Session Thirteen

Discovering
the Human Museum

Objective:
Unlearn bias that breeds disconnection.

Pivot toward human solidarity.

Familiarity is the gateway
drug to empathy.

—iO Tillet Wright

O
n April 5, 1968, when Steven Armstrong asked his third-grade teacher Jane Elliot why they “shot that King yesterday,” she knew it was time to teach he and his classmates a lesson of a lifetime.

The day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Elliot decided to break out the exercise she’d been holding in the wings. She and her students were situated in Riceville, Iowa—a homogeneous town with a population of under 1,000. Elliot felt that the experience of discrimination wouldn’t become real without drastic measures.

On day one of what came to be known as the “Blue-Eye Brown-Eye Exercise,” she announced that eye color determines intelligence and superiority. She placed collars on all the brown-eyed students, sending them to the back of the classroom. She took away their privileges at recess—since they didn’t “deserve” to play with their blue-eyed peers, who were “better, cleaner, and smarter” than them.

Elliot watched her typically thoughtful students turn nasty within minutes. Blue-eyed students became bossy and arrogant. They quickly grabbed hold of their newfound status. The blue-eyed students were clinging to being the “in” social identity group. Years later, one of her students said the exercise made him feel happy, “like I was a king, that I ruled them.” The happiness didn’t last long.

Social Identity Theory

Academic Definition

Social identity theory, first proposed by British social psychologists Henri Tajifel and John Turner, explains that self-concept relates to the groups we are part of. Our behaviors are directly dictated by expected social behavior within the categories we identify with and associate with. It creates a sense of pride, belonging, and meaning. It can also lead to stereotyping, discrimination, competition, and hostility.

Street Definition

We have hospitality for those we perceive are like us and hostility for those who are not. Some examples of in-groups and out-groups include straight versus LGBTQ, Catholics versus Protestants, Boston Red Sox versus New York Yankees fans, and males versus females. #mypeeps #squad

On day two, Elliot reversed the exercise. The brown-eyed students were now on top. The taunting continued, but less intensely. The fresh memories from the previous day seemed to keep the new dominant group from dishing it out as hard as they had taken it. Still, on both days, there was bullying, lower academic performance, and lots of tears. Each time, the superior group of the day got through phonics reading cards faster and performed better in the classroom.

The hate perpetrated by classmates didn’t take long to manifest as negative self-dialogue for the out-group. Elliot’s students were dealing with what social psychologist Claude Steele, author of Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do, calls stereotype threat. Besides having to deal with the meanness of their teacher and classmates, they were internalizing damaging stereotypes. They were starting to believe that the horrible things being projected upon them were actually true.

Like Elliot’s students, we all have some sort of collar we’re assigned that pegs us as being a certain way, based on social identity categories like race, sex, and age. Steele explains that our various identities all come with a set of expectations that we absorb into our consciousness. His research reveals that when we are expected to underperform, we are at risk of doing just that. Steele says that even the threat of stigma can make us more vulnerable to negative outcomes.

Steele cites examples of women underperforming on math tests and black students floundering on tests measuring intellectual abilities. When reminded we’re not supposed to perform well, we often don’t. Steele worries that these threats permeate US culture, particularly within schools—places where stigma should not have a home.

After two very long and difficult days of Elliot’s exercise, her students showed tremendous relief when they were finally allowed to throw their collars into the trash. One student went to great lengths to rip up his collar, piece by piece. When he couldn’t shred it by hand, he even started biting chunks out of it. His classmates cheered. Regardless of which side they were on, they didn’t want any more part in the exercise either.

Elliot’s creation of a microcosm of society right within her own third-grade classroom helps expose how foolish and destructive it is to lump anyone into categories based on arbitrary measures—and how unjust it is to grant or deny privileges based on color, or for any reason. It also shows how quickly we internalize discrimination. Sorting and diminishing collars have been part of our social fabric for so long, they often go unquestioned. We become blind to the fact that they’re there. Before we can remove and rip them up, we need to be able to see how and why so many collars have been distributed and unfairly fastened.

Identify Your Blind Spots

In the diversity course that I teach,1 I bring my students through a set of similarly disruptive and valuable exercises, minus the collars. Everyone starts out fairly sure that they are bias-free. These students are from all over the world, of all ages and walks of life, with friends from all over, who are not just “tolerant” of, but fully embrace, diversity.2 They think there’s no way they could be biased. They balk at my hints they might be wrong. They stick to their position—disavowing prejudice and denying culpability with full fervor. Been there, done that.

We start by looking closely at the work of Harvard’s Mahzarin Banaji and the University of Washington’s Anthony Greenwald. They’ve spent years measuring “implicit cognition”—features of our brains that fall under our conscious radar. This aspect of thinking causes past experience to influence present judgment without us even blinking.

Cognitively, we are wired to put people in categories. Our brains have a natural inclination to group things together. This is the foundation of our out-group social comparison matrix. Once we’ve completed our sorting, we are likely to (1) overinflate the similarities we share with people in our in-group, and (2) exaggerate the differences between us and the out-group. We then other people. In-groups can form with people from the same family, town, or country, just as much as according to skin color, religious affiliation, and sexual orientation.

In their book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, Banaji and Greenwald show that you aren’t necessarily a bad person because of these inclinations. Our brains are mega–sorting machines, churning out automatic, unconscious, and unruly signals. Even with the best of intentions, our minds are susceptible to implicit bias because of “mind bugs”—ingrained habits that lead to errors in how we perceive, remember, reason, and make decisions. This results in blind spots in our thinking and behavior—leaving us prone to stereotypes and prejudice.

It’s not that we have to accept this as fate or use it as an excuse. Together with their colleagues, Greenwald and Banaji built an entire online study known as Project Implicit to help us get to a better place with our behavior. Over 14 million people have taken their Harvard Implicit Attitude Tests to learn about their automatic preferences for everything from sexuality to gender and career, to weight, age, race, skin tone, religion, and more.

For my students, visiting the site is a little like going on Web MD with a medical ailment. You arrive with some concerns but end up leaving pretty unsettled—especially if you weren’t expecting to uncover any bias. When you’re hit with scientific proof that you do something you don’t think you do, or don’t want to do, it’s a lot worse than learning that the rash on your arm might not go away for a while.

You’d think that once we discover our errors, we’d want to immediately correct them, so things don’t escalate. But mind bugs are tricky. Even when we’re the ones on the receiving end of bias, we aren’t that different than Elliot’s students who quickly fell into line. We don’t want the worst thing that people could say about us to be true, so we submit to the collar to try and avoid catching even more heat. We give up our own interests to keep peace. It’s not that we’re all martyrs. Sometimes aligning with the dominant group provides a form of protection from more abuse and scrutiny. And as history has shown, many people have sacrificed their lives, livelihoods, and other sacred things when they’ve stood up for themselves against power.

One of the more complex and shocking elements of the Project Implicit research findings is that members of certain groups hold many of the same prejudices as outsiders do about their own group. Like Steele’s work reveals, we fall for what’s being said about us. Maybe that’s part of why they say “women eat their own,” being harder on each other than males are on women. Project Implicit research shows that most Americans show implicit preferences for whites versus African Americans, which leads to discriminatory treatment and economic, social, and health disparities. Similar associations due to gender bias and ageism have been found.

The data from Project Implicit reveal that we play favorites with our own in-groups. There’s not always actual animosity toward other groups, but a natural tendency to favor those with whom we associate. We establish camaraderie over things like being alumni from the same school, fans of the same sports team, residents in the same town, or diehard fans of a band. These connections are often innocent, but when favoritism spills over into racial, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, and religious realms, the consequences are far greater.

With all the unintended results that hidden bias produces, we have our work cut out for us. When we realize how mind bugs can keep us from breaking out of bias, we improve the chances of mitigating their impact on our decision making. Once we’ve become familiar with our own particular blind spots, we can make our way toward becoming more familiar with the people against whom we discriminate and for whom we hold misconceptions, stereotypes, and prejudices.

Find New Gateways

After the tests, my students were uncomfortable enough to want to start tackling their biases further. We watched iO Tillet Wright deliver his “Fifty Shades of Gay” Ted Talk, highlighting the nuances of the gender and sexual identity spectrum. Wright is an artist, activist, speaker, TV host, and writer who launched his Self-Evident Truths project, with the aim of photographing 10,000 persons who identify as “not one hundred percent straight.” His goal: “to show the humanity that exists in every one of us through the simplicity of a face.”

With the help of the Human Rights Campaign, Wright is on the cusp of finishing the project for display on the national mall in Washington, DC. He knows that ensuring visibility for anyone identifying on the LGBTQ spectrum is essential for us to make progress. He aims to highlight, not erase, the complexity of identity, saying that until some form of difference pops up in your own backyard, empathy is harder to achieve. He says that “familiarity becomes the gateway drug to empathy.”

After watching Wright’s online talk, I broke the class into pairs to visit a variation of Martin Rochilin’s original heterosexual questionnaire, with questions like,

After the exercise, many of my students who identified as straight were speechless. They had never thought about sexuality like that before. My “out” students—those who openly identified as part of the LGBTQ spectrum
—shared their own painful stories of being questioned in ways that belittled them and made them feel like second-class citizens. Between Wright’s portraits and the conversations, they were finding new pathways toward empathy. Things were looking up, but we still had a way to go.

Over the weeks we continued to engage with thought-provoking materials. To understand racism, we watched PBS’s Race—The Power of an Illusion, a scientific rebuttal to our erroneous beliefs about the human species. To unpack sexism, we watched Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s award-winning documentary Miss Representation, a visceral film that shows how mainstream media and culture undermine women through disparaging portrayals. To deconstruct ableism, we read Jonathan Mooney’s The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal.

Drawing from the Class Matters website, we talked about how classism is often among the most acceptable social prejudices. Many of us agreed that socioeconomic status was the make-or-break factor that either helped mitigate other forms of prejudice or accelerated it. Even if you’re in a marginalized group, higher class level and its appearance influence how people perceive and treat us. We also looked at global conditions and studied the If the World Were a Village of 100 research project, one that reveals major disparities across the human spectrum. We searched for familiarity around the world, gaining a lot of perspective along the way.

We spent a lot of time thinking and rethinking. Few stones were left unturned. We tackled endless topics—from fat shaming to slut shaming to mental health stigma. Everyone had their own story of being othered and put down for no good reason. Gateways to empathy were turning up at unique intersections. Most everyone identified with at least one experience of having collars placed on them or those they love. Many could speak of more than one collar.

We kept connecting dots, seeing how intersectionality influenced so many facets of finding solidarity. The concept originated with American civil rights activist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, who was trying to help explain that social inequities are multilayered. Racism, sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and other forms of discrimination do not act independently of one another, thus creating complexity and risk for those with intersectional identities. When we have been forced to wear our own collars, we can better recognize and empathize with someone else’s plight.

Intersectionality

Academic Definition

The idea that multiple identities intersect or overlap to create a whole that differs from each individual part. These identities include gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, age, religion, mental ability, physical ability, and beyond.

Street Definition

You may find yourself on the outs in more than one way. You might also be able to identify with the experience of someone who seems very different but has actually experienced similar things as you as because of in- and out-group status. #commonground #sameanddifferent

The further we got into the conversation, the more exhausted and exhilarated we felt. It was heavy. There were plenty of tense, defensive, and awkward moments—but we were managing to stay engaged in a productive conversation. Instead of finger pointing, we were starting to see that it was human tendency to categorize and our difficult social conditioning that were the forces to fight against, not each other. We were not willing to resign ourselves to it. We wanted to be true global thinkers—to break away from the trappings of the mind and society. We were committed to going beyond automatic instincts that were disruptive of the good life we all want.

We wanted to overcome blind spots and free ourselves of stereotypes and all their ugly consequences. Like Wright, we didn’t want to erase difference but rather learn to appreciate and embrace the beauty of our complexity. We knew we couldn’t just find gateways to empathy, but that we’d have to cross new boundaries and visit new places, too.

Visit the Human Museum

Someone kidnaps you, deprograms your brain of its mind bugs, and brings you to a human museum, with other specimens from around the world. You arrive without blind spots, as if you’ve never been exposed to the hate and exaggerated difference matrix. You are ready to absorb the full beauty that awaits. Your brain only knows how to register awe, not scrutiny. It’s a no-collar zone. You arrive wearing an Everyone Is Fam T-shirt.

There are no dominator curators in sight, deeming which art is worthy or not. Everyone has their place in this museum. The tapestry is breathtaking. No one’s covering up under their social-identity Snuggies; instead, they’re showing off their distinct features. All the shades are in their full glory; it’s safe to be you.

This visit will change you. You have the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see something for the very first time: everyone just as they are. They are no longer others or “those people,” good or bad, right or wrong, in or out, desirable or not. It’s magical.

You connect soul to soul with each person you meet, seeing one magnificent work after another. When you see young or old, pretty or ugly, fat or thin, rich or poor, black or white, straight or not, you don’t rate or judge. You get curious. Whether close up or from afar, you can really see the gorgeous, rich human spectrum in an unadulterated version. Every wrinkle, bruise, and bump is a gorgeous grit showcase. The traditions, languages, shapes, shades, and fibers of universal essence enthrall you. You behold the human miracle, and it fills your heart with joy.

You wish you had been brought to the museum sooner, especially when you were young, to develop a deep appreciation and knowledge of human art. You fill with awe as your eyes awaken to notice that each of us are inkblots waiting to be deciphered, appreciated, and admired. You start to realize how unwise it would be to allow subjectivity to rule as the guidepost for your own analysis.

Without bias, you’re so curious that you revel instead of rumble. You want to keep studying humans out of sheer fascination. Judgment makes way for pure presence, like you’re watching your own species on the Discovery Channel, fascinated by mammalian traits. Like an awestruck child, you marvel at the magic, even relishing nuances. Instead of being judgmental, you are nothing but captivated. It’s pure harmony, like you’re in the middle of an Indigo Girls concert meets Coca-Cola commercial.

Appreciation for one another is the very last thing that dominators want. They want us to judge and not look twice. They do everything they can to keep us from ever setting foot in the human museum. They want to keep us in our place, in a human prison where we are blind to our shared humanity, and instead fight over skin color, political views, religious affiliations, whom we love, or where we live—the kind of hell where there’s no time for holding each other up. “You don’t deserve that position. Or to love who you love . . . or your own bathroom. Who cares if you have equal pay or equal rights?”

They vandalize our souls, smearing venom all over our human art collection. The more we fight, the less we will challenge who’s curating us. This keeps us right where they want us: in primal fear-based instinct mode, so that we go back to our own corners and stop exploring the other wings of the museum. Gotta protect our own works. They don’t want us to see our bonds across the collection: that we are all freakin’ masterpieces.

Made of similar material, we all have shadows and bright spots, fragility and strength. We suffer and rejoice. We yearn for connection and autonomy. We want answers but have a lot more questions. We are paradoxical creatures who differ vastly but also share the desire to live, love, laugh, be free, be safe, and mostly to be seen as the beautiful creatures we are. There’s much more cause for solidarity—a sense of unity around a common cause. Imagine what would unfold if we made our mission to get to the good life together?

To keep us from seeing each other’s essence, dominators play favorites. They need to keep some of us on their side. Like dysfunctional favoritism within families, societal favoritism is destructive. The favored can be used easily as pawns to fight back against those who haven’t been granted special favors; it’s a natural tendency to want to keep it that way.

Return the Favors

Across all societies, men have been granted more favors than women. Same for straight versus LGBTQ persons, mentally healthy versus mentally ill people, and able-bodied versus disabled people. In the United States, whites have been given more favors than people of color. Religion, age, and physical appearance also lead to favors, depending on who the dominator deems in or out. You’re either the featured display or thrown in the basement.

If you fall into any of the favored categories, it doesn’t mean you are a jerk or that you’ve had everything served to you on a silver platter. Being favored can backfire. Because of the dysfunctional conditions these favors have created, there may be times when all kinds of hate and shade are thrown your way just because you’re in one of the favored in-groups, even if you’ve been awesome to the out-groups and it wasn’t your choice to be favored to begin with.

If you’re among the favored, it doesn’t mean you have failed morally or that you’ve conspired to get the perks you’ve been granted. Most favors are distributed right at birth; you didn’t have a hand in that. Since they’ve always been available, you may have never even noticed anything unique about your circumstances compared to people who haven’t. No one had ever told you there was a basement at the museum, with people who had been weighed down with collars and thrown away out of sight. No one ever steered you to visit down there to see the realities for yourself.

Just because you have the prize spot in the display case doesn’t mean life is perfect for you. You’ve worked hard and have your own hardships, too. It’s frustrating to hear all the gripes laid on you even though you didn’t choose the layout of the museum. You resent being broad-brushed as some kind of -ist pig just because you’re a guy, or white, or are in another favored group. You hate when unfair assumptions are made about you just because of this. This frustration can become the genesis of dismantling the out-group setup. You get how crappy it feels to be broad-brushed, and you know that it needs to change both ways, that there’s room to share space in your prime display case to avoid anyone having to be relegated to substandard basement conditions.

Race is an area where obvious favors have been given and withheld. Professor Peggy McIntosh describes her process of shifting away from thinking about racism as acts of individual meanness to seeing them as invisible systems that confer dominance on a group.3 In an article titled “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” she names several aspects of skin-color privilege that she experiences as a white woman. For example, she’s able to buy items like dolls and “flesh”-colored Band-Aids that match her skin, and can be in public without fear of being harassed, outnumbered, unheard, distanced, or feared. None of us can be truly free to get to or to enjoy the good life unless we return favors to those who have been denied them.

Dream Bigger

Acknowledging and returning favors is hard business. It can directly threaten pride and identity, and force us to let go of deserving theories. But even if you’ve worked your tail off, you didn’t invent the system in the first place, or if you worry that by sharing your favors, you’ll be at a disadvantage, this dysfunctional system will never help us reach the good life together. You don’t have to fork over all your goods; it’s not always possible. But it is possible to refuse to hoard them like a dominator.

In our dog-eat-dog world, the stakes are high. If you’re on the winning side, you own all the properties, and if not, you go directly to jail or the streets. No passing Go, no $200. The Economic Policy Institute reports that the average CEO makes more in one morning than the average minimum wage worker earns in an entire year.

This is a hot-button issue. Many would argue that the CEO has worked hard and “deserves” a personal masseuse and Jimmy Choos. It’s a stance common in individualistic cultures, where individual behavior, not social context and structures, are the subject of sharp focus.

We love rags-to-riches stories. They keep us believing in the dream. The you-can-do-anything, try-a-little-harder approach is enticing. Just keep those bootstraps on at all times.

But bootstraps aren’t enough. The chances for upward mobility have declined. They’ve been on the downturn since the late 1970s, but we’re highly sentimental creatures. The Dream is a lot more appealing than the wake-up call when we realize sorting begins before we’re born. With the erosion of the middle class and gaping disparities between the haves and have-nots, life paths for many or most of us are cast before we’re even able to crawl.

With an 821:1 compensation rate between top dogs versus the bottom 99 percent in the United States, you’d think everyone would be calling bullshit. Who can justify such a split? Still, people take staunch positions on their theories of who is “deserving.”

Yes, many wealthy individuals have worked hard, but it’s not enough to explain why we accept a society where the most affluent members live the life of Riley, and those with the least resources eat and live under worse conditions than animals in the wild. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation reports that our zip codes are the number-one factor in determining health outcomes. Those living in poor neighborhoods are much more likely to suffer poor health. How can we accept this?

Theories of deserving don’t add up. Over half of wealth is inherited. Who’s your daddy? matters. The Century Foundation reported that your father’s income and occupation are the greatest predictor of upward mobility. There are always outlier exceptions, but what you start off with has a lot of say.

Then there are the working poor—the over twelve million people in the United States who work at least twenty-seven weeks a year and still fall below the federal poverty level. If you are in this situation and have a family of four, it means you make $24600 or less annually. As commentator Will Rogers expressed, “If there was a correlation between wealth and hard work, we’d see a lot of rich lumberjacks.” Same for the working poor.

This isn’t a unique problem of today. Caste systems have existed across every society. Bees and ants have them, too. They are a form of categorizing known as “stratification” that organizes people according to socioeconomic status, occupation, income, wealth, and political and social power.

The scramble for status isn’t just reserved for social class wars. No matter what the in- or out-group factor involved, we always want to protect ourselves against the perceived and real threats of outsiders. If someone is different, we start throwing all kinds of shade because they’re not one of us. Rivals and enemies emerge. Competition and hostility result.

Our tendency to exaggerate common ground within our group leads us to completely overlook similarities across groups. You might think you have more in common with someone you’ve pegged as same, when there might in fact be more in common with someone you’d pegged as different. Because we’re pitted against other groups, we stop looking for the ways we could relate. We keep our swords drawn, instead of confronting the real giants we all face: unchallenged leaders, uncritical thinking, and unjust systems.

In the same way that intersectionality helps us understand overlapping identities, it can help us see that while we may not relate to being on the outs in one way, we are likely to find ourselves so in other areas. At a minimum, we can likely establish solidarity around being locked in a system that leaves us scrambling for crumbs, and that sets us up to fight, rather than to look for each other’s magic.

The University of Wisconsin–Superior has an excellent framework for developing better awareness and skills. They encourage an informed perspective that understands the construction of human categories, along with awareness of key issues and their historical foundations. They emphasize that being a globally aware citizen means we prioritize empathy, engage in effective intergroup communication, and build community across social, cultural, political, environmental, geographic, and economic boundaries.

This new path to conscious global citizenry begins when we buy memberships to the human museum, instead of buying into the caste system. It involves making trips there daily. It means being on the lookout for ways to deconstruct barriers and find intersections in our identities. This approach is part of furthering human solidarity instead of bias—one that dreams bigger and better, rather than succumbing to the chokeholds of collars and systems where most people never have a shot of being displayed the way they deserve to be.