All of Us Traumatized Early – ‘For Our Own Good’
It’s not supposed to work that way. Learning to hate or fear in your family and school experiences. But you can see how easily it happens. It’s nobody’s fault exactly. All of us incur some intergenerational fallout; we’re all born into one or another trauma-laden family among the many such families that populate our trauma-laden societies. My own family version included growing up African American in the 1950s when I was first learning how to ‘play the dozens.’
Playing the dozens, or ‘joning’ as we called it in Atlanta where I grew up: That’s the social hazing game where people ritually insult each other. It’s like the so-called ‘roasting’ we are familiar with when someone is socially insulted in good fun. But unlike most roasting the ‘play’ involves a two-way contest. You’re supposed to experience the wit and repartee between rival interlocutors as a craft of communal humor. Single examples can be exchanged such as: ‘You so ugly even yo’ mama can’t stand to look at you.’ ‘You smell so bad the wind won’t blow in yo’ direction.’ ‘Your daddy so broke he can’t afford a wallet to put money in.’ Back-and-forth, it goes on like that. But here’s what they don’t tell you. And it’s what my upbringing failed to give me a clue about. Yet some of the social science literature is persuasive: It’s a survival gaming strategy.
What’s Your Socialization Story including Family and School Trauma?
African Americans have needed to get good at this: at taking a barrage of jibes, jabs, jolts and taunts–micro-aggressions as we say nowadays. It’s as if the community is saying to its members, ‘Prepare yourself, because there will be far more lethal threats and aggressions coming your way in mainstream society.’ But that subtext is never consciously or clearly divulged when you’re a child getting inducted into this kind of play. Having just deconstructed the game, we can retrieve its logic; the logic of a people saying to itself: ‘We’re sparring here to help us get ready. How we react to this little stuff will prepare us for the big league when social predators may assault any one of us beyond our tolerance level. We’re just saying: Get ready.’
Of course I had no idea that I was involved in that kind of training for my own good. Tragically, I feared that people actually hated me. That’s right. Extended family members: aunts and uncles, cousins and schoolmates, teachers and church elders. They were all part of an ‘ecology’ of black folks caring about each other in this survival mode kinda’ way. But nobody told me! Nobody tells anybody. We’re all left to figure it out on our own. Decades later. Maybe never. So what did I learn as a 5 and 6 year-old? People who are presumed to honor, respect, love or cherish you can morph without warning into monstrous attackers.
The video offers a short and lighthearted version of playing the dozens in the otherwise warm and normally safe space of a nuclear family setting. One moment you find yourself in the embrace of family caregivers, or enjoying the camaraderie of school or church circles, and the next thing it happens–without notice–wham!
The jibes can include the more common, ‘You think you’re so smart, don’t you?’ or ‘Can’t see for looking, can you?’ Or they can be punctuated by the kind of memorable, shame-inducing recording that still clutters too much brain space in my own head: ‘Oh, did we hurt your feelings?’ So what do we learn to feel or fear about other people as 5 and 6 year-olds? Be defended? Fight back? Hate your neighbor before they hate you? Or maybe I should just speak for myself. Learning to fear, resent, shun and even hate my fellow human beings was a tragic, trauma-induced outcome of my early childhood training on the fear-hate spectrum.
‘Never Use Blame or Shame but Rather…’
Forty years ago I began learning to lead diversity training with a focus on race matters. Unlearning Racism Workshops was the title that my mentor crafted and promoted with that upfront term, “unlearning.” She deployed the term as a hook to draw people in, and most often it worked. Her name was Ricky Sherover-Marcuse (1938-88), and she was committed to a singular perspective: the view that racism and all the -isms were social conditioning from which people could be de-conditioned if one knew how. But it was also crucial to know what not to do. “Never use blame or shame,” she insisted, “And no guilt-tripping people either.”
By contrast, these plague years 2020-21 have only served to reinforce her prohibitions. The toxic use of blame, guilt, and shaming to respond to race issues has served to spread our antagonisms exponentially. One might say, using the disease metaphors that lie so ready-to-hand nowadays, that racialized pathogens in our body politic have ‘gone viral.’
So a commitment to non-blaming has become a signature mark of my own workshop style on race matters. Over the years it remains standing among the best practices bequeathed me.
Sample Workshop Coaching Segment
‘I commit not to target anyone with guilt, blame or shame as I lead our work. And I urge you not to use them on yourself. Whenever you feel them coming-on, just let them go for now.
‘(I promise that your guilt, blame and shame will still be available for you to reclaim later if anyone wants to pick them up again—ha-ha!)
‘But for the moment try not to direct them at yourself or others—including me as your leader here today. Indeed, as your leader I take responsibility to interrupt guilt, blame and shame when I see them beginning to play out among us, and to get us back on track. Oh yes, and when I make mistakes about all this I will try to admit and correct those mistakes.’
So, rather than lathering each other with guilt, blame or shame tactics, my mentor coached us how to foster solidarity across differences by creating safe spaces for people to disclose the social conditioning that we have acquired to hate and fear one another. That shared vulnerability (Brene Brown) of exposing our prejudices and biases in each other’s good company serves to dissipate them exponentially. Learning as novices how to inhabit ‘safe spaces’ for doing that, we can eventually experience release and relief in sharing the stories about how we ‘learned’ or were ‘taught’ to and hate and fear.
After a few decades on the diversity training circuit I know how to help others ‘dare greatly’ (Brene Brown); dare to openly ventilate our toxic social conditioning so that it can dissipate. But of course there’s no way to do so without the risk of making mistakes. That’s right: there’s no way to avoid making mistakes in doing diversity training. The best attitude is to resolve to learn how to admit, correct, and prevent the big ones. But let’s not allow our fear of mistake-making keep us from boldly venturing into this terrain. To aid our resolve, enjoy below the video attempt at comic relief; comedy in defiance of taking our correctness compulsions and ‘fix it’ commitments so seriously. Consider instead: “It’s Not About the Nail.”
More than a fun video!
Responsibility or Accountability
Examples like that workshop pep talk that I share above, among other features of pro-diversity coaching that I’ve labored to pass on, offer a way of establishing a sense of safety; a security zone around a group’s emotional ‘playing field.’ As trainers set the framework for a skilled intervention with participants, or with the planning team of an organization, it’s the group’s emotional context that we’re careful to monitor and safeguard.
Moreover, establishing that sphere of safety leads to a second perspective that I learned to inculcate as a diversity training apprentice. This second perspective relates to the first in the following way. The reason for not using guilt, blame or shame in race matters is because people are truly not responsible for having acquired racism—although we are accountable for recovering from it.
That’s right: we’re socialized to hate or fear certain groups of people as children but that’s when we’re most innocent and susceptible, and therefore not responsible. As adults, nonetheless, we are now accountable for how our behavior and attitudes impinge upon others and affect our working relationships in the world.
A more popular analogue in this connection emerged from the 1940s addiction recovery movement. In particular, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) waged a vigorous and decades-long campaign of public education in that regard. Addiction is not a moral failing, the founders maintained, but rather a kind of physiological allergy to alcohol that the victim cannot control without major interventions, whether medical, psychological, spiritual or all-inclusive. Emerging from that context the following paraphrase may be sloganized:
‘We’re not responsible for our disease, but we are accountable for our recovery.’
Paraphrase of a popular 12 Step recovery from addiction slogan
Here’s a short video that espouses that kind of accountability. This particular example focuses on the issue of boy’s and men’s behavior and attitude toward girls and women. Of course, similar exhortations to solidarity as allies instead of perpetrators could be provided for all the issues that pit us against one another across the cultural identities that we variously inhabit by virtue of birth and circumstances.
‘Guys, let’s be the man our true selves wannabe.’
Even Joyous Solidarity
The analogy of racism as a kind of socialized contagion offers only one such case among others that plague our interactions. But the case for joyous solidarity with other groups in their issues and struggle offers a frontier perspective that has been life changing for me personally, and professionally life affirming. The impact and lure of joyful training ventures led me eventually to serve as the local, Atlanta chapter director of the National Coalition Building Institute (< click link for NCBI International).
Since the 1990s NCBI has provided thousands of practitioners with the skills and expertise of its award winning Leadership for Diversity Institute. A distinctive feature of the NCBI Prejudice Reduction and Conflict Resolution workshops is raucous joy as participants become allies for each other across all the differences that pit us against one another in the public square. ‘For the joy that awaits us,’ we adopted the NCBI approach in my social change nonprofit in the pre-pandemic year 2019: Southern Truth and Reconciliation (< click link for STAR Inc). Founded in the early 2000’s, STAR is a restorative justice organization that joins NCBI in fostering coalitions that combine non-blaming with accountability. Moreover we employ skill sets that are culturally competent as well as empathetic and, yes, even joyous.
3 Principles for/4 Best Practices
Three principles and four best practices offer key approaches to diversity training and coalition organizing.
3 Principles
1. We can show-up as allies instead of perpetrators or bystanders in some other groups’ mistreatment or misinformation profile
2. To show-up as allies we all need recovery or ‘de-conditioning’ from participation in systems that routinely target other groups for mistreatment and misinformation; where mistreatment means treating them as less than fully human, and misinformation claims to justify that treatment
3. Allies can best foster solidarity across the range of our polarized differences by cooperating in shared projects that offer new forms of social conditioning; forms of cooperation and socialization that no longer target other groups for mistreatment and misinformation.
4 Best Practices
1. Repeatedly tell the stories of how you and your people were both (a) targeted by other groups and (b) were socialized to hate or fear other groups
2. Repeatedly listen to other groups tell the stories of how they (a) became the socialized targets of hate and fear and (b) were also socialized to target other groups
3. Repeatedly practice recovering from or letting go of the guilt, blame and shame associated with all these stories
4. Repeatedly practice personal, professional, and public policies based on no longer targeting any groups with hate or fear.
Note well: These principles and practices are remarkably simple and straightforward, even intuitive and commonsensical. However, actually enacting them can be awesomely challenging. Fortunately since the late 20th century we have witnessed a plethora of organizations and agencies that provide the resources and approaches for achieving precisely such goals and aspirations. I offer one particularly simple example in the short video below.
Yes, there are literally thousands of ways to do the work of deconstructing our reflexes of hate and fear of other people as we encounter their differences. There are even ways to experience joyous solidarity with the issues and struggles of other peoples and groups in defiance of our socially conditioned affinities and antipathies. In diversity training we get the privilege and skills for accomplishing such solidarity. Let’s go get some of that!
