This post continues the thread of thought in the previous one. In that post, I brought up the incident of Amy Cooper siccing the police on a nearby black birder. I wrote: The recently reported case of a white woman, Amy Cooper, calling the police when a black man, birding in Central Park, asked her to tether her dog, as she should already done, provides an excellent example of this cognitive process. Cooper had been working for a company with an outstanding reputation for dealing with diversity and had been given extensive training in co-existing with people of color.… Read More
Continue ReadingPrejudice Starts at Birth
Evolution has endowed humans and many other animals with a brain that is bi-hemispheric. The great mass of neurons are contained in two separate halves. In his book, The Master and his Emissary, British psychiatrist and writer, Iain McGilchrist, argues that each side attends to the outside world in strikingly different ways that reflect their evolution. One half, the right side in humans, gathers information about the immediate world, a function derived from animals’ need to be alert for predators. The other half, the left side in humans, contains information necessary to perform essential tasks like feeding or gathering food.… Read More
Continue ReadingTo Change This Broken World, Stop and Learn How to Think About It
What can one say? Anything that is coming to mind to set down on paper seems too frail and inadequate to capture the moment. Each time I say to myself that we have hit bottom, something happens to deepen the trench we have become mired in. One thing, however, keeps cropping up. The criticality of recognizing the root causes of our various and interlinked messes. Let me pick just a few: covid-19, joblessness, racism, brutality, lies, poverty, obesity and on and on. We have all the words we need to build a wonderful nation, so the fact that it is… Read More
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