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. <\/p>\n
What do you expect would happen after a couple years? <\/p>\n
I would expect confirmation bias and in-group loyalty to cause both groups to develop “racist” attitudes towards the other. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
Both groups start to develop attitudes and suspicions about the other group, which only adds fuel to the fire. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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<\/a>, “stop talking about it.” <\/p>\n 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? <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n Which is no surprise. There’s lots of money to be made in the race-baiting game. Just ask Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. … Continue reading “How to ease racial tensions”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1608"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1609,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1608\/revisions\/1609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}