Ask any black person will tell you that there are many blacks, who are more racist towards other blacks than whites. The other day, I found myself alone on a street with a black man. I was frightened. There was no apparent danger. I wouldn’t have been frightened if he had been a white man. Now my Oreo phase is long over—so wassup with that? I thought long and hard about it. I remembered a study some colleagues did at UCLA, where they showed people pictures of men in threatening situations, and they morphed the faces slightly to make the person in the picture appear to be Asian, White, Black, or Hispanic. Across the board, in all subjects, including blacks, the amygdala, the brain regions, which responds to threat, responded greater to the black man than to the others, even though it was the same man, in the same situation! The gradient went: most afraid of Blacks, then Hispanics, then Asians, and least afraid of Whites—no surprise there.
But that’s nonsensical, because historically, there has been no more dangerous group of people than white people. The Vikings, The Nazis, The Huns, The Romans, The Scots, The Franks, The Saxons—the Druids were the only reasonable White people—and they were busy sacrificing their own, left and right. If anything, the amygdala should respond exactly the opposite as it did—and it would, if the amygdala was in the cortex, which is the thinking part of the brain. However, like I am regrettably in Mar Vista, the amygdala is regrettably in the old R-Complex of the mammalian brain, which I like to call the ghetto brain. It’s the “survive now, ask questions later” part of the brain. It does not, and cannot distinguish between actual and perceived threat, because doing so could be a lethal liability.
To understand why humans are obsessed with a Teutonic based Pigmentocracy, you have to go back---way back—tio the Pliocene Epoch, between 5 to 1.3 million years ago. During the Pliocene, our simian ancestors experienced a allele split it the retina cones, resulting in color vision, sparking simians to evolve from insect eaters (the insects were meatier back then) to fruit eaters. Simian predators, e.g. jackals and hyenas, were colorblind nocturnal carnivores with laser sharp night vision. Color vision for humans, came at the expense of impaired low light vision, making fear of darkness a necessary survival instinct. The brain consolidates and simplifies information, e.g., the trillions of trial-and-error survival lessons synthesized into the basic “fight-or-flight” instinct.
Humans are the ultimate symbol smiths. Superiority at symbol usage is the distinguishing characteristic separating humans from humanoid primates, for example, humans’ ability to use graphic configurations to create written language. Thus, creating consensual realities has always been a copious human enterprise because all symbols are consensual realities. From a neuro-evolutionary perspective, humans’ proclivity for symbolic interaction, in tandem with the brain’s proclivity for consolidating and simplifying information (e.g. fearing darkness promotes survival) is conceivably how darkness came to symbolically represent bad and evil (e.g., darkest hour, dark personality, black hearted, the black knight versus the white knight etc.). Fear of darkness is an intrinsic simian evolutionary fact etched in nature. Just as darkness symbolically representing bad and evil is a consensual reality etched in human nature and expressed in language and visual arts.
Scientific studies reliably report that interpersonal threat can be specifically linked to social anxiety symptoms. We define “stress” as the processes involving perception, appraisal, and response to harmful, threatening, or challenging events or stimuli. The thinking part of the brain, or the Pre-frontal Cortex, easily recognizes the absurdity of feeling threatened by an individual based on their skin tone. Regrettably, the pre-frontal cortex doesn’t process threat—the amygdala does—and for 5 million years the humans have told themselves through epigenetic expression, emotional valence of memories, and the mass subscription to the consensual reality that dark is bad and dangerous, and therefore a threat. Thus, resolving the complexities of pigmentocracy in our world is far more complex than it appears—and seemingly the only solution is interracial breeding in hopes of moving towards the middle—which is really going to pose a challenge to humans, because marriage is hard enough when people are like minded. Trust me, I’m married to a white man… and just the light meat versus dark meat of the turkey alone at Thanksgiving is nearly insurmountable…. Holla back chirren!
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