Us and Them (by -400,000,000) is where we divide the world into those who are like us – the Us, the in-group – and those who are not like us – the Them, the out-group. It seems to go back at least hundreds of millions of years, back to when we were fish. Upon it is built racism, religious bigotry, genocide and all the rest.
It is universal, it is deep, it is instant. It is as automatic as breathing. Which is why in the United States a White police officer can gun down a Black person and yet honestly say it had nothing to do with race. Because it took place too quick for his conscious mind to take part.
Implicit bias: The Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures, among other things, how much you favour Whites over Blacks (or the other way round). It measures reaction times that are too quick to be fully conscious. That implicit bias is the very thing those “split-second decisions” that get people killed are based on. And as the tests show, racism can be part of it.
Prejudice: the Us and Them thing is further screwed up by prejudiced thinking:
- Us: We are better than we are (collective self-esteem), our shortcomings are due to circumstances (attribution error), we got to help each other out (in-group favouritism, the main cause of discrimination, not any sort of out-group hatred).
- Them: They are all alike (out-group homogenization), they fit stereotypes as proved by selective sampling (confirmation bias), they are worse than they are (out-group derogation), their shortcomings are because they are (ew/gasp) one of Them (attribution error).
Prejudice can grow worse if the in-group feels threatened.
That is the bad news.
The good news is that, unlike fish, humans have amazing powers of learning. The line between Us and Them is learned. That is why it is different in different parts of the world: Jew and Arab in Palestine, Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, Muslim and Buddhist in Burma, etc. That it is learned and not inborn is why you can be prejudiced against your own, as with internalized racism.
Race: In the United States the line between Black and White goes back hundreds of years. But it only goes back hundreds of years: it is not part of human nature. It may feel “natural” and seem to function that way, but that is because it has hooked into the fish brain, so to speak. That is what gives these lines their terrible power, sometimes leading even to genocide.
The lines between Us and Them are completely made up. They are hammered into our heads by our leaders, political, national, religious, and social, to increase their own power. We can see that going on right before our eyes with President Trump. When these made-up lines become part of the culture they get passed down by parent and teacher, becoming part of “the way things are”.
– Abagond, 2018.
Source: partly based on “What Divides Us” in National Geographic (April 2018); Google Images.
See also:
- The blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise – a perfect example of all of this
- prejudice
- the eight stages of genocide – Us and Them is stage one
- Donald Trump
- human evolution: the last 4 billion years
- Racism before 1400
- The racial future of the United States
571
The inhabitants of earth need to find a better hobby…
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@dorisjean23
Just think of all we could accomplish if we did. 😔
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“Prejudice can grow worse if the in group is threatened “ This is America -Childish Gambino
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For me this whole post describes the nightmare, malignant reality that is now this country under the wannabe despot in the White House.
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Reblogged this on League of Bloggers For a Better World.
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SOUTH PACIFIC
You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught
Richard Rodgers
[Verse 1]
You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear
You’ve got to be taught from year to year
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught
[Verse 2]
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade
You’ve got to be carefully taught
[Verse 3]
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You’ve got to be carefully taught
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This is a very culturally specific view. When strange white people first shipwrecked on tropical shores they were often treated hospitably as indicated by their own records. Clearly those people were not antagonistic towards the other by default, and it turned out to be their undoing.
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@ Origin
That does not contradict what I said. I said that the line between Us and Them has to be LEARNED. “You’ve got to be taught to hate” as “South Pacific” put it (see Mitch’s comment).
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“Us and them
And after all we’re only ordinary men
Me and you
God only knows
It’s not what we would choose to do
Forward he cried from the rear
And the front rank died
And the general sat
And the lines on the map
Moved from side to side”
Pink Flord, 1972
Roger Walters had an “us and them” tour. He got the idea from Obama’s immigration speech where he said nationalism shouldn’t be based on an “us and them” basis.
“The tour has also been met with its share of criticism and controversy especially towards Waters’ usage of anti-Donald Trump images during the show most notably on “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” which features images of the president shown in bright, Warhol-like colors depicting him with lipstick and breasts, with a Klan hood, without pants (showing a tiny penis), with his head on a pig and with the word “charade” written over his face. Video screens display actual quotes from Trump and at the end of the song “Fuck Trump” is featured in bold letters. This was changed later in the tour to “Trump Is a Pig”. Wikipedia
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@abagond
I see.
I was responding to the implication that mortal antagonism towards other is somehow inevitable (as breathing). Certainly RECOGNITION of other is automatic since recognition of SELF could not occur without its complement. Just as you cannot explain valleys without reference to hills, cannot explain dark without reference to light, or cannot cut a triangle out of a piece of cardboard without also leaving a triangular hole behind. So self-awareness is complementary with other-awareness. If you have a perception of what you are, you automatically know what you’re not.
It follows that your attitude towards the other will be related and complementary to your self-concept. If you have a supremacist view of self then the other must necessarily be inferior or made to be so. You’ll need the human chattel, you’ll need the heathen, you’ll need the dhimmi. So cultures that are supremacist in nature will teach supremacism and extreme forms of US vs THEM. This, in turn, will provoke defensive reactions from the other. However, I think we agree that this state of affairs is not as inevitable as the mere recognition of the other.
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The poster Mitch’s post pretty much is a summation of what this post is all about.
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The Christians of India are suffering the same type of discrimination as the African Americans of the USA. Same = No difference
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@ Beny
How can you see their Christianity?
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