Who’s judging who?
A story I once heard comes from the ageless tradition of the Sufis, the mystics of Islam. It concerns the idea of looking for truth in all of the wrong places. The story is a thirteenth-century fable about Nasreddin Hodja, Turkey’s renowned ancient trickster. The story has Nasreddin walking across a border back to his country from a neighboring one. He walked along while pulling a donkey by a rope. On the donkey’s back was a huge pile of straw. The border patrol guard, aware of Nasreddin’s reputation for tricks, was sure he must have been smuggling something and so, determined to catch the cheat, he stopped him for questioning.
“What are you smuggling?” the guard asked Nasreddin. “Nothing,” Nasreddin said. “I’m going to search you,” said the guard, and he did just that, searching Nasreddin, unpacking the huge pack of straw on the donkey, and finding nothing. Frustrated, he let Nasreddin pass.
A few days later, Nasreddin was back again with another donkey full of sticks and straw, again he was searched, and again nothing was found. For months this continued, every other week. Same Nasreddin, with a donkey and a pile of worthless material, but nothing valuable was found.
Finally, one day the completely frustrated guard spoke up to Nasreddin. “Today is my last day on this job,” said the guard. “I know that you have been smuggling something, but I have not been able to find it. It has been keeping me up at night to know what you are doing. I am leaving my job so I no longer want to get you in trouble, but please, for my peace of mind, tell me what you have been stealing.”
“Okay then,” Nasreddin said. “I have been smuggling donkeys.”
In our struggle for fairness, for equality, for inclusiveness, have we been looking in the right places or have we been looking for trouble in bundles of harmless straw?
This is an especially important question to ask at the present time, as I write this book almost twenty years since the attacks of 9-11, and more than ten years since the start of the dramatic recession of 2008. These two events created somewhat of a nationwide posttraumatic stress syndrome in our society, and have contributed to a regression in the very behaviors of bias I have discussed thus far. They have fundamentally moved us back to an environment in which leaders are once again baiting their followers by generating hate towards others. There is no real surprise here, as history has shown us time and again that economic stress creates a greater sense of threat and fear of “the other.” On a societal scale, hate crimes go up when the economy goes down. On a global scale, dictatorial and fascist regimes are almost always preceded by economic upheaval, whether it is Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain, or the Taliban in Afghanistan. These kinds of movements have almost always focused on identifying an “other” who has to be controlled, dethroned, or annihilated.
Consider the anti-immigrant sentiment that has swelled in the United States and Europe during the past decade. In the United States, the quintessential “nation of immigrants,” a country in which virtually every person who is not of Native American origin comes from an immigrant heritage, anti-immigrant zeal is at its highest level in generations. In Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and Germany, “nationalist” parties have risen with an all too familiar race-based fervor.
I have spent the past thirty years studying human diversity and engaging in direct interaction with hundreds of thousands of people. These sorts of reactions are not new to me. However, what has become apparent, and has been proven by research, is the pervasiveness of this phenomena of bias and most especially, how completely unconscious most of us are about it.
Over the past decade we have been given scientific tools to study this question in ways that have not been previously available. While the brain still remains a great mystery, breakthroughs in the neurological and cognitive sciences are teaching us more than we have known in all of our history of medicine. Great developments in the social sciences are teaching us more than we have ever known about human behavior, both on individual and collective bases. Science is giving us insights that lead us to conclusions that are very different from those we might imagine possible.
And that is my purpose for writing this book. After a lifetime of working on and caring about these issues, I believe these new insights into human consciousness offer us the possibility of a new leap forward. The possibility of a deeper understanding of the human condition that may hold the potential for not only solving some of our specific problems, but transforming the way we relate as a species is one I believe must be embraced with vigor.
However, I want to be clear that I am not writing this book with any sense that I know how to fix people. In fact, the more I have studied unconscious bias, the more I have found myself recognizing my own. Let me give you an example of what I mean.
A while ago I was in Jackson, Mississippi, working with the deans and faculty members at Jackson State University, one of the nation’s historically black colleges and universities. After working for two days I had to fly through Memphis, Tennessee, to LaGuardia Airport in New York to work with another client for the remainder of the week. I landed in Memphis and arrived at my gate for the last flight out that evening to New York. As I was sitting down and opening my computer to do some work, the gate attendant announced that our flight had been delayed for forty-five minutes. Almost immediately a voice bellowed from behind me in a deep Southern accent. “You talkin’ to us lady?” I turned around and there he was, a man I would best describe as Santa Claus with an attitude. Mid-sixties, white, well-fed, white beard and hair, wearing overalls and a flannel shirt. In his hand was a car magazine. Boy, did I have him pegged. I smiled to myself and then went back to work.
Forty-five minutes passed and it was time to board the plane. I had been upgraded to first class because of my airline miles and walked down the passage to my aisle seat when, lo and behold, who should be sitting at the window but “angry Santa” himself. I have to admit that I wasn’t thrilled, but we did the “airplane greeting nod” I’m sure many of you are familiar with, and sat down for the flight. As soon as we took off and were able to do so, I took out my computer and got back to work, preparing a course I would be teaching the next week at Georgetown University. My neighbor was reading his car magazine. At some point he got up to go to the restroom and when he returned he asked me, “What are you, a professor or something?” Girding myself a bit for a possible reaction, I explained what I did and that I wasn’t really a professor but was just teaching a course. He barely reacted, and we went back to our parallel activities.
This continued until we approached New York, when the pilot announced our final descent and that the time had come to put all electronics away. Experienced flyers know this is the time when “airplane chat” often takes place, because it is now safe to start a conversation knowing you won’t get stuck with somebody for two hours, someone you really might not talk to for even two minutes anywhere else. I turned toward the gentleman and asked him, “What takes you to New York?”
“I’m going to a professional meeting,” he responded.
I immediately noticed the hearing aid he had in his right ear, which I hadn’t seen before. Maybe that explained his reaction to the announcement?
“What do you do?” I asked.
“I’m a radiologist,” he replied.
So here I was, a diversity consultant with thirty years of experience, and the guy who I had pegged with all of my socioeconomic stereotypes was, in fact, a doctor. But it didn’t stop at that fact.
“Do you have a particular area of interest in radiology?” I inquired.
“Yes,” he responded, getting very animated. “We’re using active brain scans to learn about how the human brain responds to various stimuli, especially when people interact with different kinds of people.”
In other words, he was an expert in one of the very fields that I am the most interested in. If it wasn’t for my immediate stereotyping of him, and all of the biases that it brought up in me, I might have learned as much about the brain in that