RACE: The Rest of the Story not told by “RACE: Are We So Different?”

I am observing society in the process of making history-changing breakthroughs through public discussions about the social concept of race and its dubious origins.  Injecting information into our culture about the fallacy of race will eventually have a positive impact on many facets of our culture.  This is sensible at least as a truism and it also has some empirical evidence to support it. 

Can it cure human kind of prejudice? I argue a vehement, “NO!”

Unfortunately, the apparent belief in the dominant disciplines is that their view of people and populations of people is not only solely relevant but sufficient.  They seem to believe we can solve problems within the same model that created them while ignoring even stronger evidence that the fundamental forces behind prejudice remain untreated.

It is important to point out that extant progress is commendable and extremely encouraging - and it is not the wrong effort.  However, argued here is that it’s incomplete and insufficient, and a more effective effort should be an even bigger hybrid of disciplines.  Connecting the evidence and disciplines promises to better empower future generations to quell prejudice regardless of target group.  Such would enhance the development of their inherent but mainly untapped abilities to override such forces.  It is argued here that by doing so we are more completely treating the problem and getting closer to root cause.

In a nutshell, the rest of the story stipulates that prejudice will never disappear unless individuals understand and have command of their own nature.  We have enough of scientific findings now to move ahead into translation and application.  But, such command of the self will never happen through prescriptive attitudes and especially not through shut-up-and-join-the-bandwagon demands wielded on us by many groups disinterested in any other view.  Indeed, it seems some groups are even as interested or more interested in being center stage as they are in solving problems.

We cannot blame them for they are simply human beings.  Although shifting paradigms to embrace and capitalize on new information and discoveries is the hallmark of human progress, it never occurs without viscous resistance.  If human beings never did triumph over this resistance, we might still be living under environmental equilibrium and not having such a discussion let alone on an internet blog.  There always have been and always will be refractory forces in human nature that get in the way, and addressing prejudice is just another human endeavor that suffers from human flaw.

Today more than ever in my own lifetime, I witness the psychological phenomenon of resistance to attitude change. One way this phenomenon has been manifested in the U.S. is the growing division of political ideologies through the almost blanket dismissal of opposing arguments as political sophistry, even under conspiracy-infested distrust.

It certainly seems that both dominant political parties truly believe their view is absolutely correct. Indeed, if one party said the sky was blue and proved it with a spectrometer and the survey of a billion people, the other would find a way to refute it as political spin, and claim the sky is indigo.  This same disease seems to have also infected the sciences.  To truly solve social problems we will have to disinfect our efforts and truly work together publically as well as privately.

Education on History

The recent tours and educational programs about Race have probably seen the highest degree of viewing and interest ever.  Moreover, I think most people have learned significant concepts from these tours.  This is astounding and remarkable.

The history of the origins of the concept of Race is very important to understand and discuss.  It is human kind’s history – and if there is anything that history can teach us, it is that we can and should learn from history.

However, this history simply reveals what contexts the true origins of Race became manifest.  Thus, history alone is the incomplete picture and the wrong overarching story is told. 

What this article asserts is that the bigger story and most relevant to eliminating prejudice en masse permanently is that we all have built in tendencies to be prejudiced, but we can be retrained, which is ever the bit evidenced in how this has manifested in history and the resulting concept of Race.

Introduction

Society suffers from a dilemma where hard sciences technology progresses while soft sciences application has stagnated.  This speaks to everything from societal problems to individual psychopathology.

To understand the state of applying scientific findings about people to the real world, one has to understand the paradigm progressions in those fields and the same in the public.

Currently, anthropology and sociology are the drivers of social change, likely because they are favored in political science though they are not the most relevant disciplines.  Yet they have no interest in other more relevant sciences and they fight to dominate the stage.

But is it really the fault of those fields?  Probably not.  Circumstances brought us here.

Psychology has its origins in what I call philosophical mysticism.  Most notable were when theorists developed elaborate systemic theories about the inner workings of the minds from merely their observation of people.  That died off as psychology became a more scientific discipline and migrated to only accepting what was purely observable.  This process lead to behavioral-based theories of psychotherapy that later adopted more cognitive aspects as the cognitive specialty started to develop.  From this history come all theories of psychotherapy - even contemporary theories are born in this paradigm built from the past.

Regarding the research side of the house, behaviorists ruled for a long time.  The gist of it is focusing solely on what responses to certain stimuli can be invoked.  But it is not easy to do so without harming people.  Some of the most profoundly influential research came from generalizing to humans from research of non-human animal behavior.  This stirred aversion and broad motivation to move beyond pure behaviorism. 

The unfortunate thing is they had the right idea (human animal behavior based on purely empirical findings), but they needed to research human subjects and not animals and make connections to the social world.  Believe it or not, I say this even though I’m a humanist.

Such research had little efficacy until the age of fMRI and new tools and findings in neuroscience that developed throughout the last several years.  What is interesting is social psychology has for nearly a century been producing empirical findings at fundamental levels and only in the last decade has it been getting noticed. 

Why this is interesting is today we have a suite of empirical findings in social psychology where some of them have been confirmed with findings in neuroscience.  Scientifically, it doesn't get much better than this with understanding people.  Why this is significant is all this is entirely relevant to just about everything and anything to do with human cognition and behavior, which is the root of all social issues.  In short, it makes the dominate paradigms in anthropology and sociology - as well as psychology, obsolete.  In this regard, cross-disciplinary research involving anthropology and sociology, and social psychology and neuroscience has great promise. 

Unfortunately, the paradigm of those fields and the attention they get is far too much to give up.  I suspect this will remain a major force well beyond my life.  But this is not the only issue; the dominant paradigm in psychology and the memory of the behaviorist takeover is still all too prevalent and may act as a resistance.  These findings can be viewed as getting back to viewing people as mere animals while ignoring the most interesting aspect of humanity. 

But such is not what I am proposing.  

Understanding how the brain works from a systemic and sub-systemic perspective and then connecting them to real-world contexts and situations promises far more than anything else psychology, anthropology and sociology has ever had to offer.  With regards to understanding and engendering solutions, these three fields together should be like "peas and carrots" - they go together.

The field of psychology alone probably needs to be flat-lined and be reborn.  But so does what the public accepts as the experts on people. 

With this said, there is another resistance.  Just look at society and the resistance to anything with science that theists view a threat to their beliefs (at one time I was at this stage).  Both the evolution debate and the mind vs. brain debate has been a turbulent and long one - and it is still very fresh and influential.  So there is a resistance to viewing human beings in a way that posits that people behave mainly from the social constructs they've spun in response to the impulses of the creature within them.

So there you have it.  A view of how the paradigm of relevant disciplines and of society can prevent solving society's social problems - and even individual problems. 

Hopefully, we will evolve to overcome this someday.