The Roots of Hatred Our brains are programmed to distrust outsiders. But are we hard-wired to hate?
AARP Magazine
By Sharon Begley, May & June 2004
If you are mystified by the persistence of racism, even among seemingly intelligent people, Jared Diamond has a story for you. Imagine, says the University of California, Los Angeles, biologist, that you lived in the Paleolithic Period when small bands of hunter-gatherers were roaming the world. Usually, each group kept to its own turf. But just suppose, perhaps pushed by hunger or curiosity, you crossed the invisible line marking the limits of your group’s territory. “Should you happen to meet an unfamiliar person in the forest, of course you would try to kill him or else to run away,” says Diamond, who conducts his fieldwork in the wilds of New Guinea. “Our modern custom of just saying hello and starting a friendly chat would be suicidal.”
Those early humans who acquired an unconscious, instantaneous way to recognize and classify strangers—and to treat them with great suspicion, or worse—were more likely to live and reproduce. Their children inherited this instinct, and it spread throughout early human populations. Their evolving brains learned to automatically classify people as either “one of us” or “one of them.”
There is absolutely no accurate history in this article. The author tries to make “race” and “racism” seem natural.