Racism and Wokeness | Africa Brooke | Mikhaila Peterson Podcast | EP 120

I'm sure that this is going to resonate with people. This conversation, do you have suggestions for people who might be feeling that kind of like, I know what you mean when you do something that you're like your soul doesn't agree with? It's like, I call it—I think what I get is some sort of existential horror. Oh, it's just like, yeah, it's just like everywhere, and it's like you're going in the wrong direction of reality or something.

So, if people are stuck in that and are scared, how do those people try and stop and switch to going in the right direction? Hopefully, that made some semblance of sense.

Right, right, and you know what, Michaela? I wish there was a—you can imagine that I get asked that question hundreds of times. I think we want a simple answer, don't we? We want just one answer that: I don't think there's one answer.

Part of it is to try to listen to what you're saying and see if it makes you feel stronger or weaker. Yeah, like each word is like a stepping stone through a swamp, you know? And if it's the right word, then you step on it, it feels secure and stable compared to the territory around it. You test that out and then you dare to see if that's the way you think as opposed to that persona that you're putting on for public adulation and protection. Right, that's the temptation of the actor.

So, in the movie Pinocchio, when Pinocchio is trying to stop lying and to become a real boy, he faces two major temptations apart from lying. One is to be a victim, and the other is to be an actor. It took me a long time to figure out why being an actor was a temptation, but you put your finger on it with your description. It's to adopt a set of rules that will appeal to narcissistic inflation, something like that.

There's a terrible totalitarian danger in that. Terrible. Yeah, so yes, and my suspicion is that's what you were reacting to so viscerally—that you were participating in that and you had your reasons. But you mentioned something that I think maybe the three of us could discuss that would be interesting. You know this idea about all white people being racist.

So, I kind of wondered about that as a psychologist but more broadly because maybe you could say, well, are all people racist? And here's what I mean by that. Well, we all have an in-group preference. Now, what that group might be, you know, it might be you and the person you love, might be you and your family, might be you and your town, it might be you and your state or your country, it might be you and your race. You know, who that in-group is can vary, but we do have preferences for people, and we do have in-group preferences.

And the corollary of that is that we have out-group skepticism and maybe fear and maybe disgust and all of that. From what I've been able to understand anthropologically, that's more or less a human universal. As different peoples have been brought around the world into a global community, let's say one of the things that anthropologists have found is that it's almost always the case that any given tribe of people will use the word that refers to human beings to their tribe and some other word to everyone else.

So, it's possible that that's a deep tendency that we all have to fight against. I mean, there’s part of the reason these ideas are so compelling to people and able to possess the 'wokeness' ideas, let's say, the user casual category is that, you know, they contain an element of truth. You know, people have an in-group preference that can easily be distorted into something that's quite akin to racism.

I mean, you even see that in chimpanzees, for example. They'll go on raiding forays into neighboring territories, and if they outnumber the foreigners that they come across, they will tear them to pieces. So, it's—yeah, yeah, that was a stunning discovery! Lovely, lovely that primatologists made. Jane Goodall's team discovered that in the 70s. It was a real shock. Wow, right?

So, they're trying to find all the nice chimps? Yeah, well, they're like, "Oh, they just rip each other to shreds!" Whoa, okay! Yeah, exactly. Well, no one had had any inkling previous to that that that human tendency for war, you know, broadly speaking, was so deep that it was even shared by our, you know, closest animal relative. So, this is very deep.

So, you know, the idea that racism and in-group preference and all of that is something that human beings struggle with is true. And then you say, well, you twist out of it, you say, well, that's particularly true of white people because they hold the power. It's like, well, you know, it's an interesting proposition, but the question is, well, if it's true, exactly how is it true and what's its limits?

And, you know, how does that play out in the case of other races or groups, Asians, for example? Right? What are the dangers of putting the idea that way, like, and what makes you so sure that that's also not true of your group? And how does power play into that? Like, these are all genuine questions that we should be asking ourselves instead of hammering home the idea that we have the answer to this.

It's like, well, I—you said you got elevated as a black woman in this. Well, it's very difficult to see that—to not see that as an exacerbation of your in-group preference and then an exaggeration of that implicit or explicit racism on your part. And I think that's part of what you were rebelling against.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And you know what? The questions that you were just asking before, those are the exact questions that I had. Just simple questions. And it started to signal again that something wasn't right here, that I couldn't even just ask the simplest questions—or at least felt that I couldn't. I could have, but I was much more scared of the consequences of asking the questions than leading with the curiosity of getting some kind of answer.

Right. In my letter, Michaela, you read this part out earlier about the disempowerment of black people. That's how I started to feel, extremely disempowered. You know, even when people would say things like, "Yeah, it's because white people have all the power." According to who? And in what context are we talking about? The world you are? Which ones?

I had an experience like that. It's not exactly like that; it was like that, but for me, I was taking sciences because I'd switched out of humanities. There was a lot of—you know, I was taking a course on Homer, and it was Homer through the feminist lens. I was like, that's not what I came— that's not what I paid you guys for. So, I switched into sciences, and about every couple of months, somebody would come in and say, "Okay, for all the women in the room, I know you've had a much harder time getting to where you are than the men have."

And I was just like, are you telling me I'm stupid? Like, what exactly are you saying here? And how dare you suggest that? It was just—it was like insulting and kind of condescending, which was the complete opposite of whatever they were—well, and maybe it wasn't the opposite of what they were trying to do. But yeah, it's condescending and irritating.

Well, think about what that does. In some sense, it makes your generic femininity and your generic vulnerability far more important than your individual particularity, you know? And this is what I've been objecting to with regards to this group mentality from the beginning. It seems to me that it's fundamental danger—the fundamental danger is the devaluation of the sacredness of the individual as the primary category.

You replace that by group identity, and you have no idea what kind of devil you're messing with. Or maybe you do, to some degree; you experienced it a bit because you messed about with that devil, and you got tempted. And 7,000 people told you you were right. It's like, imagine you're a political leader, okay? Now imagine 30 million people tell you that you're right, and they chant that in a mob and they do that everywhere you go. If that's what happened in Germany, and then you play to the crowd, you're that actor. You play to the crowd, and you get hungry and hungrier for that validation, and you train yourself to say anything the crowd demands, no matter how dark.

Right, right, right.