هل نولد عنصريين؟ Quotes

“As Susan Fiske and Kareem Johnson describe in the first two essays of this anthology, recent research in social neuroscience has revealed that prejudiced reactions are linked to rapidly activated structures in the brain that were developed long ago in our evolutionary history. Does this mean that racism is hardwired into our neural circuitry?”
― Jason Marsh, Are We Born Racist?: New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology

“It’s that simple: building friendships with people of other races seems to eliminate unhealthy stress responses, so that each new interaction can be greeted as a challenge instead of a threat. In a racially diverse society, those who feel comfortable with people of other races are at an advantage over those who do not. These results have profound implications for the way we design our neighborhoods and institutions;”
― Jeremy A. Smith, Are We Born Racist?: New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology

“The bottom line is clear: harboring racist feelings in a multicultural society causes daily stress; this kind of stress can lead to chronic problems like cancer, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes. But interracial interactions are not inherently stressful. Less prejudiced people show markedly different physiological responses during interracial interactions. In all three of these studies, people who had positive attitudes about people of other races responded to interracial interactions in ways that were happy, healthy, and adaptive.”
― Jeremy A. Smith, Are We Born Racist?: New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology

“Harvard’s Ichiro Kawachi agrees. He identifies a range of social policies that would be vital to promoting greater socioeconomic equality—and hence, better health. “Make an investment in education, for example, to give people a decent start in life,” he says. “We can subsidize childcare, which is a major stress for low-income mothers, especially those who are single parents. We can expand unemployment insurance and expand access to health care. This is controversial only in the United States. Other societies view health care as a basic human right.”
― Jeremy A. Smith, Are We Born Racist?: New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology

“Both low socioeconomic status and racial discrimination tap into the same corrosive elements of psychosocial stress, namely lack of control and predictability, lack of coping outlets, and a static system that allows little room for optimism.”
― Jeremy A. Smith, Are We Born Racist?: New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology

“Research has linked such feelings of powerlessness to the kinds of health problems plaguing Bayview and many other communities around the world. This research shows that members of poor communities do not merely experience higher levels of violence; they are also more likely to have high blood pressure and frequent periods of increased heart rate, which contribute to a higher mortality rate. What’s more, similar health problems have been shown to afflict the least powerful members of nonhuman primate species. Taken together, these and other findings suggest that the psychology of powerlessness can wreak havoc on people who sit low on the totem pole of any social structure. “Poverty, and the poor health of the poor, is about much more than simply not having enough money,” says Robert M. Sapolsky, professor of neurology at Stanford University. “It’s about the stressors caused by a society that tolerates leaving so many of its members so far behind.”
― Jeremy A. Smith, Are We Born Racist?: New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology

“In a powerful demonstration of this, psychologist Lisa Blackwell and her colleagues showed seventh-grade students how the brain grows and makes new connections when we learn, much like muscles becoming stronger. The exercise reminded the students that they can grow their intelligence. In subsequent testing, these students improved their math achievement across the difficult transition to junior high school, whereas another group of students, who had not been exposed to Blackwell’s lessons, showed a decline.”
― Jeremy A. Smith, Are We Born Racist?: New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology

“These studies are about a lot more than foul calls and strikeouts. They’re about the nature of racism today: subtle, pervasive, persistent. And they force us to consider some uncomfortable questions. If umpires and referees, who are professionally trained to avoid bias, are still subject to racism, what hope is there for the”
― Jeremy A. Smith, Are We Born Racist?: New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology