{"id":52170,"date":"2012-10-23T11:00:24","date_gmt":"2012-10-23T16:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=52170"},"modified":"2013-07-14T14:10:16","modified_gmt":"2013-07-14T19:10:16","slug":"52170","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/10\/23\/52170\/","title":{"rendered":"Neurology, Racism, and Exposure to Diversity"},"content":{"rendered":"

New neurological research, reported by Robert Wright at The Atlantic<\/em><\/a>, suggests that racism is learned. \u00a0Earlier studies had shown that the amygdala, “a brain structure associated with emotion and, specifically, with the detection of threats,” is active, on average, when White people see Black faces.<\/p>\n

A new paper<\/a>, however, led by Eva\u00a0Telzer, shows that we don’t see this reaction until about age 14. Moreover, \u00a0how powerfully it is after the age of 14 depends on the racial composition of your peer group. \u00a0White people who grow up in more diverse environments show a much weaker reaction than those in homogeneous ones.<\/p>\n

This figure illustrates the difference. \u00a0As peer diversity increases, reaction of the amygdala retreats to zero.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is what it means, Wright explains, to say that race is a social construct:<\/p>\n

It’s not a category that’s\u00a0inherently<\/em>\u00a0correlated with our patterns of fear or mistrust or hatred, though, obviously, it can become one. So it’s within our power to construct a society in which race isn’t a meaningful construct.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For lots of examples of why race is socially constructed, see our Pinterest board<\/a> on the topic.<\/p>\n

And, for other super cool stories about biology, see language, culture, and color<\/a>; a story of human echolocation<\/a>; human brain synchronicity<\/a>; and men with higher voices have higher sperm counts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Originally posted in 2012. Re-posted in solidarity with the African American community; regardless of the truth of the Martin\/Zimmerman confrontation, it\u2019s hard not to interpret the finding of not-guilty as anything but a continuance of the criminal justice system’s failure to ensure justice for young Black men.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New neurological research, reported by Robert Wright at The Atlantic, suggests that racism is learned. \u00a0Earlier studies had shown that the amygdala, “a brain structure associated with emotion and, specifically, with the detection of threats,” is active, on average, when White people see Black faces. A new paper, however, led by Eva\u00a0Telzer, shows that we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[664,283,285,1760,1757],"class_list":["post-52170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-biology","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans","tag-raceethnicity-whiteseuropeans"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52170"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56372,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52170\/revisions\/56372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}