My Racial Bias

October 29, 2024

There are two great errors. First, that whites are superior. While societies predominantly white may have logged greater technological and cultural achievements, that’s due to no biological superiority but rather sheer happenstance. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel carefully analyzed how lucky circumstances of geography and natural environments set the stage for those divergent stories. Not white westerners being somehow smarter or better.

Desperate efforts by past white chauvinist researchers to prove otherwise all failed — proving only their prejudices.

If anything, when it comes to African-Americans in particular, there is actually good reason why they might be the biologically superior ones. Thanks to Darwinian “survival of the fittest.” Slavery’s horrors, and all the other adversities Black Americans have long faced, should have weeded out the weaker and dumber, leaving descendants of the survivors with above average genetic endowments.

The other great fallacy is the supposed evil of race mixing. The idea of racial purity to be maintained, staving off “mongrelization” and “pollution.” If slave owners were truly concerned on this score, maybe they shouldn’t have raped and impregnated so many Black women. As a result, virtually no American Blacks today are “racially pure.”

But in any case, this racial purity bugaboo flouts a true scientific principle — hybrid vigor. We actually know that reproduction between two individuals of any species having divergent genetics produces healthier offspring. Whereas in-breeding does the opposite. Thus race mixing is good, not bad (even apart from socio-cultural benefits of breaking down barriers between peoples).

Yet of course racial bias persists. Scientific studies have proven that Americans tend to have more negative feelings arise when shown images of Black people, compared to seeing whites. This is true even of Blacks themselves, who tend to absorb at least some of the deep cultural stigmatization of their own ethnicity.

So deeply embedded is this bias that it’s hard to entirely surmount. I’ve had it myself and can still detect vestigial unconscious twinges of it. Even while my conscious persona has actually veered into an opposite bias. For a long time now I’ve been experiencing (and reinforcing) more positive feelings toward Black people than whites.

One might imagine that, given all the dire history, Blacks would not reciprocate this. But in my experience, I detect almost no such resentment, but rather generalized cheerful human goodwill. Returning my smiles. Which indeed I find all the more ennobling when considering all the shit that Black people have had to endure in their lives, and still endure.

My positive feelings toward them are also mindful of how much they contribute to society, all the needed work they do. I suspect many whites are oblivious. I travel to Baltimore several times yearly, a city where Blacks are overwhelmingly predominant in service jobs, at the airport, in restaurants, hotels, etc. I love seeing it, and salute them.

For whites, on the other hand, I feel no tribal affinity. Certainly no “us-against-them” vis-a-vis non-whites. My Jewish ancestry may play a role, but I don’t have any tribal feelings there either; perhaps it actually helps neutralize all that. Meantime, looking at white people, I’m mindful how much distasteful racial animus lurks below the surface in many. More than I used to think, as Trump has brought forth. In recent years, politics has infused my feelings in that regard.

I’m still a humanist, believing most humans more good than bad, but I consider Trump support very bad, and a majority of whites support Trump. Not anyone I hang out with, and indeed, not many I encounter in my local area. But others, generic whites, come under default suspicion. While the great majority of non-whites are non-Trumpy. Part of the calculus skewing my racial bias in favor of non-whites.