August 2015
Your initial take of the video is that everyone at Bournemouth Beach is Black. There is more to it than that though. Bournemouth beach, right next to the pier, is never empty. White and Asian bathers also frequent the beach. They will have been there when the Black bathers arrived. So what happened? Where did the White and Asian bathers go?
It’s a process. As the beach begins to fill up with Black bathers, the Asians and White people start to feel uncomfortable and leave. Newly arriving White and Asian bathers will have looked at all those Black bathers and decided to bathe elsewhere, so the beach stayed Black.
The Black visitors to Bournemouth didnât bring any White or Asian friends with them. They didn’t bring any White or South Asian members of their families with them either. Indeed, who says they have any?. So the scene remains Black. How does this come about?
People tend to prefer their own ethnic groups. Humans arenât born with racial bias, but theyâre well on the way by the age of three months. They donât get that from their parents either. Three months is the age at which they are able to discriminate between faces from different ethnic groups, white, black, Asian etc. Pretty soon they are associating positive things with the face thatâs bringing them up. So if a child is brought up by a French speaking white mother, the child develops a positive bias towards French, white and women. Repeated studies on children not only confirm this, but also show that this âbiasâ is a bias for something, not a bias against something. By the time they are 5-8 years old they have âautomatic in-group positivityâ. By the time they are adults, Own Race Bias is fully established. All races have it.
Your âOwn Raceâ becomes your âIn-Groupâ, the group with which you identify and admire. When the in-group-building factor is a personâs race, then cross-race effect appears. The favouritism of in-group members also results from the decreased inborn motivation to read the face of a person of another group or culture. The data from all studies have come to the same conclusion. The cross-race effect is evident among all people of all different races.
When you combine the positive bias of the âIn-Groupâ with the negative bias of the âCross Race Effect, you have racial prejudice. In societies it becomes part of culture, and becomes entrenched in that culture. Itâs common to all races, starts in infancy, and itâs something which has to be un-learned when children are young.
This is true for Black people, true for White people and true for South Asians. What we ended up with in Bournemouth, and it is happening in other areas too, is social apartheid, a racial integration failure, or in modern parlance â multiculturalism. In politics it is a cute practice to rename your political failures and re-brand them as victories. Multiculturalism is apartheid.
For the detail on origins and ubiquity of racial prejudice, see Origins of Racial Prejudice – Not Woke
August 2024 was the same
