by Nancy Seddens

Created on: December 09, 2009

Racism is a natural, albeit no longer useful, part of our genetic makeup.  Early man knew that survival depended on working together as a group. The group was comprised of a few extended families and when the group became too large for a hunter/gather life style to support then the group split. The two groups might cooperate for a while but would in time drift apart.

Thus was born the “us and them” mind set. For those who find this hard to believe consider how personally invested many people become in sports teams and not just ones they play on or are betting on. Being a loyal part of a group whose members share resources and work together was an integral part of survival for our ancient ancestors and it’s hard to lose that imperative.   

No one wants to feel totally alone to fend for themselves and so we join clubs, and become sports boosters, we twitter and try and connect on face book. We try for some group identity in so many places because there is no modern equivalent to the small tribes we were programmed to belong to. In the tribe you would have spent everyday, all day, your whole life with a core set of people who all thought the same, looked pretty much the same and were almost as interested in your survival as you were.

That explains the Us what about the Them? Where does the racism come in? People who weren’t part of the group were to be feared and if possible avoided. People not part of the group were considered dangerous. Now consider that we, who are programmed to belong to a group type that no longer exists, still feel the urge to avoid those, not like us. The distrust of those not like Us might perhaps be even stronger for modern humans because we don’t have the comfort of a all encompassing tribal group. Today we naturally gravity toward people we think are the most like us and look upon others with trepidation. Members of the group could distinguish between the Us and the Them easily even at a distance which was important for safety.  We feel in our bones that people that aren’t like us just can’t be trusted and because skin color is one of the quickest differences to pick up race becomes a natural way of dividing ourselves.

This is of course no excuse for racism; just having a natural tendency does not mean that intelligence couldn’t or shouldn’t override our genetic tendencies. We aren’t our ancestors, we don’t live their lives or face the challenges that they faced. As civilizations developed the ability to support larger populations mankind learned to work around those natural inclinations that were no longer advantageous for their survival and prosperity. Humans will always want to divide themselves into groups but hopefully one day the group qualifications will have nothing to do with inconsequential attributes such as race or ethnicity.  

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