MAYA WILEY NOTABLE ON KORNACKI'S SHOW

+Maya Wiley impressed me this morning on +Steve Kornacki’s show Up on MSNBC.

She is the founder and president of the Center for Social Inclusion, a national public policy strategy organization that works to transform structural racial inequity into structural fairness and inclusion. Even on high-level group discussion programs, such as Kornacki’s program, it is unusual to hear remarks about brain science and racial equality problems in the same sentence. The discussion centered on the Zimmerman verdict. Ms. Wiley pointed out that people can “learn” to tolerate people of different races. That process has been going on for centuries but is not complete as the events in Sanford, Florida show, in fact, as the racial history of that town shows.

People must learn to be tolerant of all people.  Even Charles Darwin when he viewed the native people of Tierra del Fuego in the mid 19^th century; he considered them animals but could not help but recognize they were “his” ancestors; that is, much of what they were, he was. In the development of America, we have had tremendous problems with slavery and adjusting to the concepts of equality of all men. They did not start in America; our ancestors brought these problems with them from Europe. As the science of genetics developed and as world cultures mature, we recognize more and more that xenophobia is a “state of mind” made in response to a minor physical or mental fact. Therefore, to fear someone based on race, for example, is to fear an idea. Of course, racism does not stand as an isolated phenomenon, xenophobia relates to many things such as homosexuality and religion. We also recognize what Maya Wiley pointed out; Mother Nature and Father Time embedded xenophobia in the minds of man; it is innate, instinctual, or genetic but modifiable by learning. The fact that animal instincts are modifiable by learning is the basis of our humanization; the great hope of humankind.

The way Ms. Wiley made her point was to say some of us have learned to tolerate other people in minutes but brain science has shown that some of the same the tolerant people cannot are not tolerant in the first nanoseconds of an encounter. Genetically embedded xenophobia is registered immediately but can be quickly overcome by logic; in other words, we all recognize different skin color, a physical fact, but most of us have learned that it makes no difference even in the first nanoseconds. It does not cause fear; it does not matter.

I wrote about the response of embedded hate as some time ago on this blog site as the Portman Phenomenon. Rob Portman a Republican Senator was opposed to anything having to do with homosexuals until his son announced he was gay. Two years later, Portman overcame his colleague’s bias and announced he no longer supported his own long held anti homosexual bias. I speculated that he would still cringe at seeing two men kissing passionately. It is the same as Obama’s grandmother cringing at the sight of a black man on a dark street. Neither would admit intolerance; nevertheless, they have the intolerance but it is overcome by logic, which is the result of learning.

The accolades should be on all of those “who have learned” to overcome even the instinctual response to a black man and the efforts put on teaching others this model; a model of what can be.  That does not mean that even a seventeen year old boy filled with life and looking forward to a great future should be so foolish as not to fear a “man in a dark alleyway” or a “drunk driver” or a “man with a gun” or a “rogue neighborhood watchman with a gun and filled with prejudices ”.

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