Robert Henderson
Two studies by researchers in Canada , US, UK, France and China examining the response of babies of six to nine months old to people of different races have shown the babies to have a preference for people of their own racial type
The first study (published in Developmental Science) tested the response of babies to associating music with own-race faces and other-race faces with the result that from six months happy music began to be associated with own-race faces and sad music with other-race faces.
The second study (published in Child Development) found that “Infants rely more on gaze cues from own-race than other-race adults for learning under uncertainty” and six to eight months old babies were “were more inclined to learn information from an adult of his or her own race than from an adult of a different race.”
The studies involved “babies who had little to no prior experience with other-race individuals. “
Dr. Kang Lee, professor at OISE’s Jackman Institute of Child Study and the lead author of the studies states “The results show that race-based bias already exists around the second half of a child’s first year. This challenges the popular view that race-based bias first emerges only during the preschool years.” ……
‘“When we consider why someone has a racial bias, we often think of negative experience he or she may have had with other-race individuals. But, these findings suggest that a race-based bias emerges without experience with other-race individuals,” said Dr. Naiqi (Gabriel) Xiao, first author of the two papers and postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University.’.
Racial bias is natural
That racial bias is either directly inbuilt or at the least developed very early in humans as a response to the racial type which surrounds them should surprise no one because it is a natural result of homo sapiens being social animals. Behaviours and physical differences which signal that an individual belongs to a particular social group are a sine qua non of being a social animal for without such signals trust cannot develop and without trust there can be no social animal. That humans should be biologically programmed to respond more favourably to those of the same racial type is an example of the necessary signals required to determine the boundaries of their human group.
Those who will not have natural selection determining human responses to racial difference at any price will doubtless claim that if there is racial bias at such an early age it is environmentally determined, that it is nurture not nature. For example, it might be thought that a baby’s preference is for those who have provided care for the child during the early months after birth. Plausible enough at first glance . However, the research demonstrated that babies showed a general preference for those of racial type like their own not simply a preference for individuals with whom they are familiar. Of course this could be the consequence of being accustomed to same race faces – remember that the babies were specifically chosen to have had little or no experience of different race faces and the babies could have been imprinted with a positive response to same-race faces and to see other-race faces as either unrecognisable as faces or simply as not being faces containing the trigger qualities to inspire trust.
But even if nurture did determine the infants’ preference for those of the same race by making babies identify with the race of those who cared from them for the first six months or so of their lives the nurturists would still be faced with the problem that there must be an innate behaviour in babies which makes them favour those of the racial type who brought them up in the first six months or so of their out of womb existence. Even if every baby was removed from their parents and given to those of a different racial type to raise – an obvious and deeply sinister absurdity – the babies would, if it is nurture at play, still end up favouring the racial type who raised them in the early months. Racial bias would not be eradicated merely shifted from the baby’s race to another race with, presumably, the baby then favouring those of a different race to themselves.
Beyond infancy
The significance of the research reaches far beyond the behaviour of babies. If the babies naturally develop a preference for those of the same race as themselves, whether though an innate preference or because of the race of those who raises them, who will be in the vast majority of cases the same race as the baby, then it is reasonable to expect that preference is carried through to adulthood and through adulthood.
Nothing better demonstrates the natural tendency of human beings to remain racially distinct than the remarkably low rate of inter-racial breeding even in circumstances where there is every opportunity for it, most particularly in the great cities of Western Europe and North America, where the populations are increasingly varied and the prevailing elite ideology positively encouraging of such liaisons.
Even societies which have had very racially mixed populations for a long time display a remarkable ability to maintain retain racial distinctions over very long periods of time – Brazil is an excellent example of this, with social class being very much graded by skin colour. To argue that racial difference is not important to the choice of a mate is as absurd as arguing that the attractiveness of a person is irrelevant to the choice of a mate.
In Freakonomics Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner cite a study made of a US dating site (the full story is on pp 80-84). The site is one of the largest in the US and the data examined covered 30,000 people equally divided between San Diego and Boston. Most were white but there was a substantial minority of non-white subjects.
The questionnaire the would-be daters had to fill in included a question choice on race as “same as mine” and “doesn’t matter”. The study compared the responses by white would-be daters (those from non-white were not analysed) to these questions with the race of the emails actually sent soliciting a date. The result in Levitt and Dubner’s words was:
“Roughly half of the white women on the site and 80 percent of the white men declared that race didn’t matter to them. But the response data tell a different story The white men who said that race didn’t matter sent 90 percent of their e-mail queries to white women. The white women who said race didn’t matter sent about 97 percent of their e-mail queries to white men.
“Is it possible that race really didn’t matter for these white women and men and that they simply never happened to browse a non-white date that interested them?”
Or, more likely, did they say that race didn’t matter because they wanted to come across especially to potential mates of their own race as open-minded?”
In short, around 99% of all the women and 94% of all men in the sample were not willing to seek a date of a different race. How much stronger will be the tendency to refuse to breed with a mate of a different race?
Another way of testing the desire to remain racially separate is to look at social class and inter-racial breeding. The higher up the social scale a person is the less likely they are to have a partner of a different race – if you doubt this try to find examples of the rich and powerful who have a partner of a different race. Those who have the most choice overwhelmingly choose members of their own racial type, despite the fact that they have the protection of their wealth and position to shield their spouses and children from the effects of racial discrimination.
If sexual desire will not commonly override the natural disinclination to remain racially separate nothing will.
The fact of identifiable races
The fact that humans have external racial differences which are sufficiently distinct to allow people throughout the world to broadly categorise an individual into categories such as white and black is in itself indicative of the innate human tendency to breed with those who are racially similar, even though for several thousands of years large human populations of different racial types have existed in close proximity. If human beings did not have an innate preference for those who racially resemble themselves, humanity would have bred itself into something approaching a uniform racial type, at least in those parts of the world which were not very isolated – different races have had regular and numerous contact with each other for at least three thousand years. The alternative explanation to an innate tendency is the truly fantastic one that Man everywhere spontaneously developed cultural barriers to breeding which had nothing to do with any innate tendency. If anything is a social construct it is not race but the liberal idea that Man is a single species.
Race is much stronger as a mediator of who to mate with than ethnic (cultural) difference – think of the very high proportion of those in Britain who have Irish/Welsh/Scottish/English mixed ancestry. Nonetheless, ethnic differences are culturally potent amongst racially similar populations. For example, on either side of the England/Scotland border, the inhabitants born and raised close to the border retain Scots and English accents even though they may have lived their entire lives only a few miles apart.
Because the tendency to mate with those of a similar race is so strong and universal, both in place and time, it is reasonable to conclude that the behaviour is innate and that cultures necessarily include the requirement for a member of the society to be of a certain racial type. The consequence of this is that someone of a different racial type is effectively precluded from full integration because one of the criteria for belonging has not been met. That is not to say, of course, that many of the habits of mind of an alien culture may not be adopted by someone of a different race. What is withheld is the instinctive acceptance of the alien and his or her descendants as members of the society. Just as no human being can decide for themselves that they are a member of this or that group, no individual can decide that they belong to this or that nation because it is a two-way process: the other members of the group they wish to join have to accept them as a true member of the group. (Stephen Frears the English film director once wryly remarked that he had known the actor Daniel Day-Lewis “before he was Irish”).
Assortative mating
There is a widespread biological behaviour known as assortative mating. Members of sexually reproducing animals select mates by certain criteria. In that much loved laboratory animal, the fruit fly drosophila, this may be the number of sternopleural bristles; in Man it includes many criteria including racial type. Other human prime assortative criteria are size, intelligence, education and class. Some of these criteria such as education and class are more clearly linked to nurture than Nature, but even they can be direct or indirect expressions of qualities which are at least largely innate such as intelligence. I say direct or indirect because the beneficial qualities may not be in the individual, for those with superior education and high social class may lack the innate qualities of their parents or earlier ancestors and their privileged position may simply be a residue of the superior innate abilities of their parents or other ancestors.
For the purposes of inter-racial mating, size, intelligence, education and class all come into play. There are clear average differences of size between the three major races: blacks largest, whites in the middle and Asians smallest. This would mean that on average members of one racial group would be less likely to choose another member of another racial group. The differences in IQ would have the same effect, with blacks being less likely to mate with the other two races because their IQ is further removed from them than they are from each other. Differences in IQ will also be reflected, directly or indirectly in educational achievement and social class and hence in mating, for example, if a minority population of blacks amidst a majority white population have proportionately more people of low education and low social class than the white majority, something which should happen other things being equal because of their inferior IQ distribution, they are less likely to mate with members of the white majority simply on the grounds of education and class.
The hopeless and dangerous quest for behavioural change
The lead author of the two studies Dr. Kang Lee has no doubts about the scope and power of racial preference, but like so many academics who work in the field of racial difference he wants to try to fit his findings into a politically correct shape, viz:
“Implicit racial biases tend to be subconscious, pernicious, and insidious. It permeates almost all of our social interactions, from health care to commerce, employment, politics, and dating. Because of that, it’s very important to study where these kinds of biases come from and use that information to try and prevent racial biases from developing,” he said…..
“These findings thus point to the possibility that aspects of racial bias later in life may arise from our lack of exposure to other-race individuals in infancy,” …
“If we can pinpoint the starting point of racial bias, which we may have done here, we can start to find ways to prevent racial biases from happening,” he said.
“An important finding is that infants will learn from people they are most exposed to,” added lead writer Dr. Xiao, indicating that parents can help prevent racial bias by, for example, introducing their children to people from a variety of races.
The idea that babies could be programmed to not differentiate between different racial types is practically impossible . The impracticalities range from most people not having ready access to people of other races or the social contact which might allow babies to experience people of other races to the fact that there are in practice many different racial types beyond the basic racial classifications of white, black and so on, for example, an Ethiopian looks radically different from a Nigerian and a Mongolian very different from a Han Chinese. In short, the idea that showing babies people of different races would not condition them to react to all racial types in the same manner. Moreover, is it realistic to imagine that people would generally be willing to seek out those of a different race to accustom their children to different races? I think that most people would think that extremely improbable. What then, state coercion to force such associations?
The experiments also leave some important questions untested. What happens with mixed race babies where the parents are not mixed race? For example, how would a child born of a white father and black mother respond to such an experiment? Or how about a child born of a black father and a Chinese mother?
The belief that behaviour which is innate can be eradicated is downright dangerous because an innate behaviour evolves for a good reason. The reason for the preference in this case is to maintain the integrity of the group to which the individual belongs. If it was possible to change the bias towards those of the same race the logical result would be to weaken the group to which an individual belonged.
It is also extraordinarily difficult to see how such a change might be effected because if the behaviour is innate by definition it would be what the individual naturally wants to do. If pressed on the subject the politically correct would say it was a matter of education, by which they mean indoctrination or brainwashing. This of course is what many Western elites have been practising for the past fifty years or more as they have gradually placed political correctness at the centre of Western politics. But despite the immense attempt at politically correct indoctrination (which begins in schools at a very young age) mixed with threats of penalties such as the loss of jobs, the exclusion from most public offices and criminal charges for saying politically incorrect things , preference for those of the same race has remained stubbornly unmoveable amongst most of those upon whom the indoctrination has been practised.
But the politically correct indoctrination and threats are not even handedly applied. In the West it is the white native populations which bear the brunt of these practices. Indeed, racial and ethnic minorities are effectively left unmolested by the politically correct. The result is to allow these minorities to have free rein to still exercise the innate preference for those of the same race and by extension the same ethnicity, while the white native populations are constantly denigrated and increasingly punished by the state and the mass media if they attempt to do the same, namely, to favour their own racial type and their own cultural practices. The result is to strengthen the racial and ethnic minorities in the West and to weaken the native populations.
Of course most people amongst the native white populations of the West will supply the politically correct words when they are in public but it is remarkable that so many native white people , including those with a public profile, do breach the politically correct diktats, something which is doubly remarkable because of all the politically incorrect sins it is those which deal with race and ethnicity which attract the heaviest penalties. The fact that people so often behave in such a politically incorrect fashion when it comes to race and ethnicity tells its own story, namely, they still have the innate preference for their own race and ethnicity and the attempt to make them deny this, or at least pretend to deny it, produces a kind of emotional claustrophobia which results in a politically incorrect transgression.
Perhaps in the future it may be possible to genetically change the way human being relate to those of a different race but there is no sign of any possibility of that at present. But suppose it was possible, how could such a profound alteration in the human psyche be embraced by any society which called itself free or democratic?
Living In A Madhouse 