RETHINKING WHAT WE
UNDERSTAND ABOUT HUMAN PERCEPTION AS A STRATEGY FOR MANAGING RACISM...
Wouldn't it
be amazing if we possessed the ability to perceive the world through the eyes
of other people allowing us to appreciate just how diverse human perception can
be? Now I don’t mean a freakish sci-fi
movie extra-sensory perception; I’m talking about a natural and perfectly
normal empathy that could facilitate our ability to be receptive to the emotions
of others. If this is possible, and it
is, how would we use the extraordinary insight our newly found “Third-Eye”
afforded us? More importantly how could
we cultivate these perceptive abilities within ourselves in order to understand
the motivation behind the actions of those around us? How might we use this
innately human skill to uproot and undo centuries of entrenched racism. This
gift of perception has sometimes been called the “Third-Eye” in both ancient
and contemporary times. We might someday,
after a great deal of focused study, discover a way to balance our-third eye’s
perception with that of the two eyes we already possess but for now let us
simply think of it as the simplest and most normal kind of human intuition?
Having the ability to understand and adapt things that greatly differ
from our norm is a skill rooted in our affective core as human beings. It is an essential survival skill we use to
communicate across unfamiliar barriers such as language, race, ethnicity and
sometimes sexuality. Many humanitarians
and freethinkers believe that racism, classism and sexism for example are
nothing more than superficial overlays to the human psyche, glitches,
impediments, synaptic misfires acting as filters of a sort that inhibit our
ability to effectively communicate on a fundamental level which otherwise
unifies us as human beings. The
relevance of this philosophy is that it challenges mankind to confront its
failure to live up to the egalitarian ideals which are universally celebrated
across all human civilization. The
ideals of which I speak are all based upon the belief that all humans are
absolutely equal in every way. This
philosophy deliberately treats racial, ethnic, sexual, economic and other
biases and prejudices as superficial and does not consider them as functionally
fundamental to human instinct. If not
only by virtue of the fact that this discussion is necessary this philosophy
recognizes that there is a clear relationship between these biases and human
instinct but one that is not too deeply rooted that it cannot be managed or
avoided, hence the theory that this type of bias and prejudice might be
tangential or superficial rather than subcutaneous or even fundamental to human
instinct. One thing is certain no matter
how ingrained it may be in the fabric of our humanity we know for certain that
racism and bias can be successfully overcome.
We know that regardless of race, gender, economics, culture or ethnicity
all members of the human species are naturally attracted to and compatible with
each other; that superficial differences such as skin color, physical
characteristics attributable to geography, etc., are not significant enough to
infer a fundamental genetic difference within the species as a whole outside of
the stronger sexual/hormonal differences between males and females. The racial overlay which cites skin color and
racial characteristics as hallmarks of racial inequality besides being
technically flawed in lieu of modern anthropological and genetic research and
ethically/morally flawed from a humanitarian perspective is in dire need of
updates to render them culturally relevant in a time of unprecedented racial,
cultural and ethnic diversity. While the
rest of the world appears to have moved forward in terms of racial and ethnic
solidarity in virtually every arena including the furtherance of human culture
and technology American ingenuity for instance has been critically retarded by
a centuries-old struggle between black and white! As American culture dives
into a dismal cycle of decline there is no better time to cure the cancer of
racism in the hope that it will stimulate a cultural renaissance in these
United States…
Humanity as
a whole is diminished by racial, ethnical, economic and other biases. When the humanity of a people is marginalized
due to racial bias and replaced with a malignant code of stereotypes that erases
the very soul of those peoples who notwithstanding, represent a significant power
within that culture nothing less than a classic collision course with cultural
impotence has been set into motion. Superficially
it appears as if America has experienced an economic and cultural rise over the
two centuries since its inception however the omnipresent curse of racism has
festered in its gut for so long that it threatens the ability of this nation to
move forward into the twenty-first century as a globally competitive
power. Because racism discounts the
importance of entire populations of human beings in its arrogance it fails to
see how it will ultimately lose the numbers game through attrition as these
oppressed populations develop power platforms which eventually expand gaining
mainstream support. Although racism
psychologically causes people to become invisible we know that people do not
just disappear because you do not like them or desire to share economic
prosperity with them. Hitler faced this
same dilemma inspiring him to embark upon a blind trail of genocide which
history calls the “Final Solution”. We
have to ask ourselves how one man was able to set into motion the genocide of innocent
human beings who in this case happened to be European Jews; men, women and
children, even the yet unborn. The world
watched while Hitler justified murder as an alternative to discovering a
solution to the problem of racism. For
this and many other reasons it is clear that Hitler and the regime he created had
utterly failed on many fundamental levels
because they lacked the necessary creativity to humanely solve the
biggest human issue of their time. A
true leader and statesman would have welcomed the challenge to unilaterally
solve centuries old race, economic and political issues across the rapidly
changing landscape of modern Europe similarly to the way the European Union has
done today. Again, having the ability to use third-eye consciousness to
overcome prejudice could have saved the world from one of the most destructive
wars in human history. Some say Hitler
lost WWII because in his racial hatred he caused the brightest scientific minds
many of which were Jewish, to flee Europe and fight on the side of the Allies. This
outcome had played out many times before in European history such as when the Medieval
Spanish Inquisition compelled the Moors and Jews to flee taking their
scientific and technological knowledge with them at a loss to Spain. During WWII the rise of The Third Reich caused
Jewish and other gifted European Scientists to flee to America and other parts
of the world creating a technological vacuum in Hitler’s camp but delivering a
boon to his enemies, the Allies. On
another shore, when you begin to mentally calculate all of the potential
contributions to civilization that may have been systematically cancelled or
delayed because the genius behind them was Black American it becomes quite
clear why the brief technological acceleration spanning the late nineteenth
through the late twentieth centuries in America has so rapidly regressed into
what is our current lackluster American economy, an economy that produces
little that the world desires save weapons of mass destruction. It is no coincidence that America’s most
globally sought after commodity is weaponry.
For a country that has grown weak in real human productivity due to poor
education and dire discrepancies in the accessibility of critical resources
that might have the ability to strengthen it in other ways weapons intended to
establish military power are needed to compensate for the crippling lack of
creativity. America has decided it is
too hard to maintain its competitive edge in a world of commodities when all it
has to do is build the biggest gun! America’s investment in Black American
education and business follows a larger trend encompassing all Americans. This country no longer strives to produce the
next George Washington Carvers’, Charles Drew’s or Albert Einstein’s because it
has decided it is cheaper and less labor intensive to farm Americans to become
consumers. In other words, Americans are
being “Farmed” or cultivated to become nothing more than 100% consumer stock
feeding the avaricious machine of Wall Street and the global economic market it
once dominated. So although some men perceive
Black Americans including other troubled and racially profiled communities to
be a racially and genetically inferior population of peoples, freethinkers recognize
them not only as their genetic and racial equal but also understand how
strategically they represent a vast untapped pool of creative potential in many
ways making Black Americans and peoples of color in particular the last human
frontier of our age!. Even today the
economic machines of the world all have their eyes cast on Africa as the next
place to do business. Unfortunately this
shifts attention away from Black Americans who are still struggling to get
attention as the next most important commodities to invest in. Hopefully circumstances within the black
community in the states will turn around causing it to refocus attention on pulling
its fractured and beaten-down self together.
It may not
be possible for racism to be completely unlearnt but it certainly can be deprogrammed.
Deprogramming a culture that has been built upon racism is indeed a herculean
task but then so was the creation of this great nation evincing that it is
possible. Each of us is fully capable of empathetically understanding the world
through the sensibilities of those who are different from us because we are
fundamentally the same. What arrests this process from manifesting itself is
the combined pressure of racism on both sides of the line of
understanding. It is equally clear that
the possibilities exists that no one is completely incapable of succumbing to
racial bias on some level and that everyone can functionally overcome the
overlay of racism. This means the radical leaps and bounds humanity has made
toward egalitarian freedom over the past 300 -400 years still has a great hope
of being realized in full. We should
constantly be rethinking what we understand about perception allowing us to
navigate through life driven by a healthy respect for the unique world-view of others. If for no other reason than it is an
essential exercise in humility we should make a daily practise of seeing
through the lens of others. With this
skill comes the ability to comprehend the way others perceive us and that, my
friend, is the veritable crystal ball of self-refinement. So “Look into the crystal ball! What do you
see? You see yourself in the eyes of others and you see others as they see
themselves”. We all know at the end of
the day racism is mostly about perception of a skin-deep reality. Just as easily as we are able to manufacture
economic, scientific and other arguments to justify the perpetuation of racism we
can dismantle them for they are all arbitrary, ideologies having no basis in
what commonly links us as men… and that is love…
We often make
broad assumptions about what motivates people we do not know to do things we do
not fully understand. In the absence of
real facts, we sometimes rely on our own prejudices, fears, anger and
frustration to compensate our lack of a real understanding. It is at these times that our third-eye would
be most valuable. But having access to a third-eye parallax requires empathy
and compassion in order to transform understanding into a tangible deed of good
will.
While it is
true that the human experience is common, in many instances our instinctual and
behavioral similarities bleed off into a direction that is as much guided by
the unique variables surrounding the
event as they are driven by our own patently unique personality. Technology has changed the way we think about
everything especially on an evidentiary level.
In the past we relied completely upon the integrity of the individual to
gather and interpret facts and to dispense justice. Technology has largely undermined and
replaced our reliance on the integrity of an individual replacing it with a
less subjective structure built of scientific, empirical data. The technical lag between technology and policy
is evinced by the increasing number of well-documented assassinations of Black
American men whose murderers go untouched by the law. So in the past we relied
on a legal system that pretended to be ethical knowing that it could ignore and
manipulate data to justify its end. Today we are challenged to eliminate
obsolete laws originally designed to facilitate racism allowing legal injustice
to defy incontrovertible, empirical data! In the past black men were killed and it was
simply an accepted evil, false accounts could be manufactured and no one dared
to raise a question. Even if they did
the legal infrastructure of police, judges and policymakers was already so
entrenched in the perpetuation of racism it would have been impossible for real
justice to see the light of day. Today we
must ask how much has changed as it appears that a black man can be murdered on
video in front of dozens of eyewitnesses attesting to the criminality of the
assailant, the event is broadcast and protested globally but a legal loophole
that may have been crafted during the heyday of jim-crow styled racism and
should have been removed from the law books over 50 years ago will allow his
murderer to walk freely in these United States guiltless in the eyes of the law. The technology
of our time merely pretends to hold every man to a far more complex matrix of
standards than they did a lynch mob 60 only years ago. If the laws of this land cannot see a clear
pathway to justice for all people then conscientious Americans of all races,
creeds religions and ethnicities must change them! We certainly have done so in the past it is
just that we left a lot of obscure areas unpurged. Racism is so deeply encrypted into the laws
of this land it may take many centuries to finally rout them all out. As imposing as the law is it is ultimately inanimate,
an imperfect structure crafted by flawed men, it cannot comprehend or command
the use of a first, second or third-eye, it has no eye or mind or heart of its
own. The law is actually a weak thing, a blind and shapeless collection of
theory devoid of the creative and sensitive soul humans must pull from in order
to understand why people do the things they do. This brings our discussion full
circle now to the topic of race, ethnicity, cultural and social values because
in America even if they are irrelevant the question will inevitably be
raised. So because racial and other
biases can potentially play a significant role in the way decisions are made in
this country we must be equipped to effectively identify or rule them out as
variables. It is precisely here that we
must call upon our third-eye powers of perception and empathy to help us sift
through the labyrinth of human nature in order to get to the root of the real
motivating issues. Ironically, in spite
of the tendency of popular culture to elevate every motive to supernatural
proportions more often than not the things which move common men and women to
make the decisions they make are quite utilitarian and unbiased in nature, they
are just doing their jobs. Everyone should understand how difficult public
service can be as it entails dealing with a great deal of randomness and more
often than not it is loaded with the potential for misunderstanding and
miscommunication both internally and on the side of the public. It is never easy being a public servant and
even the best is still imperfect. The
branches of public service that deal directly with human conflict which
consists of law enforcement and the criminal justice system are literally
pitted between a country in which cultural, political and racial views have
radically changed and frequently change and an obsolete legal structure of
antiquated, ineffective and unconstitutional polices that have not been removed
from the laws of the land. Many of these
more esoteric laws and certainly many widely used but outdated ones should have
been deemed null in lieu of other more progressive legislation and then there
is the eternal struggle between a state’s laws and federal laws to further
complicate matters of structural alignment and policy refreshment. In many ways the very laws of this land
interfere in our ability to avoid racism.
At the end
of the day every encounter we have with others is a test of our ability to
effectively communicate. When we are
thrust into the public arena we must suddenly become highly conscious of our
responsibility to tap into our third-eye the same as those who are watching and
judging us. We should always be mindful
of the fact none of us is perfect a factor sufficient to earn a relative margin
of forgiveness for the inevitable mistakes everyone makes in life. We must weigh these mistakes carefully when
they affect the lives of others, balancing the loud but ephemeral din of
popular culture against the wisdom of a third-eye. Furthermore, because we are not along in this
world we have the ability to collect the third-eyed wisdom of others
representing our colleagues, friends, family and others whose judgment we
respect as being sound. One thing is
certain, whenever there is true and grievous injustice it should be dealt with. The problem with popular culture and social
media is rooted in its potential inability to see or to care to see clearly and
also to effectively evaluate what it sees. The real dilemma with social media is that
matters of great significance can get promoted more or less robustly than
matters of much smaller gravity. This
potential has the effect of rendering social media unreliable and making its
motives appear to be questionable to its audiences who continually are forced
to sift through data which has already been skewed in favor of some unknown
prejudice rather than simply being reported a raw objective media. For example American media coverage of and
audience attention to the Super Bowl or a popular reality show would easily
capture more attention than the plight of thousands of a growing number of
homeless families. People know about the
ills and vices of the world they live in but they just do not seem to want to
hear about it as if it will somehow just go away or should be dismissed as a
normal condition. What is normal about
homelessness and hunger? We are told some
stories are just more important than others and this psychology enables us to
ignore huge discrepancies in our world that truly deserve 100% of or undivided
attention such as the issue of racism.
What is ultimately important to us about any story is largely based on
our perception of how it affects the way we live and how it reshapes our
perspective of the world. There is one
solid truth and it lives somewhere between our opinion, the opinion of the
media and that of our third-eye forcing us to evaluate every story dropped upon
our doorstep or allow the media to decide it for us. In order to turn racism around we really have
to take a more assertive role to limit the influence of media especially social
media in the determination of critical legal decisions. Social media and media in general are amazing
tools but they have far too often been abused in America to taint public
opinion and used in concert with culturally irrelevant laws social and other
media have fabricated elaborate operant conditioning campaigns to conceal and
avoid the larger issue of policy reform in America to erase racism from the law
books of this land.
Imagine a
hypothetical but plausible scenario where four separate but similar events transpire
in four separate parts of a town at the same time. Each of these events could be interpreted
anywhere along a sliding scale from purely routine or incidental to highly
racially, culturally or ethnically motivated depending on the perspective of
the audience so this is how the story unfolds.
On the south side of town a black police officer encounters a white
youth and after a brief debacle guns him down killing the teen. At the same time a white police officer
encounters a black youth on south side of town and after a physical
confrontation with him shoots the teen killing him on the spot. Ironically within the same timeframe two
black teens on the east side of the metropolis begin to argue and in seconds
both begin shooting at each other with the result that one teen is seriously
injured and the other teen dies. On the
west end two white youths begin to fight and in the process both teens die of
their gunshot wounds.
In each case
there were plenty of eyewitnesses and these crimes experienced unprecedented media
coverage merely minutes after the last shot was fired, the news and government
were in the middle of a socio-political frenzy.
The bustling city had survived similar events in the past but they had
been isolated and spaced out generously over a period of years rather than
seconds. The media was overwhelmed by
the freaky simultaneity of these grisly happenstances. The community was in an uproar, shocked,
numbed, angered and grieved over the sheer magnitude of violence thrust into
their lives from every direction. Each
community made sobering demands upon their government officials who scrambled
to piece all of the facts together before making what they felt would be the
appropriate public responses. It was a
tense and volatile time and as if to intensify this corrosive social tsunami
the situation went globally viral.
Within less than a half hour the story was being reported live in every
country and in every language all the way around the world!
Suddenly the
wide, wide world demanded immediate answers as its unblinking, uncompromising
consciousness zoomed into the heart of a town it certainly would never have
taken time to know save for the events that had spewed their ensanguined calling
cards upon what had once been quiet streets. These otherwise unassuming streets
were where ordinary folk played out their urban realness day in and day out… So
was it the putrefying odour of death alone that distinguished this town or was
it the manner in which death decomposed our sense of safety into the simplest
and ugliest elements of fear, dread, despair, ignorance, disgust and
guilt? If you were standing on the sidewalk nearby or o’er the
extinguished bodies of these youths; if you were looking onto them lying in pools
of their own blood as far away from far away Delhi, Prague, Lagos, Washington,
D.C., Buenos Ares, Toronto or Kyoto that you could conceivably be you would see a different kind of realness. So I will not ask you what you think the
world sees I will ask you to visualize this spatially, culturally, racially and
chronologically interwoven and compressed simultaneity of events using the
third-eye philosophy and tell me what you think…
FIN
BY BIGDADDY BLUES
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