Month: December 2021

I want to start this Better Human reflection on inclusion by acknowledging human nature. I believe that there are only a handful of people in the world who deliberately set out to hurt and harm others. And if we are paying attention, those psychopaths and sociopaths among us reveal their antisocial tendencies, allowing us to wisely steer clear of them. Unlike these rare individuals, the rest of us have varying levels of empathy that prevent us from intentionally hurting others.

But we do hurt others. And most of the harm we inflict on our fellow human beings stems from either our attempts at self-preservation or human error. For example, when I was in my thirties, I was working in a department where I was the only person of color. A few colleagues in the department were throwing a baby shower for a pregnant colleague with whom I was very friendly. However, I was not invited to the baby shower. I was hurt by the obvious exclusion and asked our department head about it. The official explanation was an oversight, but the same thing happened a total of three more times and each time was meant with profuse apologies. I understand that these were not psychopaths hellbent on hurting my feelings. These were human beings conditioned by our American history to not include me. Exclusion makes minorities either hyper-visible or hyper-invisible. True inclusion requires a change in mindset.

Today, many Americans have fallen victim to psychopathic leaders who effectively fuel their need for self-preservation. This time, that empathy silencer, self-preservation, is rooted in fear rather than the greed that haunts our history. School board meetings are filled with white Americans struggling with the reality of U.S. history because they feel empathy for their children’s feelings. They understand the uncomfortable feeling of white guilt and they desperately want to shield themselves and their children from that trauma. They are terrified that learning about the historical hurt and harm inflicted upon women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and persons with disabilities by individual and state-sponsored exclusion will damage their children’s view of themselves and their nation. Misguided parental groups like Moms for Liberty are behind a push to make it illegal to teach the true history in our schools. They are literally using words like diversity and inclusion and white privilege to signal lessons they don’t want their children to hear.

Perhaps without realizing it, they are giving cover to white nationalists like Trump and others. Denying a history of exclusion paves the way to blame minorities for their problems and low status. It is possible that these protesting parents fail to realize that the Trump campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again” only resonates for those who were included in the American dream. As the nation is living with the legacy of exclusionary practices, these parents wrongly want to hide the truth that can contextualize our current situation and therefore pave the way for satisfactory solutions. They instead want to protect their fragile emotions. I say no.

It is time to acknowledge that self-preservation in the form of greed was at the root of Indian genocide, black slavery, and the oppression of women. At the founding of this nation, white males subverted any healthy empathetic impulses by readily accepting the notion (from psychopaths) that Indians were savages, that blacks were sub-human, and that women were childlike. Convince people that LGBTQ people are immoral and people with disabilities are incompetent, and society will allow for all manner of discrimination, exploitation, and mistreatment.

The history they wish to hide is that white males and their families gained wealth and power by excluding women and minorities from decision-making, ownership, citizenship, voting, education, and jobs. It made sense that if you eliminate the competition using a legal system of violence to exploit labor, steal land, rape black women, deny opportunity, and kill with impunity that these things will make you the winner in the game of life. Any reasonable person would call this “ill-gotten” gain. Trump and his supporters know that if they can hide this truth, then they can move on, retaining all they have accumulated guilt-free while covertly maintaining systems of exclusion.

I think it is accurate to surmise that these parents wrongly believe that their children cannot handle the truth that people who came before them did some pretty terrible things and that those actions had lasting negative effects on groups of people living today. They sell themselves short and their children short if they refuse to realize that their empathy will be satisfied if they face the truth and work to do better. That is what practicing inclusion is about.

Inclusion is about recognizing that doors of opportunity were closed for a very long time and that many people were so accustomed to those closed doors that they 1) never prepared for them to open; 2) don’t know how to walk through them and 3) are terrified by the mystery of what’s on the other side of the door. Therefore, inclusion requires a proactive approach, not a passive one. It means taking people by the hand and helping them to walk through open doors. It also means reminding people who have always been able to walk through open doors that the same doors remain open to them. Inclusion doesn’t mean removing people from the table, it means building a bigger table. Parents and white nationalists need to learn this lesson.

Better humans have to “practice” inclusion by continuously noticing the previously excluded. Who is missing from the invitation list? Whose voice is not being heard in this discussion? Whose story is not being told? Who is not applying for this job and who is not getting an interview? The answer to solving our exclusion problem is never more exclusion, but intentional inclusion. And that takes practice.

It has taken a fair amount of self-observation and self-reflection for me to understand and accept myself, particularly when it comes to the subject of helping others. I am neither entirely selfish nor entirely charitable. In Sunday School and scouting, I learned that helping those in need is a virtuous act and a humanitarian responsibility. It also feels good. At school and work, I learned to discern between helping and enabling. I also learned that helping can be unreasonably costly for me and my family and so I adopted the Biblical proverb that “charity begins at home”. The airlines gave me another good rule to follow. They say, “Once you have secured your own air mask, then you can assist those around you.” With these principles in place, finding the right balance for me beyond securing myself and helping my family was something I stumbled upon.

I suppose my approach to helping others is rooted in a part of my personality that is highly empathic. I discovered that I am deeply affected by human suffering to the point that I experience empathy in my body. For example, when my mother broke her foot, my foot swelled up so badly that she carted me off to the doctor for an examination. He diagnosed my ailment as “sympathy pain” and my foot reverted back to normal size almost immediately. My involuntary responses to the physical ailments of family and friends occurred frequently into my late adolescence, prompting my mother to tell me to completely abandon any notion of entering the medical field. Not surprisingly, my response to the emotional suffering of others wasn’t much better, particularly when that suffering related to injustice, suspense, and acts of violence. My kids joke about which movies I can and cannot watch because of my acute emotional responses. One example was during the opening scene of “Saving Private Ryan”. I was crying so hard that my friend suggested I leave. Over the years, I have left many movie theaters, mid-screening, to collect myself or to completely avoid the most emotionally difficult parts. As I’ve gotten older, my tolerance for emotionally taxing stories has gotten worse to the point where I need to know the end of a story before I can read the book or watch the movie.

The point is that my high level of empathy greatly influences my approach to helping others. If I cannot tolerate watching fictional injustice, suspense, violence, and human suffering, imagine the depth of my agony in real life. When I see those things happening to people, I have to do something to help. The only emotional relief I get comes from knowing that I am doing what I can to relieve the human suffering before my eyes. However, I also learned that my approach to helping is a product of recognizing my own limitations.

While I am highly empathetic, I realize that I am also highly judgmental. When I was in my early twenties, I thought I could help young women in juvenile detention. I visited the detention center several times and had conversations with the young women being detained for a variety of serious crimes. I quickly discovered that I was too angry and disappointed by their warped thinking and willingness to harm others that I abandoned the notion that I was the right person to help them. I realized that my generosity didn’t extend to people who harmed themselves or others. I discovered that my heart wasn’t that big after all. Thankfully, there are other people who have the level of compassion needed to help others find redemption, healing, and rehabilitation. I have to admit that I greatly admire the doctors and nurses who continue dealing with unvaccinated COVID-19 patients with patience and compassion these days. I couldn’t do it.

I’m also limited by an acute fear of heights, fire, water, and speed. I’ve never been the dare devil who rides roller coasters, rock climbs, surfs, mountain bikes or jumps out of planes for pleasure. I learned early on that even horseback riding was a bit too much for me. In Costa Rica, I refused the opportunity to zipline, opting to miss the beautiful forest view. In Hawaii, I sat in the boat while my family enjoyed snorkeling off the island of Kauai. And in Italy, I remained seated in the boat when my companions jumped into the crystal blue water of Blue Grotto off the island of Capri. So, it’s highly doubtful that anyone would ever find me on a dangerous rescue mission when it involves confronting these fears.

On a somewhat redeeming note, I realized through a game of “This or That” that as a scaredy cat and introvert my most prominent pattern of helping people over the years has taken the form of writing a check as opposed to physically showing up to help others. I’m not the person you will find on the front lines of a disaster, distributing food, marching in a protest, or canvasing a neighborhood on behalf of a candidate. Over the years, I have done most of these things at least once or twice and quickly discovered that I much prefer behind the scenes preparations, financial donations, or even fundraising. I prefer helping by using my pocketbook, skills, and my handiwork rather than my physical presence. For extroverts and dare devils, helping likely entails very different behaviors.

The final realization about my approach to helping others has to do with a lesson many of us have learned about giving a fish versus teaching a person to fish. I find that I am an advocate of both. Giving a fish solves the immediate problem; teaching to fish deals with the elimination of the need in the long term. I’ve worked to teach my own children to fish, although sometimes I wasn’t 100% effective and they had to learn the hard way. Beyond my family, I donate to Women for Women International, various scholarship funds, and The Boys and Girls Club with the mindset that this kind of helping enables people become the best version of themselves.

However, sometimes helping others in an immediate situation isn’t about teaching anyone a lesson; it’s about mitigating immediate suffering. So, I give to Doctors Without Borders, Unicef, Children’s hospitals, and St. Jude. When a homeless person on the street is asking for money, I tend to give it. He or she isn’t looking for a lesson on how to get a job and become a productive citizen. That person is simply trying to survive through mental illness and/or substance abuse and an inadequate public assistance system. I try to make it a point to give without judgment. In this regard, my husband taught me a different approach by refusing to give money and offering food instead so that the money can’t be spent feeding an addiction. He has a point. He will go out of his way to purchase a sandwich and take it to that person instead. Admittedly, his approach is better than mine.

I didn’t realize that the desire to help others wasn’t a universal human trait. It took a while for me to realize that I was one of those people who could only find fulfillment in my career if it entailed helping others. My parents passed down the notion that it was more important to make a lot of money and then help people on the side. My mother was known for her volunteerism in the community. However, it was only after her death that I pursued my second career as an educator and counselor. My second career made me much happier than my corporate career in finance despite the significant pay cut. I don’t dispute that some people make a ton of money and give a lot of money to charity. However, only a few actually give in proportion to their wealth and without ego-boosting strings attached. I imagine a lot of injustice, pain, and suffering in this world would be significantly reduced if the wealthiest among us actually cared enough to contribute what is needed. They have the means, but not the will. The reality is that many of them don’t even want to pay their fair share in taxes.

Better humans help others. The method may differ according to our personalities and circumstances, but the virtue and humanitarian responsibility of helping our fellow human beings is what better humans are compelled by empathy and conscience to do.

I’m amazed at how early children grasp the concept of fairness. It almost seems like our brains are hardwired to expect it and when our sense of fairness is violated, we cry foul. Social justice is the fair treatment of all people within a given society with respect to their access to resources and services, life opportunities, law enforcement, and protection from environmental harms. Whether or not a society treats all its members fairly can be determined by observation primarily of its inputs and not necessarily of its outcomes.

I know a lot of people look at outcomes to determine whether a system is fair or not. And in many cases, desperate outcomes raise red flags about a broken distribution model. For example, a mother bakes a pie and slices it, giving each of her twins a slice. However, the twins notice immediately that one slice is much larger than the other. As expected, the child with the smaller slice complains about the unfairness. Mom has a couple choices. She can ignore the protesting child and allow resentment and frustration to fester. Or, if there is more pie, she can easily rectify the situation and add more pie to the deficit slice to make up the difference. However, if the rest of the pie is already distributed to others, she could choose to take some pie from the twin with the larger slice to even out the distribution. This last option might then anger the twin who was perfectly content with the original size of his slice. The problem lies with the imperfect distributor of the pie, not with the twins who are now feeling the uncomfortable stress of unfairness. Thankfully, someone created an equal pie slicer that allows mothers to avoid this problem. But the unfair distribution within our society still needs fixing and the solutions are contested.

Today, we are dealing with social injustice caused by an historically flawed distribution of access to resources, opportunities, placement of environmental hazards, and unfair treatment under the law. Since the beginning, the system in the U.S. favored white males with bigger slices of every variety of pie the country had to offer. White males were provided with the greatest access to education, job opportunities, land ownership, healthcare, and the ability to vote and make the laws. And they were the police of the laws they made. People of color and women were not only given crumbs from the pie but suffered major atrocities at the hands of these self-serving white men. The relative wealth of white Americans today is rooted in this unfair distribution. This is history some white conservatives hope to hide. They want to hide it because, like the twin with the larger slice, they are content with what they have and are fearful that demands for social justice threatens them with the loss of their exorbitant pie slices. This is why they prefer to push a narrative that minimizes a history of slavery, genocide, stolen lands, and state sponsored discrimination in favor of a narrative that blames the lack of social economic progress on a list of character deficits they ascribe to the victims.

The truth is that America actually has more pie available, but the white conservatives want it for themselves. Social justice or fairness demands that the country first rectify the inequity of the past distribution and then moving forward the country must provide fair access to resources, opportunities, and equal protections. Yes, I am in favor of reparations for the descendants of slaves and American Indians because it is the least this nation can do to acknowledge past wrongs. I believe social justice demands mitigating the past wrongs that continue to disadvantage those who were negatively impacted by the systematic unfairness. All Americans deserve a common starting chance in life.

That said, social justice does not necessarily guarantee equal outcomes. I think about the parable Jesus told wherein a father distributed gifts to his sons. One son invested his gift, and it grew while the other took his gift and hid it, producing nothing. The father came back and condemned the son who did nothing with what he was given and then gave more to the son who invested his gift. The point is that unequal outcomes are indicative of individual human capacity and not always an indicator of an unfair distribution. Some can make much from little and others can make nothing of a lot. Think of Oprah Winfrey and how much she made of her life using her extraordinary intelligence, talent, and energy. At the same time, there are countless stories of children who were given everything and squandered their lives. It is a mistake for conservatives and others to make an example of the few extraordinary people like Oprah Winfrey or former President Barak Obama and say that their outcomes represent the fairness of our social justice system today. They don’t.

By the same token, conservatives wrongly point to the disproportionate number of black and brown people in prison and claim that it is because black and brown people commit more crimes. They choose to ignore the fact that whites made laws to criminalize drugs, then over-policed black and brown communities, gave longer prison sentences to black and brown people, and showed leniency toward white criminal behavior. One only needs to watch the different behavior of law enforcement towards armed white suspects versus black suspects (who may not even be armed). If Kyle Riddenhouse was black, he would be dead. If the 15-year-old who just killed four classmates was black, he would be dead. America knows this to be true and yet the injustice continues.

In addition, conservates choose to ignore the fact that hopeless poverty and crime are closely intertwined. It is human nature to ignore laws in favor of survival. Think of how many black and brown children grow up poor and without the love and guidance of fathers because of an unfair criminal justice system. However, the outcome of this unfair criminal justice system plays right into the conservative narrative of dangerous black and brown people. A thoughtful person simply needs to example the root of the system to discover that years of social injustice has yielded the result we experience today.

Better humans must take the lead in exposing the inequitable distribution of resources, opportunities, and law enforcement by concentrating on the broken distribution points and not only looking at the outcomes. Black Lives Matter is about looking at these distribution points where the pie continues to be distributed unevenly. This is precisely why conservatives hate them so much. This is why they fear critical race theory and “The 1619 Project”. History is not on their side. The facts counter the conservative narrative that desperately wants to hide the system of social injustice. Better humans ask questions like: Who gets access to education, healthcare, clean water, clean air, voting, and job opportunities? Who is subjected to harmful chemicals, excessive policing, poorly resourced schools, longer prison sentences, and longer voting lines?

Demanding social justice means demanding reparations for past inequities and demanding equal protection under the law and access to resources and opportunities moving forward. It’s only fair and any child can tell you that.