Racism - The Enemy Within
Einstein said “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen”.
Unfortunately some of these prejudices are very difficult to dislodge, even when we know intellectually and culturally that they are unacceptable, even obnoxious. People of my generation – I’m 58 – were raised in a culture that was racist. Not in the way that we know racism today. The racism I grew up in was explicit. There were very few black people in Scotland, none in Hamilton to my recollection in the 1960s. But there was a derogatory word for every nationality people could think of. Spanish, Italian, Pakistani people all had short negative names.
Homosexuality was illegal. At Scotland v England football games Scottish football fans sang “We hate Jimmy Hill, he’s a …” with the last word being an unpleasant slang word for a gay person. Those watching the game on television, laughed when that song was sung, as they did when the same fans sung “If you hate the fu**ing English clap your hands”.
Let’s not go any further. It’s quite unsettling to realise how much our own culture conditions us so insidiously. I can’t remember a single person telling me to think in negative ways about different people, and yet these views soaked into me like an invisible poison.
This is how the brain learns. It’s not just unpleasant things that soak in by a form of mental osmosis. I was taught to be considerate of others, not to be greedy, and other ethical behaviours, and hopefully many of those have stuck with me.
The problem as I see it, is not so much that some of our conditioned thinking is harmful or hurtful to ourselves or others, but that none of it was freely chosen by us. It was all something that happened to us.
In neuroscience this is called neuroplasticity. Plastic originally meant the ability to be shaped. So the material we call plastic is so-called because when warmed up it becomes softer and more malleable, making it easy to shape into different products or parts. In recent decades the scientists of the mind, the neuroscientists, have been able to detect that who we are – i.e. our thoughts, personality, traits, opinions – is constantly being affected moment by moment by our experiences. Over time those experiences coalesce into habitual ways of judging the world or anything around us. Or they reinforce existing ways of perceiving things. Sometimes an experience can be so extraordinary or radical that it can jolt us entirely out our old ways of thinking and create a new way of seeing ourselves, others, or the world. Many examples of these are unfortunately negative, often surrounding tragedy. We call some examples trauma, and the lasting-effects of these experiences, post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD.
The classic example is of soldiers returning from war, but families of murder victims, domestic abuse, and family suicides usually result in some major changes to how we see life.
The typical way we perceive these people is that they are in some way entirely different from us. We are normal; they are not. But it’s not quite as black and white as that. It’s more like a spectrum where sufferers from PTSD and similar traumatic experiences are at one pole, and nearly all of us are somewhere closer to the middle of the line, or indeed beyond that, moving towards the more than average levels of happiness and joy. However one thing every one of us has in common is that where we are on that spectrum is because of life experiences, aided by the genes we got from our ancestors.
Mindfulness helps us see that this is the case, not theoretically, nor solely in words, but through experience of observing it in ourselves in real time. So, for example, when I watch the news mindfully I become instantly aware of my prejudices, favourable or unfavourable, towards any politician who appears. Some of my prejudices are really ugly and hateful. With my mindfulness I notice them and allow them to fall away, giving me a calmer, more objective view of what the politician is saying. I don’t mean that my political opinion is necessarily unthinking or unreasoned, just that I have become so attached to it that I exaggerate or inflate my views on the people who don’t hold the same views as me.
My daily mindfulness practices, whether the quiet solitary ones at the start or end of day, or mini-ones sprinkled through the day, in addition to my attempts to notice without judgement what’s actually going on moment by moment, these all add up to a type of self-defence against the worst extremes that have been lodged in my mind through my lifetime. They also act as a slow but sure method of combatting and withering those prejudices and harmful emotional reactions I still have; and believe me I have plenty to deal with.
JONAA©Vilborg Einarsdottir
It’s not just thoughts or views that can be lodged deeply in your mindset. Stress, anxiety, depression, self-loathing. These too are formed from life experiences and become habitual states of mind that haunt you, seemingly at random. At a more minor level frequent irritations, frustration, annoyance, impatience also become part of who we are. Mindfulness can help us firstly see these for what they are – just mental habits created by experiences. Then it can help you cope with, manage, and finally neutralise them. Over time you can start to be in control over who you are and how you think. ▢
Martin Stepek is a member of the JONAA team in Scotland, a founding member of JONAA and sits on JONAA’s board. A Scot with Polish heritage, a Mindfulness teacher, poet, published author, columnist on Mindfulness (Ten for Zen and the Sunday Herald) and the Chief Executive of the Scottish Family Business Association.
