[wordup] Racism is not hard-wired, researchers find

[Adam Shand]

One of the more interesting chapters I've read of Howard Zinn's "A People's 
History of America" talks about how it seems fairly obvious from a historical
perspective that racism in America was deliberately engineered by the white 
elite as a way of keeping the black slaves and the working class whites from 
banding together and taking control.  Why is it that only the "bad guys" get
to use the old "divide and conquer" strategy?  <sigh> ...

Adam.

Via: Simon Horsburgh <simon.horsburgh at stonebow.otago.ac.nz>
From: Royal Society Science News

Racism is not hard-wired, researchers find
 
Washington, Dec 10 Reuters
 
US researchers experiment to solve race-based conflict
 
Racism is not hard-wired into the brain and a little coalition-building can
help people lose their racist tendencies, US researchers said on Monday. 

They said their findings offer hope for ending conflicts based on an "us
and them" mentality as it relates to race. 
 
A simple, four-minute experiment could make people forget their notions of
race, at least for a little while, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Robert
Kurzban of the Centre for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of
California Santa Barbara reported. 
 
"Social psychologists had found that it seemed no matter what you did,
people would categorise others by their race," Cosmides said in a telephone
interview. 
 
"They were trying really hard to get people not to categorise people by
race and they weren't having any luck and they were getting really
depressed by this." 
 
But Cosmides said while it makes sense that people should have evolved to
notice sex and age, there was no reason to think recognising race was
important to survival. Genetic researchers say "race" does not show up in
the genes and humans are highly interbred. 
 
"It didn't make sense to us that the mind would be designed to
automatically encode race," Cosmides said. 
 
Kurzban said the group set up an experiment in which people were asked to
watch two racially integrated basketball teams have a conversation on a
computer screen. 
 
"The participants' task was to remember who said what," Kurzban said. They
did not know why. 
 
But Kurzban said in most cases, if people get two strangers mixed up, they
are more likely to mix up a black person with another black person, white
with white and so on. 
 
"What the experiment was designed to do is show that ... when members of
two races are on both teams, the mistakes are no longer as extensive,"
Kurzban said. 
 
Instead, the volunteers mixed up remarks based on which team a person was
on, the researchers reported in Tuesday's issue of the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences. 
 
"What is most striking about these results is just how easy it was to
diminish the importance of race by manipulating coalition," they wrote in
their report. 
 
"What people are really good at is detecting patterns of alliance," Kurzban
said. 
 
Cosmides said in racially segregated societies, this often boils down to
skin colour. 
 
"Let's face it - we don't live in an integrated society," she said. 
 
People will always assign someone to a race, but it is possible to make it
signify little more than noticing someone's hair colour, she said. 
 
A similar pattern has been seen since the September 11 World Trade Centre
attacks, she said - pointing to news reports from New York that said police
were getting better cooperation. 

"It wasn't like white police officers against black teenagers any more,"
she said. "It was like, 'We are both Americans'." 
 
But there was a downside. 
 
"People immediately began to pick up cues associated with being Middle
Eastern - such as headgear," Cosmides said. 
 
"It had a positive side for white-black relations in New York but a
negative side if you are Middle Eastern." 
 
Reuters pdm©11/12/01 11-10NZ