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Is racism innate?

  
 
Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless
22:10 / 08.07.03
Wandering through London today I had a disturbing experience. As I was crossing a street something prompted me to look over my shoulder. I did so and saw a black man drive by in a BMW convertible.
What was interesting here was the total absence of conscious thought in my action. I didn't even realise what I was looking at until I had turned so the car came out of my peripheral vision. But I don't think I would have reacted in the same way if the driver had been white.
Now given that I didn't think at all until I had already turned, I believe any discussion of 'guilt' concerning this action is meaningless. One cannot feel guilty for a reflex, although one may feel guilty for not being aware of the effect of such reactions on one's previous thought, as in fact I did.
It was a thought-provoking moment though, and it spurred the following thought- that everyone, be they never so liberal, has racist memes 'programmed' into their minds to some degree. Specifically, that aspects of our subconscious psychology naturally push us toward racist points of view.
This thread is absolutely not intended as any kind of justification of racism- what I want to explore here is to what extent racism (and for that matter any other prejudice) is formed by these kinds of reaction, which determine what sort of people and situations are fore/backgrounded in our perception of the world. Does anyone else recognise the experience above? Are such reactions deprogrammable? How much effect do they have on opinion forming anyway? Can we ever be certain that we are aware of all our ‘prejudice reflexes’?
 
 
pacha perplexa
00:26 / 09.07.03
I have the impression you didn't look because he was black, but because it's uncommon (for social-economic reasons, possibly) to see black people driving expensive cars. Same as the man biting the dog, it drives attention because it's unusual.
Your guilt seems more pre-programmed than your reflex, but there is no doubt that there are racist memes out there - all avoidable and deprogrammable, I think.
 
 
Quantum
08:57 / 09.07.03
I don't think it's innate, but it's often pre-conscious. I had a similar experience several times a day when I lived in Tottenham, which gave me a racist reflex that said 'Oh, another drug dealer' every time I saw a black guy driving a beemer. So you can develop these reflexes as well as deprogram them.
I think the important thing is to be aware of these prejudices so you don't accept them as facts.
This thread has a few thoughts on reflexive racism.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
12:28 / 12.07.03
I think that when we were still "animals", we probably did fight eachother over territory, food, and whatnot. Therefore it stands to reason that one "group" may have ended up being mistrustful about another "group". Now that we don't have any animal adversaries, maybe we are having bad feelings about other people to make up for it.

It would be interesting to find a species where some of the number had some kind of cosmetic characteristic that made them different to the others, put both groups together, and see what happened.

Still, this is no reason to suggest that it's okay to be nasty to people in anyway because of their race.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
07:19 / 15.07.03
As far as I'm concerned, 'hardwiring', the whole concept, from Richard Dawkins right on through, gives fuckwits an excuse to act like fuckwits.

As your example shows, 'racism' is never only about 'race' (or, more correctly, skin colour): it also takes in class as well, and a whole lot of other elements. You noticed the driver because his socio-economic status, as demonstrated by the car he was driving, didn't meet with your concept of what his socio-enomic status should be.

You only get any distance at all with the 'hard wiring' argument because skin colour is seen to be (wrongly) something biological or genetic. Hence, the possibility of responses to skin colour being 'biological'. Whereas class, socio-economic status, really can't be shown to have any basis in biological or hard-wired reality, no? And yet in the example you gave, both elements are intimately bound up in each other, to the point where separating 'race' out erases a wholelevel of cogitation and power effects.

"It would be interesting to find a species where some of the number had some kind of cosmetic characteristic that made them different to the others, put both groups together, and see what happened."

What, you mean like humans? I know that as a moderator I should be encouraging thoughtful debate or something, but f'chrissakes.
 
 
Sonny Winters
09:45 / 15.07.03
It’s probably worth clearing up exactly what you think the nature of the reflex was. I wouldn’t have thought that there was anything directly biological, per se, in your reaction. I don’t think we actually have imperatives quite that specific ‘hardwired’ into our genetic code.

Whereas about 95% that the information your average Lion uses in it’s lifetime is inherited genetically (shapes of wildebeast, zebras, how to run/bite/kill, presumably), and the remaining 5% is aquired during it’s lifetime, that ratio is almost perfectly mirrored for Homo Sapiens sapiens. We get comparatively fuck-all from mother nature by way of a ‘users manual’.

It’s more likely that the reflex you’re talking about was inherited culturally and is a reslt of seeing few black people growing up. Actually, that’s a little bit simplistic, isn’t it? I think what I’m trying to say is that, through a combination of cultural and familial stuff, and the lack of black people in your formative experiences, you’ve unconsciously put black people in the category of ‘not-my-tribe’ or ‘not-us’ or even ‘invader’ or ‘not-to-be-trusted’. While it makes sense to me that there might be such a category that was genetically inheritable, I don’t think it’s pre-filled with any particular body-type, skin-colour, hair-colour. That’s more likely to be something that is filled in over time and in light of experience. That would certainly make more sense to me.

Although, I fully admit that I’m making wild, unsubstantiated assertions. If anyone wants to beat my argument to the floor with a well-fashioned flint club of informed debate, then be my guest. Survival of the fittest, and all that.
 
 
Mr Messy
09:56 / 15.07.03
I'm not sure about the term 'hardwired'.

My understanding is that my cognitive functioning is sped up when I take short cuts. One way of making cognitive short cuts is to group things together, i.e. stereotyping. Rather like an engine that needs lubrication, I use a kind of cognitive juice.

A personal example. I had horribly abusive and threatening neighbours a few years back. I went into a state where I felt constantly anxious and under threat. I was working over time to try and anticipate danger, and I found myself initially (pre-consciously) reacting to all black people as if they posed a threat to me. You see my neighbours just happened to be black.

As Quantum says being aware of this can be an important step to working to deprogram ourselves. But I believe that on a purely cognitive level it is impossible to stop ourselves from processing information in this way.

I like this idea because it works well as a framework to pin personal, social, cultural stuff on.
I do feel that trying to seperate out the factors that compose anyone else's attitudes is a tremendous task which presently I'm not up to.
 
 
Sonny Winters
14:50 / 15.07.03
...But I believe that on a purely cognitive level it is impossible to stop ourselves from processing information in this way.

Generally yeah, i'll agree that people sterotype and that's ordinary behaviour. But I think if you took the example of someone from, say, Morroco, where the skin tone of the people you'd count among your friends/family (i.e. the 'us' or 'my-tribe' category) is more likely to differ drastically, this person would probably not steroetype in this way. It just wouldn't make as much sense.

So therefore we're still in the arena of cultural/familial/learned behaviour rather than the genetic/inherited/universal sort.

So basically, yes, sterotyping = normal and probably universal. But what specific individuals choose as their criterion of judgement (and why) is probably the most telling and important aspect of the whole process.
 
 
Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless
21:53 / 15.07.03
After reading all the reactions above I realise that my first formulation of the ‘prejudice reflex’ was unclear and misleading, as was the thread title to some extent. The question is not really ‘Is racism innate’ per se but rather ‘Are there innate structures that make the development of racist reactions inevitable/highly likely’. I don’t believe, or want to suggest, that every Middle class English kid is primed to stare in shock and horror at Rastas in BMWs the second ze pops out the womb. Quite apart from being unpleasant this is ridiculous.
My precise meaning is implicit in the first post but not well articulated. It lies in the distinction between ‘hardwired’ and ‘programmed’.- as Mr Messy points out ‘hardwired’ is a dodgy word. Various other people have used it to describe the idea of ‘prejudice reflexes’
I never used the word ‘hardwired,’ I used ‘programmed.’ What is or is not hardwired in a device is determined in its construction. What is or is not programmed into a device is not. To clarify: Certain reflexes are hardwired. A good example is the reflex of pulling the hand away from a hot object. These tend to be things that are universal to human experience and not culture or situation dependent- heat and hand-burning are the same the world over. I think the reactions that govern our interactions with other people/animals are more subtly constructed. The structure and unconscious nature of the reaction are hardwired. The specific stimulus and the associated reaction are variables set by early childhood experiences, or possibly unreflective adult ones (the key point is the ‘unreflective’ part). Thus the hardwired part is a schema with the form (in this case)‘If you catch sight of X give it N amount of your attention.’ Some process in childhood then sets the values of X and N.- and from then on the reaction functions as a reflex. The whole process is something like that of parameter setting in Chomskyan Universal Grammar, which is where I stole it from.
So what is really interesting here is the possible grammar of the reflex schemas, and the process of parameter setting- and whether it can be reversed, and if so whether the possibility of reversal shows any relationship to the age of the person concerned.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
07:30 / 16.07.03
I still think it's a completely dodgy theory that erases the power effects going on in social exchanges, but then I think Chomsky is completely dodgy. His linguistic theory especially.

"A personal example. I had horribly abusive and threatening neighbours a few years back. I went into a state where I felt constantly anxious and under threat. I was working over time to try and anticipate danger, and I found myself initially (pre-consciously) reacting to all black people as if they posed a threat to me. You see my neighbours just happened to be black."

If your horribly threatening and abusive neighbours had been white, would you have reacted as if white people posed a threat to you, afterwards? Of course not. You'd simply have thought, 'Those were some fucked up neighbours,' and gone about your business.

My point is, nothing happens on a 'purely cognitive level'. Your behaviour is influenced by everything you learn about the privileges you acquire through your skin colour/sex/sexuality/class/etc, the hierarchies you inhabit, and the behaviours expected of you by a culture which actively works to reproduce those stereotypes produces those reactions.

Trying to figure how to 'deprogram' oneself in a 'purely cognitive' way probably won't work, because racism doesn't originate in cognitive functions. A stereotyping reaction might build, through a lifetime, around a person's racist tendencies. It's not about 'seeing few black people growing up' -- it's about the way one learns *how* to see those people. Cognitive explanations, are, in my book, a kind of excuse.
 
 
Mr Messy
11:47 / 16.07.03
Thank you for your comments. They were most thought provoking.
I think that if my neighbours had been white then I would probably have latched on to some other form of stereotype, perhaps class based.

My point is, nothing happens on a 'purely cognitive level'.

I agree with this. In reality, not on paper, the myriad elements that dictate our function in the world cannot be seperated out. It is all a lot more complicated.

Trying to figure how to 'deprogram' oneself in a 'purely cognitive' way probably won't work, because racism doesn't originate in cognitive functions.

No, I agree with that too. I don't think I made a full attempt to suggest how we can deprogram racism. I certainly don't think it can be attempted through studying cognition alone.

I tend only to be able to think these issues through on a personal level, and I think the context of my learning was important here. I was raised by white liberal parents and had invested strongly in the belief that I wasn't racist. When I learned about cognitive theory it was a challenge to me to think that I did possess skewed attitudes. What the hell, I was much more naive than I am now. It was a starting point for me to then go on and examine my childhood, the influences of my parents, society, etc., which is an ongoing process. This is how I see cognitive theory, as a starting point - you might say cognition is the hardware, and cultural/familial/learned is the software. Understanding both is essential.

Cognitive explanations, are, in my book, a kind of excuse.

I think that depends on how you use them. I wouldn't like to use them as an excuse, although I'm sure plenty have. Like I said, understanding this part of the process was important to me, but only one small part.

Going back to the topic abstract and to try and summarise, I don't believe racism is innate. However, I think we have a prediliction to make crass generalisations about distinctive groups, and that the form of these generalisations is determined by our learning.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
21:46 / 16.07.03
Personally, I'm not entirely sure what the reaction proves, except that our social conditioning has taught us that if large German cars heave into our view we should probably take a glance to establish where they are, before they hit us. Whether the driver is black or white seems something that is only processed or observed after the car is actually looked at.

However, to continue our car idea, I can think immediately of two relevant exempla here. One is the moment in "This Life" when Miles notices that his colleague, although a successful lawyer, is driving a samll, inexpensive car. When he asks why, his colleague explains that he got sick of the police stopping him in his Beemer. Another is the news story of an Anglican bishop being stopped by the police. When they asked him his profession, and he responded "Bishop of Lambeth", the police attempted to send him on his way without, for example, providing their badge numbers.

In both cases it strikes me that the issue here is class. They were subject to police scrutiny because the car they were driving was out of character with the perception of their means. This strikes me as a class issue; their blackness or otherwise is only tangentially relevant, just as Quantum might have identified both bishop and solicitor as drug dealer. But this is not a "hardwired" or "purely cognitive" response. It is a sdecision about somebody's likelihood of having engaged with a particular (legitimate) economic system well enough to have a nice car. It's actually rather a complex set of judgements to make based on the intermediate conclusion, based itself on available evidence concerning that person's skin tone, facial features and other data, that they fit the denominator "black".

I can't think of many things *less* instinctive...
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
22:01 / 16.07.03
This strikes me as a class issue; their blackness or otherwise is only tangentially relevant, just as Quantum might have identified both bishop and solicitor as drug dealer.

Except of course in that it shows that black people in general are expected to be from lower socio-economic strata, which indicates that blackness is associated, however vaguely, with poverty and crime. I expect if one saw someone who was white, wearing casual clothes, driving a BMW, one wouldn't think twice unless one associated the clothes they were wearing with lower socio-economic class, poverty, and crime. If this is the case, it seems wrong to say that the issue is one of class rather than of colour as regards black people in this situation, because ideas about colour are so bound up with ideas about class.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
22:16 / 16.07.03
Ah, but I think you're looking at "black = expectation of being poor" as the driving narrative, and I don't think it's quite that simple. More like "looks black = indicative of a natural state of poverty", which is a bit different. A black man in a posh car is perceptually unnatural, and thus discombobulating, but before we can get there we have to work through a series of perceived elements that lead us to believe that the man is black, just as we do to establish that the car is posh.Now, is one of these elements "looks unnatural in a posh car"? Because that could have a deceptive circularity...
 
 
Quantum
14:55 / 18.07.03
"ideas about colour are so bound up with ideas about class" KCC
Have to say I suspect all Beemer drivers of being dealers, unless they look like solicitors. My perceptual classification goes 'Car=Beemer, probably a drug dealer' then 'Smart business clothes=legit' or 'casual streetwear&heavy gold jewelry=dealer' then 'black or white'. If I saw a black solicitor driving a BMW I probably wouldn't see the blackness if you know what I mean. A person's colour seems less relevant to my racist reflexes than class.

..."black = expectation of being poor" as the driving narrative, and I don't think it's quite that simple. More like "looks black = indicative of a natural state of poverty", which is a bit different
Really? I fail to see the distinction, they seem like the same narrative to me.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
19:49 / 18.07.03
Because you don't have an instinctive black-sensor. "This person is black" is a conclusion you come to based on cues, just as you do "this person is driving a car", "this car is a BMW", "this person is a drug-dealer".

Then, of course, we can look at "casual streetwear and heavy gold jewellery" as a signifier by which the conclusion of blackness can be drawn...
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
11:06 / 21.07.03
I think I grasp what you mean - can you tell me whether I am barking up the wrong tree with the following (very crude) illustration: I see a person walking down the street in front of me (walking away from me). I deduce from the height, gait and clothing of the person that it is a male person. The man is wearing a beanie and a tracksuit which obviously cost a bit of money. I therefore expect the man to be young (i.e. a 'youth') and black, and am surprised when he turns round and I see that he is in fact white and in his forties. I do not understand why my expectations have been confounded and therefore am conscious of noticing that there is something unusual about this person.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
18:29 / 23.07.03
Except that thereis another stage. The man turns around, and you are presented with a set of cues which then *also* need to be decoded - skin tone, facial features...I might identify as "black" based on what I perceive somebody who thinks of themselves as mixed-race, say. For that matter, I might think of somebody as Asian who thinks of hirself as "black". Black is a descriptive term, but it is also a conceptual term - something that guides and explains how we are conceiving of people.

In your example two cues have been picked up and interpreted as making the object of the gaze conceptually black, but then when he turns round another is added - pale skin - that acts as a signifier, and a fairly strong signifier, of whiteness. so, the weaker cues are overborne. On one level, it's something we've talked about here before; the use of signifiers to avoid actually identifying people as black, but rather using handy cues like the tracksuits and the gold jewellery and the ever-popular "urban"...

So, I'm not sure that you can see "innate" racism among humans in the same terms that you could ask whether black cats instinctively distrust tabby cats, for example.
 
 
Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless
22:05 / 25.07.03
A few posts up from here Mister Disco remarks My point is, nothing happens on a 'purely cognitive level'.

This is a trivial statement as it stands. It says that there are no concepts or events in the mind/brain that are unconnected with events or objects in the outside world- that every mental event or structure has some connection to an object or event in the outside world.
This is obvious. Everything in every mind has something in the external world standing in a relationship of anteriority to it because humans are conceived and born through biological processes. This is also true for perceptions, thoughts and utterances (presupposing one believes in an external world, which is assumed here)

What Mister Disco seems to mean (and if I am wrong I hope ze will correct me) is that no human mental phenomenon is purely determined by a priori cognitive settings. A.k.a. the Lockean Blank Slate position.

At the lower end of the spectrum of mental processes this simply isn’t true. The fact that new born babies and that foals can walk a short while after birth indicates that there are certain cognitive processes that simply do not require learning input.

I agree that at the higher levels things are much more complex. But I as I tried to make clear in my last post, what I am suggesting is not a fully hardwired reaction. but a universal grammar for subconscious reactions- a schema that can be filled in by experience of certain types of thing in certain types of situation. The thing in question does not have to be a biological attribute, - it could conceivably be a token of some abstract concept. Thus Mister Disco’s contention that
You only get any distance at all with the 'hard wiring' argument because skin colour is seen to be (wrongly) something biological or genetic
is wrong. Whether skin colour is biological or not is irrelevant.
The basic point I am making is that one does not need to believe anything is ‘purely cognitive’ in order to believe that it has some reasonably complex innate component that is worth investigation.

I do not believe that all racist/prejudiced reactions function in this way, or that they necessarily determine behaviour in a racist/prejudiced way. Many racist attitudes are clearly due to the conscious evolution of opinions constrained by various social factors. I think that the kind of reaction I experienced act as adjuncts (or possibly triggers) to this sort of conscious rationalization of racism. Arguing for one does not presuppose the non-existence or unimportance of the other. Taking this point of view does not therefore erase power relations. They are present both in the conscious formulations of racist attitudes and in whatever learning processes lead to the filling in of the schemas with racist values.

Some comments on Haus’s remarks:

1.The car was driving away from me on the opposite side of the road. If it had been running me down I would have thought my reaction entirely normal and never started the thread.


2.Whether the driver is black or white seems something that is only processed or observed after the car is actually looked at.

. . .we have to work through a series of perceived elements that lead us to believe that the man is black, just as we do to establish that the car is posh

You seem to presume serial processing of ‘perceived elements’ perceived in a very short space of time. While I agree that one can only entertain one perceived element/cue as a proposition in consciousness at a time, we are not discussing conscious thought, but subconscious reactions to subconscious perceptions. The brain is composed of neural networks, and they have absolutely no problem with parallel processing. It’s just consciousness that doesn’t like it. I don’t think we need to postulate an order in which the perceived elements come, or even worry if they come in any given order.
(I agree completely about ‘black’(or 'poverty' or 'class') being a set of cues rather than a ‘black sensor’(whatever that might be).
Neural networks could certainly cope with this kind of complex reaction. Consciousness need not be involved, except in the learning process. Even there it is not clear that consciousness is necessary- neural nets can learn using fairly simple functions that might well operate at a subconscious level).
 
 
Quantum
10:05 / 30.07.03
So you could have a racist brain but not consciously be racist? It seems that consciousness must play a part, otherwise it wouldn't be racism- it would be noticing objects in your environment.
Neural networks recognising patterns are several 'levels' down from societal attitudes and prejudices, which are complex enough that they can't be mapped onto brain functions.
 
 
Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless
22:54 / 30.07.03
It's certainly correct to say that we can't map societal prejudices onto brain functions at our present state of knowledge. Whether or not some partial or complete mapping is possible in an absolute sense is actually unknown. I personally think a complete account would have three interrelated domains:neural structures, the constraints imposed on communication by the semantics/pragmatics of the language/semiotic systems in which the ideas were conveyed, as well as the memetics of racist ideas, insofar as that could be distinguished from the previous two.

Quantum, I think your argument about racism needing to be conscious is flawed- Here's why:
You seem to presuppose that for some belief to be racist the person holding it has to be capable of consciously representing their attitude to it as racist. I think that this is simply untrue. What is true is that someone, not necessarily the original bearer of the representation has to be capable of representing it as racist consciously.(This is obviously a necessary, not a sufficient, condition)
In common usage, if someone, or some entity consistently performed acts that discriminated between races, then those acts would be deemed racist, even if the person, or entity did not or could not represent those actions as racist. If we could not represent the concept 'racist' in this way, then no-one would be able to understand the concept of 'institutional racism' This for me, as a linguist, is the ultimate criterion of word meaning. But, of course, it does not presuppose that all speakers understand the word this way, only that they can if they think about it in a certain (fairly common) way.
 
 
Quantum
09:43 / 31.07.03
You seem to presuppose that for some belief to be racist the person holding it has to be capable of consciously representing their attitude to it as racist.
No, they don't have to recognise it as racist but the racist belief is a conscious thing, the thought 'X is Y' is not mappable onto brain function (yet, and possibly never will be) and is thus conscious. The racist might not classify the belief as racist (as you say) but they hold that belief consciously, they could express it if asked.

I used to live in an area of multicultural diversity, now I live in a place where almost everyone is white. My brain now notices people who are of other ethnic origins because they are unusual, which means in a way my brain has become more 'racist'- I might unconsciously turn to look at a couple of Japanese tourists go past for example. That isn't innate racism though, because the conscious aspect of it is me thinking 'Oh look some Japanese people'. It would be racist if there were some negative value judgement on my part, but without that judgement it isn't.
 
 
Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless
23:40 / 31.07.03
I think we agree these reactions exist- you just think that applying ‘racist’ to them is a misuse of language, whereas I don’t. There are good arguments for both positions. I think the use of the word ‘racist’ has very different effects on how we think depending which one one takes. It is not clear that one is better than the other. It is clear that each has beneficial effects the other cannot provide.
On a pragmatic level I can see why it might be undesirable to broaden the notion of ‘racist belief/reaction’ to include subconscious entities. It might have the effect of weakening the notion of ‘racism’ beyond usefulness. On this definition of racism the members of the BNP become invisible against the broader population.
But my counter-argument would be that defining racism as something necessarily conscious: (partially)thought through beliefs as opposed to unconscious actions based on beliefs we may not even know we have discourages people from being honest about the way that they face the world- they don’t want to think of themselves as racist, and so don’t examine how the odd ways in which they perceive things distort what is really there.

But leaving that aside . . .
Even if we accept that any racist belief, in order to be racist, must be capable of being represented by the person using it, it does not follow that the racist concerned must represent it consciously in the process of using it, or that they would necessarily ever do so. Consciousness is only so big, and one cannot possibly represent every proposition contigent to ones reactions in the world at the time of those reactions. Some large number of these propositions must merely be manifest to consciousness, as opposed to actually present in it. It is perfectly possible that some of these crucial beliefs remain constantly submerged. It is equally possible that the person holds a belief isomorphic to a racist belief in the belief that it is not a racist belief, even though the meanings are the same. And people (excepting those doing philosophy) are notoriously reluctant to examine the grounds of their beliefs. -Russell: ‘Most people would rather die than think, in fact most do’
 
 
Quantum
08:08 / 01.08.03
True, but it's a belief not a brain structure and so unlikely to be innate. Although they may never hold the racist thought at the forefront of their mind, it's still potentially expressable in a way that pattern recognition systems are not- the preconscious act of your attention being drawn to something in your environment isn't racist, only when you then assume things about them based on race (consciously or subconsciously) does the racist element appear.
Unexamined beliefs are the root of all evil.
 
  
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