March 11th, 2008
Not even Obama thinks America is ‘post racial.’ But neuroscience, like the primary results, suggests we are not doomed to see things in black and white.
Robert Kurzban remembers when he felt a whisper of hope that racism was neither inevitable nor permanent, and certainly not something hard-wired into the human brain. He had just Photoshopped different colored basketball jerseys onto images of eight young men, some black and some white, that he was using for a psychology experiment. Volunteers viewing the photos on a computer screen heard each man say something like "you were the ones that started the fight"; a few minutes later they had to remember who said what. Human memory being what it is, the volunteers made mistakes. But it was the nature of the mistakes that gave Kurzban hope. If a quote was spoken by a white man wearing a yellow jersey, the volunteers typically misattributed it to a man also wearing a yellow jersey—but of either race. In a startling twist on the old saw that "they all look alike to me," the volunteers mistook one yellow-shirted guy for another, but not one African-American for another or one white man for another. The brain, then, can override racial categories with something as arbitrary as shirt color. "This happened even though people have a lifetime of experience of categorizing others by race, but only a few minutes of categorizing by shirt color," says Kurzban, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. "Under some circumstances, you can get people to ignore race."
See the entire article here.