A Bad Attitude

Sometimes we encounter people who seem put off. Or maybe angry or irritated. And you might think they should cheer up or improve their attitude or treat you with kindness and respect. You might wish they could spread the joy of the day just as you are doing. You might think they have fallen down on their gratitude practice.

But on any given day, with each person you encounter, you never know what that person might be dealing with. What is that person having to deal with on this particular day? Maybe the boss is playing favorites, and hard work is not paying off. Maybe the insurance company isn't paying up. Maybe a son or daughter is getting unfairly disciplined at school. Maybe a police officer was on "broken window" duty and the person got a ticket for jaywalking.

Or maybe this happened:

My brother who lives in Florida has been away visiting our mother. This is what happened to his house while he was gone....

Posted by Sophfronia Scott on Tuesday, September 1, 2015

This man and his family members are probably not out spreading joy right now. I hope the coworkers and acquaintances and strangers they encounter treat them with compassion and don't judge them for any angry or hopeless vibes they may be giving off. I hope each person they meet gives them the benefit of the doubt that they are doing the best they can in this moment on this day.

The Narrow Portrait of a High Achiever

"Teachers may reward students they view as high-achieving with a supportive environment, increasingly difficult course material, additional opportunities to respond in class and/or more frequent or informative academic feedback." Linda van den Bergh, et al.

One Portrait of a High Achiever

Let's start with an obvious statement: Students are highly influenced by their teachers. Students are influenced not just by what teachers are trying to teach, but also by what teachers think. And teachers think all kinds of things that are not in the curriculum. We all have our private thoughts. We all make private assumptions. Our private thoughts and assumptions do come out and influence people. And this is especially true for teachers. Most parents hand their young children off to teachers with tears and great hopes for high academic achievement. Sometimes the results are near tragic.

What does a high achiever look like? Each teacher has their own mental image of a high achiever. Each teacher has their own private idea of who will be most successful in their class. And again and again, they are right. They are right because they make it so.

As evidence of my last statement, here is one, classic study: Rosenthal, R., &. Jacobson, L. (1963). Teachers' expectancies: Determinants of pupils' IQ gains. Rosenthal's work suggests that students perform better academically if their teachers expect them to perform better academically -- especially in the earliest elementary school years. Here is the summary of this paper:

Within each of 18 classrooms, an average of 20% of the children were reported to classroom teachers as showing unusual potential for intellectual gains. Eight months later these “unusual” children (who had actually been selected at random) showed significantly greater gains in IQ than did the remaining children in the control group. These effects of teachers’ expectancies operated primarily among the younger children.

And now comes a massive, tragic problem: What happens when African American students end up in first grade classes with teachers who expect European American students to perform better than African American students? What happens, speaking generally, is that the European American students do perform better than the African American students. Are there exceptions? Of course.

Much work has been done at Harvard University to shed light on people's private assumptions and preferences. Just as most people have a preference for either chocolate or vanilla ice cream, or coffee or tea, most people have a preference for either European American humans or African American humans. We know whether we prefer chocolate or vanilla ice cream. We know whether we prefer coffee or tea. And there is little social stigma attached to voicing our preference for ice cream flavors or beverage types. But there is social stigma attached to voicing a preference for either European American humans or African American humans. We are rarely asked to choose. Most of us are taught that it is best not to think about human preferences in those terms. And so most of us try not to. The very suggestion can trigger visceral defensive responses. But the preferences are there. The biases that we don't want to think about are implicit biases.

To test for implicit bias, Harvard researchers developed the Implicit Association Test (IAT). You can test yourself for implicit racial bias at the Project Implicit web site. Don't be afraid to do it! If you don't like your results, there are steps you can take. Here is a blog post I wrote to get you started: Prescriptive Action.

The IAT is widely used by other researchers for use as an independent variable in their studies. Here is the abstract of an important example, The Implicit Prejudiced Attitudes of Teachers: Relations to Teacher Expectations and the Ethnic Achievement Gap by Linda van den Bergh et al.:

Ethnic minority students are at risk for school failure and show a heightened susceptibility to negative teacher expectancy effects. In the present study, whether the prejudiced attitudes of teachers relate to their expectations and the academic achievement of their students is examined. The prejudiced attitudes of 41 elementary school teachers were assessed via self-report and an Implicit Association Test. Teacher expectations and achievement scores for 434 students were obtained. Multilevel analyses showed no relations with the self-report measure of prejudiced attitudes. The implicit measure of teacher prejudiced attitudes, however, was found to explain differing ethnic achievement gap sizes across classrooms via teacher expectations. The results of this study also suggest that the use of implicit attitude measures may be important in educational research.

This supports the work of Rosenthal, et al in their study, Teachers' expectancies: Determinants of pupils' IQ gains, which I mentioned earlier in this post.

Again, what does a high achiever look like? You could ask a teacher, but they may not be able to tell you. Their gut instincts on the subject, however, are powerful. Especially in the early years. This is typically when some students head onto the high achiever path, and others do not. Students who fall behind in reading and math in first grade have a very hard time catching up.

Last week I saw a study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. They took data available from the US Census and state records to determine how well children fared in different states based on their continental ancestry. The study, "Race for Results: Building a Path to Opportunity for All Children" ranked states. The results turned up interesting facts like these two: Wisconsin was rated the worst state in the nation for raising African American children. Wisconsin was rated the eleventh best state in the nation for raising European American children.

What can account for the difference in experiences of African American children versus European American children in Wisconsin? Undoubtedly, there are multiple factors. I would argue that implicit bias is one of the largest.

Implicit bias is not just about teachers. It is about the person who dials 911 to report a suspicious person. It is about the police officer who responds to the 911 call and possibly overreacts to the situation. It is about the parent who determines which children can come over to play. It is about the employer who determines which candidate they will hire. It's about the woman in the elevator who determines whether the other passenger is a threat. It's about the store manager who decides which teenagers should leave their backpacks at the front of the store. It's about who comes to dinner.

Each of us paints our own portraits of who makes a good student or friend or employee or house guest. And we make decisions based on the portraits we paint in our minds of who is trustworthy, who is hard working, who is gentle, who is smart, and who is committed. Please keep all of this in mind as you read my next post (as yet unfinished), "The Narrow Path of a High Achiever".

Dear White People: A Fun Film

The Dissolve: You’ve been called an “equal-opportunity indicter,” but the film doesn't feel like it indicts people at all. 

Simien: I don’t think it does.

The Dissolve: It’s sympathetic to everyone. Even its worst villain has a few mitigating factors. 

--From an interview by Tasha Robinson with Director, Justin Simien.

I watched Dear White People last night with my husband and daughter, and it was a lot of fun! And I loved seeing it at the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland. My first time there!

The audience was probably 70% European American, and maybe 10-15% African American. Many/most people were there in mixed race groups. The audience in the theater behaved like fans at a soccer match, cheering the "scores" and "ooooing" and "ouching" the rough stuff. A group of about four young women sat directly behind us and provided running commentary, which was generally very amusing, and at times even helpful. It was a ton of fun watching and hearing Etagu react!

Etagu could hardly believe it when, after we got home, she realized we had taken her to an R rated movie. But I had figured there would be nothing disturbing in it that would be new for her, and I was mostly right. She was shocked and offended by the "black face" college party, but, as we learned in the credits, that stuff happens. It was perfectly appropriate for her.

So, about the movie! We are so accustomed to seeing African American stereo types from a European American perspective, it was fun and interesting seeing them from an African American perspective. There were so many more of them! And stereotypes of European Americans were also in abundance. If the point still needs to be made that our lives are richer when we are exposed to many perspectives, this film helps to do that, if only through the number of stereotyped characters that an African American can come up with for both African Americans and European Americans. People may still be in boxes, but better to have many boxes than just one or two. And, of course, what is really important about the film is that it looks at very real issues. 

The only really painful part of the movie is the black face party. Seeing the African American characters react with painful disappointment and disillusionment to what they were witnessing was wrenching.

The ending is, from comments I've seen on social media, somewhat controversial. I think it disappointed some. But I found it to be a refreshing surprise. Etagu asked my about my favorite part of the movie, and I sheepishly said "The ending." She said, "Mom! You're such a hippy." I don't think I'm a hippy. That box doesn't fit me. I want more boxes to choose from. Maybe Justin Simien can help me out.

Prescriptive Action

"I was walking down the street wearing glasses when the prescription ran out."
-- Comedian Steven Wright

When I first started learning about white privilege, I was confused about what I was supposed to do about it. It seemed I was being accused of something that was out of my control. As recipient of unearned privileges,  privileges I had never asked for, what can I do? I can't ask the police to pull me over while driving because of my skin color. I can't ask a store clerk to follow me around, making sure I don't steal anything. I can't ask a prospective employer to doubt me based on my skin color. I can't ask a neighbor to dial 911 when they see me entering my own home because they suspect I am a burglar. I can't go back to my childhood to ask teachers to doubt my intelligence, work ethic, and integrity. I can't ask school principals to assume the worst about me. I can't ask people to forget about my humanity and simply ignore me or actively avoid me. This isn't my fault! It isn't under my control! I hate racism! What am I supposed to do??!!

And honestly, what I want is for everyone to have the same privileges I have. It's not that I want to give up the respect I receive in my day-to-day life. I just want everyone to be treated with the same respect that I receive.

Slowly, slowly, as I continued trying to figure it out, I learned a few things. I'm still learning. But here is my prescription-in-progress:

• Be aware of the privileges that come with European skin and hair and facial features. Notice them. Every day.
• Notice the African Americans in your environment and say to yourself: "I have superior privileges, but I am not superior. It isn't fair. And it isn't my fault. But I need to be aware of my unearned privileges so I don't come up with racist explanations for the state of racial inequality."
• Give enormous respect to African Americans who have achieved success in academics, business, politics, and other areas that are associated with European American success. Contemplate that they likely had to work much harder and overcome many more hurdles than successful European Americans in the same field. 
• At the same time, avoid the guessing game: Don't allow your mind to make up another person's story. Don't try to figure out another person's story and then ask questions of them to see if you got it right. You'll likely make assumptions based on stereotypes -- because that's all we have to go on -- and you'll likely get it wrong. And you'll likely annoy people. Because so many people have come before you and made the same assumptions and asked the same questions. Instead, notice what you have in common with all the human beings around you and connect with all the human beings around you based on commonalities -- not differences.
• Notice the African Americans in your environment and respect them as human beings with human worries, human love, human joy, and human pain. 
• When you are in a group that includes African Americans and/or Latin Americans or Native Americans, don't assume the leadership position by default. Let others take the lead. You don't have to be the leader. If restaurant staff, for example, assumes you are spokes person for your diverse group, pass that privilege on to another member of your group.
• When you have the opportunity, use your white privilege for good. This might mean standing up for people who are being treated unfairly. For example, when the Walgreens manager insists that the African American middle schoolers leave their backpacks at the front of the store while the European American middle schoolers get to keep possession of their back packs, you can say something to the store manager. Or teach your middle schooler to watch for this kind of thing and speak up. Follow up on racist comments made in private. For example, the dad who complains about all the black kids at the Palo Alto public swimming pool. Or the principal who labels an individual African American child as "aggressive". Or the neighbor who watches for crime by watching for African Americans. Or the mom who complains about all "we" do for "them". 
• Notice the difference in the ways people think about and talk about crime depending on the continental ancestry of the suspect. If the suspect is European American, ancestry will not be part of the narrative. If the suspect is African American, crime and ancestry will connect in the narrative. Be aware that this practice feeds racism.
• If you are a parent, talk honestly with your children about racism. Teach them what to watch for. For example, have them pay attention to how the teacher responds to children in class. Talk about it with them. Ask them who is getting in trouble and why. Ask them which children the teacher admires as good students. Ask them what the teacher's expectations are for different kids in class. Ask them who the presumed leaders are. Have them question rather than absorb. Have them connect with their peers based on commonalities other than skin color and hair texture. Be proactive with your children.
• Recognize what you share with people of African descent, and Asian descent, and North and South American descent, and Australian descent, and European descent: What you share is human emotion. And whether joy or grief, there is nothing more beautiful than that. Because it is all about love.

<3 I love you for reading. Thanks for sharing these concerns with me. I don't want to feel alone with all this. It's hard feeling alone with it.

This Puzzle Piece

"Each of us has a piece of the puzzle."--Lillian Smith

European American Author, Lillian Smith,
wrote "Strange Fruit", which was banned in Boston.
"...Smith maintained that the book's title referred to the
damaged, twisted people (both black and white)
who are the products or results of our racist culture." 

My Twitter handle is "This Puzzle Piece" because I know I don't have all the answers, but I also know that my life experiences provide me with a unique perspective that has value in the big picture.

You are also a piece of the puzzle. You have your own set of life experiences, which shaped your values and ordered your priorities. It can be tempting for each of us to believe that our own values and priorities should set the standard for everyone else. But as any major league football coach will tell you, melding individual strengths into an integrated whole is what moves us forward.

No matter what television or radio stations you tune in to, no matter what newspapers or magazines you read, no matter what is in your beverage glass and who is sitting around your table, societal problems are discussed. No matter what your highest priorities are, there is something you can do to alleviate societal problems.

"It's all about the pocketbook."

We, the tax payers, are paying for prisons to incarcerate human beings for very long periods of time. In the US, we lock up a much higher percentage of our population than almost all other countries. According to the fabulous Wikipedia volunteers, these are the numbers, per 100,000 population, in a few selected countries:

Seychelles 868
United States 707
South Africa 294
Singapore 233
Mexico 211
Saudi Arabia 162
Canada  118
Ethiopia 111
Switzerland 87
Germany 78
Tanzania 73

Glancing through the full list, Seychelles (pronounced "say-shells") was the only country in the same ball park. I'll be honest: I've never heard of Seychelles, a set of islands well off the coast of South Africa, but I don't think I want to go there. Do you think Seychelles is an exceptionally safe place because so many people are locked up? Or do they have so many people locked up because people are so much more dangerous in Seychelles than in other countries? Can you tell from looking at these numbers where you would be the most safe?

If it makes sense that US taxpayers need to pay to lock up 707 people per 100,000 people, there must be some truth in these kinds of statements: We are more than nine times safer residing in the US than in Germany; or  people are more than nine times more dangerous in the US than they are in Germany. We are more than four times safer residing in the US than in Saudi Arabia; or people are more than four times more dangerous in the US than they are in Saudi Arabia. Looking over the list, can we make sense of the numbers this way? Are we much safer? Or are our people much more dangerous? Or is it some other factor at work?

How much do tax payers pay for incarceration, and what do we get for it? Incarcerated people pay no taxes. Taxpayers pay 100% of the support of incarcerated persons.

If it's all about the pocketbook, we can save taxpayers a bundle by decreasing our incarceration rates. If this is your puzzle piece, go ahead and bring it to the table.

"It's all about safety."

What causes people to hurt other people? Psychologists will generally tell you that people who hurt others have been hurt themselves, oftentimes as children. We pass it on.

Who keeps children from getting hurt out in the world? Clearly they don't always do it, but primarily, that's a parent's job. Generally speaking, a kid's best bet is with their parents. While no parent is perfect, the instinct to keep our children safe is very powerful.

When we lock up parents for long periods of time for non-violent crimes, we set our society up for violent crime down the road. We are making our society less safe because we prevent parents from doing their primary job, which is to keep their kids safe.

Courtesy of the ACLU, here is just one example of a harsh sentence for a non-violent crime:

 

Patrick Matthews was arrested while riding in the truck of a friend who pawned stolen tools and a welding machine, which he was convicted of stealing. Patrick is now 25. Since he was sentenced to die in prison three years ago, he has completed his GED, and participates in Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous. "I never in the world would've thought that could happen," he says. "Made one mistake and was treated like a murderer." Patrick had no violent criminal history and had never served a single day in a Department of Corrections facility. He desperately misses his two young children, Blayton and Hayley, who are eight and six years old. One of the judges who reviewed Patrick's appeal said he did not "believe that the ends of justice are met by a mandatory sentence for this 22-year-old," but that legislation mandated sending Patrick away for the rest of his life because of unarmed burglary convictions when he was 17.

How much safer do you feel with Patrick Matthew in prison for the rest of his life? What are the chances that his children will be safer and better cared for with him in prison? He will never be at a Back-to-School night. He will never be the applauding daddy at the school talent show. He will never pay for a single soccer season. He will never protect his children from being hurt by anyone, ever. How will his children fare? Is our society better off?

If it's all about safety, we can let non-violent parents raise their own children, giving those kids a better shot at a non-violent, law-abiding future. If this is your puzzle piece, go ahead and bring it to the table.

"It's all about fairness."

Why did I use an example of a European American felon for "It's all about safety"? Because it is so darned easy to give this guy the benefit of the doubt. As I discussed in my "Scientists at Work" post, we automatically and unconsciously associate African Americans with crime. That's why people are more likely to perceive African Americans as a threat and to dial 911 to report "suspicious activity" by African Americans.. That's why police officers are more likely to stop, question, and arrest African Americans, That's why DAs are more likely to prosecute African Americans. That's why jurors are more likely to find African Americans guilty of crimes. That's why judges are more likely to extend harsher sentences to African Americans. And that's why African American children are more likely to be perceived as a threat in school and disciplined more frequently and more harshly. And that's not fair.

If it's all about fairness, we can find ways to compensate for the automatic injustices of our human brains. We can find ways to measure the injustice. We can consciously observe the injustic. We can reverse the injustice.  We can insist that people in positions of authority, whether teachers, principals, police officers, judges, jurors, or corporate managers, are measured for bias and coached in managing their unconcious biases. If this is your puzzle piece, go ahead and bring it to the table.

So, what's it all about for you?

What's your puzzle piece all about? Go ahead and bring it to the table.

Scientists at Work

"The brain is a wonderful organ to justify conclusions that the heart already reaches."
-- Zackary Dov Berger, MD PhD

Stanford Professor Jennifer L. Eberhardt
recently won a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant"
for her work on unconscious racial coding.

We can only put so much trust in our brains. For many reasons. One reason is that when we don't know something for sure, and we wonder about it, our brain just goes ahead and makes something up. And we say, "Well, brain, that sounds pretty reasonable, I guess. Let's just go with it!" And our brains have come up with creative explanations for all kinds of phenomena. We tend to accept the conclusions of our brains, and then we tend to spread the falsehoods far and wide. And then when other people's brains come up with similar conclusions, we think, "Hey! You and I both came to the same conclusion! We must both be right!" And we congratulate ourselves. That's just how we human beings roll. I love to believe I'm right.

You already know that for the last hundreds of years of human history (at least), scientists have worked hard to discover truth and expose myth. You also already know that it can take a long time for people to give up myths in favor of scientific realities. I'm just reminding you.

As scientific knowledge on a subject spreads, it can be frustrating and baffling to watch people hold on to old ideas. And it can be frightening. For example, think about climate change deniers. Will enough people come around before conditions on earth become too unbalanced to recover? Foundations are spending tremendous amounts of money to help educate people, but at a societal level, minds change very slowly.

Unlike the efforts to educate people about climate science, efforts to educate people about the science of prejudice has not reached a stride. Not even close. The incentives are lacking. But even though the usual incentives for change are not materializing, I have a hunch that we are on the cusp of a new renaissance. I see people finding their voices. My guess is that scientific knowledge about the nature of prejudice will spread through the end of this decade, and then take off in the twenties. We will look back on this era of police killing unarmed men and schools punishing good-natured children as the suffocating era that it is.

We teach children about slavery and who did what to whom, but leaving it at that, many of our kids are led to a wrong conclusion: That Europeans are superior to Africans and Latin Americans. In so many towns in the US, kids grow up seeing money and power in the hands of European Americans and Asian Americans, and we leave our kids to draw their own conclusions. We expose kids to a non-stop barrage of images of handcuffed African American men and punished African American school children, and we leave them to draw their own conclusions. They do wonder, but their brains answer their own questions, and their brains get it wrong. Our children see a deformed society, and early on they begin to interpret it as a normal society.

Our school systems are not accurately educating our children about the science of prejudice.  Until that changes, it's up to parents to explain these realities to our kids:

• There are absolutely no differences in intellectual ability among the descendants of human beings from different continents. 
• Our society and our brains work in concert to trick us into holding different expectations for people based on their skin color and physical features. 
• That trickery has deformed our society. 
• We must not fall for the trickery ourselves.

But how, as parents, do we get there ourselves? First step: Look at the science.

Perhaps the most important information for you to understand, and it's something I've already written about at least twice on A Woolman's Journey, is that the "colorblind" concept is a fiction.

Professor Helen Neville of University of Illinois and others developed the Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS) in 2000. Their work suggests that people who endorse colorblind racial attitudes may have higher levels of racial prejudice than those who consciously pay attention to race.

Construction and initial validation of the Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS).
"The purpose of this investigation was to develop a conceptually grounded scale to assess cognitive aspects of color-blind racial attitudes. Five studies on the Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale (CoBRAS) with over 1,100 observations provide initial reliability and validity data. Specifically, results from an exploratory factor analysis suggest a 3-factor solution: Unawareness of Racial Privilege, Institutional Discrimination, and Blatant Racial Issues. A confirmatory factor analysis suggests that the 3-factor model is a good fit of the data and is the best of the competing models. The CoBRAS was positively related to other indexes of racial attitudes as well as 2 measures of belief in a just world, indicating that greater endorsement of color-blind racial attitudes was related to greater levels of racial prejudice and a belief that society is just and fair. Self-reported CoBRAS attitudes were sensitive to diversity training."

Professor Robert Rosenthal of the University of California, Riverside and others published their now classic research on teachers' expectancies in 1966. Their research suggests that teachers expectations for individual students have a measurable effect on student learning. Consider the probable outcome when "colorblind" teachers work with children of color.

Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1966). Teachers' expectancies: Determinants of pupils' IQ gains.
From PsychWiki.com:
"This study found out that teachers’ expectancy can be a significant determinant of students’ responses/behaviors. The names of experimental children were given to each teacher who was told that these students would show unusual intellectual gains according to intelligence test. However, the children have been randomly assigned to the experimental condition, therefore, the experimental treatment consisted of nothing more than being identified to their teachers as intelligent children. Eight months later, these experimental students showed significantly greater gains in I.Q. than did the control group. The study found out that the effects of teachers’ expectancies were greater for younger children."

Professor Jennifer Eberhardt of Stanford University recently won a "Genius" grant from the MacArthur Foundation for her work on the ways in which people unconsciously "code" people based on physical characteristics such as skin color and facial features. Her main focus has been on crime-related stereotypes associated with African American males. Her work helps explain why European Americans may misinterpret the behavior of African Americans as criminal or otherwise threatening. That, in turn, helps explain why African Americans are so much more likely to be stopped by police, arrested, convicted of a crime, and sentenced harshly. It also helps explain why African American students are more likely to be punished more frequently and more harshly than the European American students in the same schools and classrooms.

Professor Eberhardt now works with police departments to help officers understand some of the unconscious mental processing that can lead to unjust arrest and use of force on African American males. She discusses her work in this interview for the MacArthur Foundation.

Watch her interview for the MacArthur Foundation here.

By not thinking about and talking about racism, by imagining ourselves to be colorblind, by allowing our children to draw their own conclusions about the racial inequality that they witness every day, we raise "colorblind" children who go on to continue the cycle. We can make a difference by properly educating our children about the science of prejudice.

My New Chiropractor Has Black Friends, is Colorblind, and Experiences Reverse Racism

"Whether race is a burden or a benefit is all the same to the race-neutral theorists; that is what they mean when they speak of being colorblind, all right — blind to the consequences of being the wrong color in America today." Unless you are that wrong color, your understanding of what it means to be an African American or a Latino in the U.S. will not be completely accurate." -- NAACP Chairman Julian Bond

This European American man appears to be angry.
Pretend he is a stranger yelling at you and threatening you.
Will you attribute his disposition to problems with his race? 

I love my new chiropractor. He is literally 1/2 block from me, and I'm so happy with him! I might explain why I like him so much in some other forum -- maybe a Yelp review. For now I want to tell you about the conversation we had this morning.

He was wanting to know about some of the emotional challenges that might be contributing to the problems I'm having with my TMJ joint. The problems started right after I had my gallbladder removed last month, so I have attributed the joint problem to the pain I was experiencing at night immediately following my surgery. But since I still have it, he wanted to look at possible emotional triggers, And guess what? Racism showed up on my list. I told him that was the main reason we had moved to Oakland from Palo Alto. And he told me that "reverse racism" is the problem in Oakland.

There are a key list of terms that European Americans use that immediately cause me to suspect that they are not very well educated about racism. This is not a complete list of the terms, but just what is popping into my head:

• Colorblind
• Black friends
• Reverse racism
• Victim mentality

Within the first few minutes of our conversation about racism, the doctor used all of the first three. Fortunately, he never made it to the fourth. That's my least favorite. I find that term so incredibly offensive!

The doctor told me this story: His then-wife was trying to cross the street with their daughter by their daughter's school in Oakland. A woman drove aggressively past them, then came back and yelled at them. The angry, yelling woman was black.

Given that my doctor was attempting to explain the problem of reverse racism to me, I commented that he seemed to be attributing the problem to the woman's race, and he agreed that he was. I asked him, so what if a white man did the same thing? Would you attribute the problem to his race? The doctor agreed that he would attribute it to the guy being an "asshole". And he got the point. And it made him think. And that made me happy.

Can a person be colorblind and attribute problems to a person's race? Isn't a person who uses an example of poor behavior on the part of a black individual to make a point about reverse racism assuming "there is a problem with black people"?

Can a person be colorblind and feel victimized by reverse racism? Isn't a person who feels victimized by reverse racism assuming "there is a problem with black people"?

Can a person be colorblind and worry that "victim mentality" is a problem that cripples African Americans? Isn't a person who worries about "victim mentality" assuming "there is a problem with with black people"?

If you assume "there is a problem with black people", you are not colorblind.

And I would argue, nobody is truly colorblind. People notice race. People make assumptions. Committing yourself to colorblindness will never move you forward toward universal love and kindness. Becoming aware of what you notice and what assumptions you make will move you forward. And you can do it with compassion for yourself. Because the current state of your programming is not your fault. But you do have responsibility for the future state of your programming.

For more, in case you missed it, here is my earlier post about colorblindness: Can We Be Blind to Skin Color?

If these thoughts are new to you, why not spend some time this weekend, as you are out and about in the world, paying attention to your thoughts and feelings about people of different skin colors? What kinds of wonderings come to mind? What kinds of assumptions lie behind your wonderings? Really pay attention. And if you don't like the assumptions you find yourself making, don't beat yourself up. Instead, pat yourself on the back. You just grew your brain. Well done. :-)