Is Racism Part of Human Nature? is something that Hot Abercrombie Chick asks. Her answer was well written, but, in my opinion, wrong.
Human nature can be defined in many ways. She seems to exclusively define it in terms of universals applicable to all humans. This is, from my point of view, quite clearly inapplicable. Most humans can see. Sight, and vision processing, is probably something fundamental to how humans generally function, and perhaps even how the race evolved (if you believe in evolution). Does this make blind people not human? No. But is it generally accepted part of what it means to be human – blind people are the exception, not the rule. This concept that there are rules, but that there are exceptions, is what lead to the phrase “the exception that proves the rule”.
Perhaps you think the above example trite. Consider a variety of things, such as “capacities for”. For example, the capacity for love is one thing that many a person might believe, or like to believe, that all humans are capable of. This thus must mean that it is part of human nature to have a capacity for love, correct? Similarly we can apply this same line of reasoning to hate as well, can we not? And so on and so forth.
The capacities of humans to feel/think/do a variety of things are, I think, fundamental to an understanding of what human nature is. How can we understand what humans will do or naturally do if we don’t understand what they can do?
Once that is taken care of, there are also issues of what humans tend to do, or what they would naturally do. I think we all have instincts, such as the withdrawing of a limb from a painful experience, such as fire, that are all quite natural for us to engage in. I think it would be fool hardy to not call such behavior human nature. In fact, it may very well be animal nature in general. I imagine that there are a whole host of other such behaviors.
Of course people can overcome such instinctual behaviors. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t naturally a part of a human’s nature. It just means that, with training, they can not engage in those instinctive behaviors.
To make a statement about human nature is is to state something about tendencies, not about absolute universals.
She says
Making claims about human nature is bad news
which I believe is an over-generalization. I think it is revealing when we can state (often with evidence) of what humans are capable of (both good and bad) and I think that is something we can learn from, and that that tells us something about human nature. I also think that there are general human tendencies which can be found in every society and time throughout the ages which are also quite clearly part of human nature as well.
As for how this plays out with racism and such, I’d like to recommend Darwinian Natural Right.