The End of Racism

When I was in seventh grade and had only one friend, he and I decided one day to go to the arcade at the mall. We walked from our homes in the Avenues of Salt Lake City, Utah all the way to downtown. It was a warm summer day and not being allowed to play video games very often at home I was more than excited to spend a few hours away from my family having fun.

But my joy was short lived as I walked into the arcade, suddenly surprised when a black boy several years older than I walked up and immediately got in my face and began threatening me. He spoke angrily and I couldn’t even understand what he was saying since he was using heavy jargon and slang. My little white-boy country background had never encountered someone like this—I hadn’t done anything, not even looked at him until he was invading my personal space, and I could not understand what I had done to solicit such an aggressive and unwarranted confrontation, most especially since he wasn’t communicating in a way that I could understand.

Thankfully my friend had lived in the city much longer than I, and when I looked to him with confusion and fear for my safety he simply said, “just say: ‘it’s cool man.” I didn’t immediately follow because I couldn’t understand how such a little phrase could resolve such a tense situation. Surely I had done something more egregious which required a more thoughtful response. I also couldn’t understand why the guy didn’t just hear my friend and respond in kind. My friend repeated his advice, so I just said “It’s cool, man.” The boy backed off and walked away as if nothing had ever happened, leaving me shaky and distressed for the rest of the day.

I would learn from experience throughout my life that some men are often intimidated by other men who are taller than they are, and will spontaneously pick fights with me just because I tower over them, even if I’ve not done anything to antagonize them, because they are insanely insecure. It’s like a little Chihuahua barking at a Great Dane just because the Great Dane is big, and not because it’s done anything to actually threaten him. This incident was in all likelihood just that, this boy not understanding that I was a nice twelve-year-old gay boy who was terrified of everything even though I looked like a big, straight, sixteen-year-old, and irrationally directed his own insecurities and feelings of powerlessness to me, when in fact we could have probably become friends had he instead said “hello.” I will admit that this encounter engendered no small amount of anxiety for a while whenever encountering solitary black men, irrationally fearing that they too might see me as a threat and preemptively harass me, since nobody else had ever acted that way in my entire life. But soon all encounters with solitary straight men in general became a source of anxiety, regardless of their skin color, since it is from them that some of my most unpleasant experiences came, such as the time a predatory white businessman who ran a scam of an apartment-hunting service screamed at me in front of all the other customers to get out of his office or he would call the police immediately after I asked for a refund, without any discussion and with such vitriol as to belie an intense fear of my towering stature, though I had not even been angry or cross as I didn’t yet realize it was a scam when asking for a refund.

I once shouted obscenities angrily at two police officers in downtown Los Angeles who cited me for walking in the gutter of the street on Thanksgiving morning when the only other car on the road was the police cruiser itself while pottying my dogs as requested by the city to avoid dirtying the sidewalks, and not only was I not tasered or body-slammed or put into a chokehold for my behavior, the officers stood there and took the berating even as I made them call up their superior and wait for him to arrive and waste their time over the unethical harassment (again, also was targeted by an insecure male regarding my height, and when these officers saw my boyfriend emerge from the building to ask what was wrong and realized I was gay entirely lightened their tone toward me). It’s crazy to think that something like racism really exists, especially to the degree where people are straight up murdered for their differences, something which I have not experienced, and seeing the rash of undeniable evidence such as the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Ahmaud Arbery, Botham Jean, Stephon Clark, and countless others—many of whom we don’t even know their names—can make one feel the kind of despair and hopelessness for humanity that makes it difficult to breathe, and you don’t even know about the kind of incidents from decades ago where black people were gutted, their entrails spilled out and their bodies dismembered and hung from trees politely described as lynching.

But racism and prejudice in general has in fact existed in some form or another throughout the entirety of human existence, and has been the source of an unfathomable amount of human suffering, the prelude to incredible horrors like the enslavement of humans in America, the extermination of indigenous Americans, the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide, or the killing of Rohingya people which continues to this day, and other of the most vile of human atrocities. But I am also lucky to live in a time and place where homosexuals are not also targeted in the same way, which still occurs in places like Kazakhstan, Iran, and Russia. Mankind is capable of great, great evil and hatred toward one another, but nowhere is it more apparent than in conflicts between those who exhibit different physical characteristics, and the reason we seem unable to get rid of it altogether is because we do not correctly understand racism and prejudice’s source of origin. Only when we properly understand why and where it comes from can we really do anything about it.

The most basic part of racist and prejudiced thought and action is the failure of humans to understand that we are actually an animal, and not some divine gift to the Earth which is exempt from animalistic behavior. Those who believe otherwise are, ironically, condemned to behave as animals since they are unaware of and seek to deny and ignore our animalistic instincts. This also leads to the erroneous idea that travesties of the past were merely of their time, rather than exactly the way all humans can and do continue to behave, and so they repeat in the future since humans have pretended it was a problem of the past, of unenlightened and more primitive humans. Murder, rape, child sexual abuse, racism, theft, and war are all behaviors that other animal species also commit upon each other. For instance, do you know that ducks commit rape? Or that monkeys commit infanticide? Have you ever seen this video of a male Zebra literally trying to murder a baby? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAHysptvEfo The way in which the Zebra understands that the baby cannot breathe under water and then uses his limited dexterity with purpose and violent intent to consciously drown a helpless and vulnerable infant is often a shock to people who like to believe that life is not as harsh and violent as it really is, or that animals are more stupid and unintelligent than we which thus means we cannot share their most awful instincts. But of course we can, and of course humans are racist. We are some of the most violent and murderous creatures to have ever existed, extinguishing other life wherever we go, even that of our own species and our own families. As animals we are given to very animalistic behavior every bit as instinctual and vile as the most repulsive and barbaric in nature, but which we can equally observe with disgust. The mother zebra and others of her community do not feel any less fear and revulsion at the male zebra’s murderous and calculated rampage than any of us might feel at the sight of someone of our own species being murdered.

Our misunderstanding of the origins of these behaviors comes from also misunderstanding the origin of morality. Social and moral feelings and ideas and institutions are not a special trait bestowed upon humankind to rule over the earth but are instead a tool developed by evolution to promote and maintain systems of social animals, to help their species succeed in the struggle for life. Similarly the vile and repulsive, self-centered behaviors like murder, rape, theft, and other crimes are also part of this system. This does not make such behavior legitimate or which come without consequence for the perpetrator of such actions, but they are nonetheless part of the arsenal of strategies that nature devised to keep species alive in the harshest of conditions, with the individual being sacrificed for the good of the whole. You probably read that and assumed I was referring to the victims of such behavior, misunderstanding how the concept of “survival of the fittest” actually works—the individual who is sacrificed for the common good by our instinctual and amoral tendencies is not the victim of such individuals but the criminal itself. Driven by animalistic instincts to act in ways which compromise its moral fitness and thus integration into the group, their own personal wellbeing and relationship to others, on which we are all abjectly dependent, sacrified on the altar of nature to continue the line of genetic and progenitorial inheritance at the expense of that individual not for one moment even suspecting it.

The stresses which result in the kind of anti-social, violent, and amoral behavior which results in racism (but also other crimes against humanity) originate from the perception of competition and availability of resources. Viewing life as a struggle where everyone must fend for themselves, where the acquisition of basic needs like food, shelter, and medicine come with great strife and uncertainty creates within individuals the sense that they must compete for the things they need in order to survive. Real human nature is to be cooperative, to work together to achieve common goals and thus through the power of the many provide for each individual. Derangements to this system break down our naturally cooperative and compassionate nature to instead elicit those basic and animalistic instincts to survive, which then activates increased alertness to potential conflict and competition, feeling unsupported by society and the group which would normally provide it, an individual human being who is relatively powerless and inept feels overwhelming fear, distrust, and insecurity. If this person is then raised in an environment where they are taught that other human beings are the cause of this struggle rather than their own lack of empowerment, that person becomes hyper-aware of who is and who is not potential competition. The easiest denominator for our weak and ineffectual human brains to identify competitors are then those who appear physically different than us, thus the origin of racism.

Because racism is an instinctual human behavior we don’t even recognize it when it appears in our culture and art. I love the game Minecraft, but it is an outright racist game. The villains in the game are all one skin color while the peaceful ones are another—the villains also alarmingly have darker skin color too—if there were any doubts to the subliminal influence racism has on our daily lives. Beloved works of fiction such as the Mice of Redwall blatantly host racist ideals as rats are presented as ubiquitously evil and mice universally good, which is ludicrous since rodents don’t inherently have human culture and as such is entirely a construct of prejudicial orientation toward conflict and competition. Even Star Trek, which took great strides to include racial diversity in its casting and storytelling portrayed entire species such as Klingons or the Borg as a collective threat, and I can think of no greater manifestation of the subliminal influence of our biological fears of competition which fuel the fires of prejudice (the alternative would appear as a politically aligned sect or force within the species, rather than the entire species as a whole, which I think the writers began to realize this with the introduction of Worf, but you could probably write an entire book about the subtleties of racism in regard to this—including Worf’s casting, the characterization of the species in general as dimwitted, and that the character was raised by humans thus suggesting racial superiority, etc.). In the real world, our own ignorance to our own racist and prejudiced natures can be seen exactly in the behavior of the mayor of Minneapolis surrounding the murder of George Floyd. He rightly expressed horror and revulsion, but then sent an armed force of police to monitor and harass protestors and then tear gassed the peaceful demonstrations, which in turn led predictably to more violence. Though he thinks he is not racist the mayor is in fact quite racist, as evidence to his reactionary fear and preemptive strike against peaceful demonstrators, and the disparity of the violent and disgusting treatment of Native Americans protesting the XL Keystone Pipeline (which the President of the United States did not even try to stop) and the inaction following armed white men storming an actual American statehouse or BLM office shows just how subliminal and instinctual the nature of racism, with those who believe they are not at all racist actually acting it very much in practice.

Racism will never be entirely extinguished from the human race, because it is built into our biology as a potential resource to fuel interpersonal conflict and aggressive competition for resources, and the idea that racism is borne solely out of rearing is part of the reason why we have had such a difficult time stamping it out. Believing that only select groups of people can be racist, that we aren’t like that or capable of it is precisely what keeps racism alive. It doesn’t help that nefarious forces recognize this and actively stoke prejudicial tensions to divide disparate groups and keep them distracted from the crimes and oppression we all endure. In order for racism to be mitigated we must cut off the stimulus for it. Individual human beings must be empowered to understand that they are each individually and equally capable of providing for themselves and securing the resources they need. This requires the teaching of life skills such as literacy, civics, financial responsibility, but most importantly interpersonal and social skills such as leadership, how to make friends, how to parent effectively, and the ability to apologize and amend interpersonal conflict. But because racism is rooted in competition or the perception of competition, this also requires that our societies are arranged in ways which provide sufficiently for everyone. It is the benefit that most white Americans have received from Democracy and Capitalism, but for which other groups have been systematically denied access to this system through policies such as red-lining, which legally impaired access to financial and commercial services to neighborhoods occupied by those of a homogenous minority group. The authors of such policies viewed minority groups as competition for resources of wealth and prosperity, insecure in their own self-worth and ability to succeed at life, who erroneously sought instead to increase their chances of success by limiting competition. The reality is that we can create as much wealth, opportunity, and prosperity as we want. Why is there a limit? We can do anything we set our minds to. There is no reason for competition other than what is arbitrarily concocted by fearful and feeble minds and the most base of human instincts. Of course, these ideas are borne from each individual’s own life experience, which is why we must eliminate the sources of these experiences, which are inequality, abuse, ignorance, and failure to empower those who are vulnerable. When a young white man or woman understands that power to succeed at life lies at their own hands and not that of others they stop feeling threatened by the existence of others and instead focus on their own actions and behavior, and educating and empowering in this way can even subvert indoctrination by older, racist generations because the disparity between their resultant success and what they were told will be so obvious as to change their minds and hearts. Likewise, this same approach can help the oppressed and downtrodden to rise out of the mire in which we have sunk them and raise all groups regardless of their socioeconomic or cultural background.

While racism exists across all of humanity it has its origins in the failure of human society to support those in our own communities, and it can be easily extinguished if we engineer our institutions and societies to better empower the individual, and to provide opportunity for success so that illusions and fears of competition and scarcity of resources are eliminated. Only when we take care of everyone will racism truly be eliminated. But this is not an ambitious or ideological dream. Sectors of society accomplish it all the time—it only requires the will to implement it everywhere instead of select groups of people. There are more people living in extreme wealth in just the city of Los Angeles than ever existed across hundreds and thousands of years of human civilization. The ability to empower the individual to the end of such plagues as racism is not limited by anything other than the extent of our compassion.

If you feel economically insecure you can read my article about finding satisfaction and success in this economy, or read about how it’s okay to feel insecure and broken as a person. An important tool to the elimination of racism would also be a Universal Basic Income.