Have you ever been sitting in a meeting or just driving down the street and see a black, middle easterner or obviously gay person and “The Thought” creeps into your mind.  Before you have a chance to stop it, you have entertained racist, prejudiced thoughts.  Thoughts that make you feel ashamed and dirty; thoughts you don’t believe and would never say out loud.  So, where did they come from?

The secret may lie deep in our brains in the Amygdala.  The Amygdala is an ancient part of the brain.  It is in charge of fear learning, most notably the “flight or fight” response.  Our large frontal lobes have given us lanquage and civilization but our poor little amygdalae have given us life by helping us survive long enough to get those large brains.

What does this have to do with prejudice?  Our amygdalae is in charge of making us afraid, but the amygdalae is not very bright.  It can’t store a lot of information so it has to store just a few unique things.  The amygdala is also not very good at figuring out what things we should be afraid of.  Chemicals released in the brain cause the amygdala to “store” or consolidate memories of events.  Our amygdala, activated by chemicals, chooses any unusual marker accompanying the threat.  It’s assumption is a good one, most of the time it is not active, so being activated is a unique event caused by unique circumstances.  Any unique sight, sound or smell is recorded to mark the event.  When the unique marker is experienced again the process works in reverse.  Chemicals are released to cause the “freeze or flee” response.  So could our amygdala cause prejudice by storing unusual skin coloring, clothing, or accents, and ignoring the unusual markers of the majority population?

Veterans who startle at fireworks or POW’s who cannot lock the doors to their homes are experiencing the amygdala at work.  Fireworks are not like mortar rounds to the rational mind, but to the amygdala the sound releases massive amounts of chemicals. 

9/11 was a beautiful, clear, blue, cloudless day.  One person who watched the planes crash into the buildings, gets a little anxious on crisp, clear autumn days when there is a slight chill in the air.  The amygdala scanned the memories of the day and picked out the obvious threats but also noted clear blue skies and cooler temperatures.  The information is not obviously relevant, but the amygdala doesn’t know or care.  It just knows something awful has happened which could cause it to go extinct.  Heart racing, chemicals pumping, the amygdala knows this is the real deal and stores information.

Why do I believe the amygdala has a role in developing racial and ethnic prejudices which lodge deep in our brains?  Have you noticed that prejudice is usually associated with minority populations and outward appearances?  You probably think this is a silly question.  But why don’t we have prejudice towards white people in mostly white populations or toward people who eat soup a certain way?  Behavior would be a more accurate way to be prejudiced against people because what we are afraid of is behavior, not skin color or whether a person is wearing a turban or kafia.  You can claim that American prejudice is because of our heritage of slavery, but prejudice was the reason and justification for slavery, not a result of it.  Also, in a 20/20 program, tests, which try to get at sub-conscious prejudices showed that blacks are also slightly prejudiced toward blacks.  If slavery was the cause of prejudice then why would blacks be slightly prejudiced against other blacks?

Any activity by blacks, which caused learning and fear at the same time would cause the amygdale to store “black” as a fear marker, in the same way it would store red frogs and not green frogs.  It would not store white skin as a marker because 80% of the populations is white.  That marker would not be helpful.  We can’t go around being startled by 80% of the population.  But let a black face show up on the nightly news often enough and the brain will start to associate blackness with a fear response. 

We are not afraid of the Amish because even though the don’t look like the rest of us, not many of them rob banks or commit violent crimes.  (perhaps they change out of their Amish clothes to look like the rest of us before resorting to a life of crime to support their lavish life style).

I now have a loathing of pudgy, white, middle aged men who are slightly balding.  This seems to be the appearance of child molesters.  My amygdale has seen this profile often enough to store this profile as a threat to me and I just don’t like them.  My next door neighbor was molesting his step-daughter and this is exactly how he looked.  So is this really helpful to me or a problem for my future survival as a gene carrier?  My amygdala has nothing to loose from my being afraid of pudgy, white, balding men, and everything to gain.  It may have identified the nicest people in the world as threats, but if just one of them is harmful, I am protected and have lost nothing from my prejudice, since there are so many other people who do not meet this criteria with whom I can associate.

Our conscious mind knows more than our amygdala and constantly dampens or reinforces our fears.  So why did Mel Gibson say what he did not mean?  Because he was drunk.  Alcohol depressed the rational brain and lets our amygdale do the talking.  Alcohol does not tell the truth of our whole mind.   Our amygdale is a child living in a murky, half understood world full of fear.  So if you are having white mans guilt over a thought that peeped into your brain while your conscious mind was idling, relax, you are not an evil bigot.  You are just a survivor of evolution with an active amygdala.

This is not to excuse joining the KKK, putting on a white sheet and burning crosses on another person’s front lawn.  The amygdala has nothing to do with that.  I mearly mean to try to offer an explanation for why we sometimes think what we do not mean and would never say out loud.  Our conscious brain has a role in controlling our amygdala and mitigating our fears.

Further research? – are there any populations where the population has subconscious prejudice against the majority?  (South Africa could work here, but you will have to show that black south Africans are subconsciously more afraid of blacks than whites)  Are there any populations which do not show sub-conscious fear of minority populations where they is crime amongst the minority population (Amish exception).

Reading: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Lifeby Johnson, Steven