Without doubt, many of us have become accustomed to the presence of discomfort. Approximately five months into a global pandemic that has resulted in fear, social isolation, boredom, inconvenience, and even further polarization, many people are at a loss for how to navigate such degrees of uncertainty. Ten minutes of news media, and one is witness to a range or reactions, from denial and disregard, to anxiety and fear, to paranoia and complete avoidance of the outside world. One result that has been certain, is discomfort. Depending on your news source, personal belief, or perhaps your political persuasion, you may believe that this whole pandemic is an exaggeration or that our national and state leaders have failed us by not responding strongly and seriously enough. These words are not intended to ignite any taking of sides or feuding. Instead, let's all admit that 2020 has been wrought with more than a year's share of discomfort.
As humans, we haven't always been inherently skilled at navigating discomfort. We invent devices and methods to mitigate it, we find clever ways to avoid or distract from it, and sometimes we find ourselves feeling overwhelmed by it. Discomfort isn't something to be avoided or catastrophized. Instead, it's more useful to accept its inevitability, and consider how we may navigate it.
History notes a long existence of intolerance of discomfort. In the more primitive realms of the animal kingdom, when an alpha is threatened by another, he exiles the perceived threat, or kills it. Humans are no stranger to this approach, no matter how evolved we are. Fear of a spider or disgust with a roach leads us to react. We've become conditioned to kill it without a moment's pause or consideration of its actual threat to us. Perhaps, we need to kill some threatening things. Who decides? Do we more easily and willingly accept killing less evolved animals than humans when we feel threatened by them? Perhaps, if one defines this ease by quantifying the number of bugs killed by humans compared to humans killed by humans, the answer would be yes. But, what allows us to so easily kill humans as a tolerated or accepted method of responding to fear?
Aside from the pandemic, another notable experience from 2020 is what some would call the "last straw" in police brutality toward African Americans, and in general. Police are given authority and power, exhibited and noted by their badge and gun. Yet, these items do not eradicate the emotion of fear for these officers. Nor, do these items illicit comfort and safety among the citizens they protect. Police officers frequently find themselves in harm's way, and having navigate uncertainty. Is fear the problem? Or, are particular ways they are trained to deal with fear the problem? Again, these words are not politically charged, so take a moment of pause if you feel the red or blue line being drawn. This writing is about every human being's susceptibility with fear, our discomfort with it, and how we react to it.
Interpreting a black man as a threat, with no further knowledge of him, is indicative of systemic racism. We have been conditioned, as white people, in ways that have created implicit, or unconscious, biases that tell us he is a threat before we even consider who he is. This process is not entirely different from the way we interpret a spider as a threat before we even know what kind it is. Each of these perceptions of threat is a result of conditioning.
Consider times of slavery in the United States. *sidebar - slavery was a world-wide humanitarian issue, not just in the U.S. For purposes of this point, I'll focus on the more localized issue.* As a slave owner, or someone who benefited from the free labor of captured people, one may have had some fear-evoking questions in regard to humanizing enslaved people. For instance, what happens if they are no longer restricted from formal education or "societal norms" that separate systems of bondage from systems that maintain their bondage? What if enslaved people grow confident, and overstep that system of bondage? What if the beneficiaries of free labor of slaves begins to see them as humans, and no longer feels ok with the system of bondage? The potential answers to these questions were, perhaps, too uncomfortable to consider for these people in privileged positions. Therefore, the system became all the more important to protect by those in power. Deny education, human rights, and freedom to enslaved people, and maybe beneficiaries continue to benefit. Convince oneself and others that these people are sub-human, and maybe no one stops to question how slavery was wrong in the Bible, but ok on the plantation. For non-slave owners, who supported it, or refrained from denouncing it, avoiding this issue was likely far less discomforting than deliberately facing the dilemma of humanity.
In this same time, enslaved people are forming their own perceptions. White people, and the systems in which they operate, own them, mistreat them, and benefit from their bondage. Many who don't actively enslave, aren't willing or able to meaningfully advocate on their behalf. Having a voice, opinion, or many other basic human attributes, was punished; often severely. It's no wonder enslaved people were not eager to trust the race seen to be oppressing them, and asserting authority and dominance over them.
Throughout generations, this prejudiced perception by white systems toward people of color has maintained thriving roots. Jim Crow laws were implemented to prevent voting rights to people of African descent. Segregation was enforced by law. Organizations were formed to "protect the women and children" from African American men (yes, that organization). The system of white power enforced and protected the perception that black people are dangerous, and many white people continued to buy in to it. This fear becomes unconscious and passed down through generations to the degree that we are conditioned to fear people of color, and can't point to any specific or factual evidence as to why we should be.
As time progressed, and white culture continued to respond to fear through oppression and aggression, the negative association and assumption between races continued to be reinforced. It is known in human behavior, that we can very effectively see what we want to see through biased perception. If we look hard enough for evidence that people of color are dangerous, we will likely find something that convinces us of it. If one assumes that all white people are racist, it's not difficult to have this confirmed.
In present-day United States of America, mistrust and fear are shared on all sides of the racial line, through lenses of different lived experiences. The mere fact that a racial line even continues to exists is evidence of the system's existence. The perspective that I maintain, is that I, as a white man, have the luxury of pausing to consider the validity of the truth I was conditioned to believe as a young child in rural Georgia. I have time and perspective to choose that this old "truth" doesn't fit in my world. Many who are targeted by law enforcement or denied equal access to resources often do not have that luxury. This difference in lived experience is white privilege.
For many, maybe most white folks, we aren't conscious of responding to any perceived threat associated with humanizing an enslaved person, as this way of life was long before we were born. Instead, we're simply aware of fearing people for what we've been taught about them. The narrow image of black men in gangs, committing violent or drug related crimes, being aggressive toward women, or holding up white people in a dark alley may not seem racist when this image is routinely shown to white folks in film, news media, and disproportionate arrests of African Americans. Our prejudice and bias comes in our assumption (as white people) that a black man will inherently be prone to these types of behaviors more than a white person. Our prejudice and biased lies in the negligence or denial that white men also commit these crimes. In fact, most school shootings, where innocent children are murdered, are facilitated by white men. Our discomfort with any truth that would compromise the system we've bought into (black people are dangerous), leads us to assign other explanations to white violence and crime, such as mental health issues, or difficult childhoods. Why are we not as quick to assign these qualifiers to people of color who are charged with crimes? The myth that rallies white folks to bond together in order to keep people of color from "taking" the authority claimed by white ancestors and willingly received and maintained by succeeding generations.
We carry these biases into environments and interactions with black men, and people of color in general, unless they dress, talk, or present like us. One does not have to do this intentionally or consciously for it to be true. Our discomfort with the possibility that we could hold ideas and biases contrary to who we believe ourselves to be is exactly the issue at hand. It perpetuates the discomfort with people who look different than us, because we don't lean into the vulnerable spaces to acknowledge our biases, much less, own them and move through them.
Implicit bias is not limited to any one race, nor is it unidirectional. I've been in rooms where my race, gender, and slight southern accent created tension before anyone knew me as a person beyond those demographics. I wager that I've been in that experience far, far less than a person of color. There is room for growth in all of us as a human race. In order for this growth to happen at all, particularly in a sustainable way, we must learn to tolerate our discomfort. We must acknowledge its presence, noting that being uncomfortable is not an automatic indicator of our demise, but an invitation to pay closer attention to what is actually happening. Next, we must take ownership of both the discomfort and the perception that causes it. The former is not indicative of weakness, and the latter does not automatically define us as bad people any more than it accurately defines the people we're judging. Only after acknowledging and owning our part, can we effectively move through these issues. White privilege and our prejudice toward race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. is not the problem of the receiver to fix, but that of the perpetrator. Before you believe an automatic assumption about anyone, try pausing to be curious. Identify the facts in the present, and consider alternate "truths" outside of the one you've unconsciously and so readily bought into.
One final consideration - rather than judge someone for not getting it right, perhaps, we can educate through conversation and facts. If one is afraid to ask questions, they may be left with the inaccurate information they have. Yes, people often see what they want to see. However, none of us knows everything. We can learn from each other if we allow ourselves to be vulnerable enough to admit we have more to learn. Speaking entirely for myself, the best gift for me in this context was having the safe space to ask questions without being expected to already know the answers. My perception of humanity, and the diversity within it, is largely due to spending time getting to know people. I learned through experience that information from actually interacting with people is far more rich and accurate than assumptions made from a distance.
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