Evolution / History / Sex / News
Why Are People So Racist?
Our evolutionary history might have an answer
A young black man boards a train with wishes to see his daughter in a different city. As he boards the train, he sits next to a person, not knowing they are intoxicated. Soon enough, he wants to change his seat because he can’t withstand the breath of a dipsomaniac.
As he gets up to change seats, the conductor abusively yells at him to remain seated or else he would be kicked off from the train. He looks around and sees every white person changing seats on volition, and he is cognizant of the fact that tickets do not have assigned seats.
The young man picks up his phone to call 911 but is forced to leave the train against his will.
After being declared persona non grata and forced to leave the train, he has no choice but to disembark. And as soon as he does, the train conductor laughs and smirks at him whilst the train speeds off.
The story is about two people belonging to the same species. They are both humans, albeit one thinks he can be morally elevated above the other, simply because the other person has more melanin than he does.
Analogous stories are seen all over the news on a quotidian basis. The stories are deemed repulsive and morally reprehensible by people from all races.
Why are people so damn racist?
That’s the question we will be targeting, and it seems like our evolutionary history has an answer.
Throughout our evolutionary history, long before we harnessed the global ecology, we were insignificant apes. The effects we imparted on our surroundings were equivalent to the effects that a jellyfish or a gorilla imparted.
In the past, we lived in bands consisting of no more than 150 individuals. And since kin selection goes up in small groups, everyone in your band was your kin. Even if there were some strangers in your group, you would still count them as members since you would spend time with them growing up.
In our small bands, we put more priority over the family members (kin)than strangers. And as a result, we excluded the strangers and drew a fine line between “us” and “them.” And indeed, extended family members tend to have fewer friends.
That is the main reason why we humans individually don’t have the cognitive capacity for dealing with a network of more than 150 friends.
The conditions mentioned above are ideal for ‘reciprocal altruism’ to take place. As reciprocal altruism started taking place more and more, our surroundings started favoring genetic tendencies towards kin altruism.
It is very tempting to see how our ancestors would’ve favored kin and excluded strangers to the point of xenophobia.
In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt had to say the following:
“Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.”
We humans barely rationalize what we feel. And Our feelings are the by-product of emotions that have evolved over a vast period of time.
If you think the above-mentioned statement is false, then consider the following:
Two siblings decide to have sex with each other. They pay attention to safety precautions and they decide to never do it again. Instead of the situation breeding problems, they feel more intimate and their problems dissolve after that moment. No one get’s pregnant, and both of them never experience any psychological distress .
Was it wrong for the siblings to have had sex? If you said “Yes,” chances are high that psychologists would call you “morally dumbfounded.”
Rationally speaking, there is no way of excusing that. Albeit you start feeling repulsive and think that it’s morally reprehensible. But if you try to rationalize your perspective, you will become morally dumbfounded.
So it’s our intuitions that take over our capacity to rationalize our decisions. The genes that favor the “us” more than the “them” would certainly not help us in situations that you can imagine.
What can be done?
Jonathan Haidt, The Psychologist I just quoted above, said something beautiful in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion about what can be done. Which is as follows:
“We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).”
As far as I can surmise, that’s the best answer I have heard to the question of what can be done. Additionally, I would like to mention that it would be a Darwinian fallacy to assume that genetic influence is unalterable.
The fact that we use contraceptives and condoms really shows how puny are the foundations of the belief that we can’t put genetic influence to ‘sleep.’
