What If...?
Racism's core perception
The biggest obstacle my ghostwriting students face is giving up.
Not on ghostwriting or themselves, but on their rigid perceptions. I touched on this last week, but it bears revisiting, as mindset is not only fundamental to ghostwriting, it’s also bigotry’s strongest core.
I’ve recently had a handful of conversations with friends—
Okay, I just now realized I talk about my friends a lot, which makes me also realize I actually have more friends now than ever before. That’s amazing. No other point here—just an astonishing slap-upside-the-head recognition. End digression.
… and was struck by their common, albeit individualized, insistence they weren’t racist. None of these people know each other; in fact, they’re flung across the country with little if anything in common at totally different stages of their lives, with completely diverse circumstances, backgrounds, and futures. I suspect the only life aspects they share are me, their mutual white privilege, and the remarkable similarity of what each considers plausible deniability.
I get it. Back when I sheltered-in-place deep in my fear-ridden turtleosity, I lacquered my shell with the same nearsighted gloss. So lemme unpack.
We all perceive the world based on what we experienced and were taught when we were post-birth but still itty-bitty people. That tender time formerly considered “childhood.” Pre-adolescent. Our perception/point of view is pretty much set by the time we hit puberty[1], and while we grow and learn and experience throughout the rest of our lives, we typically do so, as is human nature, building onto and off of that formative groundwork. For approximately ninety percent of us, said underpinning includes all notions about gender, sexuality, religion, and social/political bearing. Our starting point, so to speak.
When we sally forth into the theoretically less restrictive real world, we typically run into other homo-sapiens breeds, some of which we’ve been warned about, others not so much. We filter our acceptance of/resistance to those unfamiliars through our formative understandings as we explore and question, poke and prod our separateness from the absolutes of Mommy’s and Daddy’s house—our species is, after all, curious by design. Hence we modify our perceptions, our spoon-fed perspectives, to incorporate the stuff that doesn’t scare the shit out of us and shun the stuff that does.
Couldn’t possibly make more sense, could it? “That’s life,” as Sinatra sang (and Dean Kay and Kelly Gordon wrote).
But therein lies the pickle, for all humans, of whatever ilk, consider their beliefs/perspective as right and best, their motives as true and pure, and thus their agenda and subsequent actions as justified.
Collectively, none of my three friends can understand “Why are Jews are hated?”
Furthermore, they all have BIack, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPoC) friends and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual, Queergender, Intersex, or Asexual (LGBTQIA) folk in their lives whom they love or support.
Ipso facto, they reason, they cannot possibly be bigots. No racism here, folks. Move along, move along. I mean, their perception is kind and clean. Their motivations are true and pure. Their agendas and actions are logically (not to mention strictly) justified. “I see it as XX, which is nice/kind/reasonable, so the truth must needs be XX, and anyone who doesn’t agree that it’s XX is uninformed, misguided, or just plain wrong. I can’t do anything about them being racist, but I’m certainly not.”
I’ma jump into the ghostwriting milieu, because it’s easier to make the point from that non-inflammatory perspective. The above attitude demonstrates serious resistance to approaching the written word or creation thereof in any manner other than how they were taught, what they understand as right, and the path toward non-individualization they’ve been following since third grade.[2]
Non-individualization is a hellova mindset to unlearn or detach from when confronted with a manuscript or subject outside one’s familiar-and-comfortable zone. It takes extreme grit and exceptional willingness to grapple with the intricacies of Creative Analysis and Perspective, Motive, Agenda when you’re working on material beyond your typical scope.
My students step up to that plate because, ya know, they want to graduate. But my friends with their BIPOC and LGBTQIA familiars are not so compelled, and therefore non-see how constrained they are within their own unyielding mindsets. They all deliver the same protests: they make no judgements, they treat everyone with respect, they can’t fathom why other people don’t. They must be stupid or losers or too gullible for words. Rinse away the euphemisms and whaddaya got? Wrong. Those non-them people are all so obviously wrong.
I mean, come on—their perspective is so good, so pure… their attitude and motives so reasonable and right… how can they not consider their decisions and subsequent actions as right, intellectual, discerning. They read and research and think about every decision they make.
Ergo, they are all equally one-hundred percent non-racial, non-prejudiced, utterly non-bigoted because they, themselves, would never spout racism or perform a bigoted act. It follows, then, that they line-item their political/social stance, issue by issue, their mentality outlined in black, their prism unmoving. Heck, that’s the exact opposite of bigotry! It’s making informed decisions… based on their formative underpinnings.
Worse—better?—it’s a two-way street. With rare exception, no amount of reasoning, coaxing, mocking, or outright exhortation can persuade a MAGA Republican or Liberal Democrat from their stance. No fervent Bible-thumping or astrophysics preaching is likely to nudge a theist or atheist from their perch.
Ah, 2024, where polarization, aka divide-and-conquer, is damn-near absolute. Radicals rule, huzzah!
Consequently I expect my friends—Caucasian and BIPOC—will cast their vote based on individual issues rather than the full landscape, because they perceive the world in separate boxes (how dreadfully male) and are thus incapable of giving up their rigid binarity to view a broader spectrum or historical progression.
Both presidential candidates are old, so they’ll vote for someone else.
The governor didn’t control corporate greed, so they’ll vote for someone else.
It’d be safer to just accept Jesus than risk eternal damnation, so they’ll vote for whoever holds the biggest cross or quotes the best scriptures.
And that, my friends, is intolerance in a nutshell. My perspective, my experience, my position, my accident-of-birth is more gooder than yours onaccounta, well, it is. Which makes me one up and, incontrovertibly, you one down, and I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just one person. It’s not my fault… God knows what’s in my heart… I didn’t mean for it to happen….
Fortunately for the faithful, bigotry need not be actively flouted to vigorously thrive. Edmund Burke may have said, “All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing,” but I say nay, nay. All it takes is good-meaning people self-satisfyingly conforming to the privileged, unshakeable belief that: their-perspective-is-right-and-best, their-motives-are-reasonable-and-pure, so their-subsequent-actions-are-justified-no-matter-the-consequence.
That’s not doing nothing. It’s aggressively (albeit unintentionally or subliminally) declaring their perception sacrosanct.
Thus rejecting all others.
And hey, ain’t that the institutionalized way?[3]
But don’t throw in the towel just yet because we, as human beings, can wither what we’ve wrought. No, not everywhere in one swell foop. Still, we have it in us—individually and in small, focused groups—to disrupt that self-righteous intolerance with cross-community interaction, honest education, and, yes, the kind of mindset transition that begins with recognition and grows with concerted effort.
So read a book you expect to hate. Watch a movie you figure will make your eyes roll. Re-angle your prism to see the full array of possibilities and ask yourself: What if—
… I didn’t believe in whatever I hold dearest?
… I was attracted to someone I shouldn’t even think of?
… I had no choice but to accept being wrong?
Remember, my friends, perception is learned, not inbred. Please have enough faith in yourself to give up a little part of yours—for your own, and mankind’s, greater good.
[1] … formerly the demarcation line between “childhood” and “adulthood,” which, as I’ve babbled about in previous postings, was manually altered to satisfy political/racial agendas in the early 1900s. End digression #2.
[2] Third grade is pretty specific, isn’t it? Yet it’s precisely when most western-culture kids start being pushed toward what Lois Lowry called “sameness” in her young-adult novel The Giver (Houghton Mifflin, 1993). And I use that term “start” advisedly, since it indicates an “end” at some point when, in fact, there is none. The edict to do-it-the-same, to write-without-voice, to conform to form, yadda etcetera, never slacks. It continues throughout academia and deep into grant-sponsored papers. It shapes business documents and even many nonfiction, memoir, and fiction works. But that’s extremely a topic for another post on a distantly future day.
[3] We plant those traditionalist seeds whenever we teach children that a book report is a fill-in-the-blanks form. We glorify power-consolidation and nurture inequity every time we sidestep our personal responsibility. We tithe to billionaire institutions and personalities with each act of binary conformity, politically generated outrage, and click-baiting polarization. Again, that future posting…