Life isn’t a zero-sum game. Competent and well-meaning people help lift all those around them to higher performance. While that line of thought might be exactly what an incompetent racist might go through, it’s not actually the right solution for the problem of diminishing resources. The right solution is to maximize resources, especially when they are contracting, by embracing the competent (as well as the altruistic).
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Ask Daryl Davis.
He would say “yes.”
I really liked this episode of Snap Judgment (I am a fan of Glynn Washington) and this piece covers Daryl Davis through his work and success.
http://snapjudgment.org/the-klan
See also Christian Picciolini:
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That’s arguable. Superstition, fear (both rational and irrational)…which leads to distrust of the ‘other’ are deeply routed in our DNA. You could argue that the goal of socialization in a modern, open society is to ameliorate such innate tendencies.
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William Golding would not be surprised in the slightest by these conclusions. What happened to Piggy in ‘Lord of the Flies’?
Show me anything in existence which is not.
Past a certain point of evolution, I don’t believe that.
What we see happening around us today is intentional; the results of the perpetual yet often covert efforts of a select few over the course of many decades, to keep their tenuous grasp on unchecked power by any means necessary.
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Animal pack behavior. Individual thought and personality yield to the mob consensus which is often directed by alpha(s) chosen more often than not for their charisma, not for their qualifications.
Even people who may be decent and likeable as individuals can behave savagely under mob conditions.
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Uh… You came trying to engage me, not the other way around.
That’s nice.
You have a good day now; I decline to continue conversing any further with you.
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That’s a pretty good line of reasoning. Still sucks, and we need to find a way to overcome that tendency if we are to make it much longer.
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Thinking of Jewish people or Asian people or any specific group as an “other” is a learned behavior.
Most white people don’t see redheads or left-handed people as the “other” to be feared or distrusted because those prejudices aren’t currently high on society’s radar.
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See “South Pacific” “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught.”
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There is a reason this piece was frequently cut when the show was performed in the South.
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Aha! You have just proven yourself competent, thereby making yourself a target!
Or have you? Because you’ve failed to remember that incompetent people are not competent… People often forget that there are two sides to the Dunning-Kruger Effect: Incompetent people fail to understand their own incompetence, while competent people judge themselves to be merely average and completely miss just how not competent the incompetent are.
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Words have meaning. The term DNA has a very specific meaning. It is biological. So when you say something is in our DNA, you are implying that it is encoded at the genetic level.
There is no biological basis for racism. It is social. It is taught. In other words, it is 100% nurture, and nature has nothing to do with it. There is no racism gene. Period.
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In fairness, they are correct that distrust of other is deeply engrained in our DNA, and I do mean biologically. Thing is, “other” was defined as “not of my clan” which made sense when we lived in clan groups. The thing that has happened, and is absolutely new, is the concept of “all white people” as a clan. That is a modern a invention and has no basis in biology, logic or common sense. In short, nope.
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Clans are a social construct too, just a very old one. They exist independently of biology. In some cases they even transcend species (for example, in a conflict a dog will side with its own clan over its own species).
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There is a biological basis for “othering,” though. We, like other social species, come pre-equipped to recognize “group” and to then class everyone according to “group” or “non-group.” The interesting thing is that we don’t come with a particular group pre-installed; in-group characteristics are one of the first things babies learn and it’s non-optional.
What is optional is treatment of non-group members. And although initial reaction seems to set pretty early, what you do next is definitely subject to education.
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The irony, of course, was that during the pre-modern period in Western Europe Jews were, due to anti-Semitism, relegated to then-disreputable or poorly paying “Mercurian”/middleman careers that later turned into some of the most lucrative areas of modern economies. And of course were also rewarded with resentment from the same bigoted arseholes who put them there in the first place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Slezkine#Slezkine’s_theory_of_ethnic_identity
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Clan as I am using it is generally a genetic construct as most clans were family groupings, usually patrilineal. Our closest relatives still live in familial groupings of this sort. There is a theory (unproven) that the fear of other related to contagious disease which your group may not have been exposed to. (Ie, smallpox in the New World.) Anyway, there is a historical argument to be made, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with race. Unfortunately, I have seen "academic racists " try to apply this argument to racial groups. It holds no water at all. Ever.
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Agreed. It seems like humanity has multiple choices of cliffs to run off or brick walls to run headlong into.
I am in no way a sociologist or psychologist, I was just giving my point of view, based on my own experiences.
I do have hope for the future, as each new generation becomes more open and inclusive than the previous ones.
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I type too slow. @copykate beat me to it.
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