Researchers in the United Kingdom say they may have found a way to fight racism.
The heart disease medication Propranolol is believed to have a side-effect that reduces racism.
Volunteers who took the drug scored lower on a psychological test of implicit racist attitudes than those who were given a placebo pill.
Scientists say racism is largely based on fear, and Propranolol acts on both nerve circuits that control heart rate, and the part of the brain involved in fear and emotional responses.
Dr. Sylvia Terbeck says the study offers “new evidence about the processes in the brain that shape implicit racial bias.”
She adds that even people who believe in equality can have an implicit racial bias.
First thing: if someone is white, then there is no need to use quotation marks around the word white, as if to suggest that there really is no such thing as a white race. There is.
Second thing: Why were only white people selected to be the test subjects? There is very good reason (e.g., crime statistics) for the opinion that non-whites are more affected by racism than are whites. There is reason for the belief that, as compared with whites, certain non-white racial groups hate more intensely.
For example, in the United States the black-to-white per capita rate ratio for murder is 7.5, meaning that the average black US resident is 7.5 times more likely to murder someone, as compared with the average white US resident. However, when only interracial murders are considered, the average black is 23 times more likely to murder a white person than vice versa.
Now, if we suppose (as seems reasonable) that the b/w ratio for murder, irrespective of the victim’s race, indicates the greater tendency of blacks for violence without reference to any racial motive, then we are left with the remaining factor of 23/7.5, or about 3, as the b/w ratio in the capacity for feeling racial hatred. The criminal justice data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports and other Justice Department documents indicates that US-resident blacks experience racial hatred to a degree sufficient to motivate murder about three times more commonly than US-resident whites do.
I expect that similar statistics exist in the UK, though they might not be as accessible as is crime information in the United States. One thing that is certainly true is that political correctness has a stronger stranglehold on the public discourse in the UK than is true at present in the US. I can tell the truth about race without being arrested for “hate”; most British people cannot.
Political correctness is most probably the reason for why white people were targeted for this drug-based behavior modification experiment, despite all of the evidence that argues that white people are the group which is least in need of such modification.