Jehovah's Witnesses Straight Talk - Forum/Blog

June 12, 2020

“There is no such thing as systemic racism those are hate words used to put people into a group to take away individual human dignity. The hate and prejudice is found in the words to justify ones own hate for a race!”

Proverbs 18:5 To be partial to the faces of the wicked is not good, nor to deprive the innocent of justice.

Luke 20:21 They asked him, "Teacher, we know that you say and teach what is right, and aren't partial to anyone, but truly teach the way of God.

Levitius 19:15 "'You shall do no injustice in judgment: you shall not be partial to the poor, nor show favoritism to the great; but you shall judge your neighbor in righteousness.

Some Facts:

“The research is pretty clear: You put people in a group situation and they tend to do what the group decides,” says Donelson Ross Forsyth, an expert in group dynamics and ethical leadership at the University of Richmond in Virginia.

History and psychological studies both bear this out. Germany wasn’t chock-full of evil people during the Holocaust. Instead, mostly ordinary, law-abiding Germans followed their leaders in the torture and killing of millions of Jews.

In Rwanda in 1994, once-peaceful neighbors who had never acted with violence turned on each other in horrific acts of brutality.

Even the famous case of Kitty Genovese illustrates the point, Forsyth says. Genovese’s 1964 rape and murder was heard or witnessed, to varying degrees, by dozens of New York City neighbors. But the majority neither tried to stop the attack nor called for help.

Psychologists say that most people are unable to act unilaterally -- even when they know a situation is wrong -- if their actions will separate them from the group. The concept is hardly popular, but it helps to explain repeated examples of wrongdoing among groups of people who should know better.

“It’s easy to say evil happens because the people who did it are evil rather than asking what made ordinary people evil,” says Christopher Browning, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has studied the role of ordinary people in committing atrocities during the Holocaust. “People don’t want to look in the mirror and think, ‘I could have done that.’ But you’re not going to explain these things by saying we had an unusual cluster of criminal or evil people.”

“The need to feel connected to people is very intense” in such groups, says Ervin Staub, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts and author of “The Psychology of Good and Evil.” “Even when people think ‘this is wrong,’ to step forward and oppose the whole group -- the people you’ve been fighting with, the people whose support you depend on for your very own security -- is extremely difficult.”

Misdeeds by groups of people also tend to occur when the victim is very different from the group. In the investigation following the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, in which dozens of U.S. soldiers abused and tortured Iraqi prisoners, Staub says, “the soldiers who were interviewed really did describe the Iraqis as different -- people they didn’t understand. There was a devaluation of these people, not identifying them as human beings.”

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