Even the article was blunt and to the point. It seems there’s no sweet way to sugarcoat the findings of a recent study conducted by psychologists at Brock University in Ontario, Canada.  This longitudinal study followed a group of babies born in 1958 who had their intelligence assessed at various ages.

The study concluded they found a correlation to racism and prejudice were linked to simply being dumb. 

I was not stunned, but rather fascinated. This is a bit like discovering a long suspected truth for which there was no particular answer but merely a sharpened intuition. And to make it clearer, the study asserted that low intelligence individuals were more apt to hold to conservative political ideologies.

Findings postulated that an individual’s willingness to cling to simplified beliefs (like, the world is a dangerous place, etc.) were more consistently resistant to change.  Those who fit this belief category were also more likely to clutch onto a hierarchy in which people or things are classified.  I was giddy, flushed, and savored every word of their findings.

We know that prejudice is a preconceived opinion or feeling. In almost any human social setting, this sorting phenomenon is inevitable. People of a like mind seem to gravitate toward one another. Understandable, after all, who wants to hang out with folks whose views are radically different than yours? We find comfort in consensus.

But carried too far in the other direction, it becomes xenophobia. That is to say, it morphs into an unreasonable fear of that which is strange or foreign from oneself. To me, this is the life’s blood of racism. The article goes on. These faithful scientists said they found a correlation to lowered intelligence in childhood with a tendency to polarized thoughts on race in adulthood.  Brains and bias were linked with a tendency to social conservatism and a lack of abstract reasoning.  Plus, they found people with lower cognitive abilities (smarts) had less real contact with those from other racial backgrounds.

These were loaded statements. As a disclaimer, the study emphasizes it did not want to over generalize that there was no such thing as bright conservatives or dumb liberals. Since I know people who fit into both categories, this is reasonable.

Now the context of this study is plain. Not so much that prejudice exists, but why it exists. It is alive and thriving not only in this country, but in virtually any nation where ethnologies mix. The purging of such polarizing views is one of the first steps to social equality.

While the study linking dumbness and racism can probably be disproved, the evolution of civil rights in the 1960s is a prime example of how xenophobic societies can legally exist. We can see that state laws backed up the artifice of categorizing people within their hierarchal position.  At the time, it was one that the larger society felt comfortable with and perpetuated.

Besides the obvious, the bright spot here remains that efforts to alter prejudiced thinking encourages folks to see a broader point of view, scientists said. They speculate that prejudice is often based on emotional, rather than cognitive factors. If so, then the key to changing racial bias lies with modifying peoples’ feelings about different groups. This implies that belief systems, even long held ones, have the ability to evolve.  These are seeds of hope even in a modern society.

“Nothing in the world is as dangerous as sincere ignorance or conscientious stupidity,” wrote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. over forty years ago. The reasonable conclusion of which seems to be backed up by this remarkable Canadian study.

 

S.E. Ruckman is a citizen of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes in Anadarko, Okla. She graduated from the University of Oklahoma’s School of Journalism and has written for the Tulsa World and the Native American Times. She is a freelance writer who is based in Oklahoma.