Earlier this month, the New York Times reported on two groundbreaking studies that bravely attempted to meld the areas of social psychology and neuroscience. The Times article focused on a study which appeared in NeuroReport. Neuroscientists measured levels of activity in a part of the brain called the amygdala when the subjects were presented with pictures of people from different racial groups. The amygdala is located in the “inferior worm” of the cerebellum and is a center involved in strong emotions, learning and memory. They found that white subjects exhibited higher activity in the amygdala when presented with a photograph of a black person, and black subjects showed heightened activity in the amygdala when presented with the picture of a white person. For the record, your amygdala is the part of the brain that sounds the alarm when you spot garish purple toenails, cooked spinach or the aurora borealis. Anything new and different immediately causes your amygdala to do back flips. Neuroscientists are using this experiment to explore the physiological realm of race and emphasized that our idea of race may, from a purely anatomical perspective, be as substantiated as excitement over the tooth fairy. The other study, which was published in Neuroscience, was a bit more sobering. Not only did the researchers see the heightened amygdala activity when subjects saw a photograph of someone from another race, but when the subjects were administered “implicit association tests.” The subjects tended to associate “positive” connotations with whites and “negative” connotations with blacks. Peace. Joy. Love. White. Cancer. Bomb. Devil. Black. I read the article and was deeply concerned about what my own amygdala was doing. I thought back to my semester in Kenya, when I was the only white student at a public university. I wondered what sort of responses my peers would have created if they had been the subjects in the studies. Little kids in Kenya were often scared of me, because they hadn’t seen a white person just walk down the street to the market before. The word for white in Kenya is derived from one tribe’s word for “something strange” which is evidence that on top of all the troubles the Europeans brought when colonizing Kenya, the natives thought they looked weird to boot. When I visited a village in a very rural area, the looks of confusion and agitation on the faces of some of the villagers puzzled me, but now I can safely say that my crazy pale complexion was pretty much sending their amygdalae shooting out of the cerebellum and through the roof. I know that my amygdala probably got an overhaul because I got pretty fatigued with being a minority and some days prayed for the chance to refund my pasty whites for a darker, richer looking epidermis. My previously familiar skin color transformed into an ugly nuisance, and I began to see myself as alien and inferior because I had this annoying skin color that only caused me to draw untoward attention when I really wanted to be a human being. The majority can spread the blame, but the minority gets the burden of answering for anything anyone their skin color has ever done. I crossed the threshold from disliking the actions of some white bozos who had decided to dominate the world to beginning to dislike myself, because I happened to be white, too. One theory the neuroscientists proposed was that because people are taught from a young age that race is important, this social need for distinction creates a heightened reaction in one’s amygdala. In other words, if no one ever pointed out that a racial difference was important, our cerebellum may be happy as a clam without stressing over the appearance of another human being. I’ll be interested to read the studies published with the brain activity of those from multi-racial backgrounds or those who have had no previous exposure to people of another race. A friend in Kenya once held my hand and pointed at the brown mole in the center. “This part of you is the same color as me.” He turned his palm upwards. “This part of me is the same color as you.” I really believe that our amygdalae were dormant.