Dreamer Easy

Am I the only one who thinks

thegameiam was asking a rhetorical question about why people are racist in the first place, as opposed to why anyone should care about racial issues?

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got it in one.

In the perfect world, nobody cares about race, right? So my question is this: how do we get there? What actions on our part are the most likely to help? Focusing on race as a concept runs the risk of struggling with monsters...

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I've always assumed it was evolutionary. In some situations, for wild animals like we used to be, it would be an advantage to protect 'us' and defend against 'them'. As someone said above, humanity would be as one in the event that we had some extraterrestrials to band together against. It's a pretty deep-seated biological imperative -- even though we are now living in an age where it is no longer an advantage.

The reason we should focus on race (or sex, or sexual orientation, or religion, or any other common dividing line) as an issue is that most people can't just accept 'oh, it's just biology playing silly buggers' and brush off their prejudices. They believe that their prejudices are logical and right and true; otherwise they wouldn't hang onto them so strongly. It would be the equivalent of telling them it was all in their head, and people generally don't respond well to that.

So you have to start by proving to them that their beliefs about race are not actually true. First, they need to accept that people who are unlike them are not inherently evil or unworthy or inferior. Second, they need to think of all of humanity as part of the 'us' group, instead of choosing an arbitrary factor like skin colour to decide whether or not someone is part of 'us' or 'them'.

Since not everyone's hatreds are based along the same lines, you have to focus on what they perceive as the dividing line (race, religion, etc.) in order to change their minds. Starting from your position, a belief that all people are the same, will not make any sense to them at all.

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You've done something I wasn't sure was possible: said something which is both interesting and insightful on the topic of race. Many kudos - I'll need to think about it a bit to process it.

I do think you and the prior poster capture my starting position pretty well - I see the only significant "race" as "human" - the Moties are the ones who worry me...

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A footnote: a recent New Scientist aticle suggested that while favouring our own group might come from our evolution - part of our ability to cooperate - hostility towards other groups might not be so "natural". That would mean it was learned - and can be unlearned.

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That would be a good area for research.

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One of my favourite books as a kid was Sara Stein's The Evolution Book. I think that's where I read about this concept the first time: that two opposite behaviours can exist in a community at the same time, and that itself is a survival advantage for the community.

One example was of prairie dog mothers, some of whom are very affectionate with their adult offspring and encourage them to live nearby, and some of whom are cold or indifferent towards adult offspring and will run them off so that they go to live far away.

Another was of Japanese macaques, who learned to wash the grain that they were eating. The inventor of the technique was a young female, who taught it to her group; some of them followed her lead, and others just continued to eat grain the old fashioned way, getting sand in their teeth.

The idea put forward was that if either behaviour turned out to be a great disadvantage over the other, there would still be individuals who survived more successfully because they did things a different way.

I'm guessing in this context that some humans are hardwired to be suspicious and mistrustful of difference, and others to be accepting and tolerant. At any given time, one of those could be advantageous over the other. And I also wonder if our nature as social animals and our ability to love our family and neighbors is exactly what makes us so willing to defend against 'strangers'.

Now that we're animals with really big brains and can think about this stuff in depth, it would be nice if more of us would use that capability, instead of just following whatever we're genetically programmed for.

Erm... the point of all that was that I'm thinking it's a bit of a political oversimplification to say that one behaviour or the other is 'natural' and that the other is 'unnatural'. Any behaviour that we have ingrained so deeply must have been useful at one time or another, and therefore became 'natural'. (The other example of that that I'm familiar with is meat-eating; we may have initially evolved from herbivore stock, but we wouldn't have become as versatile as we are if we hadn't learned to eat other animals. And maybe today we have to unlearn it, or at least lessen our dependence on it, for the sake of resource sharing and species survival. But that's another kettle of soybeans.)

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Scientifically, there's no such thing as "race". For me, this is a very liberating understanding: all those categories that seemed so natural and obvious just break down and blow away. It's a vision of the future we want, in which race actually is irrelevant.

Sadly, one comes down with a bump into the real world, where the idea of "race" is very much alive. My country lets its Indigenous people go blind for lack of clean drinking water and locks up Middle Eastern refugees indefinitely without charge or trial. My city recently had a race riot when a drunken Anglo mob turned on Lebanese-Australians.

For you and I, these are things that happen to other people - they don't really affect our lives. But obviously, it's no armchair debate if you happen to be Aboriginal or Lebanese-Australian. That's why it's so important for White people not to fall into the "colourblind" trap. We don't live in that ideal world, not yet.

My suggestion is this: don't focus on race per se. Focus on racism. Don't worry overmuch about precise categories or identities, but look at issues like poverty, neglect, vilification, injustice, misrepresentation.

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For all of the grief the US gets in a lot of contexts, there don't seem to be the kind of egregious racial issues like the Australian ones you describe.

The bigger issues in the US, to my mind, are poverty-based: even though there's a lot of social mobility, the poorer classes have a bunch of handicaps (eg. overly crummy schools). In Washington DC, the relatively new mayor got a lot of grief over the person he chose to run the school system (after he took it over) because she isn't black. It's unfortunate that people were more interested in the race of his appointees than their competence or fit for the job.

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Poverty and race are very closely intertwined in the US, though; there are plenty of living people who can remember when segregation was the law, and black people had to live in different neighborhoods and go to different schools than white people. It resulted in a huge socioeconomic and cultural gap. The country is learning to celebrate the cultural differences, but many people are still struggling to get out of the resultant poverty.

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It's been nearly two generations since Jim Crow was overturned. Now, we have poor black folks and poor white folks, and both groups have some significant issues. Add to that the poor folks of more recent American vintage, and to me the issue becomes far less about race and far more about ensuring accesss to education and the other tools to do well.

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Poverty has more than one cause, but race is clearly an important factor, or the following wouldn't be true: "The Black poverty rate was 23.2 percentage points higher than that for White non-Hispanics in 1993; by 2000 this difference declined to 14.6 percentage points—still substantially higher even while the Black poverty rate was at its historic low." That's from <a href="the file http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/p60-214.pdf>Poverty in the United States</a>, a 2000 report from the US Census Bureau. Glance at the graph on page 4: while Jim Crow is slowly losing his hold, you can see that there's still a long way to go.

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In my neck of the woods (i.e. a part of the country where there are tremendously affluent marjority-black neighborhoods), poverty is less a function of what race you are than:

1) were your parents poor?
2) did you have two parents?
3) did you finish high school / take some college?

Now, there are statistical differences between the various demographic groups, but you'll find that poverty tracks those far more than it tracks skin color.

Race is an outmoded concept, which has outlived its shelf-life (it never had any usefulness to outlive) - let's just worry about poverty reduction: if the poor people happen to have dark skin, we'll help them. If they happen to have light skin, we'll help them. What does skin color matter?

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Racism: a Very Short Introduction cites US studies from the sixties, the nineties, and most recently Whitewashing Race (Brown et al, 2003), all of which demonstrate that "... institutional racism continues to blight black lives. Inadequate housing, the product of years discrimination and 'white flight', and poorly resourced schools lead to low educational achievement, lower admissions to colleges, and poor employment prospects."

I'd be very interested to see some of the statistics you mention.

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Coincidentally, I just stumbled across an Australian equivalent - the lack of educational opportunities for Indigenous Australians (the uni is running a program to promote science to students.

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jvowles.livejournal.com

Actually, we've pretty much done the same thing with our indigenous people in this country.

And the less said about DC racial politics, the better. Any group of idiots that KEEPS ELECTING MARION BARRY....

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Certainly the settlers' treatment of the native population was pretty appalling - but can you point to issues as bad as Kate mentioned which are still ongoing today? In general, the tribes have their own sovereignty, and the problems they've got are more correlated to multi-generational poverty rather than institutionalized racism.

There are a few politicians in DC who still engage in racial identity politics. Councilman Barry is a good example of one. However, any examination of the Washington Post's coverage of DC politics would show them giving inordinate time to people who want to engage in racial politics.

THAT is something we need to stamp out.

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can you point to issues as bad as Kate mentioned

Possibly not; IIRC, Australia holds the world record for crappy treatment of our Indigenous population. Oh yes, here it is: Australia ranked bottom of wealthy nations on Indigenous health. Indigenous Australians have three times the infant mortality rate of other Australians. (OTOH, Native Americans have almost twice the infant mortality rate of White Americans.)

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