Ease of survivability, comfort, luxury. (majority member) vs Having to be told what to do. (victim) Hmmm... tough one.... Hence, Life is a political battle to ebb the tides towards your vision. History is the "power struggle" between countries, which begins in the ebbs of the tides. Wars are the elections, the overturning of powers, and there's always mud-slinging.
didn't we already talk about this? some things that lead to racism may be human nature, stereotyping, viewing the "other" group as homogeneus. but racism itself is not.
One of the unique characteristics of human beings is the ability to override our instincts. If there is some form of racism built into human nature, our intelligence can suppress it, and not allow it to affect our behavior. I suspect that a low level form of racism is built into our nature. It is more chauvinism than racism. It is not an overt form of racism. In another world, it might not be offensive to blacks, but in this world, it is likely to seem demeaning. A person tends to value and prefer his family over his neighbors and friends, his friends over strangers, his countrymen over foreigners, his cultural type over other types, et cetera. In sports competitions (with some exceptions), I find myself rooting for Black Americans over white foreigners, and white Americans over Black Americans. If the latter makes me a racist, so be it. While I do not claim to be racially color blind, if I was the worst example of a racist, there would not be a problem. I was a personal friend of Bayard Rustin, and due to him was one of a small unnoticed group of teenage athletes who rooted for Jackie Robinson in 1947, when the white world behaved outrageously toward him. I would not have done it without his urging, but am glad that I did. I was unaware of how racist that world was until I encountered Bayard.
Evolution can't keep up with civilization We kind of already beat this to death on another thread. The problem is that we have accelerated the rate of change of the world we live in to the point that biological evolution of our species can't keep up. Like our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and gorillas, we are tribal animals. They live in tribes of 50 or so. We did the same thing when we were hunter gatherers, groups of no more than 100. That worked fine for millennia. We have the instinct to feel kinship with the people we live with, the people we know personally. We share food with them, we don't hide the extra blankets in the wintertime, and we don't feel envious of the ace hunter whose family lives under a bigger mammoth skin tent than we do. But we were the victims of our own success. Better hunting skills, then agriculture. Our tribes settled into one spot and got bigger. 200 people, 500 people. Eventually it got to the point where everybody really didn't know everybody else, and it's not so easy to feel kinship with somebody you don't know personally. Then civilization, division of labor. Thousands of people living together. Even more difficult, people traveling long distances to maintain commerce with other cities. Life is full of strangers. Did we evolve to keep up with this? Sure we did, a little. Small cities of ten to twenty thousand people work pretty well. We live in one like that. It's even multi-racial. It's 90 percent white but it's proud to have a black mayor. But to feel connected to millions of people, or billions? We don't have the instinct for it. It's not exactly racism in terms of being a different color or ethnic group. It's just not being from the same little tribe. As I pointed out in the other thread, if you think we're just not trying hard enough, take a look at another species that is a good mirror. Our oldest companions: our dogs. They have been domesticated for 12,000 years, 4,000 years longer than we ourselves have been "domesticated" by city life. We have selectively bred them mercilessly, killing off the ones that didn't meet our standards. For every century that had five or six generations of humans (in the Stone Age), there were 60 or 70 generations of dogs. They got to evolve much faster than we did. On top of that, they have more chromosomes so it's easier for new traits to evolve and spread. And what have our loyal companions got to show for this draconian, human-enforced evolution? When times get tough and humans abandon their dogs, they go off into the wilderness and form packs. Yeah, maybe twice the size of a wolf pack, 30 or 40 instead of 15 or 20. They've been domesticated longer than we have, they've been ruthlessly bred for the right social instincts, they get ten generations to one of ours, they have more chromosomes -- and after twelve thousand years they have evolved the ability to feel kinship with only twice as large a "tribe" as they started. Is it any wonder that we can't do any better than we're doing? The remarkable thing about humans is not that we have racist tendencies, that we can't feel brotherhood for somebody from a different "tribe." It is that we have come so far along in overcoming those tendencies! Oh yeah, the other remarkable thing about humans -- and dogs too -- we are the only animals to create a multi-species community. It's kind of embarrassing that we have the ability to love someone from a totally different SPECIES, but we still have trouble loving someone who is just of a different color, or who has a different name for God.
human nature to be afraid of whats different maybe, but not hateful. i think its completely nurture In ancient Rome, there was alot of unrest due to the class struggle, the wealthy vs. the poor, but not at all agasint race. they conquered into africa, and up ito britain, so there was alot of diversity, but still you had anyone being able to be a Roman citizen. you even had germans, who had become citizens, as emporors. also, fragggle, i dont think different races count as different species. a beagle and a doberman, those are different species. this is more like a red horse and a black horse. I mean, we have enough problems with people just because they have a different skin color. imagine what would happen if some people had, say, droopy ears, or fangs.
It's all about ethnocentrism, or the belief that one group is superior to others. I think its common in the human race. We compare ourselves to others, always trying to outdue the rest because we have an urge to be better than everyone else. We measure our existance this way.
