Not2BSubjugated
Callous Individualist
- Feb 15, 2012
- 3,273
- 1,247
Nobody invented racism. In-group preference is a trait shared among most animal species and virtually all mammals. Glad I could clear that up.
But you didn't. Racism is not a natural human trait as humans as a species of animal will associate with other humans. A brown skinned human is just as much a human as a pink skinned one. For what you say to be the case a human would gave to hang out with cows or horses because that would be outside the group preference.
Wow. So it used to be that the only groups were species, huh? Pretty much, then, the first time an explorer from Africa encountered an Asian person, both parties were like, "You look differently, but are clearly just as human as I am. And since you are a man and not a cow or a horse, we shall be as family!" But then, somewhere down the road, some white guy measured a brown person's skull size and came to some biased conclusions, and nobody's gotten along ever since. That's an interesting history.
Anyway, back here on Earth, humans appear to have survived by running in small tribes. Since we aren't a hive queen/drone species we, like all other individually wired social animals, arranged ourselves into small, largely familial groups, like wolf packs or schools of fish. The larger, complex societies that we've since arranged are based on this social tendency, but are only possible due to our ability to reason and to preserve knowledge, but our instinct drives us first to protect those closest (typically blood relations and romantic partners) against the rest of the world, our own species included. This instinct tends to express itself as ever larger concentric circles of in-group preference. Humans tend to show preference to their immediate families over their extended ones, then they tend to show preference to their extended families than to people who aren't familial relations, then they tend to show preference to people from their own communities than people from other ones, then they tend to show preference to people with similar customs and values than people who act very differently. An old Arab proverb put it beautifully. Paraphrased, it's essentially, me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousins, me my brother and my cousins against the world.
On the other hand, the prevalence of multi-ethnic societies is an extremely new phenomenon compared to the entire span of human existence. For the overwhelmingly vast majority of our species' history, everybody in the immediate family obviously looked like you. Everybody in the extended family looked like you. Everybody in the greater community was essentially extended family of extended family, and pretty much looked like you. Everybody who lived close enough to you to have very similar customs and traditions shared your ethnicity, and pretty much looked like you. Everybody who looked vastly different from you, for most of human history, came from somewhere far away and had very different particular values, and customs that were so different that it was near impossible to even wrap your mind around them, which means that ethnic preference was almost as inevitable as loving your own children.