My friend James over at the arc of time recently made an interesting post called “minority” that discusses the social dynamics as relates to race. James is a white guy living in Atlanta that began using the public transit system almost exclusively a few months ago. Aside from being a racially and socioeconomically atypical public transit rider in Atlanta, there is much irony in this. James, you see, owns a BMW X5. This may make him the only man on Earth that owns such a nice vehicle and yet chooses to ride the bus. It gives you some indication of just how excruciating Atlanta traffic can be. Do I miss it? Um, no. In morning rush hour here I have rocketed all of the way from my Uptown apartment to my office just south of DFW airport in 22 minutes. The same achievement in Atlanta would require a helicopter.
But I digress. James touches on some pretty sensitive subjects as regards to race, feelings of safety, etc. Essentially, he admits that while considering himself pretty enlightened, it has taken a long while to overcome feelings that imply a sense of danger when he is among many black people as the only white guy, or one of a very few.
You know how when you read something that contains a novel idea you start applying that concept to everything? I find myself doing that with James’ topic here. Over many years I have read some great writing on how the brain is wired. One of the many things you can glean from them is this – there are far more behaviors that are hard-wired into our biology than we readily accept. It is possible for our minds to overcome them, but only with lots of effort effort.
I bet that group dynamic behaviors as relates to race are like this. If you very obviously “don’t belong” in your environment as compared to everyone else around you I bet there are some really deep seated parts of the brain that whisper things like “Watch out!” and “Be alert!” simply because if you rewind the clock far enough into the past, simple differences much more subtle than skin coloring did in fact mean imminent threats to survival. Like it or not, we humans are primates. I think it is instructive to note that there thorough observations from Jane Goodall documenting troops of chimpanzees fighting what can only be described as wars of genocide. Their biological allegiance is not to “chimpanzee kind” but to their troop of chimpanzees. We humans think that all chimpanzees look alike. Apparently the chimps beg to differ.
Take a chimp from Troop A and drop him into a clearing full of chimps from Troop B and you’ve got yourself one very, very frightened chimp. Imminent threat to his survival is simply a cold fact and his biology knows it. The chimps that failed to perceive that threat got weeded out a very long time ago.
Now cut to James walking down Broad Street. His neocortex knows that he faces very little risk from his fellow humans around him, despite the fact that his skin is white and theirs is black. It can grasps statistics, prior experience walking down Broad Street, prior positive experiences interacting with black people, that physical threat could just as easily come to him from a white person, etc., etc.
But his lower brain? The medulla, the limbic system? They don’t know any of those things. They know mostly the same things that the chimp knows, and they don’t like what they see. James’ hair stands up. His pulse quickens. His eye movement increases. Deep under the mountain of his rational mind, James’ own private NORAD senses danger. The airspace above Canada is clear but the general staff nudges the threat level up to DEFCON 3 anyway. Something about those Russkies has them nervous today.
And that’s just the way it is.
But because James does have a rational mind, he does not run away to the “safety” of a crowd of white people. His somewhat embarrassed neocortex over-rides the limbic system and the medulla. “I can take care of this one guys,” it says.
This process is critical to the things that we call culture and civilization, and it is indeed an enlightenment. We fight base biological impulses all of the time. It’s why most every person that’s ever had a job has been able to avoid being fired for punching the boss, or a co-worker, or a customer. Generally it’s why we humans can defer various gratifications, or deny them when they come at the unfair expense of others. At least we can when we try.
Our rational minds enable us to be much more than what our base biology would otherwise allow. But it’s not always easy, and it’s not always fully within our control. Our higher brains can make the decision to keep riding the bus, but other parts of our minds still exercise enormous influence over our adrenal glands.
Those facts in and of themselves are not a failure of character and they do not make us racist. They only make us human. To be a racist you have to either give yourself over to those lower impulses, or otherwise build a world view by construction rationalizations which say that those lower impulses are actually correct.
Of course it complicates matters when statistics tell us that the larger measure of violence in American society are perpetrated by young black men. This makes the case still harder for the neocortex to argue. But not impossible. I think that this is not only why James can ride the bus, but why he can be honest and open regarding his feelings about the experience.
When it comes to feelings of fear created by things like loud noises, falling, reptiles, etc. we all seem to be able to accept the idea that this is wired into us for reasons related to survival. But when we reflect on reasons why we fear each other, we either seem to have trouble accepting that our wiring is what it is, and that we should congratulate ourselves when we can and do undertake the effort to overcome those limitations.
