I recently watched again the excellent 1988 film Mississippi Burning, directed by Alan Parker and starring Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe.
The film movingly depicts the racial tensions and the hatred directed against black people in Mississippi in the early 1960s. At one stage, Dafoe, who plays an FBI agent, holding a badly-beaten black boy in his arms, asks in frustration: "What's wrong with these people?"
The world has only 190 countries, but it has 5,000 ethnic groups. Few states are ethnically homogenous and many, particularly in Africa, have no majority ethnic group. On average, people of significantly different ethnic origin have an obviously different outward appearance. However, there is no biological/chemical test that will unambiguously assign an individual to any particular racial group.
Anyone who has moved around a bit knows that, as human beings, we are all pretty much the same. It is equally easy to become as fond of someone from an entirely different ethnic and cultural background from your own, once you get to know them, as it is to be fond of someone from your own group.
Yet despite the fact that, in a biological and in a deeply human sense, the concept of race has little meaning, the sad fact is that, in reality, race has a powerful meaning, and many interracial tensions, prejudices and open hostility exist.
One of the greatest blessings mankind could bestow on itself would be the elimination of interracial tension. The first step towards this end must be to understand the nature of the phenomenon.
We can do nothing about the fact that races exist, but it should be possible to do much to alleviate interracial tensions. It is commonly assumed that prejudiced views held by one racial group about another are entirely the product of environmental conditioning. It is assumed that if all children were raised under ideal conditions a colour-blind society would result.
However, a recent book, Race in the Making, by Lawrence A. Hirshfield (MIT Press, 1996), argues that things are not that simple and presents evidence that children are "hard-wired" to group people by race.
Hirshfield argues that racial thinking spontaneously arises in children as young as three and, as a result, children conclude that race is an essential aspect of a person's identity. In other words, the perception of the "otherness" of other racial groups arises naturally in people's minds and does not have to be taught. However, I find Hirshfield's evidence unconvincing.
He cites many studies of three-, four- and seven-year-old children. The studies purport to show that race is a more important people-sorting category for three-year-olds than are characteristics such as body build or occupational dress.
Sets of colour-wash line drawings were presented to children, each set including the drawings of an adult and two children of the same sex. The adults in the pictures varied according to three kinds of outward cues: body build (thin versus stocky); occupation (wearing tools, a stethoscope or a police uniform); and race (black versus white).
For example, a child might be shown a picture of a thin, black female nurse along with two pictures of children, a stocky, white girl wearing a nurse's uniform and a stocky, black girl wearing ordinary clothes.
Each child subject was asked: which child in the drawing is the adult as a child? Which is the adult's child? Which one is most like the adult? Hirshfield reasons that if children simply rely on outward appearance for making judgments they will be as likely to rely on one form of outer appearance as on another. Therefore, they should choose at random.
This did not happen. In response to the adult-as-a-child question the children matched racial types instead of body build or occupational types. They showed the same tendency when asked to choose which child was the adult's child. When asked which child was most "similar" to the adult, the subject children were just as likely to use occupation or body build to make a judgement as they were to use race.
But it seems to me that the results of this experiment are entirely predictable and tell us nothing new. I would expect the children, especially the four-year-olds and the seven-year-olds, to know from their observations of the real world that a black woman's daughter is a black girl. The test administered by Hirshfield was more of an IQ test than a test of sensitivity to race.
The human brain has an innate capacity and tendency to sort things by category. Because people of different ethnic origin are easily sorted by external appearance, race is probably an easy category for the brain to use. It may well be that the brain is hard-wired to use racial outer characteristics as a major sorting code for grouping people, although more convincing evidence than presented by Hirshfield will be necessary to prove this.
If this is true, it means that more positive and proactive approaches and interventions will be necessary to dissolve away innate feelings of "them" versus "us" between peoples of different ethnic backgrounds, rather than trusting that the avoidance of stereotyping and scapegoating will allow good will to flow freely.
William Reville is a senior lecturer in biochemistry and di- rector of microscopy at UCC