22 Trial Lawyer • Spring 2024 and one in kung fu, so he left me alone. And before we were married, Olivia let me know of a time she’d had drinks after work with some Hispanic girlfriends that she hadn’t seen for a while. When she told them that she had gotten engaged to a Chinese man, one of the women exclaimed, “Chinese? Girl, you’re pretty enough for a white boy!” Now for every story of BIPOC racial bias, we can find one from the white community. I am sure this surprises no one as it takes little to realize that the pots and the kettles in this play are all black. Why then, are we so shocked when our own racial biases, whether overt or implied, are pointed out to us? It’s sort of like being overweight In America, we all eventually become heavier than we should be. Obesity has become a huge health problem, and the three-letter “F” word is not used in polite company. But we can all agree that something needs to be done, on all levels, to reduce our collective rates of obesity. There is little controversy about engaging in the study of why our food and habits are making us overweight. Few consumers are upset by the implementation of sensible laws and dietary guidelines to reduce obesity and its attendant health risks. In other words, Americans don’t get offended by the funding of obesity research even though such research necessarily implies that we are fat. One reason could be the more we learn about ourselves, the more we understand that overeating is part of our evolved human physiology. In the hundreds of thousands of years of our evolution that preceded this relatively short agricultural age, we foraged and hunted for food like most other land mammals. Calories were scarce and the supply unpredictable. As a result, we evolved along with our animal brethren to store calories as body fat to survive the lean times. This involved eating as much of the most fattening foods we could find on the rare occasions they were available. We also moved a lot more. In our current age of abundance, however, where we can afford to discard as much food as we consume, this doesn’t work out so well. Our evolved tendencies have not caught up with this new reality where we move less and eat more, causing us to pack on the pounds. What does this have to do with racial bias? For hundreds of thousands of years, humans lived in hunter-gatherer groups where small bands of people had to cooperate within their bands to survive. Life was brutish and resources were scarce. Therefore, interactions between groups were necessarily competitive and often hostile. Humans who did not distinguish between their own group and other groups likely did not live long enough to pro-create. Hostility toward the other was a survival mechanism. As people divided into racial groups, race became a primary delineator between groups. Therefore, our current attitudes toward people of other races stem from this evolutionary in group/out group way of perceiving people. For more on this, see “Why Our Brains See the World as ‘Us’ versus ‘Them,’” Henderson, Leslie, Scientific American, 22 Jun. 2018, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ why-our-brains-see-the-world-as-us-versusthem/, and this lecture by OHSU Neuroscientist Larry Sherman called “You and Your Racist Brain,” YouTube, uploaded by The Royal Society of Victoria, 19 Sep. 2018, https://youtu.be/r3N88xIW ujE?si=dOkfeIPxifxMVcDU. This pluralistic age is brand new on the evolutionary time scale. Our bodies and minds have not yet shed all the attributes that, while useful in our recent past, are liabilities in the modern world. We still have wisdom teeth that no longer fit our jaws. We are still wired to react to immediate dangers instead of the longterm threats more likely to kill us today. We choose the short-term gain to be had from privileging our own tribal groups Racism Continued from p 21
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