Sometime back I attended a monthly dialogue session that
focuses on Anti-Racism, Racism & Discrimination. In our discussion, one of the group members
said something that stayed with me: Racism is a feeling.
Here are some rhetorical questions: please don’t give your
answers now, but simply listen to some of the questions:
§
What do you think of this statement (“racism is a
feeling”)?
§
Do you view it as true and accurate, or false and
inaccurate?
§
What are your reasons for believing the statement
to be true?
§
What are your reasons for believing the statement
to be false?
§
As I said the phrase racism is a feeling, did you notice any shifts in your body?
§
Were there places of tension, compression or release
that you felt in your body sensations?
§
A key part in this exercise is to listening discriminatively—this doesn’t
mean you listen for a way to gain information to use to discriminate against
someone.
Discriminative Listening is listening to someone’s hear/reading
between the lines; but you listen for both emotions and words contained in the
other’s communication. In this kind of
listening, we can engage our own empathic compassion for self & others, as
we listen. Pay careful attention to feeling words found in a person’s statements,
innuendos, & general conversation; this may be combined for one’s content,
and insures that we really understand what the person is saying, especially
those that are easily misunderstood.
Do you think adapting the phrase “Racism is a feeling” would be a helpful term to use in anti-racism
training? How about “Racism has many feelings? Think of your
own, and try it out?
Our goal here is to try to come to a common understanding on
the statement, Racism is a feeling. Another
way of getting at this is to take a very quick look at Brain Chemistry, since
it’s relevant for understanding this phrase.
I hope it’s also relevant in our everyday lives, too.
Human
Development
We when are growing as
children in this culture, or someone who is a citizen of another nation,
the Neo Cortex (NC) in the frontal lobe of the brain; for many people their NC
doesn’t fully develop until around eighteen years of age. The NC plays the role of language formation, so
when language is in the formation phase in youth, the role of the NC is
different than when one is older.
In the formative years of human
development, a child may not have the capacity for human language, but it has
to develop in a process of time.
However, all types of non-verbal communication are occurring. The child is exposed to many brief, or in
some cases longer, non-verbal messages, that are imprinted on one’s psyche or
unconscious—facial looks, smiles, mean looks, “be quiet” messages, positive non-verbal
& reciprocal positive regard statements, punishing looks, unspoken
non-verbal cues with underlying family or hidden messages, expressions of joy,
grief, sadness, anger, depression, acting-out behaviors, etc.
The brain somehow somehow stores these
messages, and as the brain continues growing, there are more and more of the
unconscious emergences; there is, of course, a parallel-running, language
acquisition and comprehension function of the NC. More unconscious data arises to manifest
itself in conscious ways and ordinary experiences. An individual’s self-reflective and
intentional application of new learnings appears to cement certain feelings
onto a template of everyday living.
The caveat here is that our
emotions may, in fact, need re-booting, customizing, and opportunities that lead
to personal expression of feelings and/or thoughts. What this also points to is the need to blend
both cognitive thoughts mixed with messages from the affective realm (a partnering of feeling & thought) for effective communication.
If this process is somehow
neglected, skipped, or is somehow incomplete, and doesn’t happen, it’s easy for
a human to get lost in past trauma, stuck in anger or resentment, and lose the
purpose for which she’s participating in the first place. Ending consequences may be that some medical
authorities will resist using the diagnosis of PTSD; there appears to be a
newly emerging notion that PTSD is no dream—it’s real and VA doctors are
certainly aware that PTSD harms soldiers & families. They understand, as do most professionals in
the health care field, that you can’t fool human nature, environmental hazards,
or medical technology and personnel.
A major field that we need to
understand a little about is that of cognitive-behavior theory; a systems view of racism we may consider is this: racism is a constellation of many feelings. Essentially, researchers and practioners
in this field theorize that all feelings/emotions naturally flow from
cognitions or thoughts in our brains.
There is a causal relationship to our cognitions and emotions. For example, a person’s Belief System is
formed from cognitions; cognitions may include interpreted facts, assumptions,
stereotypical thinking, inferences, opinions, biases, etc.
Cognitions trigger our emotional
infrastructure and catalyze us to get ready to feel various emotions coming up
into our conscious field. A metaphor
would be that emotions are our quality
control system. Their mental basis
is rooted in one’s cognitive schema.
Emotions that come up for air are signs for us to take note of so we can
take whatever appropriate action needed as a result of our emotional
intelligence, and either let it go, sit with it a while, dismiss it, deny it,
or merely observe the feeling.
Here’s another suggestion: what
if our phrase read Racism is a storage
area for multi-colored feelings. If
we use this as our premise we might ask “What colors could we give to the
various emotions in the constellation of racism?”
Copyrighted Christopher Bear-Beam February 3, 2015
