Random Thoughts on Race

So here is a quick test for you. Read this passage then answer the question below (sounds very SAT-ish, doesn't it?). It is about a couple in New Orleans who are leaving after being fed up with everything that is going on.

After nearly a decade in the city of their dreams, [they] climbed into a rented moving truck... and said goodbye.....Not because of some great betrayal — they had, after all, come back after losing everything in Hurricane Katrina — but a series of escalating indignities: the attempted carjacking of a pregnant friend; the announced move to Nashville by [one of their] employer[s]; the human feces deposited on their roof by, they suspect, the contractors next door; the two burglaries in the space of a week; and, not least, the overnight wait for the police to respond.

What is the race of this couple?

You can read the full article and get the answer, complete with pictures, but I'll spare you the suspense. The couple is white.

Now, I'm not sure what you were thinking, and maybe it was just me - but I was taken aback when I read the article, started reading, but then saw the pictures. I was really bothered by my immediate jump to a conclusion that the couple was black. I was surprised by my own biases, especially given that I am college-educated and a minority myself (Asian Indian).

In the wake of the Senator Biden's use of the word "articulate" to describe Barack Obama, I got to thinking about race and stereotypes. I'm also reading Blink (well, if you consider getting half-way through the book then having it sit on the table mocking you for not being able to complete it "reading"), and I started wondering: racial stereotypes are definitely bad and hurtful, but is it maybe wired into humans to rely on stereotypes in order to make sense of something or someone we don't understand...and therefore, the effort to abandon stereotypes is counter to our DNA? I'm not suggesting that relying on stereotypes is OK, however. Not everything we are instinctually programmed to do is beneficial in the world we now live in...acting instinctually on our desires for sex, or food for example, do not have a place in 21st century...racial stereotypes have undoubtedly been detrimental to our society, and we need to unlearn them....but do we need to feel guilty about our biases? Is it maybe more appropriate to acknowledge we have them and learn how manage them so they do not affect our decision-making?

We recently went to the Science Museum here in the Twin Cities and checked out their exhibit on race, put together by the American Arthropological Society. Some interesting takeaways from the exhibit:

• An overwhelming number of biologists and anthropologists have concluded that there is no biological evidence that supports racial categories.
• A multi-racial teenager (Irish, African, Mexican) had commented that: "Stereotypes are free and easy"
• Jefferson Fish, a professor of psychology at St. John's University, states: "American racial categories are merely one of numerous culture-specific schemes for reducing uncertainty about how people should respond to other people."
• Pre-1492 - when the "known" world consisted of Europe, Asia and Africa - people were categorized by religion (Moor (Islam), Jew, Catholic) rather than race
• A University of Michigan (forgot name) anthropology professor surmises the evolution of racial categories this way (paraphrasing): In the 1400s, people traveled by foot and saw a gradual variation of skin color as they migrated from east-to-west and vice-versa....in the 1500s, travel by boat involved months of isolation. Once you got off the boat, you were in a different part of the world...you think "wow, everyone looks so different"...traditional race groupings have been created based on the end points of old transoceanic trade networks.

Now, my brother and my mom are fools for the TV show "Friday Night Lights". Never watch it myself. But to end this post, I found an article about "Friday Night Lights" in USA Today (never thought I'd refer to either in this blog, but yet here it is) that perhaps most accurately characterizes the impact of racial stereostypes and discrimination:

As is often the case with the more subtle forms of racism, the problem isn't the way [people] are treated; it's the limiting assumptions they face about what they can and should do.