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SBD
Admiral
Joined: 19 Aug 2004
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 Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2005 6:34 pm Post subject: RACE By Dr. Joel Wade |
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| Quote: | RACE
The Virtue of Happiness
To the Point News
By Dr. Joel Wade
Friday, September 16, 2005
Racial prejudice makes people feel angry. It is a stance that fuels a sense of helplessness and hopelessness. Add to that the helplessness and resignation of poverty, and you amplify the feelings many times. Add to that a tragedy and you get a traumatic soup of despair, immobility, and rage.
If you pile on to this the verbal bomb throwing of a Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, or Kanye West, magnified by the communication power of a media eager for chaos, you get a pathway blazed of wrath and fury, aimed like a laser toward the defined enemy.
But you still move no further from the original problems and reality of race and poverty that set the course of this terrible journey.
There are some things that I’d like to say about racism today, that I hope can help to make sense of the spectacle we have witnessed over the past two weeks, and look to actually improving the situation.
If you’ve been reading my columns for a while, you’re familiar with Martin Seligman’s formulation of Learned Optimism (Know Your ABC’s; Teach Your Kids Optimism.
Very briefly, to strengthen your sense of optimism in the face of bad events, you want to view those bad events as temporary, impersonal, and isolated incidents. What happens if in the service of viewing those events as impersonal, you blame them on someone else?
First of all, you run the risk of making the cause of your suffering permanent and pervasive (leading to pessimism, helplessness and depression), and second of all, you bring your focus on the cause, “the other”, as an enemy, with all of the anger and fear that goes with it.
That is what looks like is happening in the rush by some people to blame a portion of the horrible consequences of this hurricane on racism.
In their study, It's Not My Fault: When and Why Attributions to Prejudice Protect Self-Esteem (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol 29, 2003)
Brenda Major, Cheryl R. Kaiser, and Shannon K. McCoy of the University of California, Santa Barbara, tested the hypothesis that awareness of the possibility of being a target of discrimination can provide individuals with a means of self-esteem protection when they are faced with negative outcomes.
The men and women in this study were asked to imagine being rejected from a college course due to either sexism, their own deservingness, or an exclusively external cause. When participants thought their rejection was due to sexism, they blamed themselves less, attributed the rejection less to internal causes, and anticipated feeling less depressed than those who saw it as a matter of personal merit.
In other words, seeing prejudice as a cause, whether or not it actually exists, is a way that people can make a negative event impersonal - one of the key strategies of learned optimism.
There’s one problem: This study also showed that discounting personal agency in this manner did not stop feelings of hostility or anxiety.
So let’s look at the worst of what we saw from a racial standpoint in the hurricane. You had poor people, most of whom were black, in a horrible situation. They could not or did not take the action they needed to take to get away from the danger. Many of them were not getting the help they needed.
Some horrible things happened, and many people died. They were or felt helpless. Word gets around from demagogues like Sharpton or Jackson, or media people, or neighbors and friends with the same point of view, that their plight was caused by racism.
They can now feel less depressed and helpless and personally blameworthy, but they also still feel anxious and angry. You saw the same dynamic in the Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, as he blamed the poor response that he bore much responsibility for on racism and other external causes.
Even if to some degree racism was played out here, the race hustlers who make it their life’s work to intensify the passion with which some people feel victim to other people’s prejudice do not help anybody in doing so.
They may relieve some people of the burden of bad feelings for whatever part they may have played in their own plight, but in so doing they replace it with an irresolvable burden of helplessness, and of fear and anger toward their fellow man.
And there is something more.
In another study, Can Race Be Erased? Coalitional Computation and Social Categorization (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol 98, issue 26, Dec 18, 2001), Robert Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides of the University of California at Santa Barbara found that we do separate people into coalitions - part of my group/not part of my group, but race is only one way that people decide that.
There is nothing hard wired in us about using race as a way of separating people out. When there are factors other than race – where you have different people of different race on the same team, particularly when there is some visual cue of this alliance, such as a uniform or shirt identifying your team from another team, when there is a coalition formed in such a way that race is not a factor in the coalition, race disappears as an issue, very fast. Even when people have been used to seeing race as important.
How fast? Here’s what the UC-Santa Barbara study discovered:
“Despite a lifetime’s experience of race as a predictor of social alliance, less than 4 minutes of exposure to an alternate social world was enough to deflate the tendency to categorize by race. These results suggest that racism may be a volatile and eradicable construct that persists only so long as it is actively maintained through being linked to parallel systems of social alliance.” (Italics mine)
The more we work to define people by their race, the more important race becomes.
One of the reasons that a tragedy like this usually brings people together, and has the effect of making other differences such as race largely irrelevant, is that we find ourselves on the same team, regardless of race or other differences. That new team, that new alliance, becomes stronger than race, and race disappears as an issue entirely.
This makes the evil of the race hustlers so profound. As the new and healthier alliances are just beginning to be formed around responding together to the threats of nature, they act to yank people back into their old racial alliances, to stop the coalition of active team members from working together against the challenges of this tragedy.
The race hustlers’ purpose is to convince people that they need to stay defined as their race, to always define themselves as their race, and no matter what happens, no matter what forces offer opportunities for them to join with others toward a new and healthier definition of humanity, the race hustlers keep blaring their message, “You are your race, always remember, never forget, you are your race. None of the new alliances with your fellow man are real, race is what is real, you are your race.
There is no way out from this message. It is a closed loop. The more we define ourselves and others by our race, the more important race becomes.
The more we define ourselves and others by other means, “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” as Martin Luther King Jr. said in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, the less race is an issue.
And this can change in less than 4 minutes.
When I see President Bush gathering about him people like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Porter Goss, Alberto Gonzales, Gale Norton, Elaine Chow, Margaret Spellings, and Carlos Gutierrez, I do not think of race. I think of competence.
He has formed a team and is continually leading the country toward forming a team that includes people of different racial backgrounds, but around a different set of principles -human principles - around qualities that are common and available to all of us if we so choose; around traits of character that are a matter of personal choice, not biological determinism.
For those who are serious about ending the scourge of racism in this country, this is how to really do it. Treat people as individuals, judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, and form alliances around qualities that are chosen.
Individualism is the antidote to racism.
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[Please note the obligatory disclaimer: These suggestions are not a substitute for professional treatment. Any decisions regarding treatment or medication should be done in consultation with a mental health professional.]
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GenrXr
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy
Joined: 05 Aug 2004
Posts: 1720
Location: Houston
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| Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2005 10:51 pm Post subject: |
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I wrote a similar arctile pointing out this is an issue about character as opposed to poor & black.
If you haven't read it please do. 
| Quote: | | Is there genuine need by many? Of course there is, but we can also ask ourselves if we as a society are fulfilling our obligations to our country. We can become better people and exhibit greater character. We can throw away our cradle to grave care mentality and require more self-reliance. It is our duty as citizens to view the people causing further misery upon the weak in New Orleans not through the myopic lens of poor or black, but weak or strong character. It is necessary for us to shame all who would prey on those too weak to survive and demand Shakleton strength of character out of all who can help themselves. We may not get Shakleton, but at least we won’t end up with a Giuliani or Powell leading the relief effort and we will shame those animals for the animals they are and not treat them as poor or black. |
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"An activist is the person who cleans up the water, not the one claiming its dirty."
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing." Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Founder of Conservative Philosophy |
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