Friday, September 1, 2017

Living With Hate



Imagine waking up every morning knowing that there are people who hate you and want you dead just because you exist. Imagine if the most beloved elements of your family’s culture were held up to ridicule – evidence of your inferiority. Imagine internalizing all of this from the moment of your birth – knowing you were the other, that you don’t belong, that you are less.
            Imagine living with hate.
            As a straight white male, it’s all I can do – imagine it. Through no effort of my own I was granted access to the inner circle. It’s a shameful “achievement” because it isn’t an achievement at all – it’s a genetic accident.
            White, patriarchal supremacy is nothing new. It’s woven into the fabric of the United States of America. Our founding institutions and documents explicitly enshrined racial and sexist hegemony. They were crafted at a time when the ownership and denigration of entire categories of human beings was moral and divinely authorized. The twin Original Sins of Native American genocide and African American slavery have yet to be fully acknowledged, repaired, and atoned for. Even Thomas Jefferson’s beloved Declaration of Independence refers to Native Americans as “savages.”
            To stand on the ground at Monticello, Jefferson’s mountain top home in Virginia, and to walk Mulberry Row where the slave quarters stood, is to feel in your bones the race hatred in the bones of this nation.
            White supremacy is the shadow side of freedom. Proclaiming that whites are superior to others, no matter how repugnant, is protected free speech. But no right is absolute. The law distinguishes between protected free speech and incitement, the latter being illegal. If your speech is explicitly designed to move others to harmful action, your speech is not protected free speech. It’s illegal to yell “fire” in a crowded theater. Therefore, a Nazi flag is not protected free speech – it’s incitement. It’s a call to action. It’s a war flag that exhorts all who salute it to discrimination, mass deportation, and genocide. Nazi flags are illegal in Germany and France. In other European countries, hate group insignia face additional restrictions. There are no monuments to Adolf Hitler in Germany or anywhere in Europe – just monuments to his millions of victims.
            What are the causes of racism and wholesale denigration of selected groups? This is where it gets complicated. But we have to talk about it. It’s not enough to mouth platitudes like “racism is bad,” or “don’t be a racist,” or my least favorite, “I don’t see color.”  If racism is the enemy, we cannot defeat it until we understand it.
            It’s popular to hold to the view that racism is learned, not innate. In other words, the thinking goes, we are born as pure non-racists. Then, as children, we are taught to hate. Last month when Heather Heyer was killed by an American Nazi in Charlottesville, Virginia President Obama wrote the most popular Tweet in Twitter history – it was retweeted millions of times. Quoting Nelson Mandela he wrote, “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion…” Then there’s the classic and oft-cited song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” from the musical “South Pacific” – “You’ve got to taught/To hate and fear/You’ve got to be taught/From year to year/It’s got to be drummed/In your dear little ear/You’ve got to be carefully taught…”
            The assertion that racism is a learned trait has merit. Cultural indoctrination is a major influence in the formation of racist consciousness. No one disputes that. And to that same extent, learned racism can be mollified by changing the narrative and teaching people how to think differently. We’re trying to do that. But it isn’t working – at least, not fast enough. But racism has another cause – a cause not enough of us are talking about or even acknowledging.
            A quick survey of evolutionary biology reveals the crucial missing piece. Among all species, humans included, it was evolutionarily advantageous to fear outsiders. Within the tribal clan a certain amount of trust was warranted. But outsiders were eyed warily, especially if they looked different from us. We see this in simian studies, as well as across all species. Why would human animals be any different? In other words, the brain is hard-wired to be biased. Our survival depended on it.
            If part of our fear of others is innate, concretized by millennia of selective adaptation, then it turns out Rogers and Hammerstein, Nelson Mandela, and Barack Obama are wrong (and you have no idea how much it pains me to say this). Well, they’re only half right anyway.
            Here’s another way to frame it. Racist consciousness is a lower-order cognitive mode that we must unlearn. It is our default setting, and it’s time for a re-set. We have to undo the very structures of thought. In Buddhist terms, we have to awaken from the illusion of separateness. Despite what the processes of evolution and selective adaptation have built into the structures of consciousness, and despite the reinforcement racist consciousness receives via acculturation, it’s time to shine a light on the dark, hidden, unconscious tendencies that drive us and realize instead that we are not defined by the color of our skin, the shapes of our faces, the languages we speak, our religious beliefs, our culture of origin, our sexual orientation, or any of the other differentiations that masks our unity. We have to unlearn this maladaptation before it kills us.
            It’s time to find a middle ground between the naturalist argument (that racism is built in), and the indoctrination argument (that it’s purely taught). It’s never either/or. It’s always both/and.
            The solution begins with an acknowledgement of unconscious bias. If you don’t admit you have it, it owns and controls you. The second step is acknowledging privilege – we all have it in one form or another. You have genetic, inherent, or behavior advantages you did not earn – tallness, an aptitude for language, mathematical ability, gender, ethnicity, youth, right-handedness, heterosexuality, and so on. These “privileges” don’t make you better than anybody else, nor do they make you bad. Simply acknowledge your privilege and begin to wield it in the service of the good. Both of these steps awaken our empathy.  Imagine keenly and deeply what it feels like to wake up every morning knowing that there are legions of people in your community who wish you were dead, who define you as aberrant and inferior, and who quietly and sometimes not so quietly despise you. Until you feel the suffering of others, none of any of this can be repaired. Until we hear the pain, we cannot heal the pain.
            You might wonder how can we live with hate? Well look around. We're doing it. And it isn't working. So many of our wounds are self-inflicted. Life is hard enough. It's time to stop hurting ourselves. It's time to turn instead toward one another, take off our masks, and feel our fears withering in the dawning light of the beloved community.      

8 comments:

Maggy Whitehouse said...

Well said, Peter. We are hard-wired to resist the other, the different - and that includes colour and disability. It's a matter for the soul to re-wire ourselves.

Mary said...

Former President Obama tweeted, “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion…” I’m also pretty sure I once heard him say in a speech that racism is in our DNA. Maybe that sounds like a paradox, but not really. Inborn suspicion and bias are one thing, and we can acknowledge that yes, we have that. But outright hate is another thing, something that is taught, but also can be unlearned. Other lower order cognitive urges have come to be socially unacceptable. We still have work to do on racism, and we must, because our survival depends upon it.

© Peter Bolland said...

Thank you Maggy for being such a vibrant part of the conscious community.

© Peter Bolland said...

I agree Mary. Thank you for your thoughtful comment, and for reading my blog.

Unknown said...

Thank you for your insight and wisdom. It feels right to accept that we are impacted by both an evolutionary component and a cultural one. I grew up in a very white, southern community where racism was common and passed down from generation to generation. It still is today. My Mother was determined to do her part to erase that thinking from me and I'm forever grateful. Having said that, doesn't it go both ways? Light skinned people are not the only ones who have that in-born bias. Isn't there there same bias in communities of color against the folks who are different? I'm in no way excusing racism on any level but sometimes it feels like we view this as a one-sided issue and I believe that wholesale change on all parts is warranted. Am I wrong here?

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Unknown said...

I'm living proof that it can be unlearned. My mother was born and raised in the deep south. She used the n word my whole life. She made Archie Bunker look like a liberal. I was beat with a belt for talking to the black next door neighbor when i was 5 years old. I rebelled grin that thinking from a very young age even though they tried to beat it into me it NEVER resonated.

© Peter Bolland said...


Brenda, it doesn't just go both ways, it goes ALL ways. That's one of the key points of the piece, that bias is unconscious and ingrained in all creatures. That being said, it's crucial to keep the power dynamics front and center when hurtling the word "racist" around. That's why I talked about privilege in the piece too -- some groups have it and others do not, and the ones that do bear a special responsibility.