This is a little essay I did for one of my classes. Doing the research made me think. I hope it has the same effect on those who read it here.
In his August 28th of 1963 “I Have a Dream Speech”, Martin Luther King Jr. expressed his longing for a day when his four children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”. Today we have an African-American President in the White House, and some would like to feel that we have reached, as a nation, the ideals of the Founding Fathers. Today, it seems, we live in a nation that finally believes in the Declaration of Independence self evident truth “that all men are created equal”. But do we? Half a century after Martin Luther King Jr’s death conditions still exist that belie that his dream has been realized. One wonders why there is still so much distance between ourselves and our ideals. Is it possible that such persistence has biological causes?
The issue might be obscured by the vocabulary being used. Merriam-Webster defines racism as “a belief that race is the primary determinant human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” Racialism, as defined by TheFreeDictionary, is an emphasis on race or racial considerations, as in determining policy or interpreting events. Both accept the distinction between races, but racism adds the dimension of rank between the existing racial groups.
Evolution does not support the idea that racism is innate, but rather that racism is a social construct. As Robert Wright wrote “There’s never been good reason to believe that human beings are naturally racist. After all, in the environment of human evolution--which didn't feature, for example, jet travel to other continents--there would have been virtually no encounters between groups that had different skin colors or other conspicuous physical differences. So it's not as if the human lineage could have plausibly developed, by evolutionary adaptation, an instinctive reaction to members of different races.”, which is true, but later in the same article he says: “I think that, though we're not naturally racist, we're naturally ‘groupist.’ Evolution seems to have inclined us to readily define whole groups of people as the enemy, after which we can find their suffering, even death, very easy to countenance and even facilitate.” Who is our enemy, in the “out-group” is flexible, as well as who is in our group. He concludes: “It’s in this sense that race is a ‘social construct.”’(R. Wright, 2012).
The tendency to classify who we encounter into groups is not limited to races. Race is just one of the many different social constructs used to classifying individuals. Racism requires the addition or subtraction of a value to one group among other groups. The idea of rank is not limited to races but can be applied to other classifications such as gender or ethnicity. Is this discrimination learned or inherent? Smadar Reisfeld interviewed Professor Gil Diesendruck, of Bar-Ilan University’s Psychology Department, who conducted a series of experiments with young Israeli and Arab children and found that young children tend to divide the world into different social categories and have an essentialist belief about them. That means that the categories they use to group individuals are seen by them as essential, rather than arbitrary. For them, ethnicity was a far greater factor than sex. In America race plays a similar role. This lends weight to the idea that racism is determined by the biography of the individual and not his biology.
However, we are not just born with the tendency to sort people into groups but also to create rank, to judge among groups as we do with many other things. An experiment done with babies suggest that these categories are not drawn with neutral interest. We learn to make social deductions. Professor Diesendruck says that “The basis for these deductions may be very incomplete and indirect, and not take details and nuances into account, but it enables me to situate myself automatically very quickly.” (S. Reisfeld, 2013).
We have come a long way in our race relations, but as these studies suggest, our natural tendencies are to create distinctions on very questionable basis. Our natural disposition is not sufficient cause for racism, but it is an active ingredient that we have to deal with. We are born with the tendency to classify people and things into easily manageable groups, not just for the sake of variety, but in order to draw conclusions on which we act. The groupings are drawn in relation to an individual’s interest and reflect a deference to oneself. As Diesendruck explains it is biologically inherent that we favor “those who are like us over those who are different”, as are the conclusions we make about other people based on this preference. (S. Reisfeld, 2013). In this sense, even if racism is not innate, the tendency to discriminate is, and because of this our society, and any other society must tackle this tendency with education and understanding. Our biology is not our fate, but it is our challenge.
Bibliography
Robert Wright, “New Evidence That Racism Isn’t Natural”, The Atlantic, October 17th, 2012
theatlantic.com/health/archi … al/263785/
Smadar Reisfeld, “Are we born racist? A new Israeli study has some surprising answers”, Israeli News, June 8th, 2013. haaretz.com/weekend/magazine … m-1.528187