(March 9, 2014 at 6:10 pm)Beccs Wrote: People, as far as I'm concerned, put too much emphasis on skin colour.Because it's one of our most obvious features, and therefore it's the easiest way for our minds to quickly determine where you fit into whatever preconceived notions we have about people. Hair and eye color are a close/distant second, respectively. The sound of your voice and any accents or affections probably follow. And so on.
We are wired to make such judgments about people and it takes some work to overcome them. I'm fortunate because my mother is what I guess you could call "virulently anti-racist." She absolutely would not abide any sort of racist talk or terms and seethed whenever anyone around us did so. But that doesn't mean that on some level, I don't "prefer" people who resemble me in any number of ways over those who do not. It just makes it a bit easier to work to overcome that mental block.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
