Why Racism Is a Common Social Disease

We like to think that in the modern, enlightened world, racism should be a thing of the past. After the horrors of the Holocaust, the success of the Civil Rights movement, and worldwide efforts to promote equality and human rights, overt racism has rightly become socially and legally unacceptable in most societies. But the sad reality is that racism continues to be one of the most pervasive and insidious social diseases afflicting people around the globe.

From violence, discrimination and institutional barriers faced by ethnic minorities in Western nations, to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, racism proves to be a disease that is incredibly difficult to eradicate fully. It adapts and resurfaces in new forms over different eras and geographies. Like a coronavirus, just when we think we’ve overcome one virulent racist strain, another mutation emerges.

No matter where you look in the world, you’ll find examples of people being judged, treated differently, denied opportunities, or subjected to prejudice, hate speech, and even violence based solely on the color of their skin or their ethnic background. This loathsome affliction persists by digging its roots deep into the soil of human psychology, fear, ignorance, and tribalism.

At its core, racism stems from the erroneous, unscientific notion that race is a biological reality determining a person’s character, abilities, behavior or worth as a human being. It defies logic and contradicts moral and ethical principles of justice, equality and human rights. And yet, overt and subtle racist attitudes continue to be passed down from generation to generation like a mutating virus, adapting to cultural shifts but remaining an underlying condition.

Part of what allows racism to keep spreading is our natural tendency toward in-group favoritism rooted in our evolutionary psychology. From an evolutionary standpoint, humans evolved to form tight-knit tribes and communities in order to protect scarce resources and survive threats. We’re hardwired to unconsciously categorize people into “us vs. them” and view outsiders with suspicion, mistrust, or even fear. Our brains reinforced this us/them mentality as an adaptation to preserve our gene pool.

While this evolutionary hangover made sense when humans lived in small clans, it’s now a dangerous liability in our globalized world. Overcoming these innate psychological leanings and biases takes active, conscious effort through cross-cultural education and immersion. It requires being exposed to people from other backgrounds and cultures at an early age. It means recognizing our common humanity beneath superficial differences. Unfortunately, in many segregated parts of the world, racial divides persist and racist stereotypes and misconceptions fester unchallenged.

Even worse, racism often gets turbocharged and weaponized during times of economic insecurity, societal upheaval or scarcity of resources. Demagogues throughout history have found that one of the easiest ways to redirect anger, fear and insecurity is to scapegoat vulnerable minority out-groups as a simplistic solution to complex societal problems. All too often, embattled majorities have lashed out at ethnic or religious groups, viewing them as a threat to their supremacy or way of life.

We saw this during the Great Depression with racist rhetoric toward Jewish people, Hispanics and other minorities get amplified. Today, we see the same dehumanizing rhetoric toward immigrants, Muslims and other groups surge alongside economic turmoil, changing demographics, and political upheaval. In both cases, the “other” gets painted as the root cause exploiting societal grievances, rather than addressing systemic drivers of inequality and hardship.

At the same time, racism and xenophobia also exploit the human psychological condition of discomfort with change, unfamiliarity and anything that deviates from the known norm. Diversity can be unsettling on a primal level for many people. Our instincts raise red flags about foreign cultures, different physical appearances, or unfamiliar customs. This fear of the “other” is a survival mechanism hardwired into our brains from our evolutionary past.

Overcoming those gut reactions requires open-mindedness, reason, and empathy – qualities that unfortunately aren’t always in ample supply when people feel economically or culturally threatened. Without conscious effort to expand our perspectives, racist attitudes can take root from that seedbed of ignorance and fear of anything unfamiliar.

Even in our modern age of intensifying globalization, diversity, and information sharing, racist attitudes and prejudices find ways to seep into new environments and mutate into more socially acceptable forms. While government policies, human rights advocacy and social conditioning have largely eradicated overt, bulletproof racism, the poison adapts to evade detection and rejection. It becomes more insidious, coded and harder to pinpoint.

Today, rather than blatant segregation or cross burnings, we face resurgent ethnic nationalisms, mainstreaming of hate speech under free speech protections, coded racist rhetoric from political leaders targeting minorities or immigration, and daily microaggressions manifesting from persisting unconscious biases. The work of eradicating racism in its modern, morphed forms is as insidious as any medieval pandemic.

So how do we fight such a widespread, persistent social disease that keeps adapting and proving so resistant to our eradication efforts? Curing the racism pandemic requires a sustained, multi-pronged effort to vaccinate societies with education, cross-cultural exchange and immersion from an early age, expanded economic opportunity, and equal enforcement of legal/political protections regardless of race.

It requires being vigilant in calling out racist behaviors, rhetoric and any attempts to normalize discrimination – no matter how subtle or coded. It means taking aggressive steps to dismantle discriminatory systems and racial disparities across policing, housing, employment, lending, and other facets of society. It means promoting positive narratives and media representation that celebrate our diversity while humanizing all races and ethnicities.

Most importantly, it takes each of us looking inward to recognize our own potential biases – both conscious and unconscious – and consciously reprogramming our ingrained psychological impulses to sort people into “us vs. them.” We must learn to truly celebrate our diversity as a source of societal strength, while recognizing our common humanity unites us. It’s an incredibly difficult task, as these racist attitudes have persisted across millennia, but the antidote starts with open and curious hearts and minds.