Build Friendships with People Who are Different Than You
{42 minutes}
Build Friendships with People Who Are Different Than You
91% of white folks in the United States Don't have a close friend who is a person of color
A major sociological study done in 2018 found that ninety-one percent of white people in the United States do not have a single close friend who is a person of color. This means that many of us who are white are not getting any honest feedback from anyone situated outside the envelope of whiteness. This insularity makes us sick. Yet to step beyond it, we have to build the resilience to be uncomfortable. As Victor Lewis, a black man says to David Christensen, a white man, in Lee Mun Wah’s ground-breaking film The Color of Fear, “We deal with you all the time, baby.” People of color deal with white folk every day. But for those of us who are white, as soon as we step out of white space, we are going to find that we are very different than who we thought we were. So we have to be open to knowing ourselves in a different way, which will be uncomfortable. And we have to be willing to discard the narrative that our minds will surely generate in the moments of ambiguity that expose differences. There’s a beautiful Spanish saying, ‘Cada cabeza es un mundo.’ Every head is a world. Part of what this means is that every word, every gesture, every action exists for each of us within an associative matrix of all the ideas, events, and experiences it is connected to in our lives. Any given word might be associated with widely varying meanings. Without thinking too much about it, when I say the word “jam,” what are the first associations that come to mind? Did you think of fruit spread? Did you think of traffic? Did you think of music? Now, there’s not a significant vulnerability in thinking of jam in one or another of these ways, but our research shows that if the first thing you thought of is fruit spread, you are more likely to be white. This is because the primary connotation of jam, in dominant culture, is fruit spread. For other folks, its primary connotations are different. This simple exercise shows you that any word can be coded with variant meanings. And some words are differentially coded along sociological lines in profound ways. The associations and meanings of some words in our society are in diametrical opposition in different communities. Police is perhaps the most striking example. For white people: protection. For black people: terror (sometimes protection).
Particularly when there is an ambiguous stimulus—something that could be interpreted in one way or another—the deeper, older, more subconscious circuitry of our minds is driving our interpretation, and this is often where confusion and disconnection happen. To build friendship across lines of difference, particularly in a highly unequal society, means that people who have more centered social locations, more power, more privilege, need to increase our/their resilience, decrease our/their certainty of interpretation, and become more willing to both be uncomfortable, and to be less attached to our/their interpretation of events. When something uncomfortable happens, instead of attaching a story to it, get curious. Ask yourself, What just happened? And stay in relationship.
Instead of defending, become curious. As a white person, when I talk about the police with a black person, I don’t know what I’m saying. Because I am not perceived by the police as a weapon. The function of the police is to preserve order. The order here is a White Supremacist order, where black folks have eight percent of what white folks have economically. At the edge of a parking garage, there are spikes that face outward. If you pay for your ticket, you get to come in to the garage, and on the way out the spikes lay down. From the outside, the spikes face you, and their purpose is to burst your tires if you try to enter. Your monthly parking pass is provided by whiteness. The police are the spikes. For us white folk, they lay down. For black folk, they pierce tires, even if you are just driving past. What this means is that we can’t agree on anything with this word, until I own the perpetration in myself, until I own that I am benefiting from this system whose purpose is to ensnare black bodies. Once I really own that, I can talk with a black person about the police, because I’m catching a glimpse of what it means to them. I still don’t understand it viscerally, in my bones, because I’ve never had them chasing me. But every black man in America I’ve talked to knows what that feels like.
I was in a trauma training in the Somatic Experiencing lineage when we watched a video of Dr. Peter Levine working with a surfer who had been attacked by a Great White Shark. The guy was on a beach off the coast of Australia, and suddenly realized that everyone had cleared out of the water. It got quiet. He started to paddle in. And then he felt something that made his hair stand on end. A shock that quickened his heart rate instantaneously. A shark has an electromagnetic targeting system. When its predation instinct turns on and points at a prey animal, the prey animal feels it and knows. Surfers talk about having a "sharky" feeling. That feeling is not an idea–it is to feel the targeting system in the water. And you know, with certainty, when it locks on. There is a trauma that comes from being targeted, because this is a biological phenomena. In the case of the surfer, it activated his fight or flight system (sympathetic nervous system), and he began to paddle like hell. A Great White moves through the water like a motorboat when it wants to. When it hit the surfboard, the impact threw him into the air like a rag doll. This man survived—but his nervous system? You could see the cascading waves of activation as he re-told this story and Dr. Levine slowly accompanied him back to a baseline state. For each wave to settle took many many minutes. They moved through the story unpacking micro-moments. The first moment he sensed the water grow quiet. The moment he felt his hair stand on end. The moment he began to paddle. Stored in the body, in each of these moments, was so much information that had to be re-assembled into coherence. So much, packed into so little time. We got to watch these moments of re-assembly as his body began to realize that it was still fully alive, intact. We got to watch him beginning to come back together. What I want you to understand is that every time a black man in America walks out his front door, he is stepping into shark-infested waters. The Great White Shark is a highly intelligent predator. Its body is covered with tiny scales that create an almost impenetrable sheath. Although sharks give birth to their young like mammals, they are a species of fish. They are cold. In sharks, the parts of the brain that process feelings are much less developed than in mammals. In this regard, their behavioral repertoire is more like that of a reptile.
I’m not a very good surfer, and where we live in Northern California there is a large population of Great White Sharks. The way I’ve worked with those two facts: I don’t surf here. Me personally, if there were Great White Sharks swimming outside my door, I wouldn’t leave the house. I say this casually, but I would not come to this knowledge casually. Knowing what I do about my own nervous system, after being chased the first time, I don’t know that I’d have the resilience to be willing to do it again. I don’t know that you could talk me into leaving. And herein lies the Catch-22 for every black person: they don’t have a choice. This is why white folk must engage in conversations about racism and unconscious bias. This is why we, as white people, must understand the origin of whiteness, its history, how it operates, how its currents run through us and through our society. Because each of us who is unwilling to do this is morally responsible for creating a world where our brothers and sisters of color must, every day, face dangers that we personally would find absolutely unacceptable for ourselves or our loved ones to face. If you are reading this, and you happen to be white, and you happen to have children, I would encourage you to think deeply about what it would mean to send your child, alone, out into shark-infested waters. Would you ever do this? I don’t have to answer this question, because I know that you would not. If you still had to, you would teach them everything you possibly could about sharks, all the while knowing that their behavior was unpredictable, that they were vastly powerful, and that if you looked at one wrong it might eat you. As you are reading this I want you to feel the reality that if white folks were forced to walk out into that world every day, we’d have long since killed off the sharks. That if even one white community in America were facing this, it would be a national uproar. In this simple awareness is revealed the depth of our failure of compassion in this country, a failure that most white folks are not even aware of.
If you want to talk to masters of resilience, talk to black men in America. These are the brothers who’ve earned the right to teach that class.Related Practices:
This is a nexus point in the model, because moving any direction from here will teach you essential skills about relationship. Linger in the discomfort of this, if it arises, because if it is making you uncomfortable this is a MAJOR, and for white folks under-utilized, doorway to deep transformation and evolution. If you deal with this, it will cascade into healing all your relationships. See Resilience in the Black community. See How Whiteness Operates. See Healthy Relationships. See Relational Mindfulness. See Every Head is a World. See Common Ways of Disconnecting.Photography: | Licensed from Pexels.com, used with permission.