A few weeks ago, I did a leadership training program in LA which helped me realize that what I really want to do when I grow up is become what I call a “shame educator”. I imagine it sort of like a “sex educator”, except about shame (which admittedly isn’t quite as sexy). Part of what made me realize this was a dramatic encounter with shame that I had while attending the leadership program itself, specifically during their daylong seminar on “embodying justice”.
It was all sparked by the word “Whiteness”. Here’s the definition of “Whiteness” that they used in the seminar:
“A global ideology and theory that proselytizes white culture, ideas, standards, and values as the norm. It is the basis for worldwide colonization and violence against people of color, past and present.”
Though most white people I’ve talked to have no problem with this definition, it immediately rubbed me the wrong way, but I was too emotional to understand exactly why at first. The source of the emotion was actually less about “Whiteness”, and more to do with the fact that with this one disagreement from what I saw as the “orthodoxy” of the group, I felt like I was suddenly different, bad, and alone (which is, of course, my definition of shame). I feared that if I spoke up, I would be judged and ostracized from this community of young leaders and new friends who I so admired. And it even went against my own sense of “wokeness”. Am I really the white guy who needs to defend the word “Whiteness”??
Though I was eventually able to work up the courage to admit in front of everyone that this definition of “Whiteness” made me feel shame, it led to a days-long shame spiral in which several fascinating things occurred, not the least of which was that my shame actually seemed to make me more racist.
Shame sparks our fight or flight reflex, which is our limbic system, one of the oldest, most basic parts of the brain (what Buddhists would call our “monkey brain”). That means our higher rational functions in the prefrontal cortex actually go offline so we can invest all of our energy into dealing with this immediate “threat” to the integrity of our identity. As a result, shame literally* turns you into an illogical caveman, run by your most basic instincts, like your innate bias towards simplistic “in groups” and “out groups” (arguably the instinctual basis for racism). I literally saw this exact process unfolding within my own shame-filled brain during and after the seminar.
All this to say, our culture’s go-to strategy of shaming racists is a terribly misguided idea. It actually just reinforces the problem! We need to find ways to encourage people caught in racist views (or any other views we disagree with) to get connected to their prefrontal cortex again by draining the shame and emotion clouding the issue. And I think the best strategy to do this is always through empathy. Empathy is inherently about equality. It says, we are the same. And it can calm people down and make them feel accepted, such that they are willing to open up, and be vulnerable and thoughtful. And empathy spreads. It builds empathy in others too, so they can start to relate to, understand, and see the point of view of the “other” they were afraid of, judging, and demonizing.
As for my own journey, I came away thinking about how I can better embody this quote by Nelson Mandela:
“…to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”
None of us will be truly free until the most marginalized members of our society are raised up to a level of equality. By the same token, none of us will be truly free until we stop implicitly and explicitly shaming other members of our society, and that includes those people who we strongly disagree with.
Corrections:
*I literally use the word “literally” figuratively like literally a thousand times.
I mistakenly call Nelson Mandela the “prime minister” of South Africa, when in fact he was the president. And I say he was in prison for 28 years, when in fact it was 27. I actually did just finish his autobiography, I swear!
