Continents in Cognition

Is it racist to think that black people think differently from Asian people or that Asian people think differently from white people? In one sense, we want to avoid assuming that someone’s appearance or skin color has any relevance to the intellectually or morally relevant aspects of their being—the ‘content of their character’ which Martin Luther King jr. hoped everyone would eventually learn to engage when interacting with one another. Still in another way, we seem to care about giving people credit for cultural contributions in a way that suggests that ethnic heritage ‘belongs’ to groups of persons in ways that are not entirely arbitrary. That is, we seem to intuitively associate black music with black people, mariachi with Mexican people and Indian music with Indian people Of course, this is not random. Music and language are important to brain development. So it seems tenable that there are mental attributes of cultural identity that vary in ways that we (non-arbitrarily) associate with varied physical appearances.