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By Cho Kyung-jin
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It is hard to say, but as an anthropologist, I find that looking for clues in the broader frame of nature and civilization can be helpful. This is why I often turn to evolutionary explanations.
I teach a general elective course titled "Global Citizenship and Civilization" at my university, in which one week is devoted to unequal race relations and racism. In this class, I try to make the students see that racism is not simply a pseudo-science based on a classification system that puts one race as inferior to another.
The historian Yuval Harari succinctly saw racism as a vicious cycle, whereby the oppression of one race by another perpetuates and reproduces differences and inequalities through cultural prejudices, fewer economic opportunities, and political exclusion. Racism as a pseudo-science morphs itself into an ideology that permeates and constructs a deeply flawed culture and society.
I often found that for many students, framing racism around a moral argument did not enhance their understanding of this topic. Racism easily lapsed into a philosophical discussion of human rights, which quickly turned concrete facts such as violence into abstractions.
However, framing issues of injustice and inequality not simply around morality but around the evolution of morality, was more useful, if not more stimulating. In a now famous TED Talk, animal behavioral scientist Franz de Waal showed us video clips of how chimpanzees reacted when they were not treated equally: the primate who was not given equal treats refused to collaborate with the "unfair" humans and would throw the "bad" treats back at them.
De Waal's argument is that morality is not a concoction created by some divine will or solely by humans. His argument is that morality is a by-product of evolution: that primates (and humans) needed to stick together and trust one another for the survival of the species.
But once this trust disappears, which it does when the codes of fairness and reciprocity are breached, a once perfectly collaborative relationship is destroyed, making it vulnerable to outside forces, thereby endangering the species.
De Waal's argument is interesting because it gives an explanation of morality that pertains to the so-called "natural order of things," which in this case he frames as preceding "culture." For de Waal, equality and fairness are not man-made cultural constructions of morality, but rather essential elements of nature. So when this natural order is challenged, people will react, and most probably, rebel.
Of course, throughout history, the use of terror and violence, among other means of force, has sought to suppress such rebellions. The systematic economic exploitation of people of color, stripping and denying them equal social and economic opportunities, has relegated them to second-class citizens even in the most "civilized" nations of the modern world.
Cultural anthropologists have long looked into the relationship of white people to indigenous populations. Michael Taussig, for example, studied race relations in the Putumayo region in northern Peru at the turn of the 20th century. He found that in the rubber plantations of the region, white masters brutally maimed, killed, dismembered, burned and raped native workers, who were at best slaves.
As he chronicles the extreme violence exerted onto indigenous men, women, and children (some newborns, as well), he explains that the white man could not extricate himself from the predicament he had created: that the white man could only strive to subdue the native with a culture of terror and fear because of the fear of reprisals for the atrocities already committed.
Michael Moore argues as much in his documentary film "Bowling for Colombine." Gun culture, pervasive in white America, is a reflection of the fear that white America holds against blacks, the fear of reprisals for unjust and unequal treatment that spans centuries.
In other words, within the white man's psyche, the collective subconscious, if you will, there is a sense of malaise that runs deep. De Waal would argue that it's inevitable: that even if the white man does not seem conscious of it, his DNA knows that racism runs contrary to the laws of evolution.
Only extreme violence will uphold the unnatural state of affairs that is racism. On the surface it looks like the violence will keep the peace, but it is destined to be broken under the laws of evolution.
Here is another evolutionary argument against racism. A recently published book about the Hapsburgs by Martyn Rady chronicles how marriage within this royal family created an empire stretching from Peru to the Philippines and most of Western Europe.
This ongoing practice of inbreeding, however, proved to be counter-evolutionary: It produces the infamous protruded jaw of many Hapsburg kings and princes, madmen, deformed offspring, and many early deaths. At the end of their reign, there was a vast empire and no Hapsburg fit to run it.
In the past, proponents of racism borrowed bits and pieces of evolutionary models to back claims of white superiority. The idea that the white race is the most evolved race of the human species has long been established as false, a pseudo-science at best.
A deeper quest into evolution reveals just the opposite; that diversity ensures the survival of the fittest, and that fairness and equality ensures the survival of the species. So those who still insist on upholding racism, understand that evolution is not on your side. It will ooze out from the seams, just as it is now.
Cho Kyung-jin (azinku@cuk.edu) is professor of the Division of Human Services at the Cyber University of Korea and concurrently dean of the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Studies.
