Racist? I know you are but what am I

So on this particular morning as I was completing the last set of sit ups on my almost extinct ab lounge machine, I was treated to a particularly interesting interview on one of my favourite BET shows, My Two Cents. The interviewee (whose name I am yet to determine) had published a book in which the premise was that the black community is to be divided into separate categories based off the intensity of the pigmentation in their skin, in other words, there should be a separation of light skinned blacks and dark skinned blacks. This brought me back to an idea I had in a University Social Psychology class, where we were given an essay to write on stereotypes, and I, being the already extreme ideologist that I am, suggested that racism was inevitable. It damn well cost me a good grade in that class I can tell you that! But the basis of my argument is something I see reflected in society today, which almost forces me to go back to that professor and demand a higher grade.

The idea comes from a social mechanism in which human beings tend to classify things in their surrounding, for several purposes. It’s a phenomenon that we see reflected in a Psychological process called classical conditioning, where a simple Skinner Box demonstrates how a rat can interpret a completely unrelated event like scratching it’s butt, to the distribution of a food pellet. Silly creatures you say… well where do you believe superstitions come from in homo sapiens ? Back in time unrelated events occurring too close to each other led to the belief in things like gods… In modern time it makes people scurry when they see a black cat, or think twice before they open an umbrella in a house. Or more popularly, makes someone forward an email to all the friends on their list, just to prevent having years of bad luck (or bad sex).

But going back to stereotypes, Psychology teaches that classifying certain characteristics, can even save your life in times of quick and urgent decisions (schema). Now I may not be a scientist, but something tells me that if I am ever lost in the woods, a plant with a particularly pungent smell may not be the first one I choose to eat from; An animal with a particularly unpleasant demeanor may not be the one I choose to pet, and a location with a particularly somber appeal may not be the one I choose to take shelter in. Similarly, if I’m walking in the city one night and I see a white bearded man behind me in a sleeveless leather jacket with tattoo’s and a bandana, he wouldn’t be the one I would choose to ask directions from. Maybe past events, experiences or something we read in a book may have taught us how to link these cues to unpleasant outcomes, and my first reaction would be “well maybe he’s a skin head looking to inflict harm on me as a black man”. The extremist may take my leather jacket example and argue that what I have demonstrated is stereotyping which may ultimately lead to racism; but in a split second sort of situation, I’d rather be wrong and alive then right and not alright! The explanation is that as human beings we tend to look for social cues, with the ultimate rationale being our survival.

This now brings me back to the idea I had in that University essay where I mentioned that racism is inevitable. Even if there were no whites, Indians, Chinese or Blacks, people would find some way to categorize human beings and place them into a social hierarchy. Imagine we were all literally colour blind, and all we could see are shades of grey, is it possible that we could all get along as variably grey individuals or would we see the need to classify people, based on hues? I ask this question because I have recognized the human ‘urge’ to classify things into good, better and best, and therefore believe that regardless of circumstance, we would continue to stereotype and group a set of people just to satisfy this ‘urge’.

This is not a completely left field idea. Why is that we see the need to see who is the better specie, the better gender, the better country? Why do we spend large sums of money to find out which country has the prettiest woman, the best designed car, or the smartest set of people? And again why is it necessary to know which country is the most famished, decorated, or even the most violent? The answer to many of these questions is survival, and it does make sense when we relate them to objects in most cases, but why is it necessary to relate them to human beings?

Could it just be narrowed down to an explanation as simple as… survival?