Economic Anxiety and Racism: It's not Either/Or
For those of you engaging in the racism vs economic anxiety debate, let's take a minute and consider the human animal and it's behavior from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist. We know, from observation, that human beings are highly social, cooperative, and tribal. This means that human beings survive by cooperating but also compete for resources with other human beings by forming teams, aka tribes. This is all instinctive, pre-intellectual, animal behavior. Racism, unfortunately, is just one way that the tribal instinct plays itself out. People find all kinds of dumb, arbitrary distinctions for deciding who is "in" or "out" of their group, all of which is driven by the basic tribal instinct. "Us" vs "them" is hardwired. It's the same reason y'all get so into your dumb sportsball teams. So, really, the problem we're dealing with currently is our biologically driven behavior is rooted in an environmental situa...