This is my last post, at least for now, pulled from the notebook in which I’ve been recording some of my reflections, over the past few months, on dr. john powell’s time in Kansas City. I’m grateful to the folks (including many good friends) at Communities Creating Opportunity for bringing him to town, and for convening people to talk and think about race and justice and how easy it is for us to “other” others.
I hear this a lot, really, in my work with policy impacting undocumented immigrants–the idea that much of this policy is constructed without a basic regard for immigrants as human beings–as though they are somehow non-persons.
And to be honest, sometimes it sounds kind of outlandish, this concept that the root of the injustice that surrounds us is an inability to see each other as people. I mean, I get it that we obviously don’t see kids in urban school districts as our neighbors, or people experiencing homelessness as our fellow citizens, or immigrants as our equals.
Obviously.
But, not even as people?
Except, you know, it kind of explains a lot.
dr. powell shared some tremendously powerful psychological research about how the brain responds to stimuli around difference, and, in contemplating the end results of the policies we end up with, it sort of becomes the only logical conclusion:
surely we wouldn’t, couldn’t, let these routine tragedies befall other people so regularly…unless we didn’t see them as such.
And, so, unless we can bring people into our circle of concern, who are currently beyond it, unless we can begin to see everyone as just as human as we are, then our tools to push for supportive policy responses–to child poverty, to criminal justice, to mental illness–will be severely limited.
Because what has a heavy application of guilt gotten anybody lately?
But if we can enlarge our circle of human concern so that it goes beyond our Facebook friends and our next-door neighbor (maybe) and the families that look just like us, then we can tap into the decency that still abides in many hearts, motivating American voluntarism and charitable giving, albeit in quantities inadequate to compensate for the abdication of our collective responsibilities.
I don’t have the answer, of course, to the key question: how?
It’s getting harder, evidence suggests, because, as our society grows more diverse, there are more and more people we see as beyond our “circle of human concern.”
There are efforts that seem to be bearing some fruit–like Welcoming America, in dealing with immigrant and refugee issues–by helping people see themselves reflected in each others’ eyes, and by connecting on the level of shared hopes and common fears.
There are policy answers, too-seriously integrated schools and mixed-income housing and the preservation/creation of public spaces–to our tendency to draw a tight and small circle that leaves a lot of “others” out.
And we need to tell stories, because it’s still hard for most of us to ignore the humanity of someone so obviously human, while statistics and even aggregations are too easily lumped beyond the circle.
I guess the key is that we don’t overlook this step, as I’ve done for so long. We can’t rush to the policy solution, scratching our heads or lambasting the culprits, without stopping to ask why it’s so easy to harm those whose pains we can’t see or even comprehend.
First, we need to make sure that those we want to help are fully humanized, since we already know they’re fully human. We have to force those in power to face the “other”.
We have to draw the circle. Bigger.
Classroom to Capitol 
Shaping our first impressions
photo credit, The Future, by Denkyem84, via Flickr
It’s been more than a year since so many of you weighed in on my struggles around where and how to educate my kids–how I’m torn between the advantages that they may accrue in the public schools where we live now, and my growing angst over the social costs of such a racially-exclusive environment.
And, no, I haven’t reached some happy conclusion.
Really, I’m more conflicted than ever.
I read a disturbing piece of the book Blink about the conclusive psychological research demonstrating how the racial stereotypes we all hold influence even our most subconscious decisions. It’s sobering for us all.
More alarming for me, though, was the research on how we can consciously influence these internal processes, by priming our minds to approach race, and racial difference, differently.
How does such priming occur?
Through intense and sustained positive interactions with people of different races, of course.
And what, precisely, are my kids likely to be denied, at least through their schooling, given the dire demographics?
Yeah.
As a parent, I want to give my children the best.
Not the best toys, certainly (we wouldn’t even know what those are, since we don’t watch TV!), but the best chance–to learn, to grow, to experience a full and wonderful life.
That requires a good school, certainly. But don’t I also want them to have the best chance, at least the best fighting shot at it that any of us can hope for, to beat back the demons of racial prejudice that so plague much of humanity?
It has already started, certainly, the awareness of divisions. My oldest son remarked how one of his friends at ‘nature camp’ (a boy of Indian-American descent) has “darker skin than mine, but lighter skin than Hayden (an African-American friend)…it’s funny, Mommy, because his skin is kind of the same color as Grandpa George’s (my husband’s maternal grandfather is Mexican), but they don’t know each other!”
Indeed, this sophisticated classification of skin tone gradients.
At the same time, there’s a definite opening now, an innate sense of fairness that is part developmental stage and part, I suspect, a product of our influence on them.
I was preparing to go to a pro-immigrant protest, and Sam asked me where I was going.
“I need to stand up against a man who doesn’t like people who come from other countries, to show that I won’t accept that in our community.”
“Why, Mommy?” he asked. “Why am I going?” I asked.
“No,” Sam said softly. “Why would anyone not like someone from another country?”
What’s the best answer, for influencing their minds and hearts so that, in the blink of an eye, they’ll always see justice and fellowship and equality?
Science, and human instinct, tell us it’s a multiracial environment, the likes of which are rare in this highly segregated and stratified society, a search even further complicated because we also want for them a chance to learn the knowledge and skills that they’ll need to succeed.
Gladwell’s book is subtitled, The Power of Thinking without Thinking. But this is one dilemma I can’t seem to think, or unthink, my way around.
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Posted in Analysis and Commentary
Tagged education, parenting, race