If you’re a regular reader of COTTonLINE you are probably looking at what is going on with BLM, CHAZ, rioting, and looting and you’re wondering how this is happening and why now? I’m no expert but I’ll take a stab at trying to figure it out.
Racism is a subset of a universal human characteristic, the characteristic by which we determine who our allies are, who is on our side. Like it or hate it, this characteristic is embedded in behaviors like having a sports team to root for, being a nationalist, being a local, being a strong political partisan, or having a serious religious belief.
The more you identify with a group and see it as better than other groups (because it’s yours), the more you are likely to view others as inferior, misguided, perhaps evil or repulsive. This tendency is hard-wired in humans, think of it as our “default or ‘factory’ setting,” the thing we revert to when we’re not paying attention or actively working to repress it.
You can find examples of this human tendency essentially everywhere humans live in any quantity. Anthropologically, it is tribalism, or the things which fill the role of tribalism in multicultural environments. And tribalism is an extension of ‘familyism,’ our bonds to those of our blood.
We can suppress this characteristic, hide it, deny it, camouflage it, disparage it ... it is still there, it doesn’t go away. What’s happening now is a flare up of this by one group, and guilt felt by those of another who know they’ve harbored it too.
Will the troubles burn out and go quiet for a spell? Probably, if past history is any indication. Will it leave unattractive scars on the national culture? Very likely, much as the troubles of the late 1960s did. Who, or what, will the major casualties be? I’d guess the universities, the media, the tech companies, and mainstream religious groups - none will be unscathed.
Will the nation stumble on beyond this trying period? Yes, but not without being weakened, unfortunately. Societies which accumulate enough such scars fail, but I judge (or perhaps “hope”) we aren’t there yet.
