No. Just… no. Racism is not “hardwired.” It’s not “natural.” I know about the experiments with babies and what-not, but those experiments don’t necessarily imply that it’s some kind of built-in biological feature.

From one article:

Previously, it’s been assumed racial bias came from bad experiences with people of different races. But this research shows it could actually be the exact opposite.

“Racial bias later in life may arise from our lack of exposure to other-race individuals in infancy,” Dr. Lee explained. “Infants will learn from people they are most exposed to.”

The explanation is isolation from people of other races, not some kind of “hard-wired” prejudices. If you had a white child raised in a black family, a la Steve Martin in The Jerk, they wouldn’t grow up with a bias toward black people.

That said, there’s also a difference in knee-jerk bias against people who don’t look likeyou and actual racism, which is systemic. Racial ideology didn’t just happen naturally as the result of “tribal instincts” or some other just-so story.

Before was codified and explicitly racialized in the Virginia Slave Codes, lower-class black and white people got along just fine—and it was a threat to the white planter class.

That’s why they passed the codes. Black and white indentured servants rose up in Bacon’s Rebellion. So in response, the planters basically co-opted the whites and armed them to make them accomplices in suppressing the black labor population. And notions of superiority and paternalism were made up after the fact to justify black enslavement.

In order to reconcile a slave economy with the basic premises of liberalism, i.e. that all humans are created equal, whites had to conceive of black people as less than human.

So no we might never be able to fully overcome the little biases that we have, but we can smash the ideology of white supremacy. And some experiments on babies doesn’t really absolve one from the need to confront one’s own racist attitudes honestly and try to change them.