What is “racism”? Does it exist?

This is going to be a short intro into the layman term “racism” and what human instinct it is and isn’t. I will keep all my points very short here but may later expand them into 30 pages if needed be.

Rational people usually avoid commenting on most such topics because few intellectuals care much about vague undefined topics laymen believe in.

This is how such debates usually go:

• Laymen believe in some cultural undefined human concept.
• Experts attack this unscientific concept.
• As the laymen are ideological on the issue no evidence will change their feelings on it. So they just redefine the concept on the spot to dodge the attack. Confirmation bias in action.
• The experts look silly as their argument now looks like a strawman argument.

No wonder most experts avoid this stuff. You’ll fall into a shit-storm and get very dirty as you debate with too loose definitions… but let’s debate with loose definitions.

How are people naturally “racist”?

Is it cultural or instinctual?

What if the trait is just cultural? Culture is flexible, it’s hard to measure in people, it seems to not predict much of anything and no one really knows what it is or what it influences or how. Since there are thousands of vague culture theories out there we also can’t really pick just one. If “racism” is culture we don’t have the tools to easily describe or measure it. Which in such a case would make it an unspecified mess that ideological fanatics would fight over. This is pretty much what racism is.

It’s not purely a social construct though. It does have some basis in instinctual behavior. So parts of “racism” can be defined and pinned down by looking into why it even exists in our brain.

The things in psychology we do measure systematically with high validity and replicability are instincts and cognitive traits. They are in all humans and as we are born with them to various degrees they are fairly stable over a lifetime and make for the best experiments in psychology. Instincts define stuff like fear, sexual attraction, how we raise children, how group leadership works. It’s all stable but variable across cultures and in individuals.

The reason this stuff is universal is because Homo sapiens, and prior species, evolved in certain environments with certain specific problems before we split into human races. We likely evolved in small flexible groups called bands with about 20–30 people. And according to Dunbar we had about a max of 150 stable relationships and didn’t really interact with people from far away.

This gives us a new way to understand “racism” that I will expand on. It’s not itself inflexible and stable but the underlying instinct is. We’ll call it xenophobia. “Racism” itself is the xenophobia instinct acting out in specific modern environments only. No different than a human being able to play piano but not having evolved to do specifically that.

Here is one such experiment looking into “racism”:

Here we report experiments, using unobtrusive measures, showing that categorizing individuals by race is not inevitable, and supporting an alternative hypothesis: that encoding by race is instead a reversible byproduct of cognitive machinery that evolved to detect coalitional alliances. The results show that subjects encode coalitional affiliations as a normal part of person representation. More importantly, when cues of coalitional affiliation no longer track or correspond to race, subjects markedly reduce the extent to which they categorize others by race, and indeed may cease doing so entirely. Despite a lifetime’s experience of race as a predictor of social alliance, less than 4 min of exposure to an alternate social world was enough to deflate the tendency to categorize by race. These results suggest that racism may be a volatile and eradicable construct that persists only so long as it is actively maintained through being linked to parallel systems of social alliance.

Here is a co-founder of evolutionary psychology presenting the same theory:

Evolutionary analyses rule out the hypothesis that the brain mechanisms that cause race encoding evolved for that purpose. Consequently, race encoding must be a byproduct of mechanisms that evolved for some alternative function. But which one? Race is not encoded as a byproduct of domain-general perceptual processes. Two families of byproduct hypotheses remain: one invokes inferential machinery designed for tracking coalitional alliances, the other machinery designed for reasoning about natural kinds. Recent experiments show that manipulating coalitional variables can dramatically decrease the extent to which race is noticed and remembered.

The argument goes: as humans didn’t see a single person of another race until very recently then “racist” instincts have not had enough time to evolve and become universal across cultures. So there is no such thing as a “racism instinct”.

What we did evolve are in-group and out-group instincts adapted to make us survive in small bands and defend them from outsiders and outliers. Those outsiders weren’t a different race. We were very closely related to them. Though they may at times have had a few different cultural norms creating different types of body decorations. In most cases the “weird” thing about the out-group was just unknown faces.

We see this type of group behavior in our nearest cousin, the chimpanzee. A chimpanzee group may attack a neighboring chimpanzee group, kill all males and children, and then kidnap adult females.

Those ape groups may not differ on culture or looks. But will still have something to gain from protecting the in-group and kidnapping females they can reproduce with.

In humans these type of conflicts will start with a ritualistic rile-each-other-up behavior where the enemy is made out to be different and less than human. The enemies will via xenophobia instincts be degraded to nasty animals. If the enemy is different and worse than us “real humans” it’s “morally right” to vanquish them to protect and expand our unique and special in-group.

Of course killings, war and kidnappings are just the extreme outcomes of group bickering. But they make for the best case examples.

What does it mean for modern societies?

Well, what you call “racism” is a small part of xenophobia rituals that themselves are very common and universal. The sub-xenophobia called “racism” is the very specific and rare xenophobia aimed at skin color or face features. That’s less than 1% of xenophobia cases and basically a non-factor in most human societies. It’s dependent on a specific environment and culture and therefore very malleable over time.

I’ll give you a few practical examples.

Example 1: USA at external war

I’ll give some simple examples without going into details.

USA attacking Japan during WW2 required calling the enemy mean names, creating caricatures of them in the media and making them out to be sinful. All that was essential to rile up the population to create a strong bond. In this specific case the race of the enemy was something that could easily make them appear different from the majority white and black Americans. But even so USA still used East Asians in their army forces and after the war the hate subsided in an instant. As racism is rooted in culture you don’t need any great time to change your opinion on a race. If culture changes your inborn ideology will stay the same but be aimed at something new. In this way right after WW2 the Japanese became part of the US in-group and a new out-group could be created right away as WW2 was replaced by a cold war. Soviet Communists were now for a few decades the main outgroup. As Russians look similar to the average American it meant that useful stereotypes of the out-group now focused on culture traits, not race. Skin color was irrelevant but cultural artifacts like their weird hats — useful in their cold environment — were now a symbol you could group them by alongside their accent. This weird out-group we cannot trust. With each new war a new out-group was automatically created based on whatever the enemy didn’t have in common with Americans.

After 9/11 Muslims became the out-group for a few years. Then as modern external wars became too expensive and difficult to win with a clunky and morally upright army the external enemies were to a degree abandoned and replaced by infights. Not having a common external enemy means that there is a higher chance of focusing on internal enemies as the perfect group is always a step away and that step requires just one more win. A first world problem grows in USA.

You can also pick any European or foreign nation and look at their history to find better examples. You’ll find the same pattern. Racism is very flexible indeed. We use it only when we need it.

Example 2: USA at internal war — the two in/out-groups

There is the external conflict, war at any scale. And there is the internal conflict, civil war at any scale.

So today USA is mainly split into 2 political sides with each group considering the other their main out-group.

Let’s call them New Party and Old Party. They consider each other less than fully human — as the other side is considered morally corrupt. This is not ideal for a nation. Former external enemy countries are happy not being the number 1 enemy any longer and are stoking the flames in USA by creating fake campaigns to divide the nation. They want all groups to lose.

In a group-fight race only plays a role if a large majority of a race supports the other side. Let’s say we have the Green race and the Yellow race. As politics and other mental traits are partly heritable each race has some mental traits they differ on and therefore have a tendency to join either New Party or Old Party in general.

So Greens will be considered partly out-group by New Party members if most Greens are Old Party members. And likewise Yellows will be considered partly out-group by Old Party members if most Yellows are New Party members. What if a Green wants to join New Party? Well, New Party members will welcome this Green individual with open arms but will as always require faithfulness to his new group and some repentance. Joining a new group will require some trial by fire as that makes you like your new group more. But at the end the Green person will have a very easy time in New Party as their dream is to get more Greens to their side. So they use the Green person as bait.

So race here doesn’t mean you belong to a certain group. But it does make it more likely that you do. At any rate race will not be a great factor in how people treat you as no race will fall exactly into only New Party or Old Party groups. There will be some overlap.

Think about it this way. A big university is giving you final say on who they should pick as their chancellor among 2 equally intelligent applicants. Option one is someone with your skin color but with an ideology on the other side of the horse shoe from you. Option two is someone with a different skin color but with that same ideology as you. Who will you pick? In reality it’s not even a hard choice for most people in a Western country unless the picker is ignorant of some races and thinks ideology is more heritable than it is. Mostly those marginal “racists” that select based on race cancel each other out politically at any rate.

What about variance between groups?

But if racism is not real then how do we think about races?

Obviously racism itself would fade away if we lived in a world where all inborn cognitive traits were similar across races.

While skin color may not matter human mental traits matter a whole lot for our options in life and what we can give back to our group. Personality determines interests while intelligence determines what sort of complexity one can solve and typically how useful one can be to the large scale modern society. These traits are not just simple universal instincts but rather mental scales any group or person is on. For example, height is such a scale. One group may be shorter or taller than another group on average. One group may also be higher or lower on a mental trait like intelligence.

If a race is less intelligent that another race it will create group differences that will not disappear no matter what happens culturally. The less intelligent race will earn less, produce less, have a higher crime rate, higher imprisonment rate, higher unemployment, lower grades, lower self-control, shorter lifespan, higher rate of reproduction. So let’s call this race, Oranges. They may differ by looks, which doesn’t matter, but they will also differ by behavior, which matters in extreme ways. The out-group marker for them will be biological looks if they are clearly noticeable. But clothing style, speaking style, housing, sports, hobbies and other cultural traits will always be a marker. Oranges will remain a subgroup in the state even if they try to imitate everything the more intelligent groups do as you cannot imitate wealth itself.

Just notice that xenophobia does not make Oranges less intelligent and poor. Their genes are their genes. They won’t change just because of words. Words can only make us pick out a new pattern to notice in the out-group.

A race that doesn’t differ on mental abilities from the current population will easily adapt fast and fully to the advanced society. Just as a race that is lower or higher than the average will place lower or higher in society no matter if they start out rich or poor. I’ll give a few factual examples, the Irish newcomers may have been the out-group in 1880’s USA when they started out at the bottom, but they soon worked their way up and became just regular Americans with nothing negative one could put a finger on. Jews and East Asians are an even more positive example. They started out poor but worked their way to the top of society by having a higher IQ than the average US population. No matter where you put the high IQ groups or how much you steal from them they will do well over time.

Conclusion on the definition

“Racism” as used by laymen is not really how the world works. That thing doesn’t exist. But as often is the case laymen intuitively do notice a real thing that they then explain it away with some pseudoreligion. They see the lightning but unfortunately claim Thor is behind it. Calling what they see xenophobia or something else would make sure there is no misunderstanding. Unless you are 100% sure the xenophobia you observe is racism it most likely is not. Because “racism” is a very miniscule part of day-to-day xenophobia.

What you need to observe when someone uses the wrong word “racism” is what out-group that person is actually trying to attack and why. Both racism itself and the accusation of racism can be used to attack an ideological out-group. So extreme Greens may say that Yellows who join the New Party are disgusting traitors to the nation. While extreme Yellows may accuse Greens of being racist Old Party members and therefore evil and less than fully human. We just pick anything to make fun off. We mostly don’t really care about race itself as it means nothing in itself. But mental traits differing between groups matter. They are what sustains out-groups even if we try to live together.

Notice how I never even defined the term I’m discussing. It has so many different way too wide definitions that it’s not really useful either way unless you explain exactly what it means before you use it. Such terms are anti-scientific and should be abolished.

Then why do I so often see racism if it’s not a real thing?

It’s your religion. People you like and look up to may tell you something is racist and you’ll believe them as you don’t understand how human beings actually work and will just believe what your in-group feels is correct. Humans explain away stuff we don’t understand without thinking about it. So before you read this blog-post you may just not have thought about this stuff in-depth. And surely even now you disagree with me?

So let me bring this home. The xenophobia called “racism” basically doesn’t exist in Western countries.

The news articles you see about specific cases of racism are anecdotes picked to enrage you to buy more newspapers and vote for a certain party. Single anecdotes are not proof. They just make you stupid and blind as you get riled up and overly emotional. Anecdotes are for losers! And how could they even be big single news stories if this stuff happened all the time? We don’t write front-page stories about rain. We don’t write front-page stories about lottery losers. It’s not rare stuff.

Many professors are only marginally better than journalists. Some social scientists can in fact find race discrimination in junk lab studies. But that’s because they define what race discrimination is and then p-hack studies to show an effect as they are searching for a confirmation of their political ideology. There are several cases of “racism” that look legit at first glance but don’t hold up to scrutiny. Harvard, for example, hosts a world-famous implicit bias test that supposedly tests for hidden racism in you. But in actuality it just tests something cultural and unstable that doesn’t predict anything in real life. In high quality statistical studies in real life settings it’s very hard to uncover anything we may call stable “racism” unless we misuse the term and forcefully apply it to our study on xenophobia. Though that is unfortunately the norm in most social science. Publish or perish… not pretty.

If you apply my rigorous definition of the term you will, just like me, most likely not even remember 5 cases or pure “racism” you have personally observed. You can easily redefine most of the cases into xenophobia, but with race being mentioned in some way. Try it out right now. Think of some racist incident you have seen and try to think of an alternative explanation for it… try harder. What could be the motivation behind using a race statement in the way you saw it applied? What is the ideology behind it?

Let me illustrate my point with a hypothetical example. A tall Old Party politician is called a tall slob. Attackers using the term “tall” don’t try to discriminate against tall people in such a case. The term may even be used by tall people themselves to attack him. Yet laymen may just hear the word “tall” and think the whole thing is about hate towards tall people in general. Laymen will feel a thought pattern is there because their inner ideology makes them feel it’s there. Researchers on the other hand can’t find it in experiments. And they are the experts!

In real life with variation in mental traits between races ignoring those variations will create a racist system as people won’t have a clear and concrete explanation but instead use weak pseudoreligious explanations like some random vague “evil cultural power” hypothesis to explain away inborn traits. So ignoring heritability will create racism! It’s the main way some small racism still exists in Western societies today. But it’s very easy to get rid off.

Of course one may want to eliminate cognitive race differences entirely. Races could mix as much as possible or individuals could look into genetic manipulation options to see how they could increase the IQ of their offspring to make them better adapted to modern life. At any rate racism internally in countries will go away at some point if most people start to accept basic science.

If you are still not convinced by the argument I recommend you stop feeling and start thinking. If you try to be fully critical of the term for just one week you may experience an illuminating worldview where you discover that most of the cultural stuff you think is inflexible and real is actually mostly just self delusions. Your mind automatically explains away the things you see. If you refuse to force this new view on yourself for a full week you’ll never get this point of view at all. And you’ll just keep raging at the fake out-group instead of seeing the real enemies out there: people who distrust reality and substitute it for their own.