How racism works

“The truth is that regardless of where we stand on racism — and we are all guilty of thinking it, speaking it, or practising it on some level — we urgently need to wake up and realise that it can only divide and then destroy us all,” wrote one columnist recently. A fine, if trite, sentiment - but I am always suspicious of people who assert that everybody is racist to some degree. Such a belief says more about the speaker’s own character than it does about human nature. The assertion suggests that a racial perspective is so ingrained in the commentator’s own psyche that she finds it unbelievable that anyone else can be free of such prejudice.

But this does not mean the sentiment she expresses is insincere. It is quite possible to be racial without being racist. The scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah defines ‘‘racialism’’ as the belief in “heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our species, that allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that all the members of these races share certain traits with each other that they do not share with members of any other race.” But, Appiah argues, racialists are not racists until they make their belief the basis for claiming special privileges for their group and for denigrating other groups. Historian George M Frederickson, in his book Racism: A Short History, argues that real racism requires even more than this. “(Racism) originates from a mindset that regards ‘them’ as different from ‘us’ in ways that are permanent and unbridgeable.

This sense of difference provides a motive or rationale for using our power advantage to treat the ethnoracial Other in ways we would regard as cruel or unjust if applied to members of our own group.” For Frederickson, the abuse of power is essential to real racism. “It either directly sustains or proposes to establish a racial order, a permanent group hierarchy that is believed to reflect the laws of nature or the decrees of God.” So Nazi Germany, the southern United States before desegregation, and South Africa were racist societies. But Trinidad and Tobago, by Frederickson’s definition, is not. Few persons can therefore be defined as racists in our country, although people like Devant Maharaj and Professor Selwyn Cudjoe frequently flirt with that thin line. But I reject the columnist’s core clause mainly because I am myself entirely free of racialism.

My saying so, of course, does not make this the case. After all, human beings are very good at fooling themselves about how ‘‘good’’ they are, and I am human for the most part. But I do not think my freedom from racial bigotry is because of any inherent moral superiority. It is more likely because of my naturally curly hair. That running joke of mine is not entirely facetious. It may well be that my curly hair, plus having South Indian features (more rounded than North Indians, with brown skin and broader shoulders) are the real cause for my lack of prejudice. My features may have shaped my self-perception, and the Creole perception of me, in a way that allowed me to move with relative ease between the racial groups. Not, of course, that this would have been sufficient: my genetic inheritance of persistent curiosity, the historical accident of a Presbyterian background, and my attendance at a Catholic secondary school — all contributed to this happy outcome.

I would like to believe that, even without these environmental reinforcements, the genetic dice roll would have been enough. I am a member of the smallest minority of humans on the planet: a person whose attitudes and beliefs are actually shaped by information. So the fact that race has no biological basis is for me sufficient reason to be non-racist. As journalist, Steve Olson points out in his book, Mapping Human History, “The human genome is not partitioned according to any definitions of race. In fact, there are no parts of the genome that define every member of a racial or population group.”

This raises a conundrum, however. If there is no biological basis for racial biases, why is such prejudice so widespread? Indeed, inasmuch as the first human groups were all dark-skinned Africans, there can be no evolutionary basis for racism. There may well be, however, an evolutionary basis for group prejudice. Such a tendency may have strengthened group solidarity, and group solidarity was a main reason that homo sapiens became the dominant species on Earth. When, 40 thousand years later in human history, the phenotype diverged, traits such as skin colour or nose shape became easy markers on which to tack group prejudice (although it took Hitler and his Reich to invent true racism).

A clever experiment conducted in 2001 at the University of California proved that racial prejudice is not an innate trait. The research team, headed by Robert Kurzban, tested people’s perceptions of rivalries and alliances (using cues like same-coloured shirts). They found that racial identity was not a factor in people’s judgments about who belonged to a group or not. “Racism has to do with categorising someone as a member of a certain race or group,” Kurzban remarked in a BBC interview. “If you can prevent the categorisation in the first place, then that ought to prevent stereotypes.”

How do you prevent such categorisation? The philosopher Peter Singer has shown how our moral sense, although evolved to favour our immediate group (family, kin, band), can grow to encompass other groups. Since the key to moral sympathy is to put yourself in the other person’s shoes, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, in his book The Blank Slate, argues that literacy, travel, realistic art, and a knowledge of history are among the technologies that help “people project themselves into the daily lives of people who in other times might have been their mortal enemies.” On the other hand, it might be easier just to give everyone naturally curly hair.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com <mailto:kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com>
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