Do White People Suck?

 In the wake of the recent discovery of unmarked graveyards at residential schools in British Columbia (at least 219 bodies) and Saskatchewan (at least 751 bodies), I've seen an outpouring of outage from some of the Twitter accounts I've been following.  One said simply "White people suck!  Don't @ me".

At first, I dismissed it as just one more emotive expression that didn't mean anything; but then I began to wonder.  Do white people suck?  Or is it just that people in general suck and white people just happen to collectively hold systemic power in much of the world?

This isn't a meaningless question.  Maybe white people really do suck.  Maybe there is some genetic predisposition to power-seeking behavior or perhaps western culture is predicated on conquest instead of peaceful coexistence and this leads to endless subjugation.  If that's the case then all of us, especially white people, owe it to the world to identify and eliminate this tendency.  

On the other hand, maybe the tendency to distrust and discriminate against those who you perceive to be not like you is a near-universal evolutionary response to our tribal roots.  In the pre-civilization era, it would have been a survival advantage to trust members of your own tribe and distrust others.  Is it possible that all forms of discrimination whether it be based on race, religion, culture or other indication of group allegiance is predicated on a primitive 'friend-or-foe' identification mechanism?  

 Still, the question remains:are white people generally more racist than non-whites?  Well, not according to the (admittedly limited) research I did.  Researchers conducted a survey asking people if they would be comfortable having neighbors of a different race and found that the most tolerant countries (surprisingly for many of us who live in them) are in North and South America, Australia and western Europe.  Conversely the worst were in Asia, Africa and Middle East.   

Anyone who's read this far might be tempted to dismiss all of this as rationalization and ask "Why does any of this matter?  Shouldn't we be against all racism?"

 Here's why I think it matters. If it's true that racism and other forms of group discrimination are evolutionary tendencies inherent in all of us, then many of the solutions proposed by liberals and leftists are wholly unlikely to rectify the issues and in fact are more likely to make them worse. The rise of identity politics and the propensity to see events through filters of race, gender, sexual preference or other identity dimension may actually be triggering to the unconscious forces within us that are predetermined to perceive other groups negatively.  Similarly, reparations for historical wrongs, affirmative action, and subsidies targeted at marginalized groups could cause resentment and further the tendency towards discrimination.

If we really want to build a world where everyone is perceived on a equal basis, it seems to me that the way we do that is to stop accentuating differences that are often based on superficial qualities (eg skin tone) and build societies based on shared goals, shared values and mutual respect.

And for the white people proclaiming "White people suck", no doubt you mean well; but you're more likely part of the problem than part of the solution.