Arrogance is when you don’t know what you don’t know but think you know. While that needs to be met with compassion, it has big consequences if you’re in a position of power or authority. Charles Eisenstein wrote a brilliant new essay, The Banquet of Whiteness, in which he considers racism and other cultural beliefs under the broader umbrella of arrogant whiteism. He unpeels our hubristic blind spot of perceived superiority and rightness we are literally not aware of because we come from a place of majority consensus and relative power (the term echo chamber has been used). Hence the perpetuation of racism. Hence the hunkering down on outmoded ways of looking at certain cultural patterns. Hence our narrow way to think and do science. Hence the worldwide monoculturalization of Western beliefs with which we are suffocating the rest of the world (see an older related post - pizza every night?).
When diversity is still a calculated numbers game of including a specific minimum percentage of non-white students or employees in an organization, when we still belittle other cultures’ worldviews and how those inform the people who live with them, when we still favor the one Western medical model over alternative, traditional or indigenous therapies regardless of effectiveness, we are still ideologically blind and biased.
Before the recent anti-racism movement hit me in the face, I believed that if all lives mattered it was inclusive enough to mean that black lives mattered under that larger all lives umbrella. But looking at racism that way belittles and denies the need for people of color to be heard, to be emotionally supported in their slight and plight, and for us white people to shift our attitude and do something about it. I just saw a very helpful post on social media that illustrates the point. If you share with me that your mother just died, and I reply that all our parents die, I pass right over your feelings of sadness and make them irrelevant.
When we truly become more accepting and integrative in our thinking, when we truly become more tolerant and broad minded, when we truly use the scientific method of asking a query and neutrally exploring all potential answers (instead of working towards those results we foresee within our own belief paradigm), when we truly look at our culture and actually admit what works and what doesn’t (without primary regard for profit), if we truly look at people’s merits, talents and capabilities regardless of skin color or other attributes we might judge somehow, we may find that the earth is not flat but round, or that we revolve around the sun, and not the other way round. Then, our world would be a rainbow of diversity and creative human expression, a joyfully imaginative jumble of humanness in all its wonderful and potential expressions.
That will be a great leap forward for humanity.