Racism Isn't learned, It's Indoctrinated
We have to recognize and oppose the hidden mechanisms that perpetuate hatred
Say you want to teach somebody how to ride a bike. I'm willing to bet that no matter how much time you spend using slides and videos and multimedia displays, you could never get your students to understand.
Hours spent lecturing would be wasted. Students cannot listen to an explanation, walk out the door, and put the theory into practice.
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There are simply things that cannot be learned through words.
Riding a bike is something that has to be felt. It's a reaction. It's instinctive.
To successfully ride a bike, you have to make adjustments almost as fast as you can perceive the need for them.
The proper way to teach somebody how to ride a bike is to get them outside, take the pedals off, and let them coast around. Little by little they begin to go farther and farther. Eventually they understand how the combination of impulse plus steering adjustments allows them to stay upright.
It's not rational.
It's conditioning.
You learn how to ride a bike because you don't want to fall and get scraped up on the pavement.
Riding a bike is an easy example, but this mechanism applies to a lot of scenarios. It's important to recognize we don't always learn through the conscious absorption of information.
Some things are conditioned.
Some things are indoctrinated.
This kind of learning can happen without our conscious awareness.
We condition ourselves to drive home after work. As dangerous as driving is, you don't have to be fully present to drive home safely. Sometimes people end up at work or at home without remembering how they got there.
We are all capable of handling a complex process without conscious awareness.
This is very useful.
It's also very scary.
We have to recognize that there's a learning mechanism that can't be properly conveyed through language or logical reasoning.
Now consider how difficult it is to unlearn something that's been taught in this way. Have you ever caught yourself daydreaming on the drive home from work only to arrive at the driveway of a house you moved out of years ago?
Having learned how to ride a bike, have you ever considered how difficult it might be to unlearn that skill?
What if I told you that a form of this involuntary process is the main mechanism that's used for perpetuating racism? How do we help people liberate themselves from an unconscious hatred that's been indoctrinated into their thought process without their awareness or consent?
Most people will recognize that racism is a thing that exists. It's unusual for anyone to try to argue that racism is a good thing. Almost everyone will acknowledge that racism is bad.
We live in a society where people largely fall into two different categories. In one category, people say, “Racism is bad.” In the other, people say, “Racism is bad, but we've defeated racism.”
There's the appearance of agreement even though it's only an illusion. Effectively, the group arguing that racism isn't a problem is the one that has been indoctrinated to obey and perpetuate the mechanism of racism.
Anti-racism means that you recognize racism is a problem, and you also recognize it always exists in either a conscious or unconscious form.
The issue we face is that there are many mechanisms in place that indoctrinate the population into normalizing racism without ever invoking the concept.
Again, you can't use language to teach people to ride a bike. In the same way, you can't use language to indoctrinate the population into accepting something they consciously know to be bad. In response to this, a mechanism of indoctrination was put into effect that never even invokes the term.
In the United States, there's a small percentage of the population that is stubbornly and defiantly racist. The form of racism that's unique to the United States has its roots in the Civil War. A percentage of Confederates evolved into various other race fixated groups such as the KKK. Over the decades, they've refined their mechanism for drawing other people to their cause.
When you study racism, you'll find that there are many examples of coded racism. The relatively small but overtly pro-racist contingent at work in our country knows that the general population will recoil at the concept of overt racism. So, they rely on indoctrination through covert ideas.
One example is that you can hide racism within a discussion of tradition. There are many traditions in our country that have a racist origin. The mechanism used to perpetuate racism has trained the population to become unreasonably hostile at any criticism of a longstanding tradition. Provoking anger helps displace a more rational thought process.
Another example is to divert attention to national identity, rather than ethics or morality. Indoctrination works by appealing to primal reactions such as anger and fear.
We're told that we need to have discussions with people who disagree with us, but that's simply not an effective strategy for confronting indoctrination. This approach can again be compared to lecturing somebody on how to ride a bicycle. You are not going to succeed.
In the United States, we say that racism is wrong but then we turn around and indoctrinate our population to be racist anyway. We've normalized a system that has transformed racism into the instinctive response through which our children perceive and interact with the world.
Our population is like the absent minded commuter who ends up arriving at a destination where he had no intention of going. It's embarrassing to recognize that the ruts that have been installed in our collective minds lead almost invariably to white supremacy.
Essentially, we were indoctrinated with racism before we even learned how to ride a bike.
It's important to understand that we're not at fault for this. We didn't make the choice to fuse that hatred with our personal identity. That hatred was installed by a mechanism that was put in place decades before we were born.
How do we reverse the indoctrination process that has tainted our national identity? The first step comes from recognizing how the process works. We must take comfort in the fact that almost everybody agrees racism is wrong. What the general population doesn't understand is the coded process that allows racism to be handed down from generation to generation.
We could start by urging people to defer to their reason rather than their rage. Concepts such as nationalism, patriotism, and religion are often used to incite a self-righteous anger. We need more social discussion about the importance of addressing conflict rationally.
Unfortunately, there is always political capital that comes from enraging the general population. Cultivating rage is a effective means of manipulating people. Therefore, there's a need to oppose rage conditioning with reason conditioning.
We need a greater emphasis on thoughtfulness from our politicians, our media and our religious leaders. Perhaps the United States will truthfully be able to say it's making progress in the conflict with racism when our national defense budget is dramatically reduced.
It's also important to educate the population to understand that the problems we're trying to fix do not exist in the rational part of our minds. Racism was never a choice, it was forced on us against our will. We have the right to overcome this malicious indoctrination, and prevent our children from having to endure any exposure.
But this is not something we're going to overcome with lectures.
You can't fight indoctrination with reason any more than you can talk somebody into forgetting how to ride a bike. Once we understand that racism indoctrination exists within a different framework of learning, we become equipped to deploy effective counter-measures.
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I watch for unconscious racism in people’s eyes.
I’ll give you an example.
I was waiting for my daughter-in-law after her first post - delivery checkup. I got talking with another mother who had a two day old baby daughter. Her proud mother was there waiting for her first post - delivery checkup too. They were both super friendly and happy for me to see the tiny baby girl.
Five minutes later my daughter-in-law came out of the doctor’s office. My husband moved forward to help her with her coat. I was about to say farewell to the new mother and grandmother before we left when I saw the daughter protectively wrap her baby and pull her away from me. Her mother’s eyes were wide as she stared at my daughter-in-law who was born in the Philippines.
She has beautiful dark brown skin and dark black hair. My granddaughter has brown eyes like her mother and soft light brown skin. Her dark tuft of black hair resembles her mother but its soft texture comes from my blue eyed fair skinned son.
Their eyes showed how threatening they felt my mixed race two day old granddaughter was.
I picked up my coat, turned my back on them and joined my family. There are no words to be said when you see that someone looks upon a baby girl with horror because she has parents of two different races.
Their eyes told me everything I needed to know.
Thank you for explaining this form of racism so clearly Walter.
A recent article by Jay Kuo demonstrated that this is true for all bigotry. The article is very dense in complex theories about sexuality. Jay wrote it in response to the GOP’s insistence that there are only two sexes, male and female and their crusade to codify that into law. The article is very dense in complex theories and formulas and made me feel a bit overwhelmed. I consider myself pretty intelligent, but I admit I don’t have a science brain. It made me realize that those who insist there are only two sexes, or who believe in White Supremacy, can’t possibly understand this kind of data. Those who double down on bigotry and racism don’t have the cognitive strength to understand deep data dives. And they’ve been conditioned not to be persistent in pursuing knowledge. It’s so much easier for them to just accept the binary as opposed to the spectrum, rather than do the work to understand the much more complicated scientific facts.