated in the past five centuries. Now it’s a question.
What do we do now?