Does History Cause Racism?

Where Does Racism Come From?

As part of my series on racism, so to speak, I’m wondering where racism comes from. It doesn’t seem to be natural, as small children do not start out with racial tensions. I believe this is a common observation.

In one South Park episode, the kids are supposed to debate whether the South Park flag should be changed. The flag depicts a group of white people standing around a black person hanging from a gallows. So the kids on the negative side (don’t change the flag) get up and say there has been a lot of killing in history, and they don’t see why people are so upset about killing. That’s when the adults realize that the kids didn’t know the issue was supposed to be about race.

That’s a fictional example, but it illustrates a real phenomenon. Kids of different races, if put together, have no trouble right away playing with each other, without any suspicion on account of their different skin colors. Kids instinctively pick on “nerdy” or “gay” kids, but it doesn’t occur to them to pick on kids with a particular skin color.

So where do racism and racial tensions come from? It must be that the older generations keep passing it down to the younger. If one generation forgot to teach it to the next generation, it would be over. Racism is learned.

But how? Here’s a theory: maybe it is partly learned through history classes, and more broadly, classes in which the adults teach about race.

Other People Are Doing It

But almost all teachers are ideologically opposed to racism, or so they say.* How could their teaching perpetuate racism?

[*I include this qualification, because of course most teachers are strongly in favor of some kinds of racism, esp. discrimination against whites, but they would refuse to call it “racism”. They would oppose all the forms of racism that they recognize as such.]

Here’s one way. People are more influenced by the desire to imitate others than they are by moral messages. Example: You have a bunch of tourists visiting the Petrified Forest National Park (which is known for its amazing fossils). You admonish the visitors that too many visitors have been stealing fossils from the park, which is really bad, and so you’re warning them not to do that.

The result is that more people steal fossils from the park. This sort of thing has been confirmed in psychological studies. (https://otismaxwell.com/tag/petrified-forest/) The reason: You told the visitors that other people are doing it, which makes them want to do it too. People who might not have even thought of stealing fossils from the park now have on their radar screen that this is a thing one does. Of course, they also heard that it’s wrong to do it, but they don’t care about that.

Another example: When a famous person commits suicide, psychologists immediately worry that there is going to be an uptick in suicides around the country, due to the publicity around the suicide. When we hear that other people are committing suicide, we’re more likely to consider it.

That’s one reason why we should have less publicity around suicide, mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and other actions that we don’t want to see. But of course you can’t convince journalists to cooperate in that.

So we have a bunch of “racism” education, the main message of which is basically: Everyone’s doing it. Before being educated, it wouldn’t even occur to most kids to divide people by race. But then they hear that that’s what adults are doing and have been doing for centuries.

They also hear that racism is morally wrong, but, again, most humans are assholes and don’t give a crap about morality (see:

Are Humans Amoral?

). They care a lot more about social conformity. So what matters is that being racist is, apparently, the normal thing to do in our society.

The Other Group Did it to You

Here’s the other important thing: when we study history, we learn about all the intolerable injustices that the outgroup did to our people in the past. And that enables us to carry longstanding historical grievances forward, generation after generation. The result is never that we get our revenge and then the conflict is over. The result is that the other group retaliates, then we retaliate, etc.

Take the case of the Middle East. Imagine that tomorrow morning, everyone in Israel, both Jew and Palestinian, wakes up with amnesia: none of them know who they are, and they’ve forgotten everything they ever learned about history. That day, the conflict would be over. I’m not sure the two groups would even notice that they’re “of different races”. Who can doubt that that would be a better world?

The obvious implication is that we should stop teaching Israelis and Palestinians about history — or more specifically, the history of their conflict. Of course, this would have the disadvantage that neither “side” would then get “justice” (/revenge) for all the evils done by the other side. But it seems like that disadvantage would be outweighed. One generation later, it wouldn’t matter anymore.

There may be something similar going on in the U.S. Each new generation learns that this one group, “the white race”, did horrible injustices to this other group, “the black race”, which they have never paid for. Each member of the new generation is taught which group is their group, so they can develop the appropriate personal feelings about the historical events.

Some white people wind up feeling guilty for these things that “their group” did, which makes them a little crazy. Other white people, however, become increasingly resentful toward both the elites and the outgroup (blacks) as a result of being blamed for the outgroup’s problems and being blamed for actions that they personally never did. Then they become Trump voters.

More important, though, is the effect of this education on blacks. Blacks learn to resent and distrust white people, society’s dominant institutions, and the dominant culture. And that, of course, makes their lives much worse.

Example: You learn about the infamous Tuskegee experiment. Your teacher (who is a woke ideologue) teaches this not as an isolated incident but as typical of the sort of racism in your society, which the teacher believes is still rampant. The lesson is obvious: Don’t trust doctors, especially white doctors.

Now, that’s an important lesson to learn if in fact most doctors are unethical and aim to harm you. But if doctors are generally ethical and helpful, then your distrust of doctors is only going to make you less healthy and more likely to die from preventable diseases.

Take another example. Excelling in school is often perceived as “acting white”, perhaps because (a) most colleges and universities are run primarily by white people (plus, increasingly, Asians), (b) most college attendees are also white and/or Asian, (c) valuing education is part of society’s dominant culture. (https://www.educationnext.org/actingwhite/) This causes some black youths to see educational success as bad. If you view white people and the dominant society in general as evil and opposed to you, then that would make you want to eschew education.

More generally, racial distrust and resentment leads to racial segregation. In the 1960’s and earlier, segregation was enforced by white racists. As everyone knew, it mainly hurt blacks. Today, segregation is mostly voluntary on the part of blacks, but it still mainly hurts blacks.

Imagine that someone proposed that Jewish and Muslim students in our schools need to get a more thorough education in all the atrocities committed by each group in the past against the other. Surely the foolishness of this is obvious to all. Surely it’s obvious that that wouldn’t benefit either group. How is it not obvious in the case of black students?

Why Teach History?

Of course, I’m not suggesting that we teach no history, nor that we actively hide or lie about unpleasant aspects of it. But I am suggesting that we put a lot less emphasis on the history of racial tensions. There are a lot of horrible events in history, perpetrated by various still-existing racial, religious, or national groups, that we don’t review in great detail for every student.

Now, what do people say about why we have to teach history?

“Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.”

When it comes to grievances against particular groups, I think the popular slogan is closer to the opposite of the truth. Those who remember history are doomed to repeat it.

Anyway, the idea that if we don’t fully describe to kids how bad American slavery was, and make sure everyone knows how bad the white people were, then we’ll probably go back to holding slaves again just seems ludicrous.

I took a lot of history classes in school. Frequently, the history teacher would explain that it’s important to learn all this stuff so we can draw lessons for the present. But they never actually drew any lessons for the present from it. So I think the explanation was just a rationalization.

Ideology

I don’t think teaching about the history of racial tensions is really motivated by a desire to benefit students or society. What I think is that it’s motivated by a desire to ideologically indoctrinate kids. Teachers who hate their own society are trying to make students hate that society too. They’re doing this simply out of hatred for their society, not to achieve any particular further goal.

They probably tell themselves that they’re working to improve society by exposing its flaws, but that’s mostly rationalization; they haven’t thought carefully about what would actually improve it. As the above discussion suggests, spending time talking about societal flaws does not always help to remedy the flaws; it may instead exacerbate them.

A more helpful type of history lesson would be lessons about past cases where people from different groups and very different backgrounds successfully cooperated and benefitted each other.