PAULA DEEN AND INNATE RACISM

Paula Deen has not been exonerated by the recent judicial decision to throw out a “racial discrimination” suite filed against her and her restaurant owning brother.  Judge Moore simply recognized that the person filing the suite had no legal standing to sue them for discrimination. He recognized it for what it was an attempt by the plaintiff to “milk” the situation using the legal system. The real issue with Paula Deen is much, much deeper and deserves more serious consideration.

People born and raised in the old plantation south, claim their racial attitudes are somehow innate. As one reporter put it, they shrug off racist attitudes with platitudes like “That is just how I was raised” or “It’s different down here in the south.” The truth of the matter is that these are not just trite expressions; they reveal a deeply held and almost universal truth. Ms. Deen expressed a desire to have “Southern plantation wedding” with black servants. The scene is one where the black servants serve white people; “servants” and “people” are not all just people but are different moral groups.

The problem of racism gives some the impression that it was almost exclusively limited to one region of the Untied States: specifically in the old Plantation South. This is wrong especially in the socio-biological sense. It is the form and intensity of a specific focus of xenophobia and not xenophobia per se. Historically, the white population in the plantation south blatantly and cruelly suppressed the human rights of slaves. This did not happen because all “mean spirited” or “amoral” people lived in one region; it happened because this is where the black population existed as part of a perceived economic reality; not only those who lived there but also those who immigrated into the area easily learned to intensify and focus innate xenophobia. The ease of learning suggests a preexisting propensity to learn. Some may refer to this as planned learning.

Once people learned, what slave ownership entails does not mean they assimilated xenophobic focus in to their genome but it does mean the stage was set for assimilation, which presumably would take generations of selection pressure. The problem of limiting my remarks to the plantation south is the question of how far back into antiquity do we have to go to define whom the “teachers” were when the selection pressure started. Some, including myself, may feel that confining the discussion just to the United States does not give sufficient time for assimilation to take pace. Scientists can modify fruit flies and silver fox genomes in 30 generations and for humans that calculates out to be 600 years. The origin of the plantation south dates to around the year 1600 but the genetic origin of the colonial people was European; thus, the origin dates back to the Fertile Crescent. Slavery is one of the oldest institutions in the world’s oldest societies; racism is not just a U.S. phenomenon.

To be selected, generations of people have to feel consciously or unconsciously that slavery is desirable or at least tolerable even after the practice was abandoned. The truth about slavery in the plantation south is far different from the fanciful picture that existed in the minds of slaveholders and subsequently transmitted by them and their children and grand children and great grand children in tales and reminiscences to people in different regions of the country and to their own future generation. The “goodness” of slavery existed only in the minds of people like Paul Deen or the classical “southern gentleman”. Like a surreal Hollywood production: there were elaborate pretentious dinner parties or weddings with black cooks and servants, powerful overseers riding highly bred horses, and people whose word was law were all part of the scene. According to these tales, their owners loved the slaves and the community accepted them for their utility, and never feared them. They, the slaves, were happy and obedient. A culture evolved around these fanciful ideas: slavery was not peripheral; it was central in that culture from the time of the first colonies in Jamestown and remained central up to the time of the Civil War. What appeared to be a linear progression of the institutionalization of slavery suddenly changed to chaos due to civil war brought on by internal and external stresses—it change from linear to non linear. Like a breaking wave or a broken beam, slavery was suddenly gone but racism wasn’t. The cultural environment in the plantation south honed individuals’ willingness to accept the fanciful idea that some people could belong to a different moral group after just 400 years (20 generations) of living in the United States.

As post Civil War reconstruction took place, the desire of the regional population to preserve the concept of the Southern Gentleman persisted in mind if not in fact. In the classic book, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Gone With The Wind; it was this social structure that was gone—or was it? Illogically, this mindset exists today over one hundred and sixty years later—it was not completely blown away in 1865; it persists in a strong format but it exists only in shreds and remnants of our population. The shrill and cry of this vocal segment or self reinforcing subgroup of people who wanted to change desegregation back to re-segregation is heard every day in one form or another usually based on the desire to have the free will (read as genetic guidance) to treat certain people as being in a different moral group. The concept of moralistic punishment applies; if you do not conform to the group norm, you are ostracized. Because of the illogical nature and persistence of racism, I believe it is more than just something that is learned; they have assimilated it into their genes; it is a cultural variant of the xenophobia universal.

If this logic prevails, as it seems to, what happened to change it in some of us? At one point in southern history slavery reached a precarious balance in the sense that the number “and power” of the slaves—obviously more than just numbers was involved—was reaching the breaking point, meaning a spark of revolt could lead to slaves overpowering slave owner and, fear of all fears for some, reverse the established dominance hierarchy. One slave owner may have owned hundreds of slaves: this of course generated the inherent political conflict in majority rule as our equalitarian constitution promises. The adoption of the constitution forged the issue of race into political tinder and the local changes in balance of power could become the igniting force. What is most interesting is that some if not most of our founding fathers, the very people who were responsible for the content of these documents, were slave owners. They seemed to recognize at an instinctive level the idea of man owning man as being wrong but were unwilling to support their innate feelings because of peer, political, and economic pressure: social pressure for learned selection to feed on. Dominance hierarchy (peck order) differs from ownership only in legal terms and not biological terms; pre emancipation codification of slavery gave slave owners legal power over slaves but still required physical force for enforcement. To point out how psychological complex dominance hierarchy was, most of the people who strongly felt slave ownership was wrong felt as strongly the two races could not live in the same society.

To spool ahead to modern times, almost all current politicians recognize racism for what it is. There are those on both sides of the question; there are some who chose and still choose to use it indirectly to their advantage thus perpetuates the practice. Look at long list of politicians exemplified by men such as Trent Lott, Halley Barber, or Mike Huckabee, to name just a few, who claim not to be racists but use the coded language. These men are “nice” men but gain supporters by publicly flaunting hidden prejudice by use of coded language. This should reflect more on the leaders than on the followers even though both are culpable. Ex-president Reagan was no different when he used closet racism to gain votes. He announced he was going to run for re-election in Philadelphia Mississippi, the site of the murder of civil rights workers—hidden meaning—subtle but an effective vote getting statement in the South where the population was sensitive to the kind of bantering but meaningless in the North. I hasten to add that he may have not truly believed that blacks were inferior but the fact that he used the belief to gain votes makes him a racist.

There is a reason I focus more blame on raciest leaders (politicians) than on the followers. Whether the leader’s sense racism is amoral or not seems not to matter they still do it, but “Why do they do it?” They are not stupid people; is the numbers of votes they gain sufficient to warrant their unsavory position on race? Is racism another example of massive and blatant rejection of logic, like acceptance of illogical religious beliefs, which I used to support my contention that genetics, not logic, control our actions more then we are willing to accept. If it was just learning we could learn racism is wrong in minutes, so why don’t we. I believe it is easy for politicians to do this because their tendencies toward lust for status is in their genomes (hierarchy dominance) just as focused xenophobic tendencies are in their genomes and in the genomes of their followers. In other words, if there is no sound logical basis for racism as focused xenophobia then we have to consider that it is genetic. If this speculation is true, the question remains, how did it get there?

Humankind appears to have learned focused xenophobia or racism, as opposed to more pangenetic xenophobia, but how focus became assimilated into the genome is the question. It should be obvious that xenophobia as it relates to racism, like all phobias, is extremely complex psychologically. The moral group concept allows people to manifest many of the same commonly recognized notions or functional clusters of alleles in two different ways: one-way for themselves and another for those who differ physically or behaviorally. The notions (modules for some evolutionary biologists) involved are numerous. In addition to variation in which notions are involved, variations in the intensity of each notion are wide, forming a personalized genetic mosaic. Many people have the same tiles or alleles—the same general phenotype but the wide range of multiple notions with all this variability, which appears related to epigenetic control, makes the possibilities infinite but we force or mold them into groups. Nevertheless, the mosaic of a son is more like that of the father than that of a neighbor, the mosaic of Mississippi neighbors are more alike than the mosaic of Minnesota neighbors, for example. The mosaic of Paula Deen is not correct, but it is a result of just how her “village raised her”.  

URL: firetreepub.blogspot.com Comments Invited and not moderated