[Editor’s Note: Charles Hayes is an independent philosopher, former Dallas police officer, and U.S. Marine Corps veteran who’s recent works (see note about the author below) have taken on difficult topics of racism, violence, and policing in American society. In this essay, he summons scientific research on brain functioning to trace the roots of racism and how we can respond to it.]
There is so much confusion about the reality of racial bias. Most of it is due to our refusal to admit how evolution has equipped us to safely navigate our daily experience. We are biologically predisposed to be suspicious of strangers because we are exceptionally prone to favor that which is familiar. In The Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam puts this in perspective: “Our blindness to bias seems willful—until you remember that the central feature of unconscious bias is that it is unconscious.” Our categorizing, in the sense of “us versus them,” is not something that we have conscious control over. Our brains have been doing this for us all our lives simply to make sense of what is before us. We stereotype automatically. If not for our ability to ostracize for otherness, we would be incapable of bonding. We have known about the bonding hormone oxytocin (often called the love hormone) for nearly a century, but it was only a few years ago when researchers at the University of Amsterdam discovered that this hormone is also a cause of tribalistic behavior, in that, at some mysterious point of experiencing too much otherness, it seems to trigger the impulse to ostracize.
Racism is such a difficult social problem that eliminating racial prejudice seems for the most part a manic social goal. Almost no one wants to admit they are guilty of harboring racial animosity. And yet, incidents of overt racial bias are frequently front-page media subjects. What we haven’t understood until recently is that our limbic system acts as a biological sentinel alarm that front-loads our life experience with warnings of potential physical harm or embarrassment in milliseconds, well before our frontal cortex (our executive brain function) is even aware of what is transpiring. Beyond physical harm, the historical cost of social humiliation was sometimes lethal.
Evolution Brought Us Here
In other words, evolution has equipped us biologically to check for warnings of possible harm up front, enabling us to act without hesitation in the case of threats. This makes perfect sense to a species that spent eons on the dinner menu of large predators or being killed by marauding tribes of strangers. For most of humanity’s existence on the planet, it was wise to be wary of strangers and to be always on alert for danger. We still have this predilection intact, although the dangers we face have lessened and changed their context. But most of the time, our thinking about this subject, without acknowledging our evolutionary development, totally misunderstands what we are up against. Abject racism aside, most people don’t want to be racially prejudiced, yet our brains have already done the subconscious sorting that categorizes people in an “us versus them” fashion. Neuroimaging shows that we do this early on, automatically, without an awareness that we have done so.
All it takes to treat someone differently, using a different standard, is to see them as the other, in any context. Hatred or conscious animosity is not necessary to do this, yet the results of othering can be just as damaging as if real hatred were present. To have any hope of eliminating harmful discrimination, we must stop making this an issue about whether we are overtly prejudiced and simply face up to the fact that evolution has wired us to pay remarkably close subconscious attention to every scenario that could result in harm, which includes anything and everything that seems unfamiliar. Rest assured, our gray matter has already taken care of this without our knowledge when we were toddlers.
This harsh reality has a tremendous impact on our nervous system and our brain wiring. In my 2020 book Blue Bias, I characterize our limbic system, which contains our brain’s major emotional regulating structures, as a sentinel awareness system for our personal safety. Our limbic system is alert 24/7 to keep us safe: It evolved to warn us of threats in milliseconds before our frontal cortex (our executive brain function) is even aware of the possible harm. In other words, limbic system warnings evolved out of necessity to enable us to act quickly without having to spend time thinking and reflecting about what we need to do. Simply put, we are evolutionally equipped to jump to conclusions in milliseconds based on scant observations.
So, when we consider how such a warning system would work effectively to keep us safe, it becomes clear that it would be necessary to learn from every experience we encounter in which danger or embarrassment of any kind might exist. And thus, our sentinel awareness system pays attention and records assumptions when our frontal cortex, our executive brain function, is not even aware that observations are being made. We are still equipped with the evolutionary gray matter that kept our primitive ancestors one step ahead of large predators on the Serengeti Plain. What makes this process problematic is that we internalize misperceptions as easily as we do correct assumptions. We will never be able to successfully address implicit racial bias until we fully understand how our minds work.
The kind of danger we face has changed dramatically, but our brains haven’t. A thorough understanding of our subconscious is necessary because it holds a key to our understanding the ever-present nature of intentional prejudice or assumptions based on simple categorical observations that are completely without malice, but in which the results mimic overt racism. We are predisposed to be fond of the familiar, but just thinking our group is special doesn’t make it so. Deeply imbedded in the bedrock of all cultures is the inherent assumption that our group is more important and more virtuous than other groups by nature of who we are. If it were otherwise, our species might not have survived.
Our hyper-sentinel awareness front-loads our life experience so that we become aware of the things we suspect or fear before we have the time to think carefully about what is occurring. Our brains put caution upfront. Again, this makes sense. Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, explains how it works. Thinking fast, Kahneman’s System One, is our limbic alarm system at work; thinking slow, or System Two, is the work of the executive function of our frontal cortex. System One is automatic. We have very little control over our fast thinking, so it is easy to appreciate how bias works, especially when we are not paying close attention and using slow thinking to closely examine what we are experiencing. Fast thinking in the case of potential harm is limbic based, intuitive, while slow thinking is more logically analytical.
Nurturing Bad Nature?
We begin as infants, sorting and categorizing everything we see, hear, and touch to make sense of the world, and only death will stop us. In his book Why We Snap, neuroscientist R. Douglas Fields explains how neuroimaging shows clearly that racial prejudice and stereotyping are wired into our brains as a means of making sense of the world. Numerous studies explain how as infants we become astute observers of the facial features of our relatives, with the ability to easily recognize individuals of our own racial groups, but we remain somewhat flummoxed when it comes to recognizing individuals of other races, which is where the common slang of they all look alike is shown to contain a kernel of truth.
When I was growing up in the 1940s and 50s, children had good reason to believe that the people who lived in nice houses were mostly white, that nurses and schoolteachers were white women, and doctors, lawyers, and politicians were white men. It is a big mistake to conclude that this experience does not result in a subconscious worldview of assumptions about the implied virtue of being white and the stigma of being black or just decidedly different. Whatever kind of experience we are engaged in as we grow up leaves us with unambiguous assumptions and impressions that are for all practical purposes permanent because we do not have the knowledge to rewrite this life experience, to overwrite the subconscious memories with their vast array of intuitive opinions only milliseconds away. The bottom line is that, if we grow up in a culture where races or groups of people are stigmatized, it is almost impossible not to have been influenced, at least as a matter of degree. This is why people en masse deny being racially biased, yet our collective biases show that, statistically, we live in a society in which racial bias is ever-present and socially oppressive.
If the groups we belong to have critical opinions about any subjects, from racism to politics to food preferences, rest assured our subconscious has made note and will regurgitate on cue if the need arises. For most of us, by the time we are adults, we have adamant biases about many topics, along with a whole host of subconscious assumptions that will only surface if we are called upon to offer judgment. The role our subconscious plays in too many subjects to list is analogous to our having done a sloppy job of photoshopping our life experience. Many intuitive conclusions our subconscious has assumed to be correct are casual, half-baked observations. We jump to conclusions based on scant information and because we don’t follow through, we are left with internalized assumptions that were misplaced to begin with.
Thus, when we encounter strangers or members of groups we have subconsciously identified as “others,” if we are acting without the intense intervention of our frontal cortex, we are left to respond primitively to the situation, so to speak. In other words, unless we shift gears by deliberately forcing the executive function of our frontal cortex to take over the interaction, then it will continue as it began.
Our Brains and Bias
Implicit bias is not a rare phenomenon: Bias is what brains do. Being cautious and conservative in our sentinel awareness makes evolutionary sense, but we need to adjust for modernity. We are no longer on the Serengeti Plain in Africa scanning the horizon for man-eating beasts. And yet strangers, uncertainty, and otherness still trigger our fast-thinking limbic system to take the slightest applicable cues from our experience as a need for caution. Those people whose work is often dangerous need to know when to override their sentinel system when executive thinking is called for and they need to be so well trained in what to do in emergencies that they can act without thinking. In other words, they must rehearse for action which requires thinking about what they need to do next, precisely when there won’t be time to think.
Our biases are not a sign of our poor character; they are instead simply the way brains have tried to prepare us to live in a dangerous world. The circumstances of our lives have changed radically, but our brains haven’t. Unfortunately, because we are not taught how brains work, we are likely to spend an extraordinary amount of time denying the reality of what our brains have naturally assumed is the case.
If we follow the evidence in neuroscience, which reveals through neural imaging that categorizing and otherizing is something our limbic system does automatically on its own, and if we then use our frontal cortex to intervene, and thus compensate for our having a photoshopped subconscious, we can mitigate implicit biases with an awareness that special attention is needed, like a flashing yellow caution light to alert us that unbiased frontal cortex judgment is required.
When we are called upon to make decisions and judgments in which bias is known to be a concern, to deal with it effectively, we must be hyperaware of what we are up against. We must engage our frontal cortex and think through the issue we are dealing with by being exceptionally thoughtful. And before you tell me that in your case it doesn’t count, because you didn’t grow up with any Black people present or that your parents taught you to respect everyone, this is just nonsense. Indeed, if one’s community while growing up is all white, it may in fact increase the likelihood of seeing African Americans and other ethnicities as the other. If we grow up in a racially prejudiced culture, even the people who are discriminated against are likely to internalize some of the humiliation. Racial bias is built into our entertainment and literature and its ubiquity makes it hard to detect because it just seems like reality.
I keep reading comments by people who decry so much emphasis on race in America, especially from conservatives who still vehemently believe that their conscious mind has a slam-dunk grip on reality, that what they see is what they believe, and who do not understand that they have it exactly backward: that what they believe is what they see. Robin DiAngelo in her book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, has struck a nerve with such intensity that some people cannot or will not read her book, not because it is not true, but, in my opinion, because they don’t want it to be true. What I find truly irksome is that there are so many people who accuse authors focusing on the ubiquity of racism of being guilty of calling too much attention to the subject who can’t seem to comprehend how important the issue is for people who have experienced oppression all of their lives because of it.
The haunting question is why our behavioral professionals have not yet explained how racial bias is passed from one generation to the next. They have not clarified the dynamics of implicit bias so that we all understand that, in making instantaneous caution-based decisions, our brains are functioning as designed. This must be considered common knowledge before we can mitigate hidden prejudice.
We are never going to deal effectively with the subject of racial bias in this country until we face up to the fact that our brains work the way they evolved to work, not as we wish them to work. Once we realize that we are predisposed to be hyperaware of all reasons for caution and suspicion where otherness is involved, we can set about to think our way through the matters at hand and mitigate the effects of implicit bias. Until then, nothing else is likely to work.
About the Author
Charles D. Hayes writes on philosophy, politics, society, and lifelong education, including Evolving in a Dangerous World Made Racism Inevitable: Concerned Citizens, Police Officers, and Teachers Can Help Change This (2022) and Blue Bias: An Ex-Cop Turned Philosopher Examines the Learning and Resolve Necessary to End Hidden Prejudice in Policing (2020). For more information about Hayes and his books, see Autodidactic Press.