How To Stop Being A Racist and Encourage Someone Else To

by Ray Mathis

We have struggled to get past racism since the end of the Civil War. We have passed laws, made discrimination and hate crimes illegal. Yet we still see evidence of racism. I believe we have never gotten past it is because we have never identified the real underlying causes of racism and targeted those causes. Our focus needs to be on racist thinking, in part because attitude is always the father of behavior. There are two innate cognitive tendencies that are the real underlying causes of racist thinking and behavior. Both tendencies evolved to help humans survive. One is a tendency to note and focus on differences between us and others. Differences are more likely to represent threats. The other is a tendency to generalize about information coming into our brains. Generalizing is a way to deal with the vast amount of information coming into our brains. Racist thinking is a form of irrational thinking Dr. Albert Ellis called Labeling and Damning. It is focusing on differences between us and others and over generalizing about it. Over generalizing is like calling an apple “bad” just because it has a bruise. Racist thinking is essentially “That bunch has some bad apples so the whole bunch is bad. He is part of that bunch so he must be a bad apple.” This is how profiling by police arises. The one thing that usually does not work is trying to shame a person who thinks and acts in a racist way into changing. Doing that is simply perceived as a threat to their symbolic self – the person they want to be and be seen as by others. They just get angry and are too busy defending their symbolic self and ready to fight to reflect on the way they think or behave. Their anger also gives them a false sense of righteousness. Dr. Ellis used to say, “Therapy should be educational, and education can be very therapeutic.” Education is our best hope. A starting place can be Unconditional Other Acceptance – choosing to see what others think, feel, say or do as part of being human and understandable given what their life experiences have been. Educating people about their two innate cognitive tendencies and Labeling and Damning would be helpful. Ultimately, our best hope is to try to create cognitive dissonance in the person engaging in racist thinking and behavior. That means pointing out the differences between their beliefs about others and reality. People do not like cognitive dissonance and will try to resolve it, usually by modifying their beliefs and the attitudes that father their behavior. We also need to educate people about “ruts” in their brains. “Ruts” get created in our brains just like ruts get created in roads – from going down the same path over and again. They are easy to slip into and hard to stay out of or get out of, just like real ruts. They make thoughts, feelings and actions automatic, which in turn make opinions feel like facts and imaginations like reality. The catch is that once “ruts” get created we cannot get rid of them. We can only make new ones and hope they compete for use with our old ones. We can always slip into old ruts and probably will. There are millions of Americans with some old ruts for racist thinking and they are even being encouraged to slip into them by others. When those who engage in racist thinking and behavior do have a change of heart on their own, it is typically because someone or something created cognitive dissonance for them. This book details specific ways to foster cognitive dissonance in those engaging in racist thinking.

78 pages, Paperback

Published July 7, 2020