POPULATION BASED RACISM LEGACY

It seems everyone senses that there is a fundamental difference in racism of the north from that of the plantation south but no one has addressed what the difference might be. A new pair of terms might help to bring that difference into focus: neophilia verses neophobia.

Innate xenophobia, the fear of something different, seems to be the fundamental basis of racism. In terms of adaptive evolution, we bury fear of what is different deeply in our genes; it has to do with survival; it is part of being fit to survive. We are afraid of different species of animals but also we fear strangers of our own species. Because many animal species share the trait, geneticists might say it is a well conserved. Anthropologists pare the general trait down to fear of specific things, for example race, and treat racism as a cultural universal. Moralists seem to object to considering racism as genetic for fear that would mean it is fixed; therefore un-changeable.

While there is little question that the ability to fear different things is embedded genetically; therefore not learned, focus of fear on certain things in that context can be learned. This concept involves intuition and as such is not as simples as one might expect. To paraphrase a definition discussed by Daniel Kahneman in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow (Amazon Kindle); A situation provides a cue that gives access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the manner of response. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition, in this case the recognition of danger to protect ourselves from harm but also the recognition that someone or something has not done harm, therefore does not represent a danger.

Although neophobia is different from xenophobia, it is grounded in xenophobia. By definition, neophobia is fear of new things. It can range from simple trust and distrust to mortal fear. The implication is that neophobia or neophila relates more to things we have recently learned or are in the process of learning. Fear of snakes is xenophobia, while fear of a new neighbor is neophobia. Fear of heights is xenophobia while fear of roller coasters is neophobia. We may or may not learn to love our new neighbors and roller coasters.

Empirically, we know we can overcome and eliminate innate deeply embedded fear as well as fear of new things: fear of heights, fear of elevators, fear of flying, fear of this or fear of that. We eliminate or lose fear by experience—for example, iron workers “fearlessly” walking narrow beams several stories above he ground. However, it is not just a matter of un-learning something as easily as we can learn something. Galvanic skin response (GSR) or lie detectors, and delay in response in word matching exercises detect subconscious feelings. A white person may say he or she is not a raciest but when shown a picture of a black person they show no discernable emotion but show a GSR or slight delay in immediately selecting pleasant words; things that do not happen when shown a picture of a friend or relative. An ironworker may shows no emotion or ill effects of being on a narrow beam high in the air but subconsciously there is fear.

From a great many experiments, scientists seem to think it takes about 30 generations of selection before we can eliminate a genetically embedded trait from a population and equally as many to instill a vertically transmitted trait in a population. As an aside, 30 generation translates into something like 600 years for people. I am unaware of any actual experiments done for this purpose. The words ‘eliminated’ and ‘instilled’ refer to subconscious or all manifestations of a specific behavior although we all recognize that conscious reactions can be eliminate within minutes in individuals by learning subconscious manifestations linger.

Xenophobia is different from neophobia in respect to racism in this way.  In the plantation south, the races have lived together for approximately 500 years; first as slave and master, and then as free people. The point is that in the south the races were not new to one another. The interacted in various ways often living within the same family in intimate and other times adversarial ways; forced labor, butler, child caring, servants of all kinds; therefore, the races were not new to one another; logically neophobia could not play a major part in racism in this culture. Racism seems open and a matter of fact based on fundamentally and genetically embedded xenophobia. I sometimes feel that the southern part of the Untied States is the only place in the world with a white population that seems to believe that racism is morally acceptable.

In contrast, in the north, the population was almost exclusively European especially in the Midwest and Northwest. In the northeast, some of the cities had a mixed race population but never reached the intimate family level relationships as found in the south. Thus, after the civil war, and various economic and social upheavals when more and more black people moved north, racism in this region took on a different flavor that remains many generations later. Northerners do not treat the racial divide as an acceptable inviolable matter of fact. It was more like the way new neighbor were treated but still underlying xenophobia was there to modulate the relationship. Learned neophobia played a bigger role than genetically embedded xenophobia and more and more evidence indicate that we are solving the problem in the north—in the south, not so much or as quickly but still it is changing. 

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