It’s ok to start off Racist. We just don’t want to end that way.
The difference between conscious, natural, and willful racism and the ways we work through it.
I remember my first time consciously meeting a black man. He was tall, taller than my dad. His hands were huge when they shook mine. He looked different.
I remember shaking his hand and looking at the difference in our skin and feeling weird about it all, and then feeling angry with myself for feeling it was weird.
I must have been four or five.
Along the way, I’ve discovered plenty of other traits in myself that are racist: visceral responses, random thoughts, flared emotions.
Things that seemed to have been there in the gut and old sayings and stereotypes that pop up in the head.
I believe a look at human history, culture, and the mind shows that racism or earlier tribalism is naturally occurring.
The challenge in our development is how do we change it?
The need to civilize ourselves.
Anger is natural. Sexual needs are natural. Hunger is natural, but we don’t act violently every time we want to, we hopefully don’t press for sex every time we want to, and we don’t steal our neighbor's food just because we’re hungry.
In countless ways, we have challenged our natural inclinations of violence, sex, and hunger. Shouldn’t the same go for tribalism and racism?
The difficulty I find in discussions about racism stems from identity.
There is no stigma for being hungry and so we can say that we are.
Where the stigma lies isn’t with the hunger, it’s with the intensity of the hunger and weight accrument and so we have eating disorders, yo-yo dieting, and fitness obsession.
Where there is more stigma, less room to simply be, we find more difficulties.
Often anger is called irrational and so we have people who repress it and people who explode all over the place.
Lust and sex while generally accepted and provoked in media and advertisements is still disparaged in our religions and society and so we have rape, molestation, porn addiction, and all the suffering that comes from the porn industry and the criminalization of the sex industry.
In the West, there is a stigma against being racist or tribal. In a way its necessary to the narrative of democracy where we attempt to transcend ethnic and cultural differences to create a better society.
The problem is when the stigma becomes so strong it makes it impossible to see our own racism.
Three types of racism.
Sitting with racism I noticed at least three different trends:
- Natural Racism
- Conscious Racism
- Willful Racism
In natural racism, we experience the body’s reaction to the unknown, to something different. It’s the natural state of the mind and body to react to the unknown in a cautious way, sometimes even a fearful way.
This is very different from conscious racism where we choose to believe in ideologies that are crafted to make our race or ethnicity seem better than others.
And conscious racism is different than willful racism where we do not feel like we are given permission to experience our natural racism and so we get caught in an unconscious defense of racism in order to defend our identity as a non-racist.
Natural Racism
The visceral reaction of unease around something unknown was a natural response for 4-year-old Josh.
It wasn’t learned or conditioned. My dad introduced me to the man, a new neighbor, and didn’t show any sign of something being wrong.
I’ve heard my dad use stereotypes before but when put face to face with a person he’s always loving.
He’s worked through any visceral reactions of racism, of the unknown.
I, however, was too young to have done any work. All I knew is that I was having an uncomfortable experience.
When this visceral reaction is then paired to the observed reactions of others and the stereotypes that get passed down we have the combination of a natural response being further conditioned by the society.
Hence the xenophobia that plays into racism, tribalism, nationalism, and any fear of the “Other.”
Xenophobia & ethnocentrism as the roots of societal racism.
Xenophobia and ethnocentrism are demonstrated by cultures and civilizations around the world and throughout history.
Go to Asia and there is racism, go to Africa and there is tribalism and repression amongst ethnicities, go to my Columbian Grandfather’s barbeque and the Columbians will be talking shit on the Costa Ricans, and the Costa Ricans will talk shit on the Mexicans, and they’ll all throw shit at the rest of the world.
In ancient societies, this was seen in the very language. The Egyptians called themselves Rmṯ n km.t (people of the black lands) often shortened to Rmt meaning “the people.”
The Egyptians believed their civilization to be built upon the principles of the gods and eventually Ma’at, the ordering principle of the universe. Non-Egyptians were then naturally aligned with Ifset, chaos, or Set.
This is similar to the Chinese concept of 人 (ren). Which means person, human, humanness or the essence of being a human, and is often used to refer to the Chinese people with 别人 (biérén) referring to the “Others.”
The Greeks referred to everyone else as barbaros, the antonym for polites or citizens of the city states. The word barbaros came from their description of non-greek languages sounding like bar-bar, essentially gibberish, the western idea of blah-blah-blah.
In his work with the Chachi, an Amerindian group from NW Equador, Istvan Praet looked into the tribe’s use of language and its relationship to tribal, human, and personal identity.
The Chachi people believe they alone know how to truly ura’chanu (live well), their identity and the essence of “human-ness,” the quality of being human, rests in their ability to live well.
When someone breaks with the “right way of living” or gets very sick, or someone is a foreigner who doesn’t know how to live then they are uyala, (man-eaters… spooks) who live wrong, firu’chunu.
(They also have a host of other terms to refer to different kinds of animals, monsters, and outsiders.)
Whereas the word Chachi to the Chachi literally means “people,” it is the very act of being human but can only be used to refer to a person when that person is living “right.”
Healers are believed to be able to shapeshift between being Chachi and being uyala, and through this shape-shifting and their ability to control supernatural forces they can bring sick people back into the right way of living and restore them as Chachi, healthy human beings.
In these traditions, it was believed that the local tribe, kingdom, or empire knew the best rituals for maintaining the world in the face of chaos. Everything was orientated by the local geography and culture.
The society was ethnocentric.
The local mountains were the home of the gods, the local landmarks were stages for the myths, often the tribes were seen as descendants of the gods, all arrayed against the chaos of the world, the storms, the blights, the droughts and the strangers with their strange ways.
Their rituals were seen as the very thing that keeps the world going, as such they are the very acts that make a human “human,” anything else would inherently be “less good,” leading to the destruction of the world in chaos, and a less than human existence.
This is how the inherent discomfort at the visceral experience of the unknown is cemented in the collective unconscious of a tribe or civilization.
Everything that is seen as good is related back to the identity of the tribe, everything that is seen as unknown, mysterious, dangerous is projected onto the people who are unknown.
Conscious Racism.
In modern conscious racism, we see the natural experience of xenophobia reinforced by social conditioning and pseudoscience.
These are the people who are avowed racists, believing themselves to be genetically, spiritually or culturally superior to others based on their ethnicity.
In the end, it is the same level of ethnocentric identity as that of the Chachi or ancient Chinese.
The difference here is that those cultures arose originally from small tribes with little interaction with others. In the isolation of the small tribe everything that is thought of as good is locally promoted, everything that is seen as evil is banished into the world beyond, the world of the unknown.
The simple image of a fire in the dark of night brings the internal sensation of ethnocentrism to life.
The rituals that start the fire, tend the fire, and keep this source of warmth, the ability to cook, and with it life itself going are seen as sacred. The tribe begins to specialize in these rituals, they give each act special meaning and believe they should be done in a certain way.
What remains in the illumination of the fire at night is familiar, sacred, essential to survival. The dangers lurk beyond the light in the dark of the night, in the unknown.
Tribes grew from this isolation, the ethnocentrism of the ancient cultures arose from the stories told around these first fires.
The heroes that raised mountains, that summoned the Sun and the Moon, that arranged the stars and the sacred places of the local myths were dreamed in fluctuating realms of isolation.
Modern racism that is consciously promoted doesn’t arise from isolation, rather it is a reaction to the intermixing of cultures.
It stems from that same visceral reaction to the unknown but it weaves a new myth, a new set of stories.
Myths of superiority.
Ancient societies would tell the stories of the gods and heroes and how a particular pairing led to their tribe. All the sleeping around that the Greek gods did are stories of the ancestors of the Greek city-states.
Each state could then claim divine ancestry from the god or gods most aligned with their city.
Rome was the same way, they claimed to be descendants of Aeneas and thus Venus (Aeneas’s mother), with further divinity infused through Romulus, a son of Mars.
In the same way, modern narratives often try to create evolutionary mythologies of superior breeding or ancestral lines of DNA.
Some even go back to spiritual myths, creating elaborate stories about bygone civilizations or “pure” generations of descendants that stretch back to Noah or Moses or some other mythical figure.
The problem here is that we know better.
Whereas the ancient tribes didn’t have much in the way of proof to show that their myths weren’t historic realities, we can trace back our genetics to common ancestors, and see their similarities across the human population.
On top of it, anthropology and history both refute elaborate mythologies such as the Nazi concept of the Aryans and an uber race.
The only place these ethnocentric (read racist) mythologies are able to grow is where there has been a rejection or lack of education in scholastic science, history, and anthropology, leaving room for ethnocentric mythology.
Racism in the unconscious.
Any time we touch on mythology it is important to keep in mind Jung’s work with the unconscious and his observation of mythos as creating narratives and stories that invoke our unconscious archetypes.
The consciousness is afloat in the oceans of the unconscious. Often times the stories we tell ourselves are compensations arising from the unconscious in order to offset conscious experience.
We have a visceral reaction to the unknown and we start to tell stories about the unknown being dangerous, evil, and ourselves being good.
We are then able to identify with the archetypes we most cherish, Venus and Mars, or Liberty, Freedom, Justice, Reason, Wisdom.
We divide the realm of the unconscious. Polarizing this space where duality mixes and sorting all things into “us” versus “them.”
Against the “them” we project our nightmares, the unpleasant bits of the unconscious, our shadows.
With the “us” we identify our admirations, living-well, being virtuous, humane, hard-working, good Egyptians, Hindus, Christians.
We then create entire narratives of associations. In the world within its all mixed but when we polarize these experiences, we start to create categories of associations that go far beyond our personal identity.
The Egyptian identity of “human-ness” includes Egyptian rites of burial, how to wear your hair, how you plant your crops or go to war.
The Chachi acts of hunting, marriage, avoiding easy foods, and tribal pride all become the “human,” the self-identity. Anything else is cast in shadow.
We begin to identify as good people. Casting everything negative on others, from greed to laziness, violence and sexual exploitation, racism and arguing illogically.
The associations spread and grow. Our culture is better, our democracy is superior, our capitalist system has transformed the world.
The polarization spreads, we become hard working, faithful, good people, they become thieves, rapists, communists, fascists, the shadows of our mind, the bits of ourselves that we’re uncomfortable with, that are unknown.
Willful Racism. (The unconscious ones.)
The reason why I am using the term “willful” is because the ego seems to willfully reject its self-identification with the shadowiness of ethnocentric racism.
Here the polarities of the unconscious cast “racism” as foreign, as “other.” Since the personal identity is based on being the good person, the ego identity cannot accept any allusion to racism whether it be seen as visceral or a conditioning by society.
Because this is based in the ego’s relationship to the unconscious and personal identity, discussions take on odd forms.
This is because there isn’t a conscious conversation happening, instead, there is a runaround, the ego is trying to defend itself as “not racist” while it espouses beliefs that are founded in the unconscious visceral reaction of xenophobia and the cultural conditioning of ethnocentrism, the roots of racism.
If we saw these conversations as values presenting themselves to the conscious ego it might look like the one below.
An imagined conversation:
A: I work hard to be a good person. Life is rough and I am suffering. We all suffer.
B: I understand that you are suffering and that most of us suffer. The difficulty is that the system we live in increases the suffering of minorities and we need everyone to come together to change that. This is what a good person does.
A: I am not a bad person. You say that others are suffering more but I am most familiar with the suffering of my loved ones. How am I supposed to help those distant strangers when I can’t help the people closest to me?
B: This is the problem with the system. It invokes suffering, we need to change that system.
A: But that system is the system I know. It is familiar. I understand it has done bad things in the past but it's not all bad, parts of it compose my identity. They help me know who I am, they are the works of my ancestors and I still believe in many of the system’s principles.
B: Not everything in the system is bad but there is always room for change and we need it, the suffering is too great and minorities and those deemed as “Other” suffer the brunt of it. The old has to go.
A: But what will I pass on to my children? Where do I stand in the unknown? If you take away the culture and system I know, how do I teach my loved ones to navigate something I never grew up with? Something foreign?
I don’t want my kids to feel like racist monsters, ungrounded in a world we don’t understand, all while loathing themselves. I don’t want to loathe myself.
The real conversation isn’t ideal and it’s not rational.
The issue here is in identities.
The ego of A is identified with the current system and the suffering of their “tribe.” To wish to undo that system, to change the rules and the stories is similar to asking the Chachi to change theirs, at least in the realm within, in the feeling states and instincts.
Which is something those from group B need to realize.
We’re not having a rational conversation. We are two brains with billions of cells that have evolved through millions of lives to protect the life, the self-identity, and tribe of the individual.
In reality, the Chachi tribe composes a few thousand people in Equador with no power over other groups.
Doubtlessly there is some repression of minorities in their system (LGBTQ, perhaps women) but in general, it is a homogenous population believing in the same myths and cultures.
Meanwhile, privileged populations in America, Europe, China, and Japan all have a much greater effect on other populations and the intensity of their suffering.
Not to mention a greater share of the consumption of the world’s resources.
But this isn’t what a conversation about racism becomes when talking to someone who tries to banish their natural racism into the shadows.
It goes both ways.
Because all participants in any conversation risk unconscious content obscuring their personal clarity on a subject, the unconscious blinders concerning racism aren’t solely the concern of the person arguing for the dominant culture.
Person A identifies with the “good person” (not racist), the dominant culture, and the suffering of their own tribes and so they can’t see the root of some of their arguments because they can’t acknowledge their own racist tendencies.
But this also applies to Person B who identifies as the “good person.”
Even if Person B owns their own racism, they can still vilify racism to a point that they drive any real conversation about our experiences of racist tendencies into the shadows.
Nothing can be done here if we’re too “righteous” or triggered to hear where someone is at and give them room to learn a new position.
The fact that Person B also often identifies with a counter-culture or a perceived “ethically” superior culture only invokes demonization of the other on both sides of the issue. Making for a very messy conversation.
Real life conversations.
Rather than our imagined conversation we tend to get the following:
B: Ethnic people are suffering.
A: White people are suffering too.
B: Ethnic people suffer more, here are the statistics.
A: Have you seen all the pain my family has gone through? Or how about this town, it used to be a great agricultural town (or coal or factory town). You keep talking about ______ (choose your minority) but who is helping us?
B: Minorities are suffering more right now. We need to fix that first. Can’t you see my statistics?
A: I don’t care about your statistics, I know my life, plus, here are mine and they prove you’re making life worse for us so you can feel good about helping ________.
B: We’ll get to you after we help the minorities and btw this is your fault for voting for racist politicians who sold you out.
A: At least I can vote, a right given to me by the society you hate. You’re handing over the work of our great society to these _______ to ruin.
B: Your society was founded on slavery and genocide (←this was me just recently. *Shakes head, knowing better*).
It is around this point most people tell each other to f&#k off using all the slurs of the “Other” shadow tribe, whether that be racist Nazi or brainwashed Marxist tyrant.
Once again this is because we’re not having a conversation about facts. We are having a conversation about our personal identity, what we associate with, and how we sort the world into “us” and “them,” those who are “good” and those who are “cast in shadow.”
The first step forward.
I’m going to go ahead and say the bit that some part inside is screaming, “YOU CAN’T SAY THAT!” It honestly churns my stomach some, showing just how invested my unconscious is in my personal identity.
Ready for it? Brace yourself.
We need to make racism ok again. . .
The giant-billboard-sign-in-neon-lights-with-screaming-heavenly-choirs caveat to this is that we also need to create a socially cultivated and pressured expectation that one does not remain racist and/or that one is constantly working to rewrite their natural racist tendencies.
Just as we all hunger, lust (most of us), and occasionally get angry, we will occasionally have a xenophobic or ethnocentric thought or experience that is racist.
But just as we don’t steal other’s food, masturbate in public (most of us), and attack everyone who makes us angry, a cultivated matured individual works to re-educate their racist tendencies and its roots in xenophobia and ethnocentricism.
A personal example.
I grew up in California endlessly hearing about how Asians can’t drive. To this day if I see someone driving poorly and they just so happen to be Asian a part of the brain spouts off an internal “of course” before I can think it through.
I then have to go through and consciously remind myself that this is simply a stereotype reinforced by selective bias and the fact that I don’t racially ascribe incompetent driving skills to every white, black, latino, and middle eastern driver who has also driven horribly.
I have had to do similar work with my Latino ancestry. My family experienced a lot of trauma and often times this was associated in their minds to their cultural background.
As such, I grew up with stories and stereotypes about Latinos that greatly twisted my understanding of others and myself.
As one of only two Latinos in my Southern California school, these negative narratives were reinforced over and over again. The way I tanned seemed wrong to me, my olive brown skin wasn’t the appropriate bronze that whites like my cousins had.
When we moved to the country in Northern California I became known to everyone as the “brown kid.”
I not only felt like the outsider but I demonized that same “outsider” ethnicity so as to identify more with the dominant population.
I was obsessed with my white father’s ancestry and ashamed of my Latino heritage.
With time and conscious effort to examine my visceral reactions, narratives, thought processes, and life experiences, I have been able to transform the self-loathing and with it my expectations of other Latinos.
This couldn’t have happened if I refused to see my racist tendencies, visceral responses, and thought processes.
And this seeing is far more difficult to do if we demonize a state that naturally arises.
Which is why to move forward we need to make space to see ourselves as naturally conditioned racists so we can talk about these experiences and begin the work to change.
The next step. Accepting wholeness.
The next part of the process is to take a step back from polarized thought processes.
First, we accept that it can be natural to have these less than desirable traits, then we have to make room for us to be a mix of desirable and undesirable traits.
For instance, I can have racist stereotypes pop up in my head and still do great work with clients.
Someone’s grandma can be the nicest person they know and also be real racist. A man can be a great father to his sons and still be a misogynist.
America, Europe, and China can have great cultures, economic success, be composed of amazing people and still act as ethnocentric empires colonizing the rest of the world through manipulation, violence, and destruction.
We need to break down the polarization of good/bad us/them and make space for a mix of traits. This is what creates room for change.
If I am either a bad racist or a good non-racist, there isn’t room for me to be a person becoming less and less racist every day while also working to be a better person.
We need to make room to see within ourselves and the world around the mixed states of being rather than the polarizations of identity and projection.
The rest of the steps.
- Observation and mindfulness.
- Work and consistent change.
When are able to see what is happening within we can begin to change our internal narratives.
Just like depression or anxiety, the important piece here is to acknowledge what is true and correct the false beliefs or narratives that arise from our experience.
Yes, we got in a car accident. No, that doesn’t mean that we’ll get in a car accident every time we drive.
Yes, we lost a loved one. No that doesn’t mean we will lose everyone we love.
Yes, we had a negative experience with someone of a different skin tone or cultural background. No, that doesn’t mean that everyone of that skin tone will hurt us.
Yes, grandma made some racist remarks at Christmas dinner. No, people don’t expect you to hate your own grandmother for being racist.
It is simply a matter of sorting the fact and fiction of our experiences and unconscious story-making, which is really some of the hardest work we can do.
We are trying to sort and edit the facts and fictions of the very modality that allows us to create, recognize, understand, and generate fact and fiction.
We are analyzing and trying to fix our mind with our mind. It takes work, practice, failure, and persistent application.
This is no different than concentrating on focus in meditation, redirecting cravings in addiction, or changing negative self-talk.
We have to observe in a non-judgmental way our own thought processes, acknowledge the experience, make room for ourselves to be a variety of things, accept the truths, and re-educate the false assumptions.
That is how we change.
What about you?
What thoughts or sensations popped up for you while you were reading this?
Love and share.
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