Bias, prejudice and a host of –isms.

                The old adage goes “nobody is born racist”. This is technically not true, but saying “We are born with an innate preference for things that remind us of ourselves and an innate mistrust of anything that is different.” Is a bit long-winded, and also a little bit untrue as well.

                What?

                What!?

                Okay! Don’t get mad just because I can’t explain the complex multi-dimensional construction of the human psyche in a pithy soundbite for you to regurgitate all over your friends to sound smart.

                Okay, I’m getting defensive and weird, let’s start again…

                Evolutionary and developmental psychologists have come up with a few theories and conducted a few experiments on new-borns to find out what is “innate” and what is “learned”. I won’t bore you with the details, but most can agree that new-borns all have things in common. They prefer to focus on faces that resemble their own in terms of ethnicity, they have a liking for salt, they can make grabbing and sucking reflexive actions without being taught, though interestingly swallowing can cause a bit of an issue, and a lot of babies can struggle with breastfeeding because of this. On the flipside developing children often have “Neophillia” the love of things “New” they’ll be drawn to investigate and experience as much as possible in order to expose their developing minds to a variety of experiences and help them learn before they got too old and crusty to absorb information at the rate they can as kids. So I suppose my irritating soundbite would be “Children start biased, but they also come equipped with the perfect engine to overcome that bias, ie: the drive to experience and learn from things outside their normal environment.” It’s why parents often have kids with huge saucer eyes the first time they see a person of another race, and they will undoubtedly go up and ask some kind of very obnoxiously worded question, not out of rudeness, but out of a genuine desire to learn and understand.

               

This is where things get messed up of course, parents or society will often tag explanations for differences along with certain behaviours, hence racism. The child’s own perceptions forever coloured by a casually cruel remark or a stilted perspective, one of the arguments against tokenism is the unhealthy stereotypes that emerge and imprint themselves on developing minds.  It’s heady stuff, and in modern days we see it in the “women are wonderful” effect, as well as the 20% longer jail times in America for minorities and a 60% longer jail time for men, as well as a host of other social ills that of real or imagined credibility that I will not go into here. Regardless of what we thing we view the world though the lenses we construct in our childhood, either in acceptance or defiance of them.

                This leads us to what some people call “The Cultural Cringe,” where society becomes so hyper-aware of itself and its perception or mistreatment of a demographic that all references to it become… well... cringey… In an attempt to represent them in society, depictions become disgustingly cartoonishly bad. You can’t just be black, you have to be SUPER-black, full-on embrace the stereotype, love rap, educated at MLK high, Graduated from Malcom X Uni, and speak using exclusively Ebonics, and so on.  You can’t just be gay, you have to be SUPER-Gay, you have to constantly reference you sexuality in every third sentence, make lovey-eyes at every same-sex person in the room, and ensure that at least one rainbow is on your person at all times. Thankfully a lot of society is past this, but you’ll still see echoes of it every now and then, people are unsure of how to combat their inner prejudices and “tinted glasses” they have from childhood that they inadvertently go massively too far in the wrong direction.  The classic everyday line is “I’m not racist/sexist, I have gay/black friends” which is a microcosm of the Cultural Cringe, your friends aren’t your friends, they’re your BLACK friends or they’re your GAY friends, people become so hyper aware of the need to not be racist/sexist that they will inadvertently reveal their still a victim of it in their own thinking. You still think through that lens of “other” even if it’s only to spite it, and it’s not a bad thing because we ALL do it, regardless of our chromosomes, sexual preferences, or melanin levels.

A lot of these emergent identities also get caught up with a strong part of being who you are is emphasizing a hatred of what you NOT. This is not heathy. Often the KKK will comment in an attempt to defend it’s ideology that it’s not an anti-black movement, but a pro-white movement (The reverse sentiment echoed by the BLM movement, interestingly.) But ultimately those interested in affirming their identity through the hatred of another group will find a sympathetic ear in such organizations. It’s where neophillia has become neophobia, the fear of the “other” and the child-like feeling of invincibility has worn off, making neophillia wither away with it, and you’re left with that gut-instinct to shun the outsider and stick with things that look like you.  It’s using fear as a cornerstone of who you are, and masking that fear with self-righteous anger and ultimately hatred, and it can only change society for the worse when it’s indulged.

               

                So is this a bad thing? Yes and No, we’re making progress, despite people’s attempts to drive people into individual special interest groups that all hate and despise one another, most people tend be growing into the “Content of their character” frame of mind, expose to different cultures, races and religions from an early age generally takes the “other” out of them and they become just an accepted part of how reality is rather then seen as something that exists outside of the norm. If anything it’s an argument for globalization, as callous as that sounds.

                I suppose in a way everyone is going to be prejudiced, simply because we can’t be exposed to EVERYTHING during our formative years and have it put into an appropriate context for us, but it’s not a bad thing, it’s just a thing.  And while you and I may always view some others as “Weird, and they make me feel a little bit insecure sometimes” the sure-fire way of getting around that is to talk to them, it’s easy to hate something you don’t understand, it’s hard to hate somebody you’re on first name terms with.

                Now I will sit and await the inevitable cascade of hatred, that will tell me I can understand nothing of prejudice because I will never have personally experienced it as a white male. Completely blind to the irony of this statement.