Hands connected - Neuroscience and racial attitudes

EMOTIONS AND BIOLOGY: Using neuroscience to understand the attitudes of certain racial groups

Last updated: March 27th, 2019

I’m not black. I’m just a dark-skinned white guy. But I do have a strong sense of empathy for what other people experience. In the case of black people, just consider some facts of their history—first of all, they were sold into slavery to work on American plantations. From the get-go, white Europeans were masters and black Africans were slaves. When emancipation finally came, this merely released black people from their slave status, leaving them bereft of anything and everything in the world, and with no culture besides the slavishness inbred within them throughout generations of enslavement.

Imagine those first freed black citizens. What do you think they thought? How did freedom come to be experienced by them? It was probably enjoyed for a bit, and improved their relationships for a while, but then over time they likely noticed that life for “whitey” was significantly easier—money came to white people because society was structured for them; the same opportunities were rarely available to black citizens until the 1960s. Black people lived on the periphery, and while on the periphery, a person can’t help but feel resentment for the “other” who has played a role in the development of their present condition.

The whole “moralizing” process we get through school is a practice of culture—we’re not born with it. It’s something that’s learned, cultivated and then passed down from generation to generation. When black people were freed, they were freed physically, but not psychologically, emotionally or relationally (in regards to their relations with white people). They were trapped, and instead of understanding this turn of events—which requires empathic awareness—the traditional response from white society has been to “offload” their guilt by asserting that blacks should “take ownership” of their situation, as if pathology normalized within all of your relationships over generations, perpetuating and deepening a certain dynamic, doesn’t make your situation very, very hard to overcome without outside support. This phenomenon—a psychoanalytical insight—is absolutely important to how we understand the impact of history on today’s black American mind.

Racism is utter nonsense, but we still entertain racist ideas, because some people simply can’t accept that environmental context is able to biologically ingrain pathology. Our studies of developmental neurobiology are teaching us that early life conditions have profound effects on mental development in later life. We naturally like to think of our subjective minds as “just there,” but the fact is, they are subtended by chemicals, proteins and other changes in cellular and intercellular activity, which are all biological forms produced by experience. The mind that experiences certain biological effects is more likely to experience the same effects again.

The problem is, nothing has been done to help black people out of this conundrum. We imagine that the problem involves only that one group’s pathology, but in fact, it involves that of white people just as much. In order for the “other,” the historical slave in this dynamic, to be suffering pathologically, there has to be an “I” who did something that was wrong to them. Those of us on the other side of the divide often succumb to the white bias to “split” black individuals into the “not-me.” We do this unconsciously and unintentionally, but we still do it. Emotions and group psychology consistently overpower our internal rational defenses.

The heart of the issue is really the regulation of emotions. White people from the middle and upper classes take for granted the historical social and biological conditions that have provided them with an environmental context that promotes healthy self-regulation. This type of environment gently guides the self, throughout early life, along a positive trajectory towards loving relationships, a love for kindness and a tendency towards humility. Of course, not all these emotions are equally present within every relationship, but there are definitely more of them found on the side of Caucasian culture, and they are there because of the continuity of and identification with having healthy historical relationships, as well as a cultural identity of being “white” (the same can be seen in regard to those who identify as “Asian”).

Unfortunately, we still live in a rather heartless society, and the people most prone to rigid identifications are people who hold very polarized and judgmental views of the “other.” Their similarity is found within their stubborn resistance to hearing (and feeling) the positions of the other. Splitting is what creates this resistance. When it seems as if someone is oppositionally against you, you can’t help but unconsciously associate them with “wrongness.” This is where absolutist forms of speech such as using the words “always” and “never,” and other such phrases that completely ignore the complex and multifarious nature of reality, come in.

The problem with racial orientation is that we lose sense of our human commonality. There are things about each of us that are phenomenologically identical. From birth, we are helpless and vulnerable babies needing, fundamentally, the help and support of the other—the mother. Depending on how our mother was with each of us, our early nervous systems, primarily the lower brain stem and limbic regions, were formed to feel secure with other people, or insecure with other people.

Now, transplant that knowledge to the current situation, in relation to black people. We all know the year is 2014, but the behavioural patterns of intergenerationally transmitted emotional tendencies are still firmly in place. Black individuals are more likely to be born into hostile worlds with people who behave in a hostile manner with other people, and this is not in the least bit their fault. A good majority of them have gone through similar experiences within their early environments. We forget this because, when we look at one of them, we see the adult. But if we could rewind and see the baby who passed through scary experiences, we could understand why they developed in a particular way, and more importantly, how utterly insensitive it is to assume that it would be easy for them to change.

On that note, behavioural possibilities don’t become possible without being catalyzed by some sort of relationship. Most black people who’ve come into the world and succeeded in this society, like the conservative economist Thomas Sowell, owe their success to certain catalyzing relationships or a pre-existing relational context not available to others of their race, that enabled them to develop the life that they enjoy.

As a non-black person, I see it as my responsibility to assume a position of humility as I think about and talk about black history. In order to accomplish this, I have to be mindful of my own feelings—specifically, the certain processes that work unconsciously when we think in ways that activate binary patterns in our brain—“I’m white; he’s black.” I have to ensure that they don’t cause me to be insensitive to the emotional realities, and the underlying biology that keeps them strong, of another’s experiences. Overall, what’s important is understanding and respecting how emotional dynamics are, from a scientific standpoint, actually deeply ingrained biological realities. Hopefully, the acceptance of this notion can help motivate empathy towards the struggles of various racial groups.

[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”]Mike De Freitas is an independent researcher with interests in mindfulness, developmental neurobiology and education. He lives in Bradford, Ontario.

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