A recent podcast about the five senses, introduced me to Isaac Lidsky, who at age 25, completely lost his vision. He was interviewed on the podcast and snippets of his Ted Talk were interspersed throughout the interview (link below). At the time of losing his vision completely, he recalls that he felt his life was over. He would never be able to do the things he wanted to do. Life as he knew it, was forever changed, and not for the better. Years later, with a law degree, law practice, and countless other achievements, he talks about how resolute he was in the belief that nothing good could arise out of his blindness. And how very wrong he was.
"To me, it's more about choosing what reality you want to live for
yourself. So this really was the profound insight that really made
losing my sight a great blessing in my life. I felt I was living a race
against the clock, a race against time, a race against blindness until I
decided to really take control of my own reality."
What I found most profound or enlightening about his insight was this:
"whenever I felt afraid, I'd ask myself two questions - what precisely is
my problem, and what precisely can I do about it? You know, I knew
blindness was going to ruin my life [at 25], but that was a reality that I was
choosing, that my mind had created for me, and I was choosing to
believe. And I decided to make another choice."
He decided to make another choice. Rather than following the pathway that places blindness as a deficiency, as something that is wrong or less than in comparison to having sight, he turned away from that narrative and chose something else. He identified his problem, and developed a solution. Sometimes, fear of the unknown controls us. We invent, speculate, and/or presume a variety of horrors will befall us when let fear reign. In our minds, fear of X is powerful and we give it credence over any other possible reality or outcome. We miss the less gloomy side of the coin: that the event, behavior, situation, or activity that we fear may actually bring us new insight, experience, and knowledge.
For Lidsky, going blind gave him vision, as he understands it. It allowed him to live with his eyes wide open in ways he had not been able to do when he had his sight. He shared his learning:
"See beyond your fears, they are your excuses, rationalizations,
shortcuts, justifications, your surrender. Choose to see through them,
choose to let them go. You are the creator of your reality. With that
empowerment comes complete responsibility. I chose to step out of fear's
tunnel into terrain uncharted and undefined."
His words and sentiments resonate with me personally as I continue on my journey of starting my own business, believing I can be a research and evaluation project lead, or being a competitive triathlete. The what ifs, fear of failure, and associated worry sometimes pushing me closer to giving up than I would like to admit.
What Lidsky outlined about fear and choice is also relevant right now, today, in our current social, political, and cultural climate. Powerfully relevant. Fear of the "other" and its explicit reification in policy is at a peak. This fear is largely directed at non-white Americans, immigrants, and refugees. In particular, the fear (white) people have of individuals from Muslim countries, and Muslim Americans is taking over. Many, many people are choosing to believe that all Muslim people are a threat to their safety. They are not choosing to see through those fears to a reality that doesn't support this claim. They are invested in the bogeyman story in this context because it's easier to give in to a fear, than it is to make a different choice, as Lidsky suggests we do. This hyper-exaggeration of a perceived threat and the resultant narrative of fear, is leading to heinous and oppressive initiatives that many argue are indisputably unconstitutional.
We each have choices. Our choices are different and complicated, and nuanced based on our identities and how we move through the world. And we still have choices about how we want to treat other people and be remembered. Choices about how and what we communicate or how we embrace challenge and change or eschew it. Lidsky ended his Ted Talk by quoting/paraphrasing Helen Keller: "the only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision." I think right now, many of us who can see, lack vision because we are blanketed in our fears of something we don't truly understand: "terrain uncharted and undefined." Embrace difference, make different choices, and open yourself up to alternate possibilities.
Ted Radio Hour, "The Five Senses" (Jan 19, 2017). Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=510624029
I have started and stopped writing a blog post on the recent U.S. election several times over this week. I have largely hesitated to write something on the results because I don't even know how to write something that captures the magnitude and nuance of what transpired. I also have nervousness in sharing my thoughts as a woman, business owner and non-citizen. However, this blog is about my observations on culture and communication in an effort to provoke thought and in some cases change. To be silent is to be complicit; separating myself from those who voted against the civil rights of others denies my culpability as someone who benefits from whiteness. As a budding blogger committed to social justice and social change, I have to say something, however lacking or insufficient, to address the enormity of what happened.
In the wake of November 8th, I, like many others find myself at a loss for words. I am unsure what to say, what I can say, or what I should say. I don't profess to think I can say anything that will make the result better or less painful. I have felt a complex fabric of emotions, ranging from emptiness to disgust to disbelief. Trump's election impacts me directly as a woman and (aspiring) ally and impacts many people I care about in devastating ways.
The pain I have experienced, absorbed and witnessed from, and through, other people online and in person is indescribable over the past six days. The President-elect's campaign rhetoric, woven deeply with racist, sexist, classist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic sentiment, exposed a deep divide in this country. Because of this, many people, particularly those most marginalized are legitimately scared about what comes next. They see and feel danger and risk in our new President-elect's policies and ideals. And those feelings are absolutely legitimate. The language of exclusion is a "normal" experience for immigrants, folks of color, trans people, LGB people, folks with disabilities, and women in this country and that reality goes a long way to explain the "how" of why we find ourselves in this place. For many, Trump's election was not surprising. As I scroll through the various Facebook posts and news articles, as I speak to friends, and hear from students, the fear of what is next is palpable. I am at once numbed and enraged by it.
My fear about the totality of what may come next is punctuated by my deep disappointment at the fact the USA couldn't bring itself to elect a woman president. I feel an immense sense of sadness over this. I don't think I realized just how invested I was in seeing a woman in the highest office in the U.S. until I woke up to the news it wasn't happening. That Hillary Clinton was not elected is unsurprising in the most pedestrian of ways, and yet I find myself ping ponging back and forth between this acknowledgement and the shock of it all. It feels like a bad dream that I desperately hope to wake from. I have worked for years to support women and girls, to break down gender and gender stereotypes that restrict and inhibit all of us from achieving our potential, and in particular to end violence against women. I cannot shake the fact that millions of Americans of all gender identities heard Trump's multiple comments about women and decided that it wasn't enough for them to cast their vote elsewhere. Women's value in contemporary U.S. society is so insignificant that voters just passed over his disdain for 50% of the population. They heard his comments and simply explained them away, were indifferent, or worse, acknowledged they were problematic and still voted for him. This is also true for his comments on Muslim people, refugees, and Mexican immigrants. His racism and misogyny was not a deal breaker for the 60 million people who voted and the many million more who did not.
The undercurrent of sexism was, and is, so very apparent. One young woman interviewed on NPR about why she either didn't vote or voted for someone else was as follows (paraphrased): "Hillary is really smart, really experienced and she can absolutely get the job done...but she isn't as charming as Barack Obama." Charming? Really. That is the key qualification you look for over and above smarts, experience, and ability to do the job? Another person shared that while Trump is "clearly crazy" (recognize the ableist language here), he voted for him anyway. I don't even know how to respond to these kinds of sentiments. How do women compete in a culture that minimizes sexual violence against them and thinks "volatile," "reckless" and "erratic" are more compelling qualities in a man, than electing a smart and vastly qualified woman?
As John Oliver stated in his last show of the season, we must constantly remind ourselves that this reality should not become our new normal. Years ago, at a multicultural retreat I was facilitating, a colleague shared that "we (those with privilege) must smell the air, even when it doesn't smell for us." I have never forgotten his statement. This could not be more vital right here, right now, particularly for men and for white people. If we explain this election away by saying well, Hillary wasn't charming, or Hillary had too much baggage, we legitimize a culture and a system that endorsed and elected an openly bigoted man by (in part) blaming the woman who ran against him. If we try to persuade ourselves that everything will be okay, that should be our sign that we have lost sight of the abnormality of what just happened and of our own privilege.
I acknowledge that my experience of the result is mediated by my own identities, my own lack of voting power, and the reality that I am tied deeply to those who voted for Donald Trump through my social identities (in particular, white women). I am ashamed and embarrassed but neither of these feelings will slow the tide of bigotry that has been uncovered during this campaign. As I mentioned earlier, racism and sexism are normal experiences for millions of people in the U.S., but we cannot let that continue. We must not get complacent as the days turn into weeks and weeks into months and the election fades from our view. As incomplete and imperfect as these words are (because there is just.so.much), I hope they are helpful, even minimally, for anyone who reads this blog. In peace.
I listened to an interesting podcast the other day on the issue of power. Dacher Keltner, a psychologist who teaches at UC Berkeley, shared his research that found those who are generous, kind and empathetic are typically people who don’t hold much power in society. This didn’t much surprise me, I think it makes intuitive sense. His research also demonstrated that those employees, people, and leaders who experience the most respect from others, and thus social power, are those who are emotionally intelligent, kind and generous. Displaying empathy therefore is a force that can lead you to acquire social power. This was interesting to me because I have heard time and again that being “too kind” or “too empathetic” can lead you to be either taken advantage of or left behind. Gender constructions position women most often in the “kindness” box and we see that few women acquire extensive, large-scale social or structural power. Indeed, if they are perceived as too kind or too empathetic then society judges them harshly as weak.
What was most fascinating about Keltner’s research however, was that when folks acquire power, they tend to lose their capacity to be empathetic: “once we feel powerful, we lose - or our capacity to empathize and to know what others are thinking really is diminished.” In gaining power within whatever system a person exists, they can become less invested in others and their empathy networks in the brain are actually quieted (research by Keely Muscatell and Supvindeer Obdea shows this). Folks who hold a lot of power and privilege, the research shows, have inactive empathy networks in their frontal lobes. Keltner on Muscatell and Obdea’s research: “if you come from a position of privilege and power, the classic empathy networks in the frontal lobes of your brain are not even active when you're thinking about another [person]. So this is a very deep effect of what power does to our empathic capacities.”
I am not a scientist nor do I know much about the brain, however, I found this to be pretty interesting. The interviewer asked about billionaires who are also very philanthropic but the researcher’s response was to point out that the philanthropy might actually be a very small percentage of their actual wealth versus someone with less who gives a greater percentage of their income/assets. If someone only gives a tiny percentage of their wealth, even though this figure might be enormous, does that actually make them particularly generous or empathetic to other people’s needs?
When I think about leadership, I think fondly of those leaders I have encountered who truly seem to care about those around them and their communities. Sadly, these people I can probably count on one hand. Most leadership lessons I have experienced have been lessons in how not to treat others. Individuals I have known in workplaces who I might categorize as empathetic and generous, when rising in the ranks and acquiring more (structural) power within that system, have been unpredictable in how they have then continued to maintain connection with their colleagues and continued to exercise empathetic and generous leadership. Power corrupts, we have all heard that phrase, but research is showing that corruption isn’t just a selfish desire to maintain one’s power per se, but instead a dampening of the parts of the brain that oversee empathy. Gaining power creates a physiological reaction that diminishes our actual ability to be empathetic to others. What does this mean for leadership in general? How do we each maintain a connectivity to kindness and generosity when our brain changes as we gain power – social, political, structural, financial or otherwise? We can see this playing out right now in the U.S. presidential election.
Hidden Brain podcast on power: http://www.npr.org/2016/09/06/492305430/the-perils-of-power
