Both internal and external factors shape our development postnatally from Day zero.
They look at us, look between our legs and based on first impressions label us male or female or ambiguous and fit or flawed. Then comes the pink or blue blanket and expectations from everyone in and outside the family. And if flawed, therapy to repair us, a special kind of outside influence where racism can occur. Some families, as I’ve heard, carefully examine our ears and what color they are as it predicts what color we may become.
Caveat: With that statement, I come to the end of my awareness of the varied cultural events in our first days that set the course of our development, which is just one more example of my being reminded that the more I learn, the more I realize how much more there is to learn. I note that, and I pause, suddenly aware that our awareness of our own limitations of cultural diversity is a profound (how can I emphasize that…) PROFOUND factor in the reason we are here, parsing how racism shapes our lives and why it is so difficult to eradicate.
Caveat: You may ask for a pause as well: you may ask, as I often do myself: Wait, I thought we are trying to understand why individuals become racist, not what racism does to us?! I have learned that among the many types of racism is internalized racism, where people in non-dominant groups have internalized the lies of racism, like inferiority or deserving second-class status (special thank-you to the Christian Bible—sorry, but I have to tell it like it is—which has some story about Ham, who was cursed by God for some reason and that’s why black people are forever to be in servitude—I know, I should probably be sure I’ve got it right, but somebody I trust reminded me of this the other day, so I’ll leave it at that). So, if people in non-dominant/less powerful groups have internalized that they are inferior, they might take out their frustrations and anger on each other. I shudder at the chain of events that could occur if a black child got inadequate treatment and became even more difficult to care for and got blamed for it, making it become more frustrated as it grows up with its infirmity and lash out. To me racism is happening if people in non-dominant cultures suffer because of inequities in any institution, including the field of medicine.
Aside: Perhaps I should leave out those last two paragraphs or put them elsewhere…, but I can see reasons for leaving them where they are.
Before the blankets arrive babies are learning by classical conditioning for sure. I’m inclined to agree with Karl Jung that they already have an expectation of what should be happening to them—consistent care from caretakers. And they have some knowledge already: they are prepared to suck what is put in their little mouths, their own hands or feet if they are hungry but nothing else presents itself. And newborns are fully equipped to use all their senses to take in information about their world and learn.
By classical conditioning they associate any two stimuli—things, people, events that occur together and so expect the one when the other appears. For example, if a person provides nourishment for them on a regular basis, they come to trust that person to perform that function regardless of either of their color or status or whatever. If a person neglects or hurts them, they learn not to trust that person. They also learn by operational conditioning; if they do something that leads to hurt and pain, they stop doing it, if they have control over that behavior. I’m also inclined to agree with Sigmund Freud here, that if they receive regular punishment for something they cannot control, like urination and bowel movements before they are three, psychic trauma can occur. And if they are verbally damned with some racial epithet in the process of the unfair punishment, some kind of racial trauma can ensue. That would be the result of cognitive or social learning, which has been employed to explain racism. Yes, in the cradle, they are learning about relationship.
They will be learning from rewards, smiles, attention, the actions they should continue. And they will learn from observation of others, the consequences of various behavior, so they do not have to learn everything from experience or explicit training. They see it, and if they can, they copy it and probably within a year, if they hear it, they may repeat it. If they hear racial epithets, they may repeat racial epithets.
And they learn implicitly. If you are out walking and when a person who doesn’t look like you appears, and you avoid that person, ignore them, or hold your stuff or your child closer, your child learns that person is to be avoided, and if you feel fear, your child will feel fear. You didn’t have to teach them; they just pick it up.
Our only instinctual fears are fear of loud noise and fear of falling. If a baby, child or anyone loses their balance or is dropped, they feel fear. If we hear loud noises, we react with fear. Clearly, evolution prepared us to respond with fear and motivation to save ourselves if we hear loud noises or lose our balance, because our lives could be in danger.
We do not instinctively fear others. Watch babies and children together, a whole bunch of them of different colors (I am all smiles just thinking of this scenario); if they can’t yet crawl they will just get excited and stare at each other! It’s adorable! If they can walk, and you give one two cookies, it will go to another child and share. Irenaus Eibl-Eiblesfeldt did fascinating work in ethnology that looked at such behaviors that occur across cultures and appear not to be learned. The assumption is that they evolved because such social behaviors are adaptive and contribute to survival. To learn more about how that might have happened, see Evolutionary Psychology .
So we are not born with a fear of others, but we are born with an interest in others and tend to share even as small children.
So, where does the fear of others who look different from us and racism begin?
Racism is learned and every form of learning contributes to the learning of racism, implicitly and explicitly. We acclimate to those we are around; we become used to those around us, who are usually quite like us, skin color, etc, and familiarity actually leads to liking. Through associative learning, classical conditioning, we learn to associate good things with those who care for us, who usually look like us. If our people avoid people who don’t look like us, we come to avoid them as well, which is implicit learning. If our people say bad things about others, we learn cognitively to accept those attitudes because we trust our people who have consistently done good things to and for us. If we see our people do bad things to others, we learn by observation to do those things. And if they tell us to do or say bad things to others and approve with smiles, words of appreciation, or rewards, instrumental or operational conditioning enables us to repeat what we learned. All of this can happen by the time we are 3 years old. So, when I saw a video of an overt racist expressing pride that the first word his child said was the dreaded ‘n’ word, I was not surprised. The racist dad probably explicitly trained his child to say that racist epithet.
If you want to see how you have implicitly learned some racial and other stereotypes, try the Implicit Assumptions Test, from a real research project at Harvard University. I take the test ever so often believing that since I keep working on healing my unaware racism/unconscious biases, surely I will be successful any day now,
I’ve been reading about how imprinting was used in projects to restore the cranes to various habitats, so I’m wondering about the father who was proud his child said the ‘n’ word; was he somehow imprinted on whiteness?
I’ll stop now and return with a discussion of how higher order cognitive learning through information processing contributes to the persistence of racism,