Imagine an experiment that collected 10,000 people to live in a small town. The 10,000 people were evaluated across multiple levels: race, religion, height, weight, personality, intelligence, background, political views, etc., and were divided into two groups as equally as possible. Then they were all given a treatment to change the color of their skin. Half became green, half became purple.
What do you expect would happen after a couple years?
I would expect confirmation bias and in-group loyalty to cause both groups to develop “racist” attitudes towards the other.
For example, one day a green guy is rude to a purple guy. The purple guy starts to think, “maybe those green guys are more rude than us purple guys.” Over the next few days, an equal number of green and purple people are rude to him, but every example of green rudeness confirms his belief, and every example of purple rudeness is an exception. This view quickly spreads among the purples.
Both groups start to develop attitudes and suspicions about the other group, which only adds fuel to the fire.
This is, in my opinion, entirely predictable based on what we know about human nature. We’re suspicious of people who aren’t like us, even on trivial things.
Have you noticed how people brighten up and feel closer when they discover some trivial similarity — they like the same soda, eat the same cereal, put the toilet paper on the roll the same way, or some other ridiculous thing. And the reverse is true. We’re suspicious of people who aren’t like us.
This can be overshadowed by insisting on a group identity that drowns out all the dumb little things. “We’re all Marines,” or “we’re all Americans,” or “we’re all Jews,” or whatever. You create an identity that supersedes trivial stuff, and you intentionally suppress the trivial stuff.
If this is true — and I believe it is — the absolute worst way to ease racial tensions is to keep pointing out race, and explaining everything on the basis of race. As Morgan Freeman said, “stop talking about it.”
Of course I questioned if I should write this post for that very reason. If my advice is to stop talking about race, why am I talking about race?
Because right now, the people who are talking the loudest about race are saying all the wrong things, and are causing racism to be a bigger problem. Unfortunately, those of us who want racism to go away have to respond. We need people to realize that the race baiters are doing exactly the wrong thing.
Which is no surprise. There’s lots of money to be made in the race-baiting game. Just ask Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
I was in a meeting today with a bunch of Indians (Asia). They are putting together a proposal for a potential client in South Korea. Some manager said, “Make sure the price is the best we can do. Koreans are cutthroat.” He’s making that statement and he’s not even white.
I have not traveled much outside the U.S., but my friends who have tell me (and everything I’ve heard confirms this) that people around the world (with the possible exception of parts of Europe) are far more racist than people in the U.S.
Imagine a white guy saying, “Jews are cutthroats.” … or pick any other nationality to speak against. I didn’t think it was particularly horrible, but imagine a white guy saying it. Say in S Central Los Angeles, it gets said about the Koreans too…but people saying it get a pass because they can’t possibly be racist.
I think people have an inborn tendency to form in-groups and out-groups, and that’s as true in middle schools where everyone has the same race, ethnicity, class, etc. as it is in more diverse settings. If there are no distinctions we’ll make them up.
It’s an even harder tendency to get rid of when the groups we’re talking about are our extended families, which is what races are, mostly. IIRC a random white guy is about as genetically related to another random white guy as he would be to a half-sibling. Doesn’t mean that Europeans couldn’t cheerfully slaughter each other en masse for tens of thousands of years — and half-siblings themselves are notoriously combative — but it’s not nothing, either, so if you’re looking for a way to divide people into groups it’s not surprising you tend to put the guy who’s kin to you into a closer group unless something else matters more to you. Like his taste in books.
The things people will say in Hong Kong about the barbarian non-Chinese will astonish the innocent Westerner. Even within the Chinese people there are stereotypes about people from different areas which are treated as matters of course. It’s not that they’re unfamiliar with the Western sense that there are things one doesn’t say, it’s just that most of the time when you’re their friend — and they’re not insulting *your* group — they don’t feel the need to hide what they think about different countries, ethnicities, races, etc. Eventually they might admit to you that they’re not the biggest fans of how Europeans smell and wish we would do something about it because it’s hard to ignore. I’ve heard it’s mostly the high dairy consumption.
And the Indians have had the world’s most complex ethnic hierarchy for thousands of years. There’s an attempt at revisionist history these days to blame Indian society’s apartheid scheme on the British, but genetic evidence confirms how endogamous the castes have been since back when the Indians were writing sophisticated ten thousand page epics about the importance of class distinctions and my ancestors.. weren’t, so it’s not very convincing.
The Anglosphere is certainly no post-racial utopia, but the idea that it’s worse in the West than elsewhere, or that racism is somehow something that the West invented, shows that some people don’t actually know much about other civilizations and their histories except in cartoon form. Modern Western racism is pretty thin gruel.
Ha ha. I hadn’t heard that the Chinese think westerners stink.
But yes, the concept of racism we get from our domestic, money-grubbing race baiters and their allies is unhistorical, ignorant and simplistic.
QUOTE: This can be overshadowed by insisting on a group identity that drowns out all the dumb little things. “We’re all Marines,” or “we’re all Americans,” or “we’re all Jews,” or whatever. You create an identity that supersedes trivial stuff, and you intentionally suppress the trivial stuff. If this is true — and I believe it is — the absolute worst way to ease racial tensions is to keep pointing out race, and explaining everything on the basis of race. As Morgan Freeman said, “stop talking about it.”
If this is true, it would seem there wouldn’t have been racial tensions in times when it wasn’t readily discussed. Yet, in US history we’ve had tensions with the immigration of the Chinese, Japanese, Irish, and Italians. As well, issues such as the Native American Trail of Tears, 1898 Wilmington insurrection and 1921 Tulsa race massacre. The notion of “we’re all Americans” didn’t seem to prevent or eradicate such tensions.
That said, tensions such as this don’t typically diminish by not talking about them. In some cases, that can breed contempt and further isolation and ignorance. If living in a bubbles contributes to these tensions, it would seem that finding ways to help people break free of their bubbles would help…such as getting to know each other, identifying similarities and having open dialogue about differences and finding ways to work past them.
Yeah, as I understand this thought-experiment, we should conclude: “If only Martin Luther King had kept quiet, racism would have just gone away!” That of course is a ridiculous conclusion. There is something missing here about the historical circumstances, something like one race enslaving the other and Jim Crow.
Given history hasn’t demonstrated “silence” as an effective strategy in mitigating racial tensions, it is curious as to why it would be proposed now. Should Jews stop talking about the Holocaust, just get over it and move on?
Knowing racial tensions still exist within the US and globally, what would likely happen if people just stop talking about it? Would it “really” lessen or eradicate those tensions or would it contribute to maintaining the status quo? It’s clear that “if” it were effective that society in general might benefit. But, we have no evidence that it would be effective. So, “if” it’s not effective, who stands to benefit by maintaining the status quo?