You've probably heard the bogus idea, "children have to be taught to hate." Like other simplistic popular nostrums, this is not just wrong, but fractally, wildly wrong.
To understand why, takes some time to explain. A lot longer than making the positive case showing an image of white and black toddlers hugging.
Most of us would love to live in a world where we could just figure out who was "teaching kids to hate," and stop them from doing that. We'd love it if adults could accept each other just like those sweet kids.
But that's not how anything works. Human nature is entirely the product of evolution. Our minds evolved right along with our bodies. Yes, it's a blend of nature and nurture, but decisions about what we nurture, are also determined by our nature.
This isn't very intuitive, for a lot of people.
To understand why we get this so wrong, you have to go back to the concept of childhood innocence. Which is the idea that a new baby is born with a "blank slate," and that child's behaviors will be shaped by parents and society. This is only partially true.
Understanding the truth about human nature also requires challenging notions of free will. Certainly people have limited ability to make choices, but we find that across the population, people make a lot of the same choices. And that's not a coincidence. Evolution and culture reward making choices that are close to the center of the bell curve, and they punish outliers.
We are born with behavioral modules in our brain that have evolved over millions of years. One of them is to favor people who look and sound like our parents, and mistrust outsiders.
So to the extent that we grow up in a culturally segregated environment, where we only see people who look and sound like us, human beings are naturally racist.
Without getting too much into the weeds, the simple cure for racism and hate is raising kids in a multicultural environment. A mixed race family, in a multicultural society avoids the categorization of any particular color or language as the "outsider."
But you see the double bind?
People who mistrust outsiders don't want their kids to grow up accepting them. So as much as possible, parents in monocultures will try to prevent a multicultural environment from taking root.
This is a generational issue. And that's what makes it so tough to solve. But we'll never solve it at all, so long as we pretend that the default of a baby is to be accepting of other ethnicities and cultures.
It's not.
And this really has very little to do with love or hate. Which is why "love" is not the answer. Racism has everything to do with core-level human nature, exacerbated by entrenched power dynamics in society that must be defeated.
Folks, this is 101 stuff. Can we all please just learn it so we can get onto the advanced courses, and have some snowball's chance of solving racism?
#racism #humannature #multiculture
Dum Dum Diga Diga
MARKEN MARC PRODUCTION
Johan Clausen
colibre
Triple Bi
🇺🇦 Sean Prophet ⚛
Debra Hall (Artist)
Kal Singh Dhindsa