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Post by Deleted on Feb 28, 2015 10:00:42 GMT -5
No one is born a racist! Watch the children and see. I firmly believe this, and that to become a racist, you must be taught to be one. For example, a Greek boy plays with an Albanian boy at an early age. The Greek parents see this, and scold their son for playing with the Albanian. With that kind of continued illogical thought by the parents, the Greek boy ends up disliking Albanians. Thoughts.
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Post by Jon Do on Feb 28, 2015 18:48:40 GMT -5
arrgg race is a social construct ... muh ... but race is only skin deep ! Mongoloid - Caucasoid - Negoid - Australoid Albinos from every race and I still bet you can all guess where they're from Because we're all the same inside. World's strongest men vs world's fastest men .... BUT ... muuh... we all bleed red !
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Post by Deleted on Feb 28, 2015 22:10:25 GMT -5
"There's never been good reason to believe that human beings are naturally racist. After all, in the environment of human evolution--which didn't feature, for example, jet travel to other continents--there would have been virtually no encounters between groups that had different skin colors or other conspicuous physical differences. So it's not as if the human lineage could have plausibly developed, by evolutionary adaptation, an instinctive reaction to members of different races.
Nonetheless, people who want to argue that racism is natural have tried to buttress their position with evidence that racism is in some sense biological. For example: studies have found that when whites see black faces there is increased activity in the amygdala, a brain structure associated with emotion and, specifically, with the detection of threats.
Well, whatever power that kind of argument ever had--which wasn't much, since the fact that a psychological reaction has a biological correlate doesn't tell you whether the reaction is innate--it has even less power now. In a paper that will be published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Eva Telzer of UCLA and three other researchers report that they've performed these amygdala studies--which had previously been done on adults--on children. And they found something interesting: the racial sensitivity of the amygdala doesn't kick in until around age 14.
What's more: once it kicks in, it doesn't kick in equally for everybody. The more racially diverse your peer group, the less strong the amygdala effect. At really high levels of diversity, the effect disappeared entirely. The authors of the study write that ''these findings suggest that neural biases to race are not innate and that race is a social construction, learned over time.''
There's a reason the previous sentence says "suggest" and not "prove." As the authors note, it's conceivable that "the increasing amygdala response to race [with age] may be driven by intrinsic factors of the child, such as puberty, rather than exposure to cultural messages." For that matter, the correlation between peer group diversity and dampened amygdala response doesn't mean the former causes the latter; it could work the other way around: maybe people with a mild response to racial difference wind up with more diverse peers.
But all of this is almost beside the point anyway, because there have always been plenty of reasons to believe that the amygdala response doesn't reflect an instinctive aversion to the racial "other." For example: The amygdala's response to African-American faces had been observed not just in European-American adults but in African-American adults--who aren't, in this case, the "other." Apparently whatever cultural information was inculcating a particular response to blacks in whites was having a similar effect in blacks.
I'm not a blank slater; I don't believe that we're born innocent, and only develop a dark side after bad tendencies are engrained by evil capitalists, or evil patriarchs, or evil warmongers, or evil whatevers. I think that, though we're not naturally racist, we're naturally "groupist." Evolution seems to have inclined us to readily define whole groups of people as the enemy, after which we can find their suffering, even death, very easy to countenance and even facilitate.
But when it comes to defining this enemy--defining the "out group"--people are very flexible. The out group can be defined by its language, its religion, its skin color, its jersey color. (And jersey color can trump skin color--just watch a brawl between one racially integrated sports team and another.) It all depends on which group we consider (rightly or wrongly) in some sense threatening to our interests.
It's in this sense that race is a "social construct." It's not a category that's inherently correlated with our patterns of fear or mistrust or hatred, though, obviously, it can become one. So it's within our power to construct a society in which race isn't a meaningful construct.
The Atlantic
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Post by Deleted on Feb 28, 2015 22:10:47 GMT -5
"Racism is taught in our society, it is not automatic. It is learned behavior toward persons with dissimilar physical characteristics."
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Post by Deleted on Feb 28, 2015 22:52:26 GMT -5
People who accept mixed marriage are more tolerant of other races and cultures.
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Post by Jon Do on Mar 1, 2015 21:05:36 GMT -5
Dr. Francis Crick, Nobel Prize winner and co-discoverer of DNA:
"We need to get rid of our liberal preconceptions. Men are not born equal, this is something which has not yet got through to the politicians, and it is by no means clear that all races are equally gifted."
Forensic anthropologist George W. Gill, in 2000:
"The idea that race is ‘only skin deep’ is simply not true.”
Carleton Coon (1962) [3]:
"Caucasoids and Mongoloids who live in their homelands and in recently colonized regions, such as North America, did not rise to their present population levels and positions of cultural dominance by accident. They achieved all this because their ancestors occupied the most favorable of the earth's zoological regions, in which other kinds of animals also attained dominance during the Pleistocene. These regions had challenging climates and ample breeding grounds and were centrally located within continental land masses. There general adaptation was more important than special adaptation. Any other subspecies that had evolved in these regions would probably have been just as successful."
Professor R. Ruggles Gates, M.A., Ph.D., D.Sc., together with Professor Wesley C. George, M.A., Ph.D., and Professor Henry E. Garrett, Ph.D., D.Sc., wrote in conjunction that:
"We do not believe that there is anything to be drawn from the sciences in which we work which supports the view that all races are equal or alike, or likely to be equal or alike in anything approaching the foreseeable future. We believe, on the contrary, that there are vast differences and vast areas of difference within mankind, not only in the physical appearance, but in such matters as adaptability to varying environments and in deep psychological and emotional qualities as well as mental abilities and capacity for development. We are of the opinion that in ignoring these differences and depth of difference modern man and his political representatives are likely to find themselves in serious difficulties sooner or later."
Louis Leakey in The Progress And Evolution Of Man In Africa (Oxford University Press, 1961):
"As a social anthropologist, I naturally accept and even stress the fact that there are major differences, both mental and psychological, which separate the different races of mankind. Indeed, I would be inclined to suggest that however great may be the physical differences between such races as the European and the Negro, the mental and psychological differences are greater still."
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Post by Deleted on Mar 1, 2015 22:22:47 GMT -5
We are not the same but we are all equals.
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