Causes of Racism: Categorization
I believe the roots of racism are grounded in two natural human traits. The first is that we recognize each other as belonging to a “race”, and the second is that we believe there are undesirable material differences between races. In this article, I would like to consider the first of these: the recognition of “races”.
When I look at another person I immediately categorize them by their appearance. If I see a person wearing a police officer uniform, I assume they are police. Because I think they are police I have expectations regarding that person’s behavior and I have ideas on ways to interact with them. Of course, my expectations of a police officer may be different than your expectations, but that is probably as a result of our separate experiences with police… or as a result of what we are conditioned to expect. Regardless, if you know what a police officer is, then you already have some preconceived ideas about them.
This ability, to look at someone or something and immediately have some expectations about behavior is a very useful skill. We go through life interacting with our environment, and when we see something new, associating the new with things already familiar provides us with a framework for predicting behaviors and devising strategies for interaction. Cognitive science refers to this process of association as categorization. For good or ill, categorizing is something that humans do naturally. It is the way we understand our world. Categorization is recognition. Things we cannot categorize are alien to us and we have no way to predict properties or behavior.
Categorization is many dimensional. My expectations of a fat female police officer are different than for a muscle bound male police officer. The categorization regarding build, gender, and profession combine to refine my ideas. That does not mean my expectations are are correct, but it does mean that when that person first enters my mind I have some ideas about them. It is my ability to categorize that gives me these ideas.
Not all categorizations necessarily provide useful information, however. You may have heard about the teacher, Jane Elliot, who divided her third grade classroom into “blue eyes” and “brown eyes”. It was after King’s assassination, and she did it for the purpose of teaching her class about discrimination. On the first day, blue eyed students were treated as inferior, while the brown eyed students where given special privileges. On the next day, she reversed it, and the blue eyed students were given the preeminent role. It was quite controversial at the time, but it was also very effective. The students were quick to learn how to discriminate based only on eye color. These students had always been aware that there were differences between them in eye color, but they never thought to associate these differences with materially important prejudices. This example serves to illustrate that while the ways we categorize people may be baseless, the consequences of that categorization are what make it real.
Just as sex, build, and profession has an effect on my expectations, so does race. When we look at one another, we categorize each other by race. This racial categorization is interesting to me, since it is very difficult scientifically to quantify race.
Many scientists think race lacks taxonomic justifications - people of certain biogeographic ancestry have physical tendencies, but there is no accepted taxonomic key that can be used to assign race. Race assignments are imprecise and vary according to the person assigning the “race”. Genetics and the study of DNA is also ambiguous about race. Like physical features, there are tendencies, but the amount of genetic variation between biogeographic groups is so small that it makes it very difficult to genetically distinguish one group from another. (Postscript: after posting this, some stories hit the news about “mixed” twin births - example1, example2.) In other words, there is greater variation within a ”race” than there is between races. The lack of scientific evidence for race seems to mean that, for now, race is in the eye of the beholder.
Note:
Science and race is an incredibly complex topic that involves history, religion, and politics as much as it does scientific fact. There currently is no overwhelming scientific consensus on this issue, though there is a growing majority opinion on the idea that there is no scientific basis for race. The idea of human “races” was a strong belief adopted by the scientific community from the Great Chain of Being philosophies in the 17th century. The idea that there existed races, and that certain races were superior to others, was politically desirable as justification for interactions between various biogeographic and ethnic groups. Prior to the Middle Ages, the idea of “race” either didn’t exist, or was considerably different than it is today. Regardless, I wanted to provide some starting points for further reading regarding scientific views of race. It’s too large a topic to cover properly in this format.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_multilocus_allele_clusters
- American Anthropological Association Statement on “Race”
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28historical_definitions%29
- http://www.pbs.org/race/000_General/000_00-Home.htm
There does, however, seem to be something truthful about race. As an example, people that identify themselves as African American have different health concerns than people who identify themselves as Caucasian. The slight prevalence of certain genes, perhaps alongside cultural or socioeconomic discrepancies such as diet and lifestyle, suggest that there may be some benefit from using the loose categories we recognize as “race”. In this role, “race” is as much cultural, ethnic, and biogeographical as physiological.
Racism requires the recognition of “race”, and it is starting to look like the idea of race may turn out to be a baseless category from a scientific perspective.
Of course, this is just splitting hairs. As humans, we categorize, and we always will. Combating racism does not start by brow-beating the definition of race, it starts by recognizing that we are all different, and for better or worse we see these differences in each other. We will always categorize each other by “race”, even if “race” isn’t the term we use.
Seeing “races” is not racism. Instead, it is the strength of the expectations we assign to the percieved races that cause problems. Seeing an overweight black man in a police uniform might mean seeing a “cop”, or it might mean seing a “black man”. How we prioritize our categories is often an indication of the strength of our convictions about that category. Knowing a person is a cop may give stronger impressions about what kind of behavior to expect than knowing a person is black.
Awareness of our tendency to categorize empowers us to consider the merits, and drawbacks, of the stereotypes we create. It also allows us to evaluate the strength of the convictions we assign to that category.