I see Turtle,we are actually born " a little bit racist", like having 10 fingers and 10 toes. It's a check list then is it? Nose,mouth, little racist,belly button. You are laughable ,get a grip man. It is a learned behavior,plain and simple and there is not one shred of evidence to support your felonious assumption.
I challenged you to refute anything I said. You failed, and failed badly. Saying you don't agree with it is not the same as refuting it. Trying to marginalize me by belittling me is not the same as refuting it. Believing in something, no matter how badly you believe in it, is not refuting something.
"Felonious assumption", my, my, my. Talk about laughable. You assume that I'm assuming. I'm not. You're the one who needs to read up on a little science. If you understood, even on a sophomoric cursory level, the science and history of racism and groupism, then you wouldn't make such emotional knee-jerk gut assumptions. Felonious is another laughable matter. Clearly, we're not dealing with the law and things pertaining to felonies, therefore by felonious you must mean that my "assumptions" are both wicked and villainous. I cannot tell you how funny that is. My statements are wicked and villainous because they describe the blatantly obvious backed up by history and scientific study. Now that's funny.
Whether you want to believe it or not, racism absolutely exists within each and everyone of us, and it is a small part of what has allowed us to survive as a species with multiple races. It is not a learned condition. The only thing about racism that is learned is how that racism manifests itself, particularly in situations where it serves no purpose.
Racism affects groupism, and visa versa, and I presented them together in perspective and connected them together. It's a connection you failed, or refused, to comprehend. Instead, you allowed your own hot button prejudices against any tolerable level of admitted prejudice to force you to focus on not only a selective issue, but to attack the validity of the messenger at the expense of the message.
In one of many studies on the subject of groupism, Ross Hammond of the Brookings Institute and Robert Axelrod of the University of Michigan performed computer models that ended up mirroring that of actual people. Their original intent was to set out disproving previous studies and to prove that racism and groupism is a purely learned condition and thus can be unlearned. They ended up proving just the opposite.
Lawrence Hirschfeld, PhD, MPhil, and MA, Anthropology, Columbia University; BA, University of Michigan; Professor of Anthropology & Psychology at the New School for Social Research, an expert respected around the world for his research methodology, has conducted many studies on these subjects, and published several books on the matters, many of them dealing specifically how young children come to understand and use social categories like race, gender, age, etc., and particularly in how children’s culture may or may not shape the meaning of these categories for both the child and the adult.
He found that by the age of 3 most children (93%) already attribute significance to skin color, regardless of their own skin color, and regardless of how and what they had been "taught" about race and racism.
To the simple question of "What is race?", he states:
It is important to begin by talking about what race is not. Regardless of what our senses seem to tell us, race is not a biologically coherent story about human variation simply because the races we recognize and name are not biologically coherent populations. There is as much genetic variation within racial groups as there is between them. Now this does not mean that race is not real psychologically or sociologically. It is obvious that race is real in both these senses. People believe in races and they use this belief to organize important dimensions of social, economic, and political life. But this does not make race a real thing biologically.
In view of this, it makes more sense to think of race as an idea, not as a thing. Moreover, from what we know from the history of race relations, race is a bad idea. Considerable effort is now being made to rid ourselves of this particular idea, to create what is sometimes called a "colorblind" society. After 15 years of work on race as an idea, however, I've come to the conclusion that it is not merely a bad idea, but a deeply rooted bad idea. But our minds are organized in a way that makes thinking racially---thinking that the human world can be segmented into discrete racial populations---an automatic part of our mental repertoire.
Indeed, it becomes clear that the idea of race emerges out of an evolved adaptation to understand humans as members of social groups. It is an adaptation rather than a learned condition, and ss such it may not be something that we can get rid of all that easily. This interpretation of racial thinking isn't all that far-fetched if you think about the sorts of problems our ancestral populations faced. Gaining accurate knowledge of who belonged to which group, and why, was clearly adaptive for members of a species whose existence is as social as ours. Those individuals equipped with this sort of knowledge were better able to assess accurately who was most likely to pose a threat and who probably did not. If racial thinking is derived in part from this sort of adaptation, it is very much a deep-rooted notion.
This doesn't necessarily mean that racism is innate or inevitable, but it is so deeply rooted as to be as close to an instinctive behavior as you can get in an socially adaptive evolution. The structures that give humans the capacity to gather and organize certain kinds of knowledge are innate. These structures make it easy to conclude that people have essential, inheritable natures, and these are thought to give rise to other less obvious qualitative differences. Bear in mind that these structures make certain kinds of knowledge possible; they do not in themselves provide us with that knowledge. The cultural environment in which we live is equally important. In some sense we can say that these two things---the mind and the culture in which the mind finds itself---work together and make each other up.
Many people [like Tallcal] are uncomfortable with this thinking. There is great resistance to imagining that anything but learned culture---social influences---shapes beliefs like race that have political consequences. Indeed, it is widely assumed, despite the lack of evidence that it is the case, that we can go in and "redo" people's thinking simply by changing the cultural environment in which that thought occurs. But this strategy ignores what the mind as an adapted organ brings to the process of making race.
Maybe it's easier to see this if we consider less politicized aspects of common sense. We now know that Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics are not accurate descriptions of the world. Still, our common-sense intuitions are well captured by both Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics. In short, common sense, if not the physical world, is well described by these systems of thought. To be sure, we can learn other systems for describing the physical world, for example Riemannian geometry or quantum physics. But we can't unlearn common sense. Race is like Euclidean geometry in this regard. We can learn that it is an inaccurate description of the world, but that doesn't mean that it disappears from our conceptual arsenal.
This has consequences for what we teach children about race. Telling children that we're all the same inside, that race is unimportant and literally skin deep, may make us feel better about ourselves but probably doesn't do much to shape children's thinking. Nor does telling children that they shouldn't have racialist beliefs, beliefs that people are divided into discrete racial groups, as these ideas do much more than make them anxious. When adults tell children that something they know to be the case is not the case, it is anxiety-provoking. It is not, however, a very effective way to change belief. Imagine how successful you'd be in getting someone to lose weight by telling them that they weren't hungry.
Numerous studies show that by age 3, children have developed quite negative attitudes toward outgroup members, be they members of an actual group, or merely members of the group called "strangers." Many people believe that children learn these attitudes passively by modeling their beliefs after the important adults (usually parents) around them. As the saying goes, "As the twig is bent so grows the tree." Based on our studies here and the many other studies that have been done, I'm not sure that this is so. The studies all lend very little support either to the claim that children are pliant learners nor to the contention that parents play a critical role in shaping children's attitudes. The twig may be bent, but it is not necessarily the parents that are doing the bending. In fact, it may be the twig that's setting its own course.
Again, this makes sense if we think of race as emerging out of an evolved adaptation to group living. Social groups are part of the social landscape and learning about them is best served by attention to that broad landscape. Children learn about race by having their attention directed to what the community as a whole believes, not by having their attention directed solely to what their parents believe. Indeed, children who have been specifically coached to believe that race doesn't matter will still have the same groupist evolutionary adaptive thinking that we have necessarily acquired.
That you think I'm just making all this stuff up, just because you don't agree with the political incorrectness of it, is rather personally insulting.
"They stand as bastions to their young class mates that all people are equal,and that by mixing from our melting pot of race's and cultures we strengthen our society and break down the NON DNA related concept that we are different in good ways or bad ways."
That's feel-good gobbledygook, and dead wrong. There is no evidence whatsoever that mixing races and cultures will strengthen society. That's a Utopian hope and belief. Indeed, the scientific evidence, historical reference, and even casual observation points to just the opposite.
"So much garbage is spewed about this forum as "truth" and "fact" . You all support your lame,ill conceived logic with a mob mentality,just like this hysterical DNA notion of race relations."
I contend that the truth and fact that I'm spewing is both truthful and factual, and not at all garbage. I also contend that the only support for your own lame, ill-conceived emotional logic is a combative attitude towards anyone who disagrees with you.
I also contend that the vast majority of the "mob" here on EO do not have a clue about the relationships between race, racism, groupism and evolutionary behavioral adaptations, and as such any mob mentality is absent here in my posts, with no mob mentality offered or solicited.
Now, what was that you said again? Oh, yeah, I remember. You said,
"It is a learned behavior, plain and simple and there is not one shred of evidence to support your felonious assumption."
Like I said, if you think you can refute any of this, have at it. You can't.
