David Berreby It Takes A Tribe Summary

The Unfavorable Offspring of the Humanistic Tendency to Form Bonds

In the article “It Takes a Tribe,” David Berreby utilizes the example of students’ immediate college loyalty to claim that humans identify with groups because they desire to have a sense of belonging. In the article “ ‘Blaxicans’ and Other Reinvented Americans,” Richard Rodriguez talks about categorization by race to claim that Americans, in particular, feel the need to be in separate, defined classes. Berreby and Rodriguez emphasize different effects of humans’ natural tendency to classify themselves. Berreby focuses on the formation of opposition between groups while Rodriguez focuses on the formation of false perceptions of groups.

Berreby focuses on the formation of opposition between groups to shed negative light on humans’ tendency to classify themselves. When examining the cause of college student’s eager attachment to new colleges, Berreby describes human nature by stating that “people need to belong, to feel a part of ‘us.’ Yet a sense of ‘us’ brings with it a sense of ‘them’ ” (9). Using this quote, Berreby introduces the tension of committing to an exclusive group. While commitment to a group marks the beginning of a new identity, it also marks the beginning of one’s separation from others. Berreby strategically uses this quote directly before expanding on the extent of loyalty that humans exhibit for their groups. History has shown that humans are willing “to give a lot, including their lives, for a group they feel part of” (9). Humans are also willing to persecute other groups for the sake of their own. By following up his quote about “us” and “them” with an unpleasant representation of loyalty, the reader is alerted to the consequences of the humanistic tendency to classify oneself. Berreby fails to identify a thought process behind persecution, suggesting that there

To support this claim, Rodriguez uses the example of Nixon’s inclination to divide America into five racial groups in the 1970s (407). From this point, Rodriguez focuses on one of the five racial groups: Hispanic. To illustrate the ludicrous nature of the term Hispanic to describe race, Rodriguez says that “such a definition suggests I have more in common with Argentine-Italians than with American Indians; that there is an ineffable union between the white Cuban and the mulatto Puerto Rican because of Spain” (407). Rodriguez uses this quote to show that the broad sense of the term “Hispanic” is not only misleading, but also incorrect when it is used to describe race. The term “Hispanic” classifies two arguably dissimilar groups such as Argentinians and Italians into one category. To add to the misinformation, the Hispanic category is then compared to other races, which only “constructs a fallacious equation” (408) since a term that signifies culture cannot be compared to a term that signifies race. These false perceptions lead to even more emphasis on race and cause humans to cling to separate identities. Once separated, there is no longer interest in commonalities but rather contempt because of differences, as seen in the example of a group of Laotians’ hatred for Mexicans living nearby. For this particular case, Rodriguez has shown that