How psychological theories are, again, being misused to justify Europe’s severe racism problem
‘A natural expression of in-group bias’ has become the go-to justification for Europe’s racism laid bare by the Ukraine crisis. Yet the theory refutes (rather than justifies) that racism is natural.
“History teaches us that any contact between the white race and the dark-skinned peoples has resulted in the subjugation of the latter by the former. This experience has convinced the black races that the white race is a higher form of being and that it is the destiny of both that the one should dominate over the other. That right of domination is however, in the strictest sense, considered solely a characteristic of the pure white race, so that, while a black man will bow submissively to a white man, he is reluctant to obey a man of mixed blood.”
- J.C. Baud, Dutch Minister of the Colonies (1848).
The European wonders: how can it be that the suffering of non-European refugees does not trigger the same amount of empathy as one feels for white Ukrainians?
According to many, the answer can be found within the psychological sciences. This selective empathy for white people, they say, is a natural human response. An evolutionary reaction that is deeply rooted in our psychology. This is not the first time that the (social) sciences are being misused to justify racism.
Also during the 19th and 20th centuries, psychology and other sciences often served as justifications for colonial racism. Racist theories conveniently supported European preconceptions of people with darker skin tones as intellectually inferior and culturally backward, rendering their colonial exploitation a matter of logical consequence. Skull shape, emotionality, skin color and many other facets of human diversity were claimed as markers that justified the unprecedented violence of Europeans against the colonized peoples. Indeed, colonial racism systematically eradicated the pang of empathy and cognitive dissonance one feels when harming innocent human beings as it disengaged the so-called ‘inferior races’ from a humanist morality. It may explain why the West’s much celebrated ‘human rights’ hardly ever seem to apply to people of color.
Indeed, today, not much has changed. In the online world, people are citing psychological theories that would explain why they feel more affinity with white Ukrainian refugees than the millions of non-European victims from the Middle-East whose countries and lives have been destroyed as a result of Western imperialism.
A natural consequence of in-group bias, they say.
The term in-group bias comes from Tajfel and Turner's Social Identity Theory, which states that people have the natural tendency to prefer individuals from their own group over individuals from another group. It is hypothesized to be an evolutionary mechanism that took shape during our hundreds of thousands of years history as hunter gatherers. Because during that time, they say, the chances of survival were greater for groups that had a good dose of distrust towards strangers.
As I discussed above, the unscientific application of a scientific theory often serves to justify inhumane behavior. I have often discussed the theory with my students during my lectures and if there is one thing that the theory does not explain it’s racism.
Let me tell you why.
The authors of the theory correctly state that evolutionary explanations for human behavior must be sought in our past as hunter gatherers. For too short a time have we been part of complex societies to have evolved behavioral tendencies that are adapted to such environments. That is why we have no natural fear of cars, yet they pose a graver danger to us than snakes for which we do possess an automatic fear response.
This also means that behavioral tendencies such as the in-group bias evolved during a time that the only strangers one encountered as a hunter gatherer had the same hair color, skin color and facial features as oneself. Ships, planes and automobiles that allow us to travel the world and meet people of different skin colors did not yet exist. Hence, one classified someone as a stranger based on non-phenotypic characteristics such as language and clothing style.
In other words, the theory indirectly posits the opposite of what the online self-proclaimed scientists would have you believe, which is: that during most of our history, people who looked like us posed a greater threat to our lives than people who did not. People with different skin colors lived so far away that we simply never encountered them. Even until recently this has been the case: in the past thousand years, white Europeans waged more bloody wars against each other than against any non-European group.
The reverse is also true. When Europeans first arrived on the shores of the Americas, the native populations received them with open arms. Travel diaries of European settlers describe the surprise they felt at the kindness and warmth with which they were welcomed. The Europeans apparently looked so vastly different from the the native population that their appearance did not trigger any sense of threat, comparable to the birds species found on remote islands that do not fear human beings because they never experienced our potential for violence.
It was to no avail: millions of the hospitable and friendly indigenous peoples were massacred to satisfy the Europeans’ insatiable hunger for land, labor and resources.
In other words, the recent phenomenon of colonial racism based on skin color cannot be a natural phenomenon, evolutionarily nested in our psychology. Racism is an ideology, just like fascism is. Ideologies serve as mechanisms for justification: they excuse one's own, often immoral and dishonest behavior towards other people. Just as monarchism justifies the excessive economic and political exploitation of the masses by a small group of powerful people, so justifies racism the exploitation of those classified as “non-white” by those classified as “white”.
In sum, an in-group bias only occurs when we classify people as 'the other' or the ‘out-group’. For most of our history that classification has been reserved for people who resemble us as they posed a greater danger to our lives than those who did not. Recently, however, colonialism ensured that the out-group status is reserved only for people who historically posed virtually no danger to Europeans, namely: people with a different skin color.