Dear Sticky Wicket,
Historically, every race and ethnic group that has come to America, or was in American already i.e. Native Americans, suffered racial slurs and racism, regardless of whether they were Africans, Asians, Germans, Irish, Italian, Jews, Latinos, etc. What is it about the human psyche that says we need a “collective enemy” or group to hate? Is it real or imagined?
~Love to Love in Los Angeles
Dear Love to Love,
Actually, L2L, there have been numerous studies on whether biases towards races other than one’s own are “hard wired."
A study conducted by Princeton University researchers Mary Wheeler and Susan Fiske, “Controlling Racial Prejudice: Social-Cognitive Goals Affect Amygdada and Stereotypes Activation,” and printed in the January 2005 issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society, included an experiment that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure activity in the amygdale.
The amygdale is the section of the brain where the “fight or flight” instinct is triggered. Wheeler and Fiske asked a group of white participants to view pictures of African-American and white faces foreign to them.
Three separate tasks were performed by the participants while they examined the pictures. The first was to guess whether the person preferred a certain vegetable, like carrots, and then signal if the image had a grey spot, with the final task of categorizing the images into an over-21 or under-21 years of age.
The only time amygdale activity registered was when white subjects guessed the black subjects’ ages. The reason given for this was that the first two tasks, indentifying the likes or dislikes of vegetables and locating a grey spot on the photo, did not require race as a consideration, but guessing the age did.
Professors of psychological sciences Scott Vrana and David Rollock, conducted a similar study involving whites and African-Americans, published in the July 1998 journal Psychophysiology.
Vrana and Rollock gathered 105 undergraduates from Purdue—54 black and 51 white—they put them alone in a room hooked to monitors that tracked heart rate, perspiration, and facial movements. A stranger would enter the room saying they were checking equipment. Sometimes the stranger checking the equipment was of the same race, sometimes not. In all cases, the equipment checker was the same gender as the participants since the researchers felt different sex pairings would complicate the study.
“We found that for white males, heart rates went up almost ten beats per minute when a black man entered the room,” Vrana says. “This is a really large change.”
Not only did heart rates go up, they remained elevated during the entire one minute.
Measuring facial expressions also led to interesting finds.
“Smiling when you greet someone is not inevitable, it is just something that we as a culture have chosen to do and train our children to do,” Vrana says.
For the first 10 seconds of the encounters, participants smiled to greet the person who walked into the room. During those first 10 seconds, their smiles remained the same when the person entering the room was of the same race. However, after the initial 10 seconds, participants tended to smile longer and show a greater smile to persons of a different race.
“Once people recognize that someone is of another race, they may make a conscious effort to smile at them,” Vrana says. “It may be that we are more self-conscious of how we present ourselves to people who are different from us.”
If you’d like to test your own reactions to race, you can take a Harvard study called the Implicit Association Test at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/.