One of the major plotlines in Commander in Chief is when President Mackenzie Allen (played by Geena Davis) is given an old film of her archrival, Speaker of the House Nathan Templeton (played by Donald Sutherland), who, as a young congressional candidate in the 1960s, spews talk of black racial inferiority to a group of potential campaign contributors.

Allen could use the tape to ruin her rival’s career, and she does indeed show Templeton the film (by the way, is that Keifer Sutherland playing a young Nathan Templeton?). Templeton claims that he never believed what he said in the film, and that he was just doing what it took to get elected in those days. If we’re to believe this TV portrayal of racism, then in just 40 years, we’ve progressed from a society where overt racism, at least in political backrooms, was a requirement for office, to one where it’s political suicide, even in the deep south.

But surely racism exists in America today: we’ve seen it in the faces of armed police officers blocking the exit of New Orleans flood victims across the bridge into lily-white suburbs. We know how hard it can be for an African American to hail a taxi, and sometimes, even to get a job. The FBI recorded over 7,000 hate crimes as recently as 2004. If racism is such a taboo, why does it persist?

Unfortunately, I believe it’s because of human nature. We naturally group together with people like ourselves. Don’t believe me? Take a look at your neighbors. Whether or not they’re the same race as you, they are very likely in the same income group. Your friends probably all have similar levels of education and income. It makes sense that we may have evolved that way — after all, binding together in social groups is a great way to defend against predators. As humans became more successful, they also had to defend against neighboring tribes. The more successful tribes could very well have been the ones who learned to hate the other more.

This is not to say that a million-year-old survival instinct justifies hate crimes. The fact that America has progressed so far in just forty years in its attitudes toward racism is evidence that we can overcome this part of our nature.

We restrain ourselves from grabbing a tasty-looking candy bar from the lady sitting next to us on the subway, even though our instincts tell us it would taste oh, so good. We don’t do it, because we know that stealing is wrong. If we can do that, then surely we can also ignore someone’s skin color when we make a hiring decision.

We’ve come to the point where nearly everyone recognizes lynching is wrong. When will we stop clutching our purses tighter when a black man walks by? When will we stop assuming that a job applicant named LeVon Jameson is less likely to be qualified than, say, Nathan Templeton (unless he’s trying out for a basketball team or a jazz band)?

Ending racism today means realizing that these less overt acts and thoughts, too, are wrong, despite the primal urge we might have to let them slide from the unconscious to the conscious.

Ending racism today means moving beyond instinct to truly thoughtful acts, in everything we do. It just might be the the most challenging intellectual activity humanity ever engages in, but if we succeed at it, it will be worth it.

This post is part of a multi-blog effort to blog against racism on December 1, 2005. If you didn’t have a chance to blog against racism yourself today, why not consider doing it tomorrow?