Babies Born Racist?

This is a weird conversation. It makes me wonder what all those forensic scientists who can tell a murder victim's ethnicity from a piece of jawbone would make of the concept proposed here that there are no racial differences.

Granted, the genetic differences within an ethnic group may be greater than the differences between ethnic groups, but it's not the differences that define an ethnic or racial identity, it's the shared similarities.
Oh, and race isn't confined to humans. Racial variation in cuckoos and herring gulls is well documented.
I can see that this "no-race" movement is well intentioned, as it's trying to bring down unnecessary barriers between people, but it strikes me as far more politically motivated than common-sense motivated.

Anyway in response to the OP, babies are xenophobic, as are all animals as far as I'm aware. We perceive others who look superficially or act superficially different to be more threatening than those whose appearances/behaviours we are familar with. I'd be far more surprised to discover that babies weren't xenophobic.

Revoltingest said:

Study: Babies Show Racial Bias « CBS Seattle
People love to say that racism is a learned thing, perhaps hoping that it
might be cured completely some day by our just becoming more advanced.
Does the above linked study dash such hope?

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Not really.

From the article:

Sommerville did point out that this research does not mean that babies are racist.
“Racism connotes hostility,” she said, “and that’s not what we studied.”
Sommerville says that her study shows “babies use basic distinctions, including race, to start to cleave the world apart by groups of what they are and aren’t a part of.”

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Breathe said:

What about this definition of race?

"Race is a classification system used to categorize humans into large and distinct populations or groups by anatomical, cultural, ethnic, genetic, geographical, historical, linguistic, religious, and/or social affiliation."​

- From Wiki​

So, I suppose if this definition would be used, there'd be, well, a lot of races. North African, East African, West African, Sub-Saharan African, Northern European, etc? Possibly then further characterized as "European", "African", etc, and then by things that ultimately would boil down to... appearance, I guess?
Kind of sad, but like anything, the more generalized it becomes, the more diluted the definition becomes.

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It wouldn't exactly contradict with my definition.

I feel that creating something as a taboo and getting to emotionally involved in the discussion is unhelpful in the long run. Pointing of fingers, accusing others of bigotry, and storming off may make people feel good in the short-term, but long-term, it is not helpful.

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But that's engraved in my lhp personality. :sorry1:

Sometimes you have to speak about things you don't want to.

The avoidance of speaking about race and whether or not it exists risks, in the long-term, encouraging racial discrimination because it is off the cards for intelligent discussion, and ignorance will set in. Ignoring something does not make it go away in the real world, even if mama told you otherwise when you were in school; it'd be nice to think otherwise, but it isn't the case, sadly. The current rise of nationalism in Europe is testament to that.
We're all grown-ups here, after all, we can discuss this like adults. Right?

My thoughts, anyway.

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Well said.

Revoltingest said:

Even without an explicit definition, for you to not recognize differences which others see points to a different definition. Even though there are demonstrable genetic differences resulting in differences in appearance, maladies, & response to treatments, you still see no race where I do.

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It's called population genetics. Certain genes are more common in certain populations. But that doesn't lead to something called "race". Once again, I don't see this being defined.

One could say that denying the existence of race is a lazy & dishonest way to achieve a multicultural utopia. A problem is that such venomous pronouncements don't advance discussion. Some thoughts are best left unsaid.

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Instead of getting uppity over my observations, why don't you take a crack at defining what you mean when you speak of "race", so we're both on the same page?

Halcyon said:

This is a weird conversation. It makes me wonder what all those forensic scientists who can tell a murder victim's ethnicity from a piece of jawbone would make of the concept proposed here that there are no racial differences.

Granted, the genetic differences within an ethnic group may be greater than the differences between ethnic groups, but it's not the differences that define an ethnic or racial identity, it's the shared similarities.
Oh, and race isn't confined to humans. Racial variation in cuckoos and herring gulls is well documented.
I can see that this "no-race" movement is well intentioned, as it's trying to bring down unnecessary barriers between people, but it strikes me as far more politically motivated than common-sense motivated.

Anyway in response to the OP, babies are xenophobic, as are all animals as far as I'm aware. We perceive others who look superficially or act superficially different to be more threatening than those whose appearances/behaviours we are familar with. I'd be far more surprised to discover that babies weren't xenophobic.

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Ethnicity isn't race. Once again, what exactly do you mean by "race"?

Provide evidence that all animals and babies are xenophobic? Sounds like a projection.

Babies are very egocentric, and they show strong preferences for certain people over others.

It stands to reason that they may show an inborn bias towards people of familiar ethnicity.

If true, that means that racism is a natural tendency that must be taught against.

The Sum of Awe said:

Keep in mind I'm defining this myself so it might be a little off, but this is just my picture and understanding of race:

A race is a group within a species that share similar traits from ancestry.

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That's rather vague. Unless you're descended from a remote tribe that hasn't been in contact with other groups for thousands of years, your genetic markers are likely to be all over the place.

White-skin usually is more northern or European while dark-skin is usually more southern or African.

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Not really. It has more to do with distance from the equator. East Asian descended people, including Inuits, often have paler skin than many "white people". "White people" often have olive skin or beige skin. Same as how there's many dark skinned humans who are not Africans.

saint_frankenstein said:

It's called population genetics. Certain genes are more common in certain populations. But that doesn't lead to something called "race". Once again, I don't see this being defined.

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Lack of a precise definition doesn't preclude existence. Similarly, there's no good
working definition of "porn" except for an individual knowing it when seeing it.

Instead of getting uppity over my observations, why don't you take a crack at defining what you mean when you speak of "race", so we're both on the same page?

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I was calling you on applying terms like lazy, dishonest & offensive to opinions
of others. It's "uppity" to decry such sanctimony & uber-certainty?

Revoltingest said:

Lack of a precise definition doesn't preclude existence. Similarly, there's no good
working definition of "porn" except for an individual knowing it when seeing it.

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When you're talking about a subject that's supposed to be biological, it should be clearly defined. Porn is an abstract cultural concept. Seems "race" is much the same.

I was calling you on applying terms like lazy, dishonest & offensive to opinions
of others. It's "uppity" to decry such sanctimony & uber-certainty?

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I do think it's lazy, dishonest and offensive to lump vast swaths of people together to establish boundaries between others.

saint_frankenstein said:

When you're talking about a subject that's supposed to be biological, it should be clearly defined. Porn is an abstract cultural concept. Seems "race" is much the same.

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That is a valid criticism of the concept of race.

I do think it's lazy, dishonest and offensive to lump vast swaths of people together to establish boundaries between others.

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That would depend upon the use of these boundaries.
If for effecting adverse treatment, then yes.
But for medical, advocacy & social studies purposes yer all wet.

Revoltingest said:

That would depend upon the use of these boundaries.
If for effecting adverse treatment, then yes.
But for medical, advocacy & social studies purposes yer all wet.

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So you're basically arguing for race as a socio-cultural construct and not really as a taxonomical categorization?

saint_frankenstein said:

So you're basically arguing for race as a socio-cultural construct and not really as a taxonomical categorization?

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Nah...there are genotypical & phenotypical traits mixed in there too.

Revoltingest said:

Nah...there are genotypical & phenotypical traits mixed in there too.

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Which is about that person's specific ancestry and not "race". Genetics has basically destroyed the theory of biological race.

saint_frankenstein said:

Which is about that person's specific ancestry and not "race". Genetics has basically destroyed the theory of biological race.

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So you say, but we still see that traits are inherited from one's ancestors (genetics).

Revoltingest said:

So you say, but we still see that traits are inherited from one's ancestors (genetics).

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Which I already mentioned in the very post you replied to.

saint_frankenstein said:

Which I already mentioned in the very post you replied to.

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Then we're going in circles, so it's time to move on.

Revoltingest said:

Then we're going in circles, so it's time to move on.

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....... the above posted to the Saint.

So let's move forward.
The experiment showed how daft these so-called experimenters are. Let's step back and take a more academic view, can we? You might like to look at experiments carried out on more developed infants at an Israeli Uni. As suggested by me, ( )they used two colours, yellow and blue to create in-groups and out-groups. The results show that females take less notice of in and out group membership than the boys, which is fascinating.

You will notice how a professional will narrow down the parameters, and look for variables as they occur, rather than search for want they want to see.

These tests tend to suggest that young male minors do notice ethnicity, but only in the same way as they recognise other factors which can tend to form sub groups.

To test babies (nappy age), very tight controls have to be prepared for such tests, and in the OP experiment shown these were embarrassingly absent.

I don't know what your agenda is but there is a big difference between ethnicity and race, and since babies can recognise and respond to so many variables in other babies which they meet with, the very reason why socialising is so important in all minor age groups, I wonder why you picked on racial recognition as your subject matter.

Have a look at this finding from a quality Israeli Uni experiment. You really should have focused on gender rather than racial responses. Hell, it might have interested the feminists more.....? I do so love to read their ideas.....

Well, I have to say that would interest me more, anyways.

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/.premium-1.528187

Also:

Humans of the same sex are 99.9% genetically identical. There is extremely little variation between human geographical populations and most of the variation that does occur is in the personal level within local areas, and not between populations.[122][153][154] Of the 0.1% of human genetic differentiation, 85% exists within any randomly chosen local population, be they Italians, Koreans, or Kurds. Two randomly chosen Koreans may be genetically as different as a Korean and an Italian. Any ethnic group contains 85% of the human genetic diversity of the world. Genetic data shows that no matter how population groups are defined, two people from the same population group are about as different from each other as two people from any two different population groups.[122][155][156][157]

Current genetic research have demonstrated that humans on the African continent are the most genetically diverse.[158] There is more human genetic diversity in Africa than anywhere else on Earth. The genetic structure of Africans was traced to 14 ancestral population clusters. Human genetic diversity decreases in native populations with migratory distance from Africa and this is thought to be the result of bottlenecks during human migration.[159][160] Humans have lived in Africa for the longest time which allowed accumulation of a higher diversity of genetic mutations in these populations. Only part of Africa’s population migrated out of the continent, bringing just part of the original African genetic variety with them. African populations harbor genetic alleles that are not found in other places of the world. All the common alleles found in populations outside of Africa are found on the African continent.[122]

Geographical distribution of human variation is complex and constantly shifts through time which reflects complicated human evolutionary history. Most human biological variation is clinally distributed and blends gradually from an area to the next. Groups of people around the world have different frequencies of polymorphic genes. Furthermore, different traits are non-concordant and each have different clinal distribution. Adaptability varies both from person to person and from population to population. The most efficient adaptive responses are found in geographical populations where the environmental stimuli are the strongest (e.g. Tibetans are highly adapted to high altitudes). The clinal geographic genetic variation is further complicated by the migration and mixing between human populations which has been occurring since prehistoric times.[122][161][162][163][164][165]

Human variation is highly non-concordant: most of the genes do not cluster together and are not inherited together. Skin and hair color are not correlated to height, weight, or athletic ability. Human species do not share the same patterns of variation through geography. Skin color varies with latitude and certain people are tall or have brown hair. There is a statistical correlation between particular features in a population, but different features are not expressed or inherited together. Thus, genes which code for superficial physical traits – such as skin color, hair color, or height – represent a minuscule and insignificant portion of the human genome and do not correlate with genetic affinity. Dark-skinned populations that are found in Africa, Australia, and South Asia are not closely related to each other.[129][134][164][165][166][167] Even within the same region, physical phenotype is not related to genetic affinity: dark-skinned Ethiopians are more closely related to light-skinned Armenians than to dark-skinned Bantu populations.[168] Despite pygmy populations of South East Asia (Andamanese) having similar physical features with African pygmy populations such as short stature, dark skin, and curly hair, they are not genetically closely related to these populations.[169] Genetic variants affecting superficial anatomical features (such as skin color) – from a genetic perspective, are essentially meaningless – they involve a few hundred of the billions of nucleotides in a person's DNA.[170] Individuals with the same morphology do not necessarily cluster with each other by lineage, and a given lineage does not include only individuals with the same trait complex.[122][156][171]

Due to practices of group endogamy, allele frequencies cluster locally around kin groups and lineages, or by national, ethnic, cultural and linguistic boundaries, giving a detailed degree of correlation between genetic clusters and population groups when considering many alleles simultaneously. Despite this, there are no genetic boundaries around local populations that biologically mark off any discrete groups of humans. Human variation is continuous, with no clear points of demarcation. There are no large clusters of relatively homogeneous people and almost every individual has genetic alleles from several ancestral groups.[122][163][164][172][173][174][175][176][177][178][179][180]
Human - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ergo, "race" is a useless biological and anthropological concept. It belongs in social sciences since it's a social construct.

I think it's ridiculous to say that babies are born racist. Racism is a relatively recent social construct. Humans lived in small nomadic bands for tens of thousands of years. We are primarily a tribal species since cosmopolitanism is a very recent development in our species' history, and a huge number of humans still live in or have a tie to a tribal group. So if a baby is born discriminating against others, an Anglo baby would discriminate against a Jute baby.

Lol, this topic is so silly to me.

saint_frankenstein said:

Lol, this topic is so silly to me.

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Hi there.....

......and suspect......
if the experiment was positive, that is, say, research to discover how to use infant socialisation to reduce or minimalise prejudice in minors towards race, ethnicity, gender, disability, age, etc etc i might think that it was healthy, but it don't look very healthy in itself.