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Category Archives: spark your spirit
no fear, no bias
When I first read this I thought it was a joke. I suppose it had something to do with naming this a disorder when it seems like we should all be striving to attain such open-mindedness when it comes to race and the perception of otherness. Then I thought we should all be so lucky as to be born with this “disorder.” What this article doesn’t mention though is that there’s a lot more to Williams syndrome than lack of racial biases. It is not a joke. And hopefully there will be a cure someday. I’m grateful to those who did this study and hope to hear that further studies with racially-mixed families will be done to test this explanation of fear based racial biases.
Individuals with Rare Disorder Have No Racial Biases
Robin Nixon
LiveScience Staff Writer
Never has a human population been found that has no racial stereotypes. Not in other cultures or far-flung countries. Nor among tiny tots or people with various psychological conditions.
Until now.
Children with Williams syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that makes them lack normal social anxiety, have no racial biases. They do, however, traffic in gender stereotypes, said study researcher Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the University of Heidelberg in Germany.
illustration by Anne Sibley O’Brien
Normally, children show clear preferences for their own ethnic group by the age of three, if not sooner, other research has shown.
And, indeed, the children in this study without Williams syndrome reliably assigned good traits, such as friendliness, to pictures of people the same race as themselves. When asked something negative, such as “which is the naughty boy,” they overwhelmingly pointed to the other race.
Children with Williams syndrome, however, were equally likely to point to the white or black child as naughty or friendly.
While this study was done with white children, other research has shown that blacks and people of other races also think more highly of their own, Meyer-Lindenberg told LiveScience.
Williams syndrome is caused by a gene deletion known to affect the brain as well as other organs. As a result, people with Williams syndrome are “hypersocial,” Meyer-Lindenberg told . They do not experience the jitters and inhibitions the rest of us feel.
“The whole concept [of social anxiety] would be foreign to them,” he said.
They will put themselves at great peril to help someone and despite their skills at empathy, are unable to process social danger signals. As a result, they are at increased risk for rape and physical attack.
Nature or nurture?
While the first human population to demonstrate race-neutrality is missing critical genes, “we are not saying that this is all biologically-based and you can’t do anything about it,” Meyer-Lindenberg said.
“Just because there is a genetic way to knock the system out, does not mean the system itself is 100 percent genetic,” he said.
The study does show, however, that racism requires social fear. “If social fear was culturally reduced, racial stereotypes could also be reduced,” Meyer-Lindenberg said.
Despite their lack of racial bias, children with Williams syndrome hold gender stereotypes just as strongly as normal children, the study found. That is, 99 percent of the 40 children studied pointed to pictures of girls when asked who played with dolls and chose boys when asked, say, who likes toy cars.
The fact that Williams syndrome kids think of men and women differently, but not blacks and whites, shows that sex stereotypes are not caused by social anxiety, Meyer-Lindenberg said.
This may be because we learn about gender within “safe” home environments, while a different race is usually a sign of someone outside our immediate kin. (Studies to test this explanation, such as with racially-mixed families, have not yet been done.)
Racial biases are likely rooted in a general fear of others, while gender stereotypes may arise from sweeping generalizations, Meyer-Lindenberg said. “You watch mother make the meals, so you generalize this to everyone female.”
In their heads
Due to the present study, we now know that “gender and race are processed by different brain mechanisms,” Meyer-Lindenberg said, although those involved in gender are less understood.
Previous work has shown that in the brains of people with Williams syndrome, the amygdala – the emotional seat of the brain – fails to respond to social threats. While the amygdala itself is functionally normal, it is misguided by the pre-frontal cortex – the executive of the brain – to block all social anxiety.
This system is now thought to underlie racism, but it seems uninvolved in the formation of sex stereotypes.
Meyer-Lindenberg and colleagues are now using brain imaging to get a clearer picture of how racism and sexism are differentiated in the brain. The present study was published in the journal Current Biology.
start right now
Excerpted from “The Wisdom of No Escape”
by Pema Chodron
There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs, and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly.
Tigers above, tigers below. This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life, it might be the only strawberry that we’ll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.
Trungpa Rinpoche always used to say, “You can do it.” That was probably one of his main teachings, “You can do it.” Thich Nhat Hanh, in his Guide to Walking Meditation, begins by talking about how everybody carries around this burden, and if you want to put it off, if you want to lay it down, you can do it. You can connect with the joy in your heart.
…When things are still, you may find that you are feeling grim and doing everything with a grim expression: grimly opening the door, grimly drinking your tea, concentrating so hard on being quiet and still and moving slowly that you’re miserable. On the other hand, you could just relax and realize that, behind all the worry, complaint, and disapproval that goes on in your mind, the sun is always coming up in the morning, moving across the sky, and going down in the evening. The birds are always out there collecting their food and making their nests and flying across the sky. The grass is always being blown by the wind or standing still. Food and flowers and tress are growing out of the earth. There’s enormous richness. You could develop your passion for life and your curiosity and your interest. You could connect with your joyfulness. You could start right now.
The Navajo teach their children that every morning when the sun comes up, its a brand-new sun. Its born each morning, it lives for the duration of one day, and in the evening it passes on, never to return again. As soon as the children are old enough to understand, the adults take them out at dawn and they say, “The sun has only one day. You must live this day in a good way, so that the sun won’t have wasted precious time.” Acknowledging the preciousness of each day is a good way to live, a good way to reconnect with our basic joy.
mulatto diaries 