19 August 1999, 818 words
It is quite natural to be a racist. The weird persons amongst us are those who are free of ethnic prejudice and class bias and so on. But no one is not a bigot in some way. (I myself am extremely bigoted against bigots. Also fat men who wear bikini swim trunks.)
Experiments carried out by psychologists, and anthropological studies of foraging peoples, show that hatred between groups is part and parcel of human nature. In one famous experiment, social psychologist Muzafer Sherif took a carefully selected group of well-adjusted, middle-class American boys and randomly divided them into two groups that competed in sports and skits. Within days, the groups were attacking each other so fiercely that the experimenters had to intervene for the boys' safety.
Similarly, I once saw an episode of Oprah where the division was done by eye colour, and the groups told that brown-eyed people were inherently smarter and better-behaved than blue-eyed people. Some brown-eyed people immediately remembered all sorts of anecdotes "proving" what they had been told.
But the reasons for the divisions don't matter in the least. In one experiment, people were put into two groups at random but told that the criteria was whether they overestimated or underestimated dots on a screen. The people in each group instantly formed negative opinions of the other. This baseless bigotry was evoked even when the experimenter divided the groups by flipping a coin before their eyes!
Now you might argue that Americans aren't the best subjects to test for civilized behaviour. But the results find a ready corollary among hunter-gatherers. The !Kung San, a foraging people of Africa, are among the most peaceful bands: their murder rate is only as high as Detroit's. The women of the Iyau, a New Guinea tribe, frequently get new husbands when the old one is killed by a man who wants them. Among the Yanomamö Indians of South America, killers are highly esteemed, usually having three times as many wives and children as men who have not killed anyone. Archaeologist Lawrence Keeley has documented that warfare was common among Pacific Islanders, Australian Aborigines and American Indians, especially in the centuries before British colonialism.
So, contrary to what you'll hear from Afrocentrists and other badly-educated persons, the portrait of primitive peoples living in harmony with nature and one another has no basis in reality.
But by now you must be wondering why human beings are like this. Well, for reasons too complex and boring to go into, it seems that our brain is predisposed to interpret reality in categories. This includes everything from shapes, sounds, words, plants, animals and, of course, people. Add to this the programming of our genes - duplicate, duplicate, duplicate - and you can see that we have strong tendencies to favour our own familial group (children, mate, siblings, parents, uncles, aunts, cousins and so on) as well as band, tribe, race, religion or country.
Ethnocentrists of all stripes like to say that people must always favour the needs of their group over the needs of the individual. The trouble is, favoring one's group almost always mean trying to subjugate, or even exterminate, some other group. (In the animal kingdom, ants fit the group-over-individual criteria perfectly. They are also one of the few species in the animal kingdom which wage war and have slaves.) Our predilection towards categorisation is what creates stereotypes.
But it can get complicated. Kamal Persad, for example, is the same race as most Trinidadian Muslims, but his Hindu bigotry supersedes his racial self-categorization as an "Indian". Indeed, Persad's self-categorization as a "Hindu" is itself so narrow that he excludes even Hindu activist Ravi-ji from being a "true Indian". (A "true Indian", according to Maha Sabha Hindus, is anyone who agrees with everything Maha Sabha Hindus say.)
Anyway, that is why we are how we are. But the more interesting question is this: why are some of us not? Given that categorization is so fundamental to our mental processes, it seems likely that liberal, tolerant people are able to slot other people, and themselves, into categories wide enough to supersede differences of ethnicity or race or gender or class or creed. Perhaps the smallness and complexity of Trinidad, which has virtually forced generosity of categories upon us, accounts in large part for our peaceful racial history, plus the non-racial perspectives of most of the younger generation.
So when I said at the beginning of this column that it is natural to be racist, I did not mean that that makes racism right. The naturalistic fallacy, which confuses morals with science, is a fault that plagues even the most competent thinkers. But the irony in our society is that our most virulent bigots love to pose as spiritually driven, intellectually able persons, even as their coarse categorisation reveal how completely controlled they are by basic biology.
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh