Racism is natural. We are all racists. Racism, biases and stereotypes from a Neuroscientific perspective.

Ok. I know that this is not a politically correct statement. We tend to view our selves as important and we are more morally confident than we should be. We are inclined to believe that we are good people and that we are immune to biases and prejudices. Me, a racist? Come on. Right? But our brains suggest otherwirse. Our bains are actually built on racism and in-group/out-group discriminations that we are not implicitly aware of. Only if we accept our nature we can do something about it, and this only by making the implicit, explicit.

People tend to categorize and discriminate on everything. We are not only prone to racial biases but pretty much everything around us are examined and evaluated based on preferences. Skin color is just one of them. Take beauty for instance. We all value beauty, symmetric V body shapes and we spend entire fortunes to look good. Imagine how obese people feel about this, when whole industries value slim bodies and diets. We usually make fun of obese people every day by laughing at memes but very few people have the honesty to admit that they are doing it. Employers discriminate every day when they prefer attractive women (or men) working as waitressess, bartenders, beauty shops, gyms, spas, underwear shops, sports shops, etc.

And that is not the fault of the employer. He is not being an asshole. Any employer in general prefers happy, smiley, good-looking faces and bodies, extroverted, out-going, cooperative, obedient, cheerful, intelligent employees and prefer anything that looks good to the eyes (or the ears). We (the majority), the public, the average Joe, chose this. We are sensational creatures and we value more our sensational physiological instant gratification than the emotions of others as much as think otherwise.

The same thing goes for everything. We discriminate based on looks, appearance, intelligence. We like different tobacco and alcohol brands, coffee, tea, food, clothes, cars, houses, colours, have a different taste on pretty much everything. And this is the beauty of individual differences. Someone might argue that racism and preference are completely different things but if you think about it its exactly the same mechanism in action. For instance, in my country employers prefer specific ethnicities for particular types of jobs. They would hire a foreigner to work in agriculture, farms, cleaners, caregivers for the elderly and the disabled because many foreigners are faster, they can work for an exhausting amount of hours of labor work, they cost less, they think different from the dominant culture (Cypriots), they are conditioned in a certain life-style that we apparently are not used to and cannot handle. Apparently, in this case, we do prefer hard-working and faster hands. And I am not talking about social and cultural differences only, conditioning, mindset, habits, customs, cultural indoctriniation. I am talking as well about biological differences, genes. No matter how debated this is or politically incorrect.

The same goes with football and any type of sports. Some ethnic groups are born with better (or worse) traits. Some are taller and can play better basketball, other cultures produce better bodybuilders or powerlifters because most of them are born with a particular body (endomorph) shape. Even if someone starts a heated debate on the culture/biology, nature/nurture thing, one needs to consider how the culture and lifestyle nonetheless affect the genes through reproduction. Therefore, biological factors cannot be elliminated entirely.

Similarly, if you want a tall, blonde white actor with a particular accent for a very particular role, you will know where to look.If you want to know which country produces the best football players you know again where to look.

There has been a massive effort (usually by the Left) to silence all the voices who dare to mention any biological differences because this might sound 'racist' but this is like denying basic human nature. We are all humans and we are all cousins in a sense but nobody has managed to quantify what does that 0.000% which separates one from another really mean. Is it big or small? The same goes for the 1.6% which differentiates us from chimpanzees.

Now from a neuroscientific standpoint someone can point-out my main argument. That we are all racists, prejudiced, and discriminatory and to support this it only needs for someone to take a professional 'implicit' test. These type of tests, such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT) have shown that people react with a bias (by a few milliseconds faster) and they believe (on a unconscious level) what their culture has brainwashed them to accept as natural even though they deny it at a conscious level: That men are stronger or even more intelligent than women, that fat people are disgusting and repulsive, that black people are inferior, that the Scotish are drunk and stingy, that Italians are sneaky and sly, that a particular minority in their country are lazy, drunk, stupid and many other stereopyes that we mostly use in jokes. After all, one needs to wonder where do jokes and stereotypes come from if they are not hold a nugget of truth. Through years of bombardment of information all these information are now a part of our 'collective unconscious', even accepted as realities but they only come out in subtle ways (after a few drinks, in moments of anger, through jokes and sarcasm), etc, etc.

(http://www.news.com.au/finance/work/careers/the-simple-test-that-determines-if-youre-subconsciously-racist/news-story/cfbfc79590e0ee2e636bb991de071ef5

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40124781

Similar findings demonstrate for example that our amygdala (the center of fear and anxiety) reacts faster when we see a black person in a dark alley than a white person. The same findings have been replicated when we see an individual who is not a part of our group, an out-group member who is not similar to us, either this is race, culture or some other attribute which is not present in our group. It is simply registered as 'different', 'alien' and our brains warn us to protect our selves. Now this happens implicitly, at a milliseond rate, and we are not consciously aware of it, our bodies are though and other subtle facial cues and reflexes but we can overcome this after some effort, after prefrontal cortex processing. Prefrontal cortex prosessing allows us to overcome our implicit tribal automatic effortless responses by recruiting analytical effortuful reasoning, critical thinking such as ' Ok, he is gay but he might be a good person and this does not mean anything' or ' ok he is black but that does not make him a shoplifter or a burglar'. This rationalization is a response to the amygdala circuit which informs us that something is unfamilar, strange, even threatening and we need to act, but the 'logical' part of the brain takes over and sends input to the limbic system that everything is all right.

And this is the source of all unwanted behaviors we see among people such as nationalism, tribalism, in-group/out-group violence, discrimination, stereotypes. Stereotypes and categories allow us to decide faster, not better. They are not meant to be accurate or representative of a situation. They are instinctual survival mechanisms nurtured by evolution and this is why they are components of human nature.

Further Readings:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3973920/
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/12/15/study-shows-unconscious-race-bias-found/
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0ee6/4e6fe4c286e5b87e13058b6c2cc25f67bf1c.pdf
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-media-psychology-effect/201604/mris-reveal-unconscious-bias-in-the-brain