Ask the Scholars

One of the fundamental things that the human mind does is classify. And one of the basic classifications is, are you member of my family - and family can be defined in any number of different ways - versus a non-member of my family. That's why anthropology starts off with a recognition that kinship structures social organizations. So, once you get beyond, "Are you someone I can trust because you're in my family or are you someone I have to be suspicious of because I don't know that much ...

There's something in us that likes to classify. It's almost something that's a necessary part of how we learn, how we go about developing socially. But when it comes to separating who is part of the in group or the out group, when we've done this analogy to race, we always talk about fear of the other and xenophobia. Nobody also talks about how the other is often seen as attractive and desirable, and all those other positive aspects of the other. Which also come into play.

But th...

I do not know of any data on this topic; however, it seems counterintuitive to me that humans would be hard-wired to focus on racial differences. Most of our evolution as a species took place in Africa. And during most of that time, people probably were not in contact with people who appeared extremely different from themselves. The morphological differences that we consider to be racial differences were not the kinds of differences that people were routinely exposed to. So it doesn't ma...

The ancient Greek Herodotus says that the Ethiopians are the most beautiful people in the world. And he's certainly quite admiring of them. Obviously, modern attitudes about whites and blacks are tainted by the history of slavery.