For an arbitrary mental construct, it is remarkable how closely race matches clusters in a principal component analysis of the human genome: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Worldwide_Admixture_...
Black and white was a competitive construct of us and them. It is that simple. Human culture really isn’t more complex than that. It is just strategies and tactics layered atop the same goals animals have.
Re:Overcoming Us vs. Them (2017)
by DoreenMichele on Friday August 07, 2020 @10:21PM
(#24088419)
No, in this case it was a simple way of saying "This group of people can be slaves and that group of people cannot be slaves" which is why we get weird demarcations about how you are still "Black" even if you are only 1/8 African: So slave owners could rape their slaves, father children upon them and treat those children as slaves for several generations.
In the US, our weird definitions surrounding "Black" and "White" are a polite euphemism for "People officially marked as someone you can victimize and people officially marked as someone who can do the victimizing."
Which I didn't really want to baldly state because it isn't something Americans really want to hear.
I liked your first post, but this one is in line with the article.
Slavery is a competitive construct.
Re:Overcoming Us vs. Them (2017)
by bingobongo1 on Friday August 07, 2020 @11:23PM
(#24088672)
Compassion is key.
I don't know what you are hoping for here. This is probably not it.
I spent a fair amount of time in therapy in my teens and twenties. I'm quite convinced that a lot of our identity is a mental construct.
Let's take race. What makes someone "Black" or "White"?
It's not their skin color. You can find "Black" Americans and "White" Americans with very similar skin tones.
It's not their blood. The US decided somewhere along the way that people who are 7/8 Caucasian/European ancestry and 1/8 African ancestry are "Black." I have read these same people would be classified as "White" in Brazil.
It's not their culture. Even if a "Black" person gets a good education, etc, they will still be othered by most "Whites."
Anyway, we get taught certain categories and mental models and it winds up being taboo to think too hard about where they come from and what they mean and why they were really created and we live with the legacy of those inherited mental models and then those mental models shape both how we see ourselves and with whom we identify as "Us."
In other primates, those associations will tend to be more rooted in "This group takes care of me and I have positive associations with them and I'm one of them" and "This other group is openly hostile to me and they are my enemies and they are a problem, not an asset to me."
Human culture is more complex than that and it ends up being super hard to find a way out of those traps.
Even if you can find your way out, other people will try to keep pushing you into one of the preexisting categories in their own mind.
So the real question is "How do we find a path forward on getting group think to change?" because lots of people do therapy, sort their crap ...and then find that other people are actively affronted at their failure to fit with existing mental models.