Untidy Thoughts

Why won't they just speak English?  Why don't they have better control of their kids?  Why won't he pull his pants up?  That's not how you say "ask"....

Hardly anyone is explicitly racist anymore - that takes a lot of guts.  But we all have biases, and it is common to treat groups of people differently by engaging in any number of small slights - not affording them the same respect as they would another group in the same position.

It happens quickly, is often reasonably deniable, and difficult to pinpoint or quantify.  When I treat my mother-in-law a little bit differently, say, bristle a bit more at her foibles, my lack of respect towards her is hard to define.  But it is a result of a bias I have, and comes through in my interactions with her.

These are the kind of untidy thoughts we can all fall prey to with any community who has historically been the target of discrimination.  Disreputable narratives develop about them which, we absorb from the larger culture, and that we are often unaware of.  

...Why should people be required to speak English in America?  Maybe they have good reasons for not learning it yet.  Maybe they just weren't talking to you.

...Maybe they are having a bad day. Maybe plenty of white parents let their kids run all over.

...Maybe that's his style - his way of expressing himself through rebellious fashion?  Why do you pull your pants up over your bellybutton?

...Maybe because that's how she pronounces the word ask.  Do you articulate all of your words perfectly?  Do you never say the word "gonna", or "I'm-unna"?

Maybe in each of these examples you are treating them differently because of their race, by not giving them the benefit of the doubt, by jumping to conclusions, and by not having reflected on your own choices.  Maybe you are behaving in a racist way without even knowing it.

How Can Smart People Be So Wrong?

The Flying, Anchise Picci (1982)

This morning I was thinking about cases where otherwise smart people believe crazy things.  I wonder if the common variable isn't the degree to which they have a strong ideological "feeling" about something.  We've seen cases where enormously smart/educated people seem immune to facts - anthropogenic climate change deniers, vaccine skeptics, creationists.  In some sense, one wonders if their intelligence doesn't allow them to create ever more elaborate rationalizations.

I'm not sure what that "feeling" really is.  It's obviously an unconscious bias; it's as if their reasoning is a rope you follow along until you come to a dark cave, beyond which there is nothing but darkness.  This is the point at which conscious reason disappears.

Yet we can find interesting patterns when we zoom out and examine the larger context of their ideology.  There are correlations between the likelihood of specific beliefs and larger attitudes.  Religious fundamentalists might be the easiest to understand, because they have a scriptural interpretation that they insist is the final authority.  It becomes more difficult when dealing with something like homeopathy, or 9/11 "truthers" where there is no specific scripture they are required to obey. 

But maybe these two aren't so dissimilar.  What if we assumed that scriptural fundamentalism wasn't really about the text, but rather about a socially normative relationship between one and their community - friends, family, congregants, pastor, etc.?  We could assume the same about the homeopathist.  They too are following certain communal norms.  A striking commonality among these groups is how frequently they live in an insular world, in which they are rarely challenged.  And when they are, it is likely by someone who is an "outsider" to their special community.  Immediately, they are a "traitor to the cause".

So, I think we're getting to tribal and identity politics, which largely exist at the unconscious level. 

Maybe something interesting to think about is the individual who is allergic to these sort of ideological "feelings", those who seem to be reasonable and level-headed, better able to think objectively.  They too might live within insular communities, yet somehow don't feel the same strong sense of allegiance that promotes unconscious tribal bias.  How is it that they have been able to establish within themselves a sense of comfort with breaking tribal norms?  Do they have some special self-esteem?  Do they not feel the same fears?

In thinking about myself, I am objectively a pretty reasonable person - at least in terms of your standard political bogeymen.  I have a lot of nuanced views, and understand both sides pretty well.  But it is enormously difficult to self-analyze this stuff.  Reaching into one's unconscious is hard - where to even begin?  I'm sure I've got plenty of tribal bias.  And how much is any of it affecting my cognition at any given moment?

Undercover Racism and the Compassionate You

Before sitting down to write my last post on racism, which ultimately evolved into quite the beast, I had been thinking a lot about the fundamentally incorrect way we think about racism in America.  It occurred to me that the discussion generally revolves around whether or not one is "a racist".  Since we've largely gotten to the point in society where we've established that racism is wrong, it's not only taboo to express it but to think it.  And while this is unquestionably good, it has in a way created a weird sort of space for racist thought to exist in a manner that is almost impossible to speak of.  As such it has become a sort of undercover disease.

Basically, most racism now exists as an expression of the unconscious.  It takes the form of subtle biases of thought, leading to prejudice and faulty assumptions about race and ethnicity.  People (aside from a very small minority of avowed racists) are no longer racist with a capital R, but expressers of racism.  They are not actual racists, but some of their behavior is racist.  Some more than others, of course.  And a good case could be made that we are all indeed subject at times to hidden racist biases that course through our hidden minds.

So the question ought not be whether one is a racist, but whether one's behaviors might represent an expression of unconscious racism.  One of the big stumbling blocks to dialogue on racial issues is a feeling that one must either be a racist or not.  So when accused of racist expression, the subject often feels as though they must either choose between being labeled as a "Racist", or not. 

Yet if we acknowledge that the unconscious is an integral part of the mind, and that it will inevitably acquire biases of many sorts, then racism is in many ways a natural outgrowth of this structure. 

No one could possibly function without unconscious bias.  We are biased towards helping small children, or those in need.  We are biased to fear dangerous situations.  We are biased to let our guard down with loved ones.  Unless absolutely necessary, we don't think.  We just act.  In his book, The Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam details just some of the many ways in which the human brain creates and depends upon biases throughout its life cycle.

Fortunately, we can learn to recognize our tendency towards bias and try and control it.  In many ways, what is commonly referred to as political correctness is our attempt to do this at the societal level.  Obviously, people have taken the concept too far, and created a harmful atmosphere of over-censorship.  But the essential tone of the movement is to try, as a society, to come to grips with our historical tendency towards bias that has unquestionably resulted in a great deal of oppression.  It is an acknowledgment that these biases exist in our unconscious and are, by definition, difficult to control.

The greatest opposition to political correctness has come from those who seem to deny outright that unconscious bias even exists at all.  Yet this is rather absurd.  It is one thing to feel insecure about one's knowledge of self, but quite another to deny the possibility that unconscious bias exists at all.  Now that we've moved beyond racism, they'll often argue, the matter is settled.  But is it?

I would argue that even decades ago, when racism was seen as perfectly healthy and normal, people were even less conscious of their bias.  Sure, if you asked them to own up to it they would oblige.  But if you asked them to explain it they wouldn't have a clue!  There have been attempts throughout history to provide some sort of legitimate, rational explanation - whether religious or scientific.  But this was ad hoc.  They were merely making up stories to justify these unconscious emotions and attitudes they simply felt.  The fact that they were so unaware of where their bias came from just made it that much more of an unconscious process. 

The civil rights movement was nothing if not dependent upon people taking it upon themselves to self-reflect and question their own traditional assumptions.  And just because today we as a society have finally decided that racism is wrong, it doesn't mean that our hidden biases have suddenly disappeared overnight.  The phrase "old habits die hard" may have never been so true.  We are humans and we are imperfect.  Each and every day we wake to face new challenges to our magnanimity, or compassion, our selflessness and kindness.  It doesn't come naturally.  It is something that takes steady, relentless work to maintain.  We can be thankful that we have realized that racism is our enemy.  But now we must do the difficult work of being vigilant every moment, and making sure we smite it when it slithers out from within.

The Real Reid Gaffe, Pt. 2

To continue from my last post, Obama's response to the event, highlighting Reid's commitment to "social justice", says it all. He's referring to the liberal belief that the current state of racial inequity - in the classic words of former president G. W. Bush - "a history of racial discrimination".

Black achievement rates are much lower than whites. Some liberals say this is because of active discrimination. But even more say it's a little of that, but mostly a dysfunctional social system in which families, neighborhoods, and schools aren't providing the same opportunities for development for black children that white social structures do. And because liberals believe in socialization, we see this dysfunction as a result of our immoral, racist past. Thus it is our responsibility to actively redistribute resources into the black community to help build social capital.

Republicans have no such commitment to "social justice" because they define it differently. They see the current inequality as the fault of blacks themselves. They see our racist past as having no bearing on current structures. Thus they feel no obligation to make personal sacrifices, either at the personal or state level in order to repair a broken system.

It is a logical position. But it reflects deeper beliefs about consciousness and personal identity that would seem to give support to a racist perspective, even though not necessarily racist itself. I think most conservatives would love to see blacks do well. But they obviously are not.

So why is this? There are only three possible answers, and only two are available to the conservative: genetics or free choice. The third option is socialization, but that is a view contrary to the conservative philosophy of individual autonomy, and the embrace of which would require social ownership of individual outcomes - and any social ownership implies human rights and must lead directly to redistributive taxation. Genetics is racism, defined. So leaving that aside, the only available option is the mysterious notion of free choice. This would, one presumes, allow the individual to overcome any genetic or socialized determination within reason.

This is a fair enough position, granting the long and complex philosophical history of debate over free will. Its embrace by conservatives is not radical. And by doing so one is freed from many obligations to create a society in which certain freedoms are guaranteed, as long as those freedoms are the domain of individual, not social origination.

And so in the Republicans we have a modern conservative party that has little interest in social justice. In fact, it spends much of its time defending individual justice from the concept of social justice, as its logic sees misguided social obligations as a threat to the freedoms of those being compelled to sacrifice.

And of course, if one were a racist, the modern conservative movement would seem a sensible fit: blacks don't deserve our charity, just not because their self-efficacy is originated individually but instead because they're simply inferior. And so political aims become aligned. The tricky part, for those of us on the left, is parsing the difference.

Since racism has become almost unanimously seen as wrong, all but the most extreme racists hide their true feelings for fear of public outrage. And as any one who has spent much time trying to understand the racist mind and its historical expression will know, racism is a highly subversive and subconsciously driven pathology. Many people who in fact hold deep-rooted racist feelings will not admit to being racist, either to themselves or others.

One could then see how a liberal, who believes that black inequality is due not to genetics or free choice, but to socialization, and sees many parallels between racist and conservative thinking, would be skeptical of conservatives when they claim not to be racist. Of course it is perfectly possible that they are not. Yet it is also perfectly possible that they are.