Cultural psychosis

A friend of mine posted this story on the warnings that black women give their male children about surviving in a white world on Facebook today, adding that he remembered getting this talk when he was five. Reading the testimonials of what black women were telling their sons, deep sobs built in me and gushed outward. Anyone who knows me knows that this is pretty uncharacteristic behavior, and I am not sure exactly what caused me to empathize so deeply right now. Possibly opening to my own childhood pain has given me a point of reference. This is a deep tragedy happening to so many kids all around us all the time. Unfortunately, it seems that nobody really knows how to talk about it, and much of the conversation seems stuck on whether racism really exists. I think the problem is that people have largely unexamined irrational unconscious or implicit beliefs which affect their actions. The implicit bias website, Project Implicit, tests for such hidden biases, and many people find biases within themselves that they had previously been unaware of. As well, there have been a number of illustrative studies on racism. A notable one involved sending identical resumes to employers, one with a white-sounding name and one with a more black-sounding name. Employers were more likely to hire the person whose name sounded white.

Meditation is a great tool for bringing unconscious beliefs to the fore. I have had this happen to me time and again. My mind would do something reflexive and the meditation practice gave me the space and training to notice that it happened. Once these implicit beliefs become conscious, they become far less powerful. They like to operate under cover in the dark. The light of day tends to evaporate them. Of course, the more engrained the belief, the longer this process will take. Yesterday I was riding my bike down the street and I saw a group of black teenagers hanging out on the side of the road. My first thought was fear and even the fleeting thought that I hope they don't kill me. That reaction lay unexamined in my mind until today when I realized what I had done. Unconscious racism. Now that that reaction is exposed under the full light of my conscious awareness I am deeply ashamed and embarrassed by it, but with it in sight, I can not listen to it or be controlled by it. I suspect that a lot of people suppress such self-analysis in defense of ego. Even as I write this, it worries me what other people will think, but how are we going to root out racism if we can't see it when it's right in front of our faces?


I think one of the ways racism and sexism functions is via archetypes. The mind has a culturally informed ''typical example" of certain categories, like say "scientist." For many people, the archetypal scientist is an older white guy, perhaps in a lab coat. When we are not careful, this archetype informs our thinking in pretty deep ways. I really like the comic strip Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, because the author consciously evenly distributes the role of scientist to men, women, whites and blacks, as well as gay and straight characters. This is something that would have been difficult for old time comics distributed in printed newspapers because the confusion that it causes among readers eats into the bottom line. This is similar to why commercials tend to reinforce stereotypes. Challenging your unconscious beliefs will associate discomfort in your mind with their product, so it's better to reinforce your beliefs from the profit perspective. Aware of the strong sexist tendencies in society, I try to do something similar in my classes. I try to use the female pronoun as often as the male pronoun, and in particular when I crack jokes, which I am wont to do, I try to include both genders fairly. Looking through humor on the internet is actually kind of depressing because jokes tend to lay bare the archetypes I've been talking about.  If a joke mentions a mathematician, for example, that mathematician is almost always male, because that is the normative trait for the defining archetype, and mentioning a female mathematician, when it is not relevant to the punchline, strikes many people as artificial. Which is completely fucking nuts. The idea that white and male is normative is as universal as it is pathological. It's a cultural psychosis.

Anyway, feeling the pain of my friend and so many other millions of kids so personally and deeply has made me renew my efforts to lay bare and root out the manifestations of that psychosis in myself.