Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society

Afterword

229 In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now. Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, 2004 Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. WestartedthisdiscussionbyquestioningtheideathattheUnitedStates, in electing our first African American president, is now a post-racial society. I have explained why I think we still have some distance ahead of us and have offered some suggestions for how I think we can leave the era of racialization behind us. Emerging understandings about the interconnected and multiple nature of the self, the mutable and illusory qualitiesofrace,thepervasivenessofimplicitbiasandunconsciousracial anxiety, and the limitations of some of the more questionable tenets of Enlightenment thinking all provide valuable keys to how our lives and governing systems must change if we are to achieve a fully democratic society. A greater willingness to view major elements of our lives as socially constructed opens us to more possibilities for this change, which mustbeginwitharecognitionofthesocietalgroundingofthejusticesystem and indeed, of all levels of government, from local to international. HereIwishtoliftupsomeof theinsightsandconditionsthatshould help sharpen our understanding and better prepare us to move beyond A f t e r w o r d Afterword 230 justawareness,toengagementandthehardworkofcreatingchange.Ina number of places earlier I have mentioned the unconscious on one hand and structures and systems on the other. Our understanding of both has grown exponentially in recent years. With respect to the unconscious, we increasingly recognize that most of our cognitive and emotional response to our environment happens, as it were, behind our backs.1 Scientists estimate that we can process eleven million bits of information per second but can only consciously process up to about forty of these.2 Moreover, the forty or so of which we have conscious awareness will be heavily affected by prior exposures to images and metaphors that have become part of our subconscious minds. In this respect, each of us has conflicting associations or schemas that are fairly but not completely malleable. For example, our networks related to hope or fear can be salient at any given time. What is salient will be substantially influenced by cues we pick up or are offered from our environment. This process of being given cues is called priming. Because so many of our cues as well as the environment that helps structure the pathways in our brains are social, many of our unconscious associations are social as well. They are internal, but not private in the ordinary sense. Our increasing ability to use technology to view and measure this kind of brain activity means that we no longer have to rely so heavily on self-reporting. That method of inquiry was extremely limited in terms of unconscious processes, for what we believe and feel consciously may directlycontradictwhatweareexperiencingunconsciously.Indeed,this phenomenon is most likely to occur when our unconscious feelings and judgments are inconsistent with our aspirations, as can so often happen in the context of race. Thus, applying the insights of this emerging sciencetosocialcleavagesandstratificationssuchasrace ,gender,andother areas subject to often powerful socially constructed attitudes allows us to gain a better understanding of the dynamics that produce and exacerbate these cleavages. It can also help us develop ways of overcoming them. It is important to emphasize in this context that the idea of “not noticing race,” or color blindness, is a phenomenon that may or may not happen at the conscious level. There is strong evidence that most Americans are not only race-sensitive but also have racial biases that impact Afterword 231 their feelings and decisions at unconscious levels. In other words, we cannot just decide that we will notunconsciously noticerace,though we can–through interactions with one another and changes to our structural arrangements–grow beyond these biases. Some may object that only older people see race and harbor racial biases, while young people growing up today in a more tolerant and diverse world are less likely to seerace.InThe Hidden Brain,ShankarVedantamdiscussesexperiments that tested this very question. Dr.FrancesAboudaskedchildreninaMontrealpreschooltolookat apictureordrawingofawhiteandablacksubject.Shethenreadpositive and negative words to the children, such as honest, nice, cruel, or ugly. There was a consistent association of positive traits with the white figure and negative traits with the black one. Dr. Aboud was interested in how these associations had developed in the...