Poll: Racism: Nature or Nurture?

[DarkRyter]

Everyone's a little bit racist. Well, anyone who's ever made a judgement based on someone's appearance, whether it be clothing, or looks, or hair color, or in this case, skin color.

But the racism most people think of (hate speech, lynching, segregation and that sort of thing) can only come from experience. Even the KKK Emperor, they have emperors you know, wasn't born thinking black people suck.

 

[newwiseman]

Like everything, it's a combination of the two. Humans after all do a have a natural fear of the unknown but at the same time our brains have developed a co-operation imperative that supersedes instinctual fears.

I'd say you buddies kid probably has developed his response from the way his developing mind has processed what he knows of black culture, a limited view based on whatever he has been exposed to.

Or maybe the black kid at his preschool stole his chocolate milk, what do I know.

 

[RandV80]

It should obviously be both. You can easily inherit racist tendancy's from your parents or friends, but there's obviously a subconcious element to it too.

For the latter, it's my personal opinion that it's not so much about skin colour, as the media or PC crowd always like to play up, but rather the cultural differences. It's pretty easy to become 'colour blind' so to speak, when people of different colour more or less look and talk the same way you do. It's when they don't that natural tension can arise.

 

[Vykrel]

id say the majority of it stems from upbringing, although not necessarily always from the parents.

my dad is a wee bit racist, but i am not.

 

[EeveeElectro]

One of my mums friends daughter used to hate black men, just because she was scared of them. I suppose to a child, seeing someone who is completely different to you can scare some of them? I think she was intimidated. It was a shame because my cousin married a Jamaican (he is absolutely awesome XD) and she screamed and fled when they were in the same room.
So my guess is a fear of people different to him.

I think you can 'pick up' racism from family or friends but it depends on the individual. If they're too dim to form their own opinions of people of a different race, or if they go out there and make friends with anyone because they realise, "Dad doesn't like x ethnicity because of x reason, but surely they can't all be bad."

That probably doesn't make much sense. I'm tired >.>

 

[Archwright]

Racism is a flawed application of the in-group, out-group capacity of our minds. Those in your in-group look, speak, believe, screw, or think like you; the opposite for the out-group. Additionally, humans gain a preference for familiar settings. If someone has only been exposed to one type of environment for their entire life, then they (generally) automatically gain an aversion to other stimuli. (Look up developmental psych, and learning if you want to know more.)

I'll use Dragon Age as an example. There are Dwarves who are afraid of the surface because they've only known how to live underground. It's not because they are Dwarves; after a generation, aversion to the surface disappears. The writers applied real, honest-to-goodness psychology here.

For another example, lets take someone who's only lived in the Great Plains, in a socially, ethnically, religiously, and economically homogeneous environment. Blindfold that person, transport them to the center of Taipei, un-bindfold them, and you have yourself an instant panic attack. Our victim here simply cannot process the number of people, the terrain, the buildings, the language, the people.

If someone is only exposed to a few type of people, they will count those people in their in-group. If you expose someone to a broader group of people, they will be more likely to consider more types of people in their in-group.

Racism is the product of a bug in our ability to differentiate between different types of stimuli that only comes about though intentional or accidental nurturing.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Actually all three.

Nature's racism is that we genetically identify with our own kind.
Nurture's racism is that we're always told to beware of strangers.
And the third is that we know that racism is "wrong" from an early age, but it's one of those things that can't be experienced until it's used against you. The kid isn't being racist when he's saying "I hate black people" because he can't understand what he's meaning.

He does know that it'll get a reaction though, and that's what a lot of kids want.

If you want to cure him of it, get someone - or yourself - to say that they hate people like him - and then exaggerate his flaws to the maximum. Then pause and ask him if he wants to say the same thing to black people again.

Kids can't be racist because they just don't have the life experience to define it. They can be little goddam brats, but that comes naturally.

 

[MikailCaboose]

It's a bit of both. Many emotions, such as fear and anger, are automatically processed by the brain, sometimes with little to no actual, immediate cognition regarding the matter. Yet, while it is possible that a sense of racism can be naturally spontaneous, environment definitely does play a part in shaping what emotions are "learned" to be right and which ones are wrong. At four years old, his sense of fear is still mostly going by the innate, natural response to difference. It's very likely that he will grow out of it.

 

[Zyphonee]

Xenophobia is actually a piece of the human mechanism. As humans, we are programmed to keep a really strong understanding of what a human should be and shouldn't be, that's what kept our primate ancestors from being an easy prey. When that very same primal urge to segregate the different to prevent it from hurting you is introduced to a society, you have racism, which is a mixture between this very natural and biological response to elements that are alien to us and many, many and really many sociological patterns and standards; for example, kids whose parents repeat they shouldn't trust strangers end up having a higher possibility to develop a full racism complex, but it can also be from different other factors, such as a bad understanding of cultural relativism, peer pressure or flat out ignorance (A lot of racists say that it's logic to say that black people are mentally inferior to white people because they integrate a smaller portion of society but they commit a larger number of crimes, which is actually true, but not because of a lesser mental potential, but because of the need developed from generations of abuse towards the aforementioned ethnicity.)

So yes, both.

 

[EightGaugeHippo]

Its down to nurture. But its not as simple as YOU bringing your children up right and they wont be racist. No, they will pick it up off other kids in the school yard.

Gather round children, I'll tell you a little story.
Once upon a time...
There was a white majority in my primary school (only 2 black children in my year) and they where picked on by other kids because they where diferent. Now, most of those who picked on them,(my self included) had grown out of racism by the 3rd year. But a few of those students who then went on to my highschool where still a tad bit racist, not due to them being born racist, but because when they where younger, it was normal.
The End.