If someone is racist, or something along those lines, is it genetic or is it because of parental upbringing? Or by something else?
Answer
This is certainly not genetically determined, there are no indications for that. Look at it differently: racialism, racism and bigotry are in all of us; they are part of the search for identity, group belonging, etc.
People need Others, Enemies, to define themselves, to distance themselves. Striking Others are people with a different skin color, of a different social class, of a different gender,…
This fairly normal social-psychological process of identification and distancing (inclusion and exclusion) can be facilitated, weakened or interpreted by the upbringing (parents and school). Of immense importance is growing up in as diverse a multicultural environment as possible, a situation towards which we in the West are growing more and more.
So yes. Upbringing (parents and school) has to do with this, because it promotes intolerance, stimulates it or because they cannot offer enough resistance against those fairly common (and in that sense ‘normal’) temptations; too little resistance, usually due to a lack of insight into these mechanisms.
Answered by
prof. dr. Gie van den Berghe
morals, ethics, history of Nazi camps and genocides, eyewitness accounts, the Enlightenment, eugenics, Darwinism, historical photographs, transhumanism
http://www.ugent.be
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