Prejudice is an unnamed and unaddressed bias in my life. It is a prejudgment of another person's value. It generally relies on physical appearance alone to weigh and measure one's response to or interaction with another person. It is seldom apparent to the prejudiced person but is more than evident to those around them. It is most obvious to those who bear the brunt of our prejudice. When it is grounded in fear or other deep-seated emotions, it will become part of the shadow life. By hiding it we support the fiction that we are not prejudiced. But, biases, the seeds of prejudice, are an important part of every person's life.
Everyone has a bias. It is a survival skill that helps us stay alert to dangers. Our preference for sweets has helped us avoid those bitter, poisonous foods and steer clear of rotting meat. We may harbor a bias for small animals with larger heads because they are likely cubs or puppies and may be less dangerous. These biases serve us well when we apply them to the things in our world.
But our biases can become deadly prejudices when we apply them to people. They can become a cancer on our souls when we harbor the biases so tightly that they become prejudices against whole groups of people. They will eat away at our capacity for love and trust, joy and hope. They will erode our resilience and destroy our capacity for mindfulness and self-awareness. Racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ, xenophobia, and other root causes of poverty become public policy when people with power and privilege hold deeply ingrained prejudices. Prejudice, like war, is not healthy for people or other living things.
What have my prejudices cost me as an older, white cis male in 2020?
As part of acknowledging and addressing my prejudices, I am discovering their costs to my life. I enjoy many benefits of being a cis male due to my racism and other prejudices. I enjoyed being catered to by business and public policy as long as I could ignore those who were behind me in society’s line. I enjoyed walking the streets until I saw that my safety was being paid for with the lives of others who were needlessly accosted by the racist police who were "protecting my neighborhood." I savored the benefits of being an American citizen until I began to acknowledge that my government was protecting me with walls of cruel and shameful laws that closed our borders to others because they were not privileged with being born on this side. Once I began looking at the costs of my prejudice, it became possible to drill down more deeply within myself and see the terrible price that I, and I suspect, many others are still paying.
The Personal Cost of Prejudice
Love and Trust – The growing capacity for placing other's needs ahead of my own and entrusting others with my needs.
- My biases draw me away from people who could and should be companions for my journey. I allow my first impression to steer me away from people who would enrich my mind and soul. Prejudged relationships seldom develop in ways that reach beneath the surface of "cocktail party" conversations. We will withhold trust when a relationship is grounded in a bias. I will neither invest myself in their needs nor entrust them with my needs. Biases and prejudices that grow out of them diminish my capacity for loving, trusting relationships.
- On a broader scale, my prejudices prevent me from being part of communities that can help me through my struggles. There was a time when a person would rather die than receive a transfusion from a person of a different race. Similarly, prejudice has isolated me from communities that have been through many of the same struggles I have faced, both personally and professionally. But, I did not benefit from their wisdom and insight because I had already decided that it was either irrelevant to me or deeply flawed. I would not listen, even when that community had a clear perspective on the concerns that filled my body-mind-soul.
- On those rare occasions when I broke through my prejudice, I was rendered deaf to hearing the truth when it conflicted with my unnamed biases. I quickly discarded inconvenient truths from people who were not respected (meaning they existed beyond my comfort range for a relationship). Sometimes their words were pushed aside because they could not possibly understand my situation. I discounted their wisdom as inappropriate and biased against me and my situation. Sometimes, I would have to engage in personal attacks on them just to create enough noise to drown out their voice in my soul. I could neither receive their gifts of love nor offer them the gifts of respect and simple human decency.
- All three of these have eroded my capacity for love and trust. They reduced my spiritual health and created a vacuum where anger, bitterness, and resentment flowed in and destroyed these relationships.
Joy and Hope – The growing capacity for finding meaning in each day and believing that the best is yet to come.
- My prejudices have stolen my capacity to see the beauty in differences and diversity among my companions. I love sushi, but a bias against raw fish prevented me from ever trying it. Over the years, my prejudice against people different from myself has confirmed my bias for people like me. My eyes could not see the beauty in different cultures. My ears struggled to hear the music of other voices. My mind would not embrace the questions asked by other cultures because I believed my culture had already answered them. My capacities for joy and hope diminish when my eyes are veiled to the beauty in other people and cultures.
- Most painful of all, hope ebbs when I pass my biases and prejudices on to those who love, trust, and look up to me. The future's horizon becomes more clouded. I have stolen their capacity for joy and hope from them in the name of helping them see things "as they really are." My shared prejudice becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that will long outlive me in the body-mind-soul of those who trusted me.
- Both of these erodes not only my capacity for joy and hope but also takes away another generation's capacity as well. By teaching my prejudices as the "way of the world," I will have made room for a continuing resistance to justice and peace well into the future. I have not only prevented joy and hope from growing, but I have also planted the seeds of cynicism and despair in my children and grandchildren.
But, by far, the most significant personal cost to my spiritual health has been the loss of authenticity in my life. Authenticity is being real with ourselves and the world around us. The word authentic grew out of an old Greek word for authority. We become inauthentic when we allow something other than the facts or reality to become our authority. We begin to live a lie. We neither know ourselves or others. We get lost in flights of fantasy. We become blind to our faults and to the truth that exists beyond our wants and wishes. We not only live behind a mask; we carefully construct that mask to present our false self to the world and to ourselves. All the while, we live in fear that someone will see through the mask and rip it off. But we are more fearful that we will see ourselves than we are that others may get to know the real us.
Unnamed and unacknowledged fear and despair drive the inauthentic life. They make spiritual health impossible as we serve our needs first and foremost while letting others take care of themselves. We hurry to the front of the line before the good stuff runs out. The world is a place of scarcity, and we believe that those who are not “looking out for #1” are not successful or worthy of our attention. Love and trust, joy and hope are words for suckers and losers. Such attitudes and beliefs are the product of eyes, ears, hearts, and minds that have been blinded by bias and prejudice. They linger in the hidden recesses of the human spirit. Our fears and selfishness become the authority in our lives and the authors of our biography.
What Can I do?
In closing, I am only talking about what I can do for myself. These actions are not a prescription or universal antidote for prejudice. I share it only to help you, the reader, begin to listen to and choose ways that you can deal with your own bias and prejudice. I hope these musings are helpful.
I see my own biases and prejudices as a cancer on my spirit, body-mind-soul. They are taking away my capacity for love and trust, joy and hope. There are two common ways to deal with cancer when our natural immunity does not prevent it from occurring. We can find a "drug," an outside agent, that will kill it. Or we can find a way to cut it out, surgically removing it from our spirit. Education and experience of other cultures can serve as a useful "drug." But, living into and accepting my prejudices and not allowing them to hold sway over my life is a painful but successful "surgical" method. Unfortunately, this surgery will require that I "cut deep and wide enough" to find clean margins to prevent the prejudices from growing back. I may need to remove large parts of my assumptions, beliefs, and daily routines. I will need to accept that both the "surgery" and education/experience will be necessary if I am to move beyond relying on my biases and prejudices to write my daily story. Here are a few of the ideas I am using to achieve this forever goal.
I must assume that I have unhealthy biases at play in my soul. My soul is not pristine and shiny. I have learned and created all kinds of biases that have metastasized into life-stealing prejudices.
I will pay attention to the little bursts of fear or resentment when I encounter people who are different from me. These are signs that I have encountered these hidden tumors, and I need to let them teach me about my prejudices and biases.
I must second-guess all of my first impressions. I tend to hide my bias against people who are different from myself in these first impressions. These unthinking presuppositions slip by so quickly that I often miss them. But I am committing more energy to detect and process these instantaneous prejudgments. Hopefully, I will become more skilled at catching these as time goes on.
I am listening and learning about stereotypes. I have two books on my Kindle that are proving helpful at the moment. They are How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi and Over-Coming Bias by Tiffany Jana and Matthew Freeman. I am also watching quite a few documentaries on racism and other expressions of prejudice. These experiences are helping me to examine my expectations of others for evidence of these stereotypes in my day-to-day living.
I seek out relationships with people different from myself. I do so to listen and learn. I engage and cultivate meaningful relationships with them. I not only come to appreciate their experiences, but more importantly, I begin to see myself more clearly in the mirror they hold up to me.
I try the art, food, and music from other cultures without preconceived ideas or expectations. That first bite is all-important. However, the second bite is also essential to avoid relying solely on a first impression. I will give them a fair seeing, tasting, and hearing.
I will continue to learn the difference between a preference that serves a valuable purpose and a bias that destroys my relationships with other people. I am working to recognize a healthy bias from one that does damage to myself and others.
I appreciate those of you who have stayed with me through this lengthy self-care note. These words are hard-won after countless battles within my spirit. I realize that they will need to revised and likely re-written as the days, weeks, and months pass. But I am honored by your attention. I hope that they will inspire you to make an honest effort at understanding and addressing your own biases and cancerous prejudices.
By assessing the real cost of our prejudice and identifying the damage we do to our own and other's lives, will we begin to lay them aside for a healthier and more just path ahead.
Blessings,
Bob