The “color blindness” some of my friends of the pale shade proudly vindicate is a mirage. The amygdala (the fear center of the human brain) activates within a fraction of a second when seeing a Black face, even for melanated folk.1 This is to say that the frequently touted trope that “racism is taught”—rather than detected and exploited by the minority in power—is totally false.
By addressing this falsity, the intent is to decrease the painful outrage about humankind’s propensity for discriminating (this is also a nod to Toni Morrison’s idea that “racism” is a distraction). Aiming to eradicate it completely would be like trying to eradicate mosquitoes from the Amazon. Though mosquitoes carry infectious diseases, like racism has detrimental consequences, the least risky solution remains putting on thick clothing and spraying insect repellent. Furthermore, being alarmed by it is a bit like being outraged by someone screaming, “Die!” at a professional basketball player shooting free throws during the NBA playoffs. Instead of dwelling on the utter lack of sportsmanship and possibly missing his chance to score, the player should learn how to anticipate and counterbalance the distraction, as well as understand that the screams for “death” aren’t literal (most of the time), but rather, more of a mental game. After all, would you dwell on another car cutting you off if you knew a pregnant woman whose water had just broken was in the backseat?
Until police are screened, prepared, educated and familiarized with the neighborhoods they police, they will always be more likely to perpetuate violence than they should. To try to rid the human mind of racial bias in the current context is as futile as a germaphobe scrubbing their own skin to the point of bleeding, all out of the ignorant belief that, somehow, they’ll rid their body of bacteria and viruses, especially given the fact that such a high percentage of microbes is symbiotic.
Racism is a very weak term for what we are dealing with anyway, a proverbial fork in a soup bowl. It is not only rooted in pseudo-scientific “merchant speak” from the 1200s, but has also shifted definitions numerous times. We are dealing with something much deeper. What could possibly explain the frequent reemergence of ethnic squabbling every decade throughout the world, like some weed sloppily beheaded? Tribalism. As a term, it possesses more cultural overlap, defined as, “The state or fact of being organized in a tribe or tribes.” This word provides the correct framework for addressing the depth of the problem. How pompous of me, right? My response would point to the fact that the War on Racism seems about as effective as the “War on Drugs.” Only something like the sunk cost fallacy could stop us from questioning the current framework from which we are attacking the problem—namely, by drawing arbitrary lines in the sand between the words tribalism and racism (don’t get me started on “colorism”). Tribalism has been around forever, and we even detect it amongst our hominid cousins, whereas “racism” has recently cropped up since Europeans came up with the convenient idea that humans evolved separately in different geographical areas, an idea that has long since been debunked (the overwhelming scientific consensus is that Africa is the cradle for modern human beings).
Much of the altruism we observe within the family structure and inside the community structure, combined with competition amongst out-groups, can be averaged out to correlate strongly with genetic resemblance. The more one calculates similitude in phenotype, the more there is a perceived correlation in genes; and the more there is similitude in genes, the more one is likely to be altruistic to that individual of the same species.2 This use of phenotype as a proxy for kinship is actually a constant throughout the animal kingdom3 and I would surmise it to be nothing less than self-serving to claim that we aren’t privy to it. What does this mean? It means that discriminating against perceived out-groups has always conferred a genetic advantage to a degree, even though, on the opposite end of the spectrum, everyone knows incest causes problems. It is this ancient instinct/ability to identify averages that we call “racism.” And it is this instinct that is, on paper, frowned upon in certain contexts.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m doing my best to describe what is and not what ought to be; I am not defending discrimination, but I am saying its roots are found within threat detection, which is an essential survival mechanism. We are surrounded by examples of survival mechanisms that backfire in certain contexts. Negativity bias, for instance, is something we feel when we focus on that one troll who made a negative comment out of a hundred positive or neutral ones. Essentially, when you ask someone to be unbiased about looks, you ask them to quiet the intrinsic threat detection machinery that took billions of years to evolve, and with a message that we just learned to rationalize: “Just because the average reported crime rates in Black neighborhoods are significantly higher than in white neighborhoods does not mean that the Black individual in front of me is a hardened criminal or a sexual predator.” Yes, one of the first things we learn in entry-level statistics is that averages correlate weakly with individual profiles.4 But who’s actually been in an entry-level statistics class?
What’s more, who actually applies mathematics indiscriminately in their daily lives? Quieting our primitive machinery costs energy just like putting the brakes on a recently accelerated car. Energy is the difference between making a split-second decision that can save the life of a loved one and not, so why would one risk wasting it for the sake of being “humane” to an outsider or member of an out-group? Framed differently: humane behavior towards random individuals could pose a disadvantage and, thus, over time, would be weeded out in the name of genetic survival. This may be why Genghis Khan has the greatest number of descendants on Earth, and not some canonized saint. Survival is an arms race.
This leads me to a simple question: how can we reasonably hope to eliminate this bias in our social interactions, while, at the same time, encouraging similar discernments in other domains? Just look at school teachers who profile their students; police; security guards; the superficial filtering process when interviewing job candidates. A one-variable analysis on skin pigment is shallow and unscientific, but our society has evolved to make split-second decisions. Now, more than ever, split-second decision-making is rewarded because modern humans are supposed to filter unimaginable amounts of information. Plus, our eye cells use precious energy that could be allocated elsewhere at a hundred times the rate of other cells.4 This is a reflection of how we’ve evolved to use more energy on our vision than other senses, and this brought about a competitive advantage in order to survive through periods of cohabitation with camouflaged predators (hence, the role of snakes in the Abrahamic religions).
In other words, humans have been rewarded for their visual discernment for hundreds of thousands of years. It is intertwined with our perception of others. It activates our amygdala, it gives us gut reactions and, without sufficient energy to put the brakes on our intolerant knee-jerk responses, we are condemned to use them. Take a look at the machinery that makes us fear getting on a plane more than driving a car (even though the latter is statistically proven to be more dangerous), or the instincts leveraged to make terrorism such a prevalent affair that our governments spend billions in order to “eradicate” terrorism (another big fail).
It is precisely the aforementioned hardware, the mammalian brain, that is the machinery that has been leveraged by crude AI algorithms to keep us glued to our screens, and by disingenuous politicians to keep us outraged and fearful of out-groups through anecdotal evidence. It is also the machinery that foreign governments exploit (and why wouldn’t they with our geopolitical track record?) to sow division and turn Western democracies’ diversity against them.
Yes, people are too overwhelmed to care. And all that most of the companies behind the algorithms seem to care about is staying competitive in the race to the bottom of the brainstem. Outrage, for now, is the best way of doing so because it is the most measurable. It is our fight-or-flight survival mechanism—responsible for fear, anxiety and threat detection—that dilates the pupils and activates “doom scrolling.” Once you marinate on these realities, you begin to see a clear picture of why “populism” has sprung forth so abundantly worldwide with no particular overlap besides the availability of the smartphone.5
As much as we’d like to, we can’t and will never be color neutral—not without a sufficient energy budget. Color neutrality is more than idealistic for the poor, unhealthy, doped-up, smoked-out and overstimulated masses. We’ve got more fundamental problems that, if treated, could lead to improvements in discrimination. The word “racism” attracts our attention like strobe lights, but it also blinds us to the ugly motherfuckers we are dancing with—relative poverty and misinformation.
Footnotes:
*Colorism is another exercise in the inappropriate lumping of Black folk together. Black skin is paraphyletic and has emerged at different times and places. Why would the word “racism” only apply when crossing the blurry line between whiteness and Blackness? Lumping Black folk together is like lumping birds (descendants of dinosaurs) and bats (descendants of mammals) together.
0: see: studies of DNA change on victims of the Shoah (FKBP5 gene expression), or DNA expression change within hours of arriving in space by astronauts. Imagine the exponential effect over multiple generations of brutal subjugation.
1: this would imply, in today’s society, that Black folk are also more predisposed towards short-term discrimination against melanated shades like white folk in small time frames, which doesn’t encompass all forms of racism. And yes, most of this article deals with short-term discrimination, and not how this short-term discrimination is cultivated by societal factors to grow into the monster it currently is.
2: this is known in the biology community as the green-beard effect. Please don’t associate the citation of Richard Dawkins with any of the bullshit anti-Islamic finger-pointing games made by Dawkins or those who supported his anti-Islamic rhetoric. The genetic fallacy (guilty by association argument) is very prevalent in today’s society, yes, but that doesn’t make it right.
3: yes, we are a subset of the animal kingdom.
4: the brain uses twenty percent of the body’s energy and forty percent of that energy is used by the eyes. The eyes weigh on average 0.056 kilograms and the body weighs on average seventy kilograms…that’s eight percent of the body’s energy for 0.0008 of the body’s weight. This goes without mentioning that the eye cells are less numerous per unit of volume.
5: see: Jaron Lanier’s TEDx Talk. He is one of the forefathers of virtual reality and has an insider perspective on the inner workings of the tech companies that shape the current zeitgeist.