Racism

It’s Just Plain Wrong

Defining the Problem
• Racism is defined as prejudice, discrimination or antagonism directed against someone
of a different race based upon the belief that one’s own race is superior in some way
• Throughout history racism has been associated with ethnic conflict generally as well as
with specific historical episodes such as the Transatlantic Slave Trade, racial segregation
in the United States and Apartheid in South Africa, the Holocaust in Europe and the
European colonization of the Americas and genocide of the Native Americans
• Because it undermines the basis for cooperation and trust in a society, racism imposes
significant social costs, preventing the full contribution of all members of a society
• In addition, racism has been linked with psychological and physical problems such as
depression, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and a large number of other stress-
related problems
What is Race?
• Race is the classification of humans based upon physical traits, ancestry, genetics or
social relations
• There is an ongoing debate among scholars as to whether race has some biological
basis in reality or whether it is simply a social construction
• On the one hand, there are highly visible differences between different population
groups (e.g. humans residing in East Asia versus those in West Africa), however it is a
well known fact that humans are far more similar in their underlying genetics than
most other species
• The amount of genetic variation among humans is very small and studies have found
that, on average, any human on the planet is 99.5% similar to any other human
• To put this in perspective, the amount of genetic variation among a single group of
chimpanzees (55 individuals) in the Ivory Coast was recently measured as twice the
level for the entire human population (7 billion individuals)
The Population Bottleneck
• A population bottleneck or genetic bottleneck is a sharp reduction in
the size of a population due to environmental events or human
activities
• The high degree of similarity within the human species (Homo Sapiens)
is widely believed to be the result of a severe population bottleneck
that occurred approximately 70,000 years ago when a supervolcano
erupted on the Indonesian island of Sumatra at what is today Lake Toba
• This is known as the Toba Catastrophe Theory and it is believed that
this event reduced the entire human population to only a few thousand
individuals of whom we are all descendents
So Why Do We Look So Different?
• While most scientists would agree that the concept of ‘race’ is at best problematic
and at worst entirely useless, the superficial difference between humans from
different parts of the world still deserves an explanation
• It used to be believed that racial differences were a form of environmental
adaptation (e.g. the pale skin of Europeans serving to compensate for the lack of
sunlight in northern climes and preventing vitamin D deficiency)
• However, these ideas have been called into question because of a number of
important exceptions (e.g. the dark skin of Tasmanians) as well as the failure of
this theory to explain other traits such as eye and hair colour
• More recently, evolutionary biologists have emphasized the importance of sexual
selection and the founder effect in determining the emergence and stability of
different ‘racial’ groups
A Brief History of Racism
• Racism as we usually understand it is a relatively recent phenomenon since ‘races’ are the result
of historical isolation, and, hence, it was rare for members of different ‘racial’ groups to come
into contact
• Nevertheless, there are many examples throughout history of cultural bigotry and xenophobia
such as the distinction in ancient Greece between Greeks and barbarians (this epithet referred
to anyone who did not speak Greek)
• The modern history of racism coincides closely with the period of European colonialism,
beginning in the 16th century, when Europeans first came into contact with different groups of
people in Asia, Africa and the Americas
• This coincidence has led many scholars to conclude that racism served as a justification (or
rationalization) for the oppression and exploitation of non-European peoples
• This racism manifested itself in stereotypes about different groups (such as the notion that
Native Americans were lazy or that Africans were unintelligent)
• [Link]
The Transatlantic Slave Trade
• Between the 15th and 19th centuries, tens of millions of West Africans were captured and
transported to the Americas where they were forced to work on plantations, producing
many of the high valued commodities that were later sold on European markets (e.g. sugar,
cotton, tobacco etc.)
• While the Transatlantic Slave Trade was not the only such system in existence (there were
also the older Red Sea, Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slave routes), it was the largest
slave trade in terms of numbers and had a much more significant impact on the local
societies from which the slaves originated
• It is widely believed that the current state of poverty and conflict in which Africa finds itself
is partly a result of the historic slave trade, which served to increase ethic fragmentation
and undermined the basis for trust (a prerequisite for economic development)
• The Transatlantic Slave Trade was also significant in that it contributed greatly to European
ideas of white supremacy which were used to justify the torture and imprisonment of
millions of black Africans
The Indian ‘Wars’
• The arrival of Europeans in the Americas led to the extraction of great wealth in the form
of commodities but it also naturally provoked conflict with the native peoples
• While estimates of the pre-Columbian native population in North and South America
vary widely, most historians agree that the population decline in the centuries following
Columbus was dramatic (as much as 95% of the population died off in this period)
• The causes of this depopulation were varied and included disease, conflict, displacement
(e.g. the Cherokee ‘Trail of Tears’) and the wholesale massacre of native groups (e.g. the
Pequot in New England)
• Historians have debated whether the term genocide can be used to describe the entire
process of European colonization of the Americas and the substitution of the native
population there, however there can be no doubt that many of the specific ‘wars’ that
were carried out were genocidal in nature
• [Link]
Colonialism and Scientific Racism
• During the 19th century, many European scientists and social thinkers began to advance what
they called Scientific Racism, which was a set of theories and techniques that were supposed
to provide scientific evidence to validate the racist beliefs that were common throughout
Europe at this time
• Scientific Racists claimed that the success of Europeans in conquering much of the rest of the
world was a result of their own innate ‘racial’ superiority
• The practice of measuring the skulls of different individuals and ‘racial’ groups in order to
predict IQ, called phrenology, was common during the early 19th century and survived until
the 20th
• Many prominent thinkers within this movement tried to create a link with Darwin’s theory of
evolution by natural selection, claiming that the same laws that applied to organisms in
nature also held with respect to human groups such as races
• Although this movement did include some prominent biologists (e.g. Carl Linnaeus) it is
important to point out that Darwin himself was not an advocate of Scientific Racism
The Legacy of Colonialism
• While European colonialism no longer exists in a legal sense, many have argued
that the legacy of colonialism persists to this day
• This is visible in the persistent underdevelopment of large parts of the world
(many former colonies) as well as the continued intellectual and cultural
domination of Europe
• The Afro-Caribbean scholar, Franz Fanon, argued that the most significant legacy
of colonialism is the sense of inferiority that it imparted upon its colonial subjects,
who came to believe that they were lesser humans in some sense
• What Fanon and others have called for is a decolonization of the mind whereby
non-European peoples should embrace their own intellectual and moral traditions
rather than those imposed upon them by the Europeans
• [Link]
Racism in the Modern World
• While there is widespread opposition to racial discrimination throughout
much of the world today, racial inequalities still persist
• For example, in the United States, African Americans are twice as likely to
find themselves unemployed; black households possess only 6% of the
wealth held by white households; blacks have higher rates of stroke,
diabetes and childhood obesity; and blacks are victims of homicide at far
higher rates than whites
• While some government programs have been instituted to try to address
these sorts of inequalities (e.g. Affirmative Action) improvements have
been very modest and many within the black community in the United
States remain skeptical about the society’s commitment to racial equality
Black Lives Matter
• In 2013, an African American teenager, Trayvon Martin, was shot and
killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, who
was later acquitted for the killing
• While the case remains controversial, the acquittal sparked
nationwide protests that would later crystallize into the Black Lives
Matter movement
• Black Lives Matter was formed to address the singular problem of
police shootings of unarmed black men, which occur at far higher rate
than for other groups (4x the rate for young white men)
• [Link]
The Science of Racism
• There is a debate among scientists concerning whether racism is something that is entirely ‘learned’ or whether
there is some biological basis for this
• Some evolutionary biologists have argued that racism represents a mistaken generalization of kin selection, which
is the tendency for organisms to favor other organisms with whom they share genes in common
• Racial stereotyping, which is the belief that members of a particular racial group share certain characteristics in
common, might be seen as an example of a more general problem in human psychology which is categorical
thinking (i.e. assigning things or people to categories and then treating these categories as though they existed in
reality)
• Sociologists have shown that humans tend to identify themselves with particular in-groups and to show favoritism
toward members of these groups, while showing hostility toward members of other out-groups (these could be
racial groups, although there is no clear reason why we should identify as members of a race)
• The out-group homogeneity effect refers to the common perception that members of an out-group are more
similar than members of the in-group and this is clearly related to the problem of stereotyping
• Some experiments have demonstrated a subconscious component to racism even among children: https://
[Link]/watch?v=nFbvBJULVnc
• Nevertheless, studies have also shown that racism is correlated with lower IQ and less diverse peer groups during
childhood, suggesting that socialization plays a strong role
Other forms of Bigotry and Prejudice
• While racism is undoubtedly one of the most prominent forms of
discrimination, there are others that are no less problematic
• Discrimination can occur due to many other factors such as age,
disability, gender, sexual orientation or religion
• Some countries have established laws to prevent these and other forms
of discrimination, however they are still commonplace in many societies
• Even where formal discrimination has been mostly eliminated, it is
important to point out that there are still vast disparities that exist in
income, incarceration rates, education and a variety of other social
indicators between different groups of people
What is Islamophobia?
• In many Western countries there has been a dramatic increase in the number of
hate crimes directed against Muslims
• According to the FBI, the United States witnessed a 67% increase in the number
of assaults, attacks on Mosques and other hate crimes targeting Muslims in 2015
and that number increased further in 2016
• Some have blamed the openly racist and xenophobic campaign of Donald Trump
for this outcome, however it is more likely a result of the ongoing conflict
between the United States and various countries and organizations in the Middle
East
• In addition, there is widespread ignorance in countries like the United States
regarding Islam and followers of the religion
• [Link]