Links and comments
You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught? Maybe not that carefully, as long as you’re segregated when young. A new study shows that babies as young as three months show signs of race preference when shown a mix of Caucasian and African faces. Andrew Sullivan gives this link a gloomy introduction, suggesting that bringing up a racist may be impossible to avoid, but I’m going to point out where the glass is half full: Three month old babies are also significantly less likely to prefer the faces of their own race if they’re being raced in a mixed race environment.
This study shows that our environment greatly influences our perceptions. Even infants at 3 months of age demonstrate signs of racial preference, but this preference is limited to the race they are mainly surrounded by. Heightening cross racial contact mitigates the effects of the bias. Is the own-face race bias a problem? Perhaps: the bias signals a lack of diversity in surroundings. The influence of the own-race face phenomenon may carry over into our daily perception and can cause some racial prejudice beyond our direct control.
The downside of that ethnically diverse environment: the blogosphere is buzzing again about a study that came out in 2001, which showed lower levels of trust in ethnically diverse neighborhoods. Neo-neocon references it in a somewhat muddled post about the Supreme Court’s recent decision blocking school integration efforts in Seattle and Louisville: hey, maybe we should celebrate that decision, because diversity isn’t so hot after all. Sort of. She doesn’t really want to return to the days of segregation, but, you know, the black students always ate together at her college in the 60s, and everyone kind of naturally segregated themselves, as soon as there were enough black students to make a group who could eat together. And, incidentally, the researcher, Robert Putnam, is supposed to have been so disturbed by his findings that he delayed releasing his results (a claim that the researcher himself vigorously disputes in this comment thread at Rod Dreher’s blog).
As I read neo-neocon on her college experience, I first remember mine. I had planned, my freshman year, to apply to live in the Asian-American dorm, because of a high school interest in Chinese culture spiked by two close friendships with students from Taiwan. I got scared out of doing that by rumors that white students were out of the social network in the ethnic dorms, but did wind up in a neighboring dorm, so that I got to see F.O.B. (Fresh Off the Boat) in its first showing in 1978. But anyway, the thing that I remember about my college experience is this: there was a point when my grandfather, who lived nearby, was trying to convince me of some Bell Curve-like argument about how black people really aren’t as smart as white people, and said that his “life experience” supported that view. And I knew darn well that my own life experience didn’t support anything like his take. Grandfather, born early in the twentieth century to a family with Southern white roots, simply hadn’t lived in the world that would give him the life experience to see black people’s intelligence (other than the rare “OK, I don’t mean you” exception). Whatever neo-neocon’s experience with the “black table” in the dining hall in the 60s, something really did change.
The second thing that I remember is my experience making Turkish friends. Being Greek-American, I at first expected them to be wary, hostile. What I actually found was more complicated. Turks tend to be especially warm when they find out I’m Greek. We trade stories about the things we have culturally in common – food and suchlike. We head over to each other’s corner of the room. And this extra friendliness lives alongside the fact that, if we get down to details about how we see Greece’s and Turkey’s mutual history, we find lots of places where we disagree. Even traditional “enemy” relationships are more complicated than simple hostility. It only makes sense that the effects of closer contact can be similarly complicated. If simply living near each other made for harmony, life in the Balkans would be rather different – how you’re interacting also matters – but at the same time, actually being able to get to know the people you’d otherwise fear really is a positive force.
And, in fact, when I look at the actual press release for Putnam’s research (provided by him in that thread on Rod’s blog), complexity is what I find in the section on “The Opportunity and Challenge of Diversity.” He reports both on less trust in ethnically diverse neighborhoods and on an increase in willingness to form friendships across racial lines.
The research may point to challenges in integration, but it’s certainly no reason to stop being grateful that I grew up in a post-Brown world.
Speaking of that Supreme Court decision, Lawyers, Guns, and Money has more posts on it than I can fairly summarize, including a nice link round up.
Comparing murder rates under different presidents. Clinton does best, then Reagan. The part I think Lenny will like, given what he’s said to me about gun control, is the fact that there’s also a positive correlation between how well Sturm, Ruger & Co stock does in a given year and how high the murder rate is. As the pro-gun-control version of the saying goes, guns may not kill people, but they make it real easy.
Some Catholic theologians are proposing the Church rethink its position on premarital sex. Good luck. But the argument is interesting; its based on an appeal to tradition, of a sort.
In the article, Lawler and Risch say their proposal reflects Catholic tradition. They noted that in the 13th and 14th centuries couples were often first betrothed — a mutual consent to spend the rest of their lives together — before they were actually married.
“The first sexual intercourse between the spouses usually followed the betrothal — a fact of the Catholic tradition that has been obscured by the now-taken-for-granted sequence of wedding, marriage, sexual intercourse,” Lawler and Risch wrote.
They called for a modern-day betrothal, marked by a public ceremony in which the man and woman agree to marry in the future. Then the couple could live together and have sexual relations if they chose. Then the couple would marry.
This process would bring the Catholic Church more in line with today’s social norms, Lawler and Risch wrote, saying about 5 million unmarried couples already live together in the United States.
Several of today’s links stolen from Andrew Sullivan.
June 30th, 2007 at 9:15 am
Did Neo-neocon ever consider that in the sixties that those black students first integrated experience may have been in this college. Mine certainly was, leaving a segregated environment into an integrated one is not done with ease. Even though I did not tend to “sit at the black table” is becomes the place where you know you will not be disrespected. Since I was in a southern school, one white girl I associated with was pressed to move out of her dorm room, because I would go there to study. That self segregation at that time was more because, you didn’t know how you would be treated otherwise and to be at some place familiar, since it your first away from home experience. When my son went to a HBCU, the urban kids tended to socialize together.
July 2nd, 2007 at 7:01 am
Yeah, and the white students, as well, were bound to be less comfortable socializing across racial lines in their first integrated experience. To me, neo-neocon’s post amounts to “change is hard at first,” which is hardly a reason not to want integration.