I think Grace's question on racism can be summarized more as, "How can prejudice be rationalized?" That question has produced a number of interesting and divergent reponses here, and I'd like to comment on a few points.

First, it's clear that the transmission (teaching) of historical and cultural prejudices, in the classroom, is a subject that must be approached with extreme care. It's been a while since I've been in high school, but when we studied the issue "Why did the settlers not enslave the Native Americans?", we were made to recognize it in its context: It was THE SETTLERS who thought of Indians as lazy and weak. As I understand it, they even had a "reason" for believing so -- but *we* do not. Back then, the first Portuguese and Spanish traders in the Americas unsuccessfully attempted to impose slavery on the Arawak and other tribes. Their efforts were thwarted by the natives' devastating lack of immunity to European diseases (such as smallpox). One of the governors of the time even complained that a healthy Amerind, taken in the morning, would lay down sick on the job by afternoon, and be dead by nightfall. So it is not surprising that this pattern of belief -- that the natives were mindless savages who *ought* to be enslaved, but they were unsuited to it -- continued during the subsequent colonization of North America. And it would be foolish to pretend that this and other cultural rationalizations for slavery never existed in the past.

Of course, the dangerous part about all this is that today's students can absorb such cultural prejudices divorced of their historical context, and fail to see the inconsistency.

Which brings me to my second point. I've been struggling to understand how darwinism got dragged into this discussion on prejudice. One poster even equated the teaching of evolution in school with instruction in racism! But I'm wondering if the problem stems from the way it's taught. Evolution in its proper sense is the study of genetic variation in species and the mechanism of inheritance in organisms. That is all. But if, in the classroom, discussions on evolutionary theory are diluted down to the catch-phrase "Survival of the fittest" (a phrase coined not by Darwin but by the philosopher Herbert Spencer), then this indeed *isn't* science anymore. It's a disguised ideology instead... and one, I think, that hijacks the valid biological concept of natural selection, and twists it. This train of thought unconsciously interprets darwinism as a moral imperative upon behavior meaning "Might equals right" and winner-takes-all. I find this extremely disquieting. Taken to its logical conclusion, this type of false "Social Darwinism" provided the Nazis with a "justification" for bigotry, forced eugenics, slavery, and "ethnic cleansing" (i.e., plain old genocide). So if natural selection, as learned in class, is carrying such a repressive baggage... Is THIS why evolution at school has received such bad press??

Wolf "Prejudice can be subtle and pervasive... Where do you think our cultural image of the Devil comes from, as being red-skinned and hairless and carrying a pitchfork?" Spirit