Ask the Scholars

Interviews from 2003

Question 31
Are people who are similar naturally drawn to one another?

Don't people naturally gravitate towards people who are similar to them or have a shared cultural background? Couldn't you say that racial animosity is just a product of the natural human tendency to separate ourselves out from others?

Answers:
George Fredrickson

Historian

I think the question confuses race and culture. There is a normal tendency to associate primarily with people with whom you share some beliefs and values and customs and so on, but these characteristics are not fixed or unchangeable. Cultures learn from each other, people change their cultural values or create new cultures, and that kind of fluid, interactive situation is appropriate to the concept of culture. That's not race, though.

I don't think race is hardwired, because I th...

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Audrey Smedley

Social Anthropologist

I agree that there's a confusion of culture and biological features and this is at the heart of the idea of race all along. But when you look back at history, it doesn't confirm that we only gravitate towards people who are physically like ourselves. The American Indians, for example, accepted or embraced Europeans. Everywhere in the world intermarriage among various peoples who are very different from one another physically occurs. In England today in the Midlands area, there are a larg...

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James Horton

Historian

I also have to disagree with the questioner. This question assumes that we all have an identity that we use all the time. Therefore, we can go through the process of selecting people who also have similar identities that they use all the time, and these identities can be put into one community of like identities. But the question I would ask is, (1) is there an identity that any person uses all the time, and (2) is that identity race?

First, I think it's absolutely true that peop...

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