All Humans Probably *Are* Racist, But It Doesn't Mean We Have To *Be* Racist

I think if we really could access windows into souls, we'd find that most perceived racism isn't really racism as per the dictionary definition. It will be one of two things:

1) Dislike of the person - not their skin colour or ethnicity - but of their views, beliefs, attitudes or what they represent (this will have both proximal effects and distal effects, by association). If you think of contrasting two black people like the execrable Afua Hirsch and the excellent Thomas Sowell, you'll probably sense an idea of what I'm getting at here.

2) Outward manifestation of the inner gamut of insecurity, frustration, self-regret, self-loathing, pain and hurt that lives within human beings. A lot of what seems like racist behaviour is actually fear, pain and longing from within the bowels of the perpetrators. They feel marginalised, and without much hope, and suffer from the 'malice of the underdog' that Evelyn Waugh wrote about (which actually has its provenance in Proverbs 26:26 -"Their malice may be concealed by deception")  

To that end, Black Lives Matter and the SJW virtue signallers are fighting the wrong battle from the off, because these battles are more about planting fruit-bearing seeds into our own minds than about trying to chop down weeds in other people's. Only truth, facts, love and kindness can solve human problems - and every individual stands accountable to first get their own house in order before they try to change things on the outside. If the attention-seeking Black Lives Matter and SJWs could understand this they wouldn't be partaking in misjudged demonstrations with bogus opposition to illusory enemies - they'd take some time out in solitude - you know, the place in which Byron rightly said we are least alone - and fight the enemies within that are stopping them see the power of the truthseeking individual who knows how to love.

I won't ignore the enemy they think they are fighting, though. I'll just try to expound on it on my terms, which hopefully explains why I think love and words are better than noisy protests. The best explanation I have for racism is that it is an exaptation (as per Stephen Jay Gould) - it's a trait that evolved because it served an in-group function to aid survival by helping us to be tribally connected, but has subsequently hung around in vestiges of our personality. Social development and greater cultural integration means it is frowned upon in relatively advanced places like the Western world, but it is still nested in our behavioural mechanisms, especially when we are not conspicuously exposed.

This seems to be backed up by what Carlos Navarrete found in his "Prejudice at the Nexus of Race and Gender", that there is evidence for biases against out-group males that were markedly distinct from those in the in-group. Men's biases were motivated by social dominance, presumably to increase the probability of passing on their genes, and women's biases were motivated by fear of sexual coercion, presumably because they don't want to get impregnated by males that are not going to stick around and help rear a child. Both of these findings tie in with what we know about differential selective pressures on men and women and the necessity of in-groups for survival stability.

Consider this interesting social experiment from Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘Blink’:

“Consider, for example, a remarkable social experiment conducted in the 1990s by a law professor in Chicago named Ian Ayres. Ayres put together a team of thirty-eight people—eighteen white men, seven white women, eight black women, and five black men. Ayres took great pains to make them appear as similar as possible. All were in their mid-twenties. All were of average attractiveness. All were instructed to dress in conservative causal wear: the women in blouses, straight skirts, and flat shoes; the men in polo shirts or button-downs, slacks, and loafers. All were given the same cover story. They were instructed to go to a total of 242 car dealerships in the Chicago area and present themselves as college-educated young professionals (sample job: systems analyst at a bank) living in the tony Chicago neighborhood of Streeterville. Their instructions for what to do were even more specific. They should walk in. They should wait to be approached by a salesperson. “I’m interested in buying this car,” they were supposed to say, pointing to the lowest-priced car in the showroom. Then, after they heard the salesman’s initial offer, they were instructed to bargain back and forth until the salesman either accepted an offer or refused to bargain any further—a process that in almost all cases took about forty minutes. What Ayres was trying to do was zero in on a very specific question: All other things being absolutely equal, how does skin color or gender affect the price that a salesman in a car dealership offers?

The results were stunning. The white men received initial offers from the salesmen that were $725 above the dealer’s invoice (that is, what the dealer paid for the car from the manufacturer). White women got initial offers of $935 above invoice. Black women were quoted a price, on average, of $1,195 above invoice. And black men? Their initial offer was $1,687 above invoice. Even after forty minutes of bargaining, the black men could get the price, on average, down to only $1,551 above invoice. After lengthy negotiations, Ayres’s black men still ended up with a price that was nearly $800 higher than Ayres’s white men were offered without having to say a word.”

This experiment probably indicates that Carlos Navarrete was onto something about having the congenital structure for racism, and this probably applies to xenophobia too, and maybe even homophobia. But it’s not so straightforward. Our evolution has endowed us with traits from numerous historical legacies, and there are most likely degrees of racism, xenophobia, homophobia in most of us, as well as cognitive characteristics that manifest themselves as tribal and familial and territorial biases. To me, this is perfectly understandable – it doesn’t mean we are all nasty bigots – it means our mental endowments have template-based foundations based on survival mechanisms and competitive instincts that alert us of potentially dangerous situations. Perhaps we could classify these traits with ‘sub’ and ‘supra’ prefixes – they can be called sub-tendencies and supra-tendencies. It doesn’t mean we should all walk around seeing each other as racists. It’s better to think of us as creatures who have the handicap of an evolutionary legacy that once facilitated a form of racism in group rivalry but that now is suppressed with advanced cultural and social development. 

The present gives testimony to our evolutionary past. Those with a group-territorial mindset that we see by the photocopier machine at work, and in politics, and in football stadiums, and in gangs on sink estates - they closely resemble our distant evolution as much as our being vicars, charity workers and Samaritans does. It is this patchwork of elements that demonstrate our history and our mechanisms for survival, and it is this kind of personhood that we have taken into the world. That is why it isn’t surprising to realise that racism, homophobia and xenophobia are still a part of our sub-tendencies. As indicated above, it is easy to imagine why they are there; once upon a time natural selection would have favoured the genes that enabled us to identify a rival, have an acute radar against anomalous and potentially threatening behaviour, harbour a fear of the unknown, and be mindful of radically unnerving breaks from normalcy that could be seen to threaten the status quo. 

Our evolutionary legacies are seen broadly across our behaviour, because they are vestiges of our past. The evolution of the eye has left us with a large blind area in the middle of the retina. Our prurience is the result of our sexual past. Our long spine and susceptibility to back pains and injuries are the result of our quadruped ancestry. Our wisdom teeth are a result of our once having bigger jaws. Plus our fear of the dark, our blushing, our sneezing, our hairs standing up, our goose bumps, our reactions to moving objects, our trepidation at wild animals, and our behavioural similarities with other primates closest to us in origin, all of these show that we are a medley of inherited ineptitudes, built for the Savannah. 

Now here’s the key thing, I think, that keeps us civil and stops most of us becoming brutes (at last outwardly). As well as being integrated into a culture and society of other personalities, we cultivate the ability to suppress these sub-tendencies and we subvert them with what we might call our supra-tendencies. The reason the car-salesman exhibited an underlying prejudice is because it was manifesting itself in a subtle way – it bore the resemblance of a sub-conscious racism – and if he were shown the results afterwards he probably would have been quite perturbed.

Such is the necessity to suppress our vestigial racism, homophobia and xenophobia, we find most of us suppress it rather well. Our supra-tendencies are those more positive aspects of our personality (love, grace, kindness, generosity, acceptance, tolerance, charity, empathy) that we know we must cultivate if we are to avoid being complicit in a kind of Hobbesian collapse of our society. Instead of pulling out the weeds, we have grown trees to tower over them – and in the majority of cases it’s only when we scrape beneath the surface of the roots that we find the roots of the weeds too.