So does our biology doom us to poor race relations? Not according to Robert Kurzban of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Indeed, he argues that evolutionary theory, modern genetics and the available empirical data all argue that race, per se, is not a dimension used by human brains to automatically categorize people. First, he argues that evolution could not have selected any racial bias, since our ancestral hunter-gatherer selves were not able to travel far and would have only very seldom encountered other “races” if indeed they ever did. Second, he points out that among geneticists, “race” has become an antiquated term that means relatively little; there is much more variation within racial categories than between them, so any analysis of “race” is chimerical – the construct of “race” is of uncertain validity at best. Finally, he and colleagues John and Leda Cosmides have shown that it is relatively easy to reduce the extent to which people categorize others by race. When people are encouraged to associate individuals with teams, indicated, for example, by wearing either gray or yellow t-shirts, they are much less likely to attend to racial differences. On the other hand, sex differences are still very likely to be used to categorize people, despite encouragement to categorize along other dimensions. Add these results together and what do you get? The conclusion that though we are born ready to categorize people according to their sex, our tendency to categorize by race is learned. Further, Kurzban and his colleagues have found that it is easy to cause people to unlearn racial categorization. It takes the average person about four minutes. [240 seconds.]

So what are we left with? Yes, we have a biological tendency to form coalitions based in part on what we are not. And yes, we also have a biological tendency to distrust and despise the groups we do not belong to. But our use of skin color (nominally “race”) to form such coalitions is arbitrary and learned. It is not in our nature to be racists, per se. In the end, racist policies are unscientific and illogical, and when they derive secondarily from our natural tendency to despise individuals who are unfamiliar, they are lazy and puerile. Trent Lott, in both his literal and figurative forms, may not be evil or even particularly mean-spirited. But his sympathy for segregationist policies and ideologies reveal him to be both intellectually lazy and immature, if not stupid.