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Originally posted by qan
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I don't have some exact figure here but i'm assuming like 99.9% of all animals have a genetic predisposition to fear/dislike "different" animals - the evolutionary equivalent of "playing it safe" to protect that animal from encountering a potential predator
But then with humans you throw in sentience and the shit gets complicated. People can rationalize and feed a racist belief because it confirms their unconscious initial aversion to seeing a "different" animal, but everyone sort of defines "different" differently, and everyone learns and experiences different information and environments.
So cultural traits can appear and disappear in response to new circumstances much faster than biological ones -- you might even call culture a kind of pseudo-genome -- but they still exist only because they've provided some advantage, at some point in time. As did racism.
I think about this when I look at the period between 1960-1990. During the 60's, minorities began gaining civil rights on a mass scale, and are finally able to "enter" American culture, and in the following decades you see more and more minority individuals becoming wealthy, becoming famous, etc. You see their cultural influence more and more. At the same time, however, the American population exceeds the number of American jobs available for the first time ever. Corporations, realizing there's more people than jobs, realize they can stop raising wages to entice people, "if you dont like it you can quit, there's dozens of people willing to take this job". So the inflation-adjusted average wage basically freezes around the 70's. But that's not enough, profits need to be higher, so by the 80's these corporations are realizing it's cheaper to simply build factories overseas where they can pay literal pennies to people to do jobs Americans used to do.
So now imagine you're a relatively average white dude living throughout this era. You're not an economist, you're not a historian, you might read the daily news but not much else. During this period, what seems to be happening? You see the economy beginning to stagnate, you see friends and family laid off and your own paycheck ain't getting any bigger. But for thirty years you've been watching TV and listening to the radio and you're seeing more and more minority politicians, minority businessmen, minority celebrities. And then someone like David Duke comes along, points these two facts out, and tells you that minorities are stealing wealth and power from Good, Hard Working White Americans. You don't see that minorities are also suffering economically because the previous generation's racism led to minorities being herded into ghettos, you just see more minorities on TV but you notice you're seeing more and more of them than you did 30 years ago, while outside and around you, your (mainly white) community experiences the impacts of the beginning of late-stage capitalism. Sure enough, that racism pseudo-gene kicks in, and since corporations are making record profits they can spend that money to find ways to blame the state of the economy on anyone but themselves. Previously people in power could just blame "the blacks" or whatever, but you can't do that anymore in a post-Civil Rights America (not openly, anyway), but this time around they played it a little more subtly. Corporations begin a campaign that goes like "sorry guy, we'd pay you more, but unfortunately we had to give all that money to the government, by the way the government uses tax money for welfare, by the way here's a 30-min news segment on how literally every welfare recipient is a crack-addict with a brand-new Cadillac in the yard.", and let the David Dukes of the world take that and run with it. And year after year these corporations shatter new records for profits while telling the rest of us that "sorry, there's just no money in the budget to give you a raise. Actually, we're going to let you go because it's cheaper to pay a child in singapore to work in our factories. And now, here's a 30-minute news segment about thousands of illegal immigrants and how they're all working on farms in California."
So yeah qan, "racism-as-a-pseudo-gene" makes alot of sense because in a way, you see how a small part of society has exploited racism to divert attention away from the fact that they're looting our country blind. It's incredibly advantageous in that sense. At the same time, it's advantageous for the increasingly oppressed proletariat, because they can make themselves feel better by blaming their own economic stress on someone else - black people, immigrants, welfare recipients, pick your poison.
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