Susan Fiske: Stereotypes
[5:34]
THE TRUTH (The real version)…. Those who want to learn and do the right thing…. GOOD FOR US…. but, we are not perfect as we go about our day, I refuse to play the righteous one and be all SELF HELP GURU!!! Not me, no way!!!… Why?….
I asked a handful of ‘White’ Greek Cypriots, male and female recently, harmless people, ‘good’ people, who mean well generally.. They just want to get on with their lives peacefully, hard working, the don’t bother anyone types…THE QUESTIONS REQUIRING QUICK RESPONSES WERE…. ‘Your teenage child, what scale from 1 to 100 (100 = super happy) would you be happy with them eventually marrying / partnering a ‘good’ Greek Cypriot partner or, alternatively a ‘good’ ‘Black’ partner…. The average score was 90/100 emotional connection to partner a Greek Cypriot and 30/100 emotional connection for marrying a ‘Black’ person. This was not an either or scenario… The percentage was the emotional level of acceptance score for each individually.. There’s a variety of reasons the scores may have been so, and 30 low score does not necessarily mean hate and rejection due to blind judgement.
Now me….I know I’m not a racist, I know I’m not homophobic, but there’s something within me trying to cling on to those past prejudices, something deeply rooted from childhood cultural indoctrination that lurks and does not want ‘me’ to let go completely of being so….Another part of ‘me’ also wanted to avoid saying what I just said in the previous sentence too, in case of possible backlash… If we are to truly going to progress though as a collective, I feel it’s imperative that we start noticing our biases, even the ones that lurk to what ever extent in that background of a not ‘me’ now mind, and learn to truly observe ourselves, rather than gliding along appropriately with the major contradictions that go side by side with that, sidestepping the ambiguity of an overall mindset.
That past ‘me’ lurking, has nothing to do with present day me, however it’s a very complex brain that connects millions of neurons together and sets them into place and bad habits do not disappear so easily just because new insights settle in too….. I’m too smart now to stereotype people and not look at each individual for what they truly bring to the table, but the ‘I’, my identity, my mind is not just about the advanced education and thoughts of me now… I concede and repeat…..the complex nature of identity and morality forming is simply not all to do with the aware me of now. I’m not ashamed of that, I accept the complexity of brain forming mind… 100 billion neurons up there!
The prejudices we are bombarded with via childhood indoctrination’s do not just disappear completely because we now know better and demand equality for all with current thoughts and opinions.. There’s still a past mind f*ck we have to keep dealing with and keep trying to cleanse, if that’s the correct word… A paradox within the mind. The me I no longer am I actually still am to a certain extent but never really got round to thinking about it to notice… The setup of my brain, a puppeteer to the mind avoids ‘me’ from observing my own contradictions all too often.. It really does get messy and hard to sort out what is truly going on up there.
We may assume we have rid of past prejudices but quick fire questions demanding answers like those to the Greek Cypriots above can catch us all out… That does not make us bad people. It just means we are very complex survival brains / minds dealing with life, stuck in a paradigm where we cannot truly understand our very own human nature in much detail and definitely not as much as we assume we can.
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