Theory on prejudice needs addressing. I need logic and fact, not 'prejudice is wrong because it just is'.

Question

I'm not racist. I will not say what race I am, it is irrelevent to the discussion. I was in a debate yesterday and could not find a fault with this persons logic, but this persons logic said it is ok to be prejudice (NOT OK to hate others, but to have prejudices about the type of person they LIKELY are).

Here it is. A black bear, a polar (white) bear and a brown bear are about as genetically and physically similar as different human species. Black bears are the smallest (statistically), asian humans are the smallest (statistically). So why is ok to say something like a polar bear is the most prone to violence but not 'race A' is most prone to violence. Why can an average brown bear be smarter than an average black bear but a average 'race B' can't be smarter than an average 'race C'

Furthermore, why can we say 'race D' is statisically taller than 'race E', but not that one is smarter. If studies show that a particular race is better at, say math, why is it racist to say it?

First, if some of you read the question you would have seen I'm the one trying to shoot down HIS bear theory, so please don't attack me or make remarks about my mid 20's thinking. My thinking or his is rather irrelevent. The question may have been worded improperly.

Why is it ok to say a particular type of bear is genetically predisposed to be more violent or more intellegent (not book smarts, logic and reason which is innate in all of us) than another bear, but not the same about a particular type of person.

The only reasonable answer I've seen so far that does not rely on personal beliefs is that the types of humans are significantly more similar than types of bears, so the comparison my opponent made is flawed.

Keep up the good work, we'll shoot him down.

And it's not about being better or worse than anybody or asserting ones self or a 'holier than thou' standpoint. It's about facts.

His point is we are all different, we all have our strengths and weaknesses, yet it is wrong to say so. and he wants to know why bears can be different but humans can't. Neither one of us wants to be better than other races.

I think Ronin, Neil S and Student of Life hit the nail on the head. Thank you very much to everyone for your help, I feel I can rationally refute the polar bear argument now. We're meeting tonight around 8 to complete the debate, so although still appreciated, any postings after that will be of little use to me. Thanks again guys, you rock!!

Answer 1

This all plays into the lie of 'you can't judge a book by its cover'.

With a bit of thought, it's pretty clear that you not only CAN, but you MUST. If you wish to choose a book to read from among many that you haven't, it would be ridiculous to assert that to make that choice you must first read every book in the group completely, attend discussion groups, peruse criticisms of each of the books, and only then would you be able to make a judgement about which book you should read.

The correct version should be 'the more you know about a book the more likely you are to make an accurate judgement about it'.

It would be nice if we all knew everything about everything. But we don't. So we are required to make judgements based on incomplete information. Many of them will be wrong. This does not mean it is wrong to make such a judgement... there is, in fact, no other choice.

The problem with prejudice and racism is that in many cases these are NOT rational judgements and are made by people who are no longer accepting either new information or the possibility of their own error. Because people have used irrational judgements so frequently upon each other, they become hypersensitive to the idea, particularly when it might be used against them.

That is why you see resistance to even scientific assertions of that nature. A person with a gun in his belt might not be looking to kill someone else... but then again he might. Those who KNOW you mean no harm and that your pre-judgement is not your final-judgement will cut you slack on such statements, but I wouldn't blame anyone else for being wary.

So make your pre-judgements. We all do. Just don't stop there.

Answer 2

You are right to pursue your inquiry. The warning is in this area, "there be dragons."

Some people find it hard to not to make value judgments. First you must self examine. Is it a vain inquiry? What is the motive and how will you use the results? Is the end purpose a value system? For this inquiry I think a person should have a remarkable character before they begin.

Prejudice is inaccuracy with a bias. inaccuracy is generally bad, however some people have realized that world-view is self realizing to some degree and use this toward an advantage. If you bias your race's intelligence some people in your race will believe this and some people in the other race will also believe this. Carl Sagan said that 5% of the population is open to almost any suggestion.

As a result of this property of world-view a lot of information being disseminated is not trustworthy. When the information is good, it may be vain. That is it cannot be used for a purpose beyond the mere existence of fact or statistic where it is used to feed the bias engines and on to value systems.

Basically value systems of world-views impose on some people a disadvantage which is justified by value judgments of what is good. Doing sums in your head is good so I am better that another person who cannot do sums in their head. This sum skill can be applied narrowly but not broadly. I have to add here that humans are as a group so defective in judgment it is dangerous to go into this area at all. You need to watch out for genocide. That said, the idea that what we pick is good is the basic problem. Doing sums is not a spiritual aspect and we are spiritual beings and spiritual gifts are difficult to measure, but sums are easy.

If you are looking for some reason why you are better this premise you are using has to be narrowly defined. Like you can remember numbers and are fit to be a postman. When you toss the net over a race, even using IQ, or size facts your judgment becomes defective. When you try and use your limited points as a justification for deferential treatment all the human moral and spiritual principles you begin the violate turn your wide judgment into a conviction of stupidity. Yet world-view self realization is still present and status quo is still given a moral exemption.

Also do not assume that you are not a racist. You may not know enough yet to not be a racist. You are looking at things from the angle that racists look at things.

Answer 3

I read your question headline - but I think the rest of you question goes off in another direction slightly. As with most things in life, there is no definite right or wrong, just a sensible way of approaching the issue.

Put simply, prejudice does not show a rational or "scientific" methodology of decision making. A prejudice is something which is based on an opinion rather than on a hard fact. That is why it could be deemed to be "wrong".

It is very easy to be holier than thou about prejudice, but extremely difficult (in fact, almost impossible) to put into practice, because all of us have pre-conceived ideas about many things.

I would agree that it is not racist or prejudiced to say that a particular group is statistically different from another, as this is (hopefully) based on hard facts. This could, however, be construed to be a glib statement because you need to look at the story behind the statistics.

For instance you could say that, statistically, Americans are more computer literate than Africans. This does not mean that Africans are thick, as the underlying issue would probably be that Africans have less opportunity to learn IT skills than Americans.

The lesson here is that pure logic is incapable of dealing with emotive issues.

**EDIT**
Well sir, you ask a question and you get answers. Sorry if you don't like them, but that's the way a forum operates isn't it? So don't be critical of the answers you've got, we're only trying to help.

Answer 4

It seems logical to say that if there are physical differences, there must be mental/psyhcological ones as well. From what I have seen, no study has confirmed that any race is smarter/more stable/more successful than any other race. This could be truth, this could be hedging data b/c it would jsut be a huge bombshell if such data got out.

I really don't know. But to generalize about a group is perfectly acceptable, the problem is when u apply that generalization to an individual.

Answer 5

First off, the differences between types of bear are far larger than the relatively tiny differences in humans.
Scientists have found striking uniformity across the races, underneath the skin. We can all use one another's organs and blood, so long as the basic blood types are compatible. I wouldn't try that between bear sub species.
Matters of height and average body sizes are physical adaptations to suit whichever environment these factors give an advantage in. Window dressing.
Intelligence? People have needed as much of that as possible, no matter where on the planet their race developed.
I am immediately suspicious of a term like "smarter". Whose yardstick is this measured by? For centuries, western science dismissed medicines, herbs and acupunture from the east,only to "discover" that they were sound medical tools and knowledge.
Same with Native American medicine, same with African medicine. We are all still here; we ALL made it this far.
Don't forget also that school systems in different parts of the country/world vary a great deal in the quality of education they offer. There are also different levels of emphasis within cultures on education, (in the formal sense).

Answer 6

For starters, different races of humans are not different species, or even sub-species. Different types of bear, are.

Second, if you're going to make some sort of judgment or assessment of someone, you naturally want to be accurate. Believing that a person is LIKELY to have some quality based on some physical attribute means that you're making a guess about them based on what is likely to be an unfounded assumption, thus your assessment of them will be more flawed and inaccurate than if you were to judge each individual as an individual entity.

Third, it's a common logical and statistical fallacy to equate correlation with causation. Asians may be somewhat shorter on average, for instance, but simply being Asian does not CAUSE you to be shorter. Differences among humans are just as likely to be cultural or the result of dietary variations rather than genetic. (E.g. the average height of Japanese has been going up substantially ever since the end of WW2 as the result of increased protein in their diets, which in turn was the result of economic prosperity their country had never known prior to c. 1950 or so.)

Fourth, there are simply too many exceptions to the rule for these sorts of assumptions to serve any useful purpose whatsoever.

Fifth, if enough people believe a stereotype then you run the risk of it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. For instance, because black inner-city schools are regarded as places of low academic achievement, they are not given enough resources or qualified teachers. Result? Low academic achievement. But that was the result, not the cause, of the stereotype.

Sixth, humans simply have a very poor history with using stereotypes. With very few exceptions (like women being more prone to breast cancer than men), nothing good ever results from making prejudgments, and very often, substantially bad things result.

In short, not even talking about morality, making prejudgments about people is neither logical nor pragmatic.

Answer 7

To start with, you need to understand what racism is. Racism is very rarely saying "race A" is more prone to "x" than "race B." The logical fallacy of racism is, even if the previous statement is entirely true, to move to "All people of race A are x." This is a basic logical fallacy. The racist would deny, say, a black person a certain job because they are black and "black people tend to be x." But the fallacy of moving from "A's tend to be X" to "All A's are X" is obvious. Regardless of racial tendencies, there are some pygmies who are taller than some white people, and so the racist stance of denying a job requiring tallness to a pygmy, based on his ethnicity and not his actual height is absurd.

If the person you were in a debate with only wanted to keep his argument limited to vague ideas of general racial tendencies, you are right, there is not much to fault there logically (whether he has good empirical data is another question.) But you should remember that it is an obvious fallacy to move beyond this highly abstract idea of racial tendencies to judgments of individuals. Prejudice is not saying that a race has a certain tendency, but prejudging a person based on the race they belong to and not their actual qualities. Racists violate this (and basic logic) by moving from vague tendencies to universal judgments.

To use your example of bears, it may be justified to say that polar bears are more prone to violence, but to say that because Joe is a polar bear he is more violent than Bob, a black bear, is utterly irrational.

Another big problem with his example is that in bears, culture plays little or no role, whereas in people it does. Assuming that there are certain ways white people tend to act and certain ways black people tend to act, this says nothing at all about genetic predispositions. Whereas the bear example indicates a genetic difference amongst the bears, every study to date shows that when a white child raised in a "black" environment or vice versa, the child will adopt the characteristics of the culture they were raised in. There is so much evidence for this, it cannot be disputed. And this cultural aspect renders his bear example completely irrelevant. This would be why it is wrong to move from the bear example to human examples.

A large problem with moving from saying that race D is taller than race E to race D is smarter than race E is that there is a very easy and uncontroversial way to measure tallness. Measuring intelligence, however, is very difficult. What should count as intelligence, what intelligence is, whether some types of intelligence are "better" than other types and what standard you could even use to measure this, are all very controversial questions in psychology. It is not at all like taking a yard stick and measuring. Culutral prejudices are built in to IQ tests. What questions get asked, what qualities are evaluated, etc. are all things which have a high likelihood of being influenced by the culture of the test makers. The difference in complexity of measuring intelligence vs. measuring height is so vast that no analogy can be drawn between the two here. Saying that race A tends to be less intelligent because they do worse on race B's IQ test than race B does is a racist statement because it automatically assumes that race B's worldview is the correct one. Race A does worse on race B's tests, therefore race A is obvjectively worse is a racist position when race B's tests are not actually objective. And there is so much controversy over this nothing should be assumed. It is hard enough for us just to say what reason is in western culture, let alone what it is in other cultures, and if there is a difference which is better.

Yes we all have our strengths and weaknesses. And we need to be judged by these qualities, this is not prejudice. (Racial) prejudice is not us being judged by whether we are actually intelligent or not, but by whether we belong to a race which tends to score better on a certain culture's IQ tests. This isn't judging individuals by their strengths and weaknesses, it is the total opposite.

Answer 8

There are too many factors involved in the formation of humanity, such as effects of culture, education, diet, priorities, etc, to make any definitive statements on differing intellects. It would be a different story if research into pure intellectual differences had continued, but they were halted due to political reasons quite a few decades ago, around when civil rights were gaining steam. So while it's not necessarily racist to posit racial differences, it is unfounded and baseless to assert superiority in the arena of intellect, since the science isn't there to support it.
Baseless assertions of genetic superiority engender racism.

PS. IQ tests are an inaccurate, biased method of establishing intellectual differences. It's not science, but statistics. (The bell curve).

Answer 9

In 2006, a huge study compared nations IQ and found, that the USA has an average IQ of 91%, compared to Northern Europeans - Dutch, Germans, Danes and Swedes around 110%. Although they are the tallest and healthiest. That's measurable facts. But having prejudice against a person you don't know, is ignorance. (I believe, that Oprah Winfried is a much smarter person then Bush, but that has its own reasons).

Answer 10

His is a fallacy called false analogy. Bears, in general, have hard wired behavioral characteristics that they do not deviate from. What is true for one member of a genus of bear will tend to be true for all of that genus. Humans, on the other hand, have cortical development that allows novelty in behavior (even in weighting of hard wired responses). So, while we may be able to point (statistically) to tendencies in a group, no single memeber of that group will necessarily follow those tendencies.