Liberal white haters

A couple months ago I was reading online comments to a political article and was really intrigued by this one: "The problem with white liberals is that they hate white people and can't admit it."

As time went by I couldn't stop thinking about it. It reminded of the time I was flying over London as the Princess of Wales's corpse was being wheeled through the city center and the mid-eastern man sitting next to me said, "You know she was pregnant with his baby. They knocked her off because they couldn't have a Muslim heir to the throne."

Before opening my mouth to say that I thought the idea absurd I remember thinking, "Of course that's what it looks like from the perspective of a brown-skinned man whose religion has been the second class citizen of the world for the last four hundred years." So yes - I get it. I see how one might easily imagine such a theory if one were Muslim. But that doesn't mean it's true (or false).

My fantasy is the author of the white-hating comment is a white male, who is unemployed and wasn't unhappy with the recently-defeated democratic majority in DC. But who knows?

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I remember the day it really came home to me what it means to be afraid of difference. I was at a party where there were a very wide variety of human forms: men, women, gay, straight, brown, yellow, black, white, rich, poor, artists, bankers. And I remember thinking: I LOVE this!!! I LOVE when it gets all mixed up like this!

But I wondered what if instead of pleasure I was feeling discomfort or even fear? And what if that fear were of the same intensity as my pleasure?
Wow! That was a blast! - just trying to imagine that feeling was pretty powerful.
So that's what racism feels like! Whew!

Basically it looks like this:
- I'm a Y, all Y's are good
- All X's are bad
- Therefore I hate all X's

But what I find particularly fascinating in the reader's' scenario is the mental leap that goes beyond the above syllogism. It looks like this.

- I am a Y, all Y's are good
- All X's are bad
- I hate all X's
- You are a fellow Y but you have compassion for an X,
- Therefore you hate me.

Of course I would totally I understand the much more classic:

- I am a Y, all Y's are good
- All X's are bad
- You are a fellow Y but you have compassion for an X,
- Therefore I hate you

This is the adult version of the high school boys who beat up fags. Then one day they beat up one of their own because he actually starts to get to know a fag and finds out the fag's not a bad guy after all. Or the radical Zionists who beat up a fellow Jew because he starts to wonder if the settlements really are a good idea.
You get the picture.

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As a psychotherapist I see that unfortunately for a lot of people shifting out of one mental position to explore another is often a REALLY tough thing to do

For instance lots of folks go to therapy to ask what they can do to change their spouse - (even when their spouse is a fellow Y!). A therapist's job is to invite the patient to do detective work: what do you suppose makes your spouse tick? why do you think s/he responds that way? what was his/her childhood like? what do you suppose makes you respond this way? is one person's way actually better than the other's? how is that?

What happens in therapy is really simple. People start to use their imagination. They use it to wonder about the other's perspective. Then they start to make room for someone else's reality in their mental schema. What I've discovered is that this is often new for folks, particularly men. In many cases they have never been taught how to use their inner world as a way to imagine what it might be like to put themselves in the other's shoes.

The outcome of this type of therapy is that people generally realize they don't need to change their spouse at all, that their spouse is not so bad after all. They discover they can learn to sit with their discomfort and they actually end up becoming more accepting, more loving. Sometimes, in the face of this new, more loving attitude - the other spouse actually ends up dropping the annoying behavior without so much as a nudge.

So why don't most people use their imagination to wonder about other people's reality?

My impression is that for many people it's frightening to imagine what it's like to be poor, to be black, to be bullied, to be raped, to be Jewish, to have cancer, to be a woman, to be evicted. They usually only start wondering about it when they are forced to. I imagine this is why the members of congress who've had some kind of degenerative illness in their family were more apt to recognize some of the fatal flaws in our healthcare system.

But even bigger than avoiding discomfort it because most people actually walk around with an internal pattern that pretty much convinces them that, unless proven otherwise, not-like-me humans want to do some form of harm to them. And if those not-like-me humans happen to have a bit of power....watch out! So they don't want to use their imagination to feel what the other might feel because it's more familiar to cling to the notion that the other is out to harm them.

Which brings me to my BIG question. Maybe I'm a fag but what I personally don't understand is why we don't see the following more often:
- I am a Y
- I look around me and see that my world is mostly made of Y's, some good some bad.
- I'm pretty comfortable being a Y.
- I encounter an X
- I wonder what it's like for an X to navigate a world mostly run by Y's, I wonder what are all the unspoken Y rules I don't see anymore, I wonder how I can help the X better navigate the world of Y's, I wonder if the X has anything to teach us Y's about making our world better, I wonder if the X thinks I'm a jerk because lots of Y's speak disparagingly of X's.

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I recently attended a graduation ceremony for adults in an urban professional certification school. The certificates varied but they were all paths to more expertise and a better job or a raise in pay. Most of the graduates were over 30; three-quarters had brown or black skin - not a reflection of the general population of the city we were in. "Pomp and Circumstance" was playing over the loudspeakers, blue polyester gowns were worn, tassels were dangling appropriately. I was really proud of my white, middle-aged mom friend who had recently struggled with bankruptcy and worked hard to complete a nine-month course with honors. I duly yooohooed her when she reached the podium.

But what brought me to tears was when a young lady, walking with difficulty, visibly Latina, struggled up onto the stage to get her certificate. She was closer genetically to the Indigenous people of Central America than to the European populations that came later and she had clearly suffered some kind of physical handicap. I imagine her journey to that point must not have been an easy one and it broke my heart open with a mix of joy and sorrow.

Now maybe my thoughts about this young lady were completely crazy. Maybe her family's been in the US for five generations and maybe they are millionaires and maybe she doesn't speak a word of Spanish and maybe she walks with a limp because she fell one day on her father's 75-foot yacht painlessly but with lasting effects.

But maybe not.

What I am sure of is that my strong feelings for the Latina did not lead me to suddenly disdain my white friend. In the same way when I wish Happy Holidays to people who may or may not be Jewish, Muslim, Shintoist or Buddhist - I don't hate Christians (although some of the louder more obnoxious ones do get on my nerves). When I enjoy speaking the second language I worked hard to acquire I don't hate all English speakers.

I am not saying I am better than anyone else. In that high school gym graduation I was able to have compassion for that woman - other times in my life I jump to immediate dismissive conclusions about people based on things as simple as a sentence, an accent or a piece of clothing.

But as I approach the end of this essay and remind myself that it's customary to offer some kind of solution the conclusion I find myself coming to (much to my surpris) is: Americans need to study more History and Geography. We need more Social Studies. And not just the white-washed, Texas Board of Education version; we need the dark, earthy, Wikileaks version. We need fewer romantic-comedies and more really good documentaries. We need fewer Olbermanns and Becks and more deep investigative journalism.

Because when we get glimpses into, say, the history of the papacy, the truth behind Love Canal, the history of colonialism, the Birmingham riots, the Spanish-American War, the tragic deaths of western-bound settlers in America then we see that humans are more complex than we think and we get to know ourselves a lot more. We get to feel proud of our country but also get to feel shame and disappoint and rage at our country. It's not easy. It's not comfortable. But it's healthier than the black and white thinking.

It's much more comfortable for us to just live in the present and keep wandering around with permanent smiles distributing business cards because every other human is a potential client.

I'd even go so far to say we need to study Social Studies in discussion-format type classes. So we can digest this stuff together, these complicated stories of struggle and victory. We need to learn to think critically about history and politics, to distinguish between slanted and good journalism, to understand power dynamics, economic dynamics, demographic dynamics.

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When I was a young journalist I was on assignment in Jerusalem. I was probably 25 or 26 years old, college-educated and well-traveled. While there I discovered a rather significant detail about Christianity. Despite the fact that I had been raised by a pious Christian family who actively studied the bible, I had never been informed of this simple fact and was actually a bit embarrassed not to know it. Jesus was a Jew! Who knew? Once my anger had passed (since I'm quite sure this was willfully kept from me) I remember thinking: Wow! That makes the whole story SO much more interesting and in my eyes made ole JC a much more likable guy!!

So to get back to the reader's comment. No we white liberals don't hate white people (ourselves or other white people) but we don't glorify them either. We've learned too much about the complexities of the human experience to do either.
And I think this country could use more of that.