How Your Brain Looks at Race

Robert Kurzban remembers when he felt a whisper of hope that racism was neither inevitable nor permanent, and certainly not something hard-wired into the human brain. He had just Photoshopped different colored basketball jerseys onto images of eight young men, some black and some white, that he was using for a psychology experiment. Volunteers viewing the photos on a computer screen heard each man say something like "you were the ones that started the fight"; a few minutes later they had to remember who said what. Human memory being what it is, the volunteers made mistakes. But it was the nature of the mistakes that gave Kurzban hope. If a quote was spoken by a white man wearing a yellow jersey, the volunteers typically misattributed it to a man also wearing a yellow jersey—but of either race. In a startling twist on the old saw that "they all look alike to me," the volunteers mistook one yellow-shirted guy for another, but not one African-American for another or one white man for another. The brain, then, can override racial categories with something as arbitrary as shirt color. "This happened even though people have a lifetime of experience of categorizing others by race, but only a few minutes of categorizing by shirt color," says Kurzban, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. "Under some circumstances, you can get people to ignore race."

Is this presidential campaign such a circumstance? One experiment in the artificial setting of a lab might not be very persuasive on the question of whether racism is eradicable, especially when pitted against real-world evidence of how African-American home buyers are discriminated against by financial institutions, for instance, and dark-skinned criminal defendants are treated more harshly than whites by jurors. But the primaries and caucuses have produced equally real-world evidence that race may matter much less than it once did. Barack Obama won the 93 percent white Iowa caucuses, and carried the white vote in Illinois, Wisconsin and other states. Democratic primary voters are not exactly representative of the whole electorate, however, and in November even small pockets of racism could make a difference. Whether they do, say political strategists and scientists who study racism, depends on how well Obama can manage something akin to the scientists' ruse with the basketball jerseys: persuade voters who might reject an African-American or biracial candidate to re-draw the lines that denote who is "one of us" and "on my side."

Obama himself does not believe that America is "post racial," a phrase he rejects as naive. To the contrary, reports NEWSWEEK's Richard Wolffe, who reports from the Obama campaign, the senator recognizes that the country's legacy of racism is too deep to be eradicated overnight, or even over the course of his campaign. Nevertheless, Obama has said, voters are judging candidates on their ability to fix health care, foreign policy, the economy and education, not on a candidate's racial identity.

Just a few short years ago, neuroscientists as well as political consultants would have called that wishful thinking. Scientists believed that the human brain automatically classifies individuals by race, just as we classify them by sex and age. Recent research confirms that the brain evolved specialized circuits that make the latter two classifications. But the idea of a brain module for racial categorization was always problematic. Simply put, back when the human brain was evolving a few million years ago, our ancestors didn't get around much. They therefore had no chance to encounter people who looked different from themselves. "There would be no adaptive advantage to a mental module that automatically took note of someone's race," says Penn's Kurzban. His basketball-jersey experiment and others that have confirmed its results suggest that humans do have brain circuits for classifying people—but according to whether they are likely to be an ally or an enemy. In some societies, skin color can indeed be a true clue to that: in the Jim Crow South, if you had black skin, it would have been quite useful to quickly classify a white-skinned person as someone who might shove you off a sidewalk, or worse. In other societies, however, skin color is no indicator of whether someone is friend or foe, as the recent tribe-on-tribe bloodshed in Kenya shows. It therefore makes more sense for the brain not to get hung up on skin color or other race-based aspects of appearance, but to be flexible and nimble about which signs of group membership—of "like me" and "on my side"—it picks up.

Candidates have a choice about which such signs they present to voters. In his 1984 presidential campaign, Jesse Jackson said repeatedly that it was "black people's turn" in Washington. That made it inevitable that many voters would see him as a black candidate more than as, say, the candidate of change or economic populism. Obama has not taken that path. "Senator Obama hasn't run away from being black, but he hasn't run a campaign that is defined by him being black," says Kam Kuwata, a Democratic campaign consultant and former campaign manager for California Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Obama has made sure that voters see him as, first, a Democrat—an identity that will become even more prominent if he wins the nomination. In politics, the most salient group identity is party; about 80 percent of both Democrats and Republicans vote for their party's presidential nominee, and in a campaign where Democrats are fired up more than they have been in years, that percentage could be even larger.