Can humans be naturally racist? A “Deep Dive” in the human mind and history.
Why “Racism” can be a primal survival instinct? Is Nature racist itself ?
Self Reflection
Did you ever have any thoughts of feeling intimidated or feeling uncomfortable by a person of different race?
Do you ever get intimidated even slightly when you interact or meet a person of color ?
The feeling of threat and un-comfort is actually a primal feeling.
Our Shared History
Humans used to live in groups and tribes completely isolated from each other for thousand of years.
Neanderthals in Europe and Homo erectus in Africa. These ancient humans lived in groups and most of the time inbred which resulted in populations that looked 90% alike with no genetic diversity. This is a research conclusion which can be read here.
Imagine this population of people when seeing an archaic human from a different population with different features ; what will be there reaction ?
Simply they will consider that human as an outsider and will consider that human a threat. The feeling of living in a group was and is comfort and the feeling of someone different then the group was and is a sign of threat.
In order to make sense of our surrounding and survive humans had two bins of thoughts where they would categorize things. Safe and Unsafe.
Safe meant things which were familiar and unsafe meant things which were unfamiliar. They two categorizations have helped our ancestors to survive and evolve into us.
The feelings of racism is a residual from our ancestors that reside within us and the two bins still exist.
Those thousand years of training still shows up in our behavior. How can you expect it not to ? Globalization is so recent that we have to be patience with humans and ourselves. We are actually overriding a significant piece of our brains and behavior.
Lets talk about a closely related topic.
Stereotyping evolved from racism because it gives a sense of guessing as what to expect from the individual. This is also a mechanism which helps to be more aware of a situation and feel safe.
Hence we always stereotype people and also feel intimidated by people of different color. This two feelings are innate and primal, hence we always had and have them.
Our Shared Experiences
These feelings get overridden by our experiences. By getting to actually know the person and their stories and personal experiences, we override these feelings constantly.
Hence people who say they are not racist have just interacted with a lot of people of color and made themselves aware of this instinctual feeling and have controlled and diminished it.
They always try to listen and understand the person and be tolerant towards people in their lives. This is a skill that is taught and people are actually educated to be more tolerant in order to specifically eradicate these primal feelings.
As globalization has enabled mix of races, people are getting more chances to override their feelings of racism and the stereotypes that they carry in their heads.
Sometimes although the stereotypes are validated and the racist thought is strengthened. In this case nothing can be done. Still these people should not be looked as they are negative and racist people but we should understand that in their life experience they have met situations that have reinforced their beliefs. I know this sounds like a very optimist approach towards people, but actually it is very logical.
Most of the time that experiences we go through, we have very little control over them. When we are born, we don’t choose the place, culture, and religion. Yet those are the factors that shape our brains and behavior.
People can easily negate their believes if they try and interact more with people of color and understand that color was and is just a natural selective process not a sign of a superior/inferior being.
Color is part of natural selection and the while the human beneath the skin has the same feelings and experiences as every other.
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