Natural Born Racists
The Enlightenment conception of human nature was laid bare in the opening line of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s masterpiece, Émile (1762): “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.”
We are all, to some extent, sons and daughters of the Enlightenment. When we hear about, say, a school shooting, our first thoughts are: Was he abused as a child? Was he desensitized by violent video games? Corrupted by violent music? Ruined by violent movies? Does he have a chemical imbalance? Does he struggle with mental health problems? It rarely (if ever) occurs to us that he might just be evil. Because we assume, like Rousseau, that kids start out good. If they turn out bad, “the hands of man” are to blame.
Recent research has given the lie to these notions. As Steven Pinker puts it in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2010): “most of us—including you, dear reader—are wired for violence, even if in all likelihood we will never have an occasion to use it. We can begin with our younger selves. The psychologist Richard Tremblay has measured rates of violence over the course of the life span and shown that the most violent stage of life is not adolescence or even young adulthood but the aptly named terrible twos. A typical toddler at least sometimes kicks, bites, hits, and gets into fights, and the rate of physical aggression then goes steadily down over the course of childhood. Tremblay remarks, ‘Babies do not kill each other, because we do not give them access to knives and guns. The question . . . we’ve been trying to answer for the past 30 years is how do children learn to aggress. [But] that’s the wrong question. The right question is how do they learn not to aggress.’”
Children learn not to aggress because we teach them. If you’ve spent any time around new parents or a daycare, you’ve probably noticed that they spend a hell of a lot of time saying “No!” Taming this innate feature of human nature takes a great of time and effort. But it’s well worth it, because it makes it possible for us to live in peace with each other.
If Frank Chalk is right, this is exactly how we need to view the problem of racism. Like being violent, being racist—i.e., having an innate preference for people who look like you—is natural. The question we’ve been trying to answer for the past half century is “How do children learn to be racist?” But that’s probably the wrong question. The right question is “How do they learn not to be racist?”
Racism, as a theory about human difference, is almost completely bullshit. It’s a culturally-transmitted narrative that has very little grounding in biological reality. We can fight this kind of racism—i.e., ideological racism or pseudo-scientific racism—by fighting those culturally-transmitted narratives. But the subtler, more “natural” kind of racism—i.e., having an innate preference for people who look like you—must be counteracted more proactively.
Children learn not to be racist, not because we act like race doesn’t exist, but because we teach them not to be racist. Taming this innate feature of human nature takes a great of time and effort. But it’s well worth it, because it makes it possible for us to live in peace with each other.
