Letters to the Editor
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We need neuroscience to tell us this is innate?
How about plain ol' logical deduction?
Hypothetical situation - a kid is looking out his car window at a passing farm, points and says "look, mom... doggie." The mother corrects the child and says "no, that's a cow." She might add "cows say moo" or "cows are our spiritual superiors," but mostly, the kid is - on his own - subconsciously comparing what he knows about dogs to what he sees in the cow. His brain might assume that all cows live on pastures. Or it might conclude that all cows are brown. Or both. And more. But the brain has made patterned decisions based on previous information and new information, and this is precisely how we all learn until our brains are developed enough to start thinking logically.
Which brings us back to race. I remember, as a youngster, seeing a black man for the first time in the store, pointing to him, and saying "Look, Dad, Isiah Thomas!" Now, according to my father, the man looked nothing like Isiah Thomas, and he had to correct me. But my five-year old brain thought "black man = Isiah Thomas." And this same process, to a continually smaller and smaller degree as we age, continues. Our brains spot patterns and notice trends (msot wrod pzuzels wrok uendr tihs pcipnlrie), especially when those have been pointed out to us ahead of time (such as the classic double picture of a young lady/old woman) - very useful in most arenas, not so much in trying to avoid subconscious racial profiling.
So what I'm getting at is that, yes, it's neuroscience (unless our consciousness resonates on some level outside of our brains), but it seems ridiculous to me to claim that we have a "racial center" of our brain when the patterning that occurs in human learning easily explains this trend.
Jeez, the last thing we need is a group of human guinea pigs unable to identify other peoples' faces because overzealous scientists and media spurring them on mistakes the human "face recognition and processing" area for some sort of "magic box of prejudcial mystery."