Nicholas Kristof Displays His Status Marker: “Our Biased Brains”

For the last half-century, one of the most socially advantageous status markers you can display is to imply that you always think well of black people.

It’s analogous to the Victorian Era’s notorious status marker among the bourgeoisie: acting like you seldom think about sex.

An amusing aspect of the most characteristic status markers of a particular age is that they are resistant to moderation by diminishing marginal returns. Instead, the more dysfunctional they become, the more people double down on them (for awhile). This leads to bizarre excesses that seem comic to later eras.

For example, in reaction to the youthful passions run amok during the Wars of Religion, the Enlightenment emphasized mature composure. There’s a lot to be said for maturity. Eventually, however, everybody who was anybody was wearing a powdered wig to look old, which seems pretty silly today, but apparently seemed to make all the sense in the world at the time.

One advantage the 19th Century British Victorians had over us was that, due to their class system, some people were excused from participating in the intellectual monoculture of their times. The poor and, especially, the aristocracy were sometimes allowed to not pretend they were wholly uninterested in the topic of sex.

It’s only natural for people of high social status to believe that their obedience to the dictates of their age stems from conscious decisions they’ve made rather than that they are just rationalizing what they needed to do to claw their way to the top.

From the New York Times:

Our Biased Brains MAY 7, 2015

Nicholas Kristof

To better understand the roots of racial division in America, think about this:

The human brain seems to be wired so that it categorizes people by race in the first one-fifth of a second after seeing a face. Brain scans show that even when people are told to sort people by gender, the brain still groups people by race.

Racial bias also begins astonishingly early: Even infants often show a preference for their own racial group. In one study, 3-month-old white infants were shown photos of faces of white adults and black adults; they preferred the faces of whites. For 3-month-old black infants living in Africa, it was the reverse.

This preference reflected what the child was accustomed to. Black infants living in overwhelmingly white Israel didn’t show a strong preference one way or the other, according to the study, published in Psychological Science.

Where does this ingrained propensity to racial bias come from?

Scholars suggest that in evolutionary times we became hard-wired to make instantaneous judgments about whether someone is in our “in group” or not — because that could be lifesaving. A child who didn’t prefer his or her own group might have been at risk of being clubbed to death.

Even if we humans have evolved to have a penchant for racial preferences from a very young age, this is not destiny.

“It’s a feature of evolution,” says Mahzarin Banaji, a Harvard psychology professor who co-developed tests of unconscious biases. These suggest that people turn out to have subterranean racial and gender biases that they are unaware of and even disapprove of.

I’ve written about unconscious bias before, and I encourage you to test yourself at implicit.harvard.edu. It’s sobering to discover that whatever you believe intellectually, you’re biased about race, gender, age or disability.

What’s particularly dispiriting is that this unconscious bias among whites toward blacks seems just as great among preschoolers as among senior citizens. …

Researchers find that in contrast to other groups, African-Americans do not have an unconscious bias toward their own. From young children to adults, they are essentially neutral and favor neither whites nor blacks.

Banaji and other scholars suggest that this is because even young African-American children somehow absorb the social construct that white skin is prestigious and that black skin isn’t. In one respect, that is unspeakably sad; in another, it’s a model of unconscious race neutrality. Yet even if we humans have evolved to have a penchant for racial preferences from a very young age, this is not destiny. We can resist the legacy that evolution has bequeathed us.

“We wouldn’t have survived if our ancestors hadn’t developed bodies that store sugar and fat,” Banaji says. “What made them survive is what kills us.” Yet we fight the battle of the bulge and sometimes win — and, likewise, we can resist a predisposition for bias against other groups.

One strategy that works is seeing images of heroic African-Americans; afterward, whites and Asians show less bias, a study found. Likewise, hearing a story in which a black person rescues someone from a white assailant reduces anti-black bias in subsequent testing. It’s not clear how long this effect lasts.

Comrades, the last half-century of pro-black propaganda has not failed; it has not been tried hard enough. You must redouble your efforts to propagandize each other. Always be on the lookout for the wreckers among you. When you spot one, report him to the proper authorities for liquidation. You wouldn’t want anyone to think you are a wrecker, now would you?