Philosopher Michael Levin says in 1994: “Why are whites acting the way they are? Why have they handed over the world they created to a group whose only contribution to debate is anger and accusation? I believe the answers may be partially rooted in biology and evolution.
“When two groups with different social signals get together, they are going to misunderstand each other. Whites misunderstand blacks. Whites have been evolving with whites for many thousands of years. They have evolved a cooperative ethic, a more cooperative ethic than has evolved in Africa, where life is easier, it’s not necessary to hunt large animals, it’s not necessary to divide the kill and to store the meat during the winter in a way that will satisfy everybody, there has been a less evolved sense of justice. Social signals have evolved… Certain tones of voice, facial expressions, and gestures have a certain signalling function.
“For example, if you begin to scream at me, this means that you are very angry. Among whites, a certain level of anger can usually be reliably taken to indicate a real harm and a real wrong has been done and we’ve evolved a reaction when we see that expression to feel a desire to see what’s wrong and to try to make it better. These reactions were adaptive when we were living together in small groups in Eurasia. This is a reaction that whites can’t help having to anger. Among whites, it is an accurate reaction to an emotion that’s really there and it’s socially useful. But now blacks, having evolved a looser sense of cooperation and a looser sense of justice, and being more impulsive, have a much lower readiness to become angry. If you’ve heard black conversations on the street, they are the sort of conversations where you think a fight is about to break out, you’ll find it’s just joking.
“What I think has gone on in the last 30 years is that the force proximity of whites to blacks have played into this difference. Black anger is misinterpreted by whites as evidence of real harm, which in turn triggers in whites a solicitous desire to alleviate the harm (that isn’t there). This triggers further black reaction because blacks learn that anger gets these solicitous reactions from whites. The solicitous reactions from whites do not cause the black anger to go away as it does among whites. If someone is yelling at you and you mollify him, the general result will be that he’ll calm down and things will proceed as before.
“What happens in black-white interactions is that blacks get angrier and whites get more confused. This triggers their innate tendency to seek a solicitous solution. Blacks become angrier.”
“Why didn’t this happen 150 years ago in the South? The population difference was greater. There was no question which group was in charge, which group’s morals were to be observed.”
“The only way to cut through this dialectic is simply to allow whites to be by themselves for a while and to recover their forces and to not constantly subject them to this constant black rage… Whites can’t keep their balance when this goes on… They need to catch their wits.”
