While there are obviously folks of different races running around, the amount of import that we give to it differs. Take this article in which it’s written that at three months, babies prefer to look at faces of the same race. When that’s the race of the faces they’re used to seeing. Sorta. The experiment was done with Israeli babies in Israel, Ethiopian babies in Ethiopia, and Ethiopian babies in Israel, the latter of which would be the control group, since they would be expected to regularly see faces of both races. Just thinking about it real quick, an interesting follow-up experiment would be to see if babies make intra-racial distinctions. That is, would an Ethiopian baby from Ethiopia look more at the face of a Nigerian or an Israeli? Simple questions can’t get at the good complexities.

Even more complex is something that we take for granted in the United States, because even though we have different dialects, the differences are minor. We’re all basically intelligible to each other, which means that language bias doesn’t come into play (at least, not among babies). To wit:

[Babies] like toys more that are associated with someone who has spoken their language. They prefer to eat foods offered to them by a native speaker compared to a speaker of a foreign language. And older children say that they want to be friends with someone who speaks in their native accent.’ Accents and vernacular, far more than race, seem to influence the people we like. ‘Children would rather be friends with someone who is from a different race and speaks with a native accent versus somebody who is their own race but speaks with a foreign accent.’

These findings make perfect sense according to two California-based pioneers of evolutionary psychology, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. In the Stone Age, race was next to useless as an identifier, because most people would never have travelled far enough to see anyone of a different skin colour. Accent, vocabulary and dialect would have helped distinguish friendly tribes from foes. Tooby and Cosmides concluded that humans are born with a predisposition to divide the world along ethnic lines traced out by language and accent, more than racial lines.

This also explains the preference of “Black” Hispanics to think of themselves as “Hispanic” first, and Black second, if at all. Having been raised in the US, where skin color trumps all, I always thought something was weird about that. But then, I’m in the linguistic majority. I suppose that in a country where the primary language was different than my own, I’d fall in with other speakers of my language group, too.

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