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[personal profile] dreamer_easy
International Blog Against Racism Week begins tomorrow, 6 August. Before the week officially starts, I'd like to try something a bit dodgy.

For the next twenty-four hours, you can leave an anonymous message here with any questions you have about race or racism. IP logging is off and there are no LJ Toys or other IP-capturing stuff to worry about.

I know many people are afraid to say or ask things about these subjects, for fear of looking stupid or causing offence. I'll delete anything that's obviously just supposed to be abusive, and anything that uses insulting words, but otherwise, anything goes. POC, please be warned: that means there may be annoying, frustrating, or offensive material - you may prefer not to read the comments left here.

I can't guarantee answers to questions that are posted, but I will try to respond if I can. I won't judge or lecture anyone for honest curiosity or confusion. (Keep in mind I'm just a well-meaning White middle-class liberal, and no expert on racial issues.)

The twenty-four hours is up, folks! You can still post anonymously, but IP logging is back on. Thanks for your comments!

Date: 2007-08-05 09:31 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] antikythera.livejournal.com
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.

Date: 2007-08-05 09:59 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thegameiam.livejournal.com
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...

Date: 2007-08-05 10:25 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kateorman.livejournal.com
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.

Date: 2007-08-05 10:34 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thegameiam.livejournal.com
That would be a good area for research.

Date: 2007-08-05 10:50 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] antikythera.livejournal.com
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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