f you are
mystified by the persistence of racism, even among seemingly intelligent people,
Jared Diamond has a story for you. Imagine, says the University of California,
Los Angeles, biologist, that you lived in the Palaeolithic period when small
bands of hunter-gatherers were roaming the world. Usually, each group kept to
its own turf. But just suppose, perhaps pushed by hunger or curiosity, you
crossed the invisible line marking the limits of your group’s territory. "Should
you happen to meet an unfamiliar person in the forest, of course you would try
to kill him or else to run away," says Diamond, who conducts his fieldwork in
the wilds of New Guinea. "Our modern custom of just saying hello and starting a
friendly chat would be suicidal."
Those early humans who acquired an unconscious, instantaneous
way to recognise and classify strangers – and to treat them with great
suspicion, or worse – were more likely to live and reproduce. Their children
inherited this instinct and it spread throughout early human populations. Their
evolving brains learnt to automatically classify people as either "one of us" or
"one of them".
Studies suggest that our brains still have this protective
programming – a psychological need to divide people into groups. Unfortunately,
one of the most pernicious examples of this inborn trait, and certainly among
the most persistent, is racism. Might we be programmed from birth to hate people
with a different skin colour? Scientists today are working hard to solve this
mystery and they are coming up with some startling new answers to these
questions: why and whom do we hate? While our need to categorise people is
inherited, it seems, we may be more innately colour-blind than was previously
thought.
That may seem like a surprising finding, given the colour-conscious
society we live in. In 21st century America, most people still view one another
through the prism of race. Skin colour often determines who’s a member of our
religious group, our neighbourhood, our office clique, our school or social club
– and who isn’t.
The stubborn persistence of racism in modern culture has led
social scientists, neurobiologists and evolutionary psychologists to take a hard
look at why – with all the differences between humans we could choose to focus
on – the human mind seemingly insists on classifying others primarily by race
and specifically as white, black or Asian, as studies find. One of those
scientists was Mahzarin Banaji, now an experimental psychologist at Harvard, who
in the late 1990s, with Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington,
developed the Implicit Association Test, which attempts to lift the curtain on
people’s unconscious attitudes and feelings about race.
The premise of the experiment is that unconscious stereotypes
operate without deliberate thought but can powerfully affect behaviour,
preferences and judgements. The test (try it online) measures how quickly people
associate positive or negative words ("glorious", "evil", "failure", "love")
with a photo of a black face or a white one. The more automatically your mind
links "horrible" to a black face or "love" to a white one, the faster you press
a key. If the task requires you to quickly link "failure" to a white face and
your mind rebels, your responses will be slower.
In the years since Banaji and Greenwald crafted this test, the
findings have held steady. About seven out of 10 white people show unconscious
racial prejudice, including those who claim to be bias-free. The test has shown
that many Americans – especially white and Asian – "have an automatic preference
for white over black", as the scientists put it. How automatic? Even an
ethnic-sounding name can elicit prejudice. "It is surprisingly easy to get
people to develop a false memory that a person named Tyrone is a criminal,"
Banaji says.
In subsequent experiments, however, Banaji found that if our
tendency to group people is automatic, it’s also highly emotional. Peering
inside the grey matter of her subjects, Banaji discovered that when shown photos
of black faces, whites who showed unconscious prejudice on the Implicit
Association Test had increased activity in the amygdalae, a pair of little
almond-shaped structures deep in the brain that register fear and anger.
Interestingly, the subjects didn’t have this negative reaction when they viewed
faces of well-liked black Americans, such as Bill Cosby. Their brain activity
was revealing the effect of cultural learning, Banaji suspects.
While these negative emotional responses were deeply rooted in
the brain, they may not be indelible. "It is only due to the memory of recent
historical events that the groups we ‘naturally’ see are black and white,"
argues Michael Shermer, whose new book The Science of Good and Evil
explores the biological and evolutionary roots of morality and ethical systems.
He believes that the racism detected by Banaji’s tests reflects something our
minds have learnt, not something our brains were hard-wired with at birth. There
is no reason classification has to be based on skin colour, Shermer notes.
Instead, the brain should seize on any characteristic, any marker that could
indicate a distinction between one group and another. "If everyone looked like
Tiger Woods," says Shermer, "we’d simply find other ways to divide people up."
Perhaps eyebrow shape would then be the dividing characteristic.
It’s not difficult to find real-life examples that support
Shermer’s theory. Northern Ireland’s Catholics hate its Protestants and vice
versa. Atrocities between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda or Serbs and Albanians in
Kosovo didn’t erupt from recognition of racial differences but rather for
religious and political reasons.
In fact, people are more likely to automatically classify one
another by sex and age than they are by race, says evolutionary psychologist
Robert Kurzban of the University of Pennsylvania. Humankind hasn’t been out of
Africa long enough, he says, for our brains to evolve the wiring that lets us
see race in a way that’s as fundamental as whether someone is, say, a young girl
or an old man.
Thus, linking the origins of racism to early humans could be
misleading. "These different groups of early humans almost never came into
contact with one another, so there would be little opportunity to evolve a
classification system that grouped people by race," Kurzban says. Indeed, they
may never have encountered someone of a different race. "In prehistoric times,
even our enemies looked like us," Kurzban says. "There was no evolutionary
pressure for brains to instantly classify people into ‘members of my race’ and
‘the enemy’."
The latest research in human genetics further weakens the case
for innate racial bigotry. Standard racial categories as we define them, more
geneticists are concluding, have no biological validity. Yes, there are
obviously genetic differences between the smaller groupings called biological
populations – say, between a member of the Yoruba tribe of Nigeria and a Lapp
from northern Scandinavia, for instance. But the genetic differences between
racial groups of white, black and Asian are less than the differences within
any one of these major groups. This means that you are more genetically similar
to many people outside your race than to many of those within it.
Kurzban recently conducted a study that offers convincing
evidence that race is not a basic classifying factor. He and colleagues at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, had 200 volunteers look at 24 photos of
basketball players on a computer screen. Each player pictured belonged to one of
two teams that had recently brawled, Kurzban told the volunteers, and they were
all wearing identical jerseys. Paired with each photo was a sentence that a
particular player had uttered during the rumble. The volunteers’ test: look at
all 24 photos and as each sentence was flashed on the screen again, recall who
said it.
When the subjects got it wrong, their mistakes were telling.
When they attributed a sentence to the wrong player, their incorrect choice was
usually a person of the same race as the player who actually said it. It was as
if they were thinking, I don’t recall who said it but it was definitely a white
guy.
Next, they viewed photos of the same players but each was
wearing either a grey or yellow jersey. Once again, the misattributions fell
along colour lines – but this time it was the colour of the player’s jersey, not
skin. The volunteers had quickly made the mental switch to classifying people by
a more logical sign of a group: the colour of their uniforms.
"Despite a lifetime’s experience of race as a predictor of
social alliance, less than four minutes of exposure to an alternate social world
was enough to deflate the tendency to categorise by race," the scientists
concluded. Race can quickly be overridden as a factor if people see a more
immediate basis for a coalition, such as the colour of a team jersey. "The human
mind is very flexible," Kurzban says. "It dynamically evaluates situations."
So while it appears that we are hard-wired from birth to view
the world in terms of "us" versus "them", the evidence shows that we can
reprogramme our brains to come up with new definitions for who we view as "us"
and who we view as "them". One way to stop our brains from perceiving race as a
meaningful way to categorise people is to mimic the conditions of these
experiments. Namely, to mix it up at work and play, so "my group" includes
people who look different from "me". This has never been easy. But at least we
can strive for a society that treats all men and women as equals, knowing there
is nothing in the human psyche that makes racism inevitable.
(Sharon Begley is the science columnist of The Wall Street
Journal.)
(Courtesy: SPAN magazine.)