Purpose (objectives, goals, desired outcome, intention, function)
The purpose of bigotry is to force people to conform to peer groups and social roles they are expected to play. In other words, bigotry is an unclear, imprecise, irrelevant, inaccurate, illogical, unfair tool to use with respect to a human being, but it is significant. The most important problem to consider is that the foundation for bigotry is embedded in our culture, our laws, our institutions and in our system of thinking.
Much of our everyday decision-making is based on poor sociological thinking.
For example, we often uncritically conform to peer groups when we should question them or note their contradictions and inconsistencies”, says Dr. Linda Elder in The Thinkers Guide for Analytic Thinking. Unfortunately, questioning the “contradictions” and “inconsistencies” in the logic of sociology is not an option unless you conform to these human groups. Today, human groups are defined at the federal level.
For example, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s Standard Form 181 requests “ethnicity” and “race” from employees for federal employment agencies. In the form, the following text reads in the Privacy Act section:“provide[ing] this information is voluntary and has no impact on [your] employment status, but in the instance of missing information, [your] employing agency will attempt to identify [your] race and ethnicity by visual observation”. This federal requirement dictates only one out of the eight elements of reasoning ought to be defined by federal agencies: Information (data, evidence, observations). More specifically, “visual observation”. This requirement may define the voice/needs of the federal government and the means to do it, however, it does not require the agency it dictates to explicitly define the context, assumptions, the point, point of view, nor conclusions derived when such requirements are interpreted and carried out by employers.
These arbitrary “visual observations” place no responsibility on the federal government and all of the responsibility to any consequences to the unnamed stakeholder, the employees. Human-being groups or categories such as “race” and “ethnicity” in Standard Form 181 have been used like weapons in a war. Historically, these categories have been used to fulfill the home mission or the enemy’s mission. Is there an enemy in this context?
Question at Issue (problem, topic, “the point”, “Q at I”)
The problem is that a bigot’s unreasonable attachments to a belief, opinion, or faction are consequences of the human categories that are currently defined by the U.S. government. Unfortunately, human categories, such as “race” and “ethnicity” in Standard Form 181 not only deal with categorizing employees, but also deals with categorizing adolescents. For example, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015 continues to focus on each state’s “subgroups of students who are consistently underperforming”.
These subgroups are defined as “students from major racial and ethnic groups”, “students with disabilities”, and “students with limited English proficiency” in section 1111(c)(2) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The fact that the ESSA requires states to label, categorize, and group adolescents, does not mean that the labels in the requirements are intended for adolescents to identify with. The adolescents are not responsible for interpreting and executing the requirements— that responsibility falls on the adult setting up the classrooms. If the only means to define an adolescent’s “race” and “ethnicity” is through “visual observation”, whose to say the adolescents won’t interpret what they visually observe and associate in the classroom as information to substantiate their developing identities?
Most adolescents have a child’s point of view, where responsibility and dependency fall on the adult. This adult is responsible to categorize them to satisfy state requirements in an education setting. For instance, if a child is told he is not smart and inferior, directly or indirectly, the child might not acknowledge that it is his responsibility to counter that unproductive thought and choose his own truth. If a child is told he is smart and superior, directly or indirectly, the child might not acknowledge that it is his responsibility to counter that unproductive thought and choose how to tell the truth.
It is in the adult point of view that human beings might take responsibility toward their choices and might be independent in thought. For this reason, adults carry the responsibility in helping the child define his or her identities either directly or indirectly. The problem in categorizing and labeling adolescents is not in the requirements the adults must adhere to but in the lack of understanding as to how a child develops their identities and how they interpret responsibility and dependence. Understanding what identity we choose to function under is like prioritizing the needs of a mission — something an adult is expected to do. Is it more important to promote inclusivity of arbitrary categories like “race” and “ethnicity” or promote exclusivity of character?
The United States of America was founded on the basis of a social experiment where human groups were used as independent variables to measure economic, social, and political achievement. The purpose of this experiment was to reduce competition for land, resources, and opportunities. This social experiment failed and was corrected in 1865 when the 13th amendment abolished slavery, then failed again with the Equal Pay Act of 1963, then failed again in 1964 with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, then failed again with the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, then failed again with the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and so on and so forth. These corrections tend to arise not out of a steady, incremental rise of successful insights but rather as a reaction to failures in the past. The treatment of these failures is important not only as a measure of intellectual humility, but also for the essential features of our thinking methods at the time.
The thinking methods of today continue to breakdown human groups based on arbitrary characteristics found through “visual observation”. Improving the social design and reliability of our institutions in the United States is like practicing “preventative and curative engineering”. Lev Zetlin, a structural design engineer, said “I look at everything and try to imagine disaster. I am always scared. Imagination and fear are among the best engineering tools for preventing tragedy.” If I view the design of our institutions as products of engineering, I fear that the idea of met requirements, standards, and processes will continue to be translated as design soundness. This will only produce complacency and unchecked requirements, standards, and processes — and catastrophe.
Assumptions (background theory, what is given or what is taken for granted, axioms)
Bigotry will remain engrained in our thinking processes as long as arbitrary characterization of human beings remain in our laws, systems, standards, requirements, and processes. The word “arbitrary” is defined as being based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system. Today, categorizing human beings on “visual observations” of “race” and “ethnicity” has been rationalized into our laws in order to negate bigotry — it has not been reasoned. For example, the “U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is responsible for enforcing federal laws that make it illegal to discriminate against a job applicant or an employee because of the person’s race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy and related conditions, gender identity, and sexual orientation), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information”.
In other words, it’s illegal to discriminate against a person because of a pre-defined, arbitrary characteristic that can be “visually observed” by another person. In order to raise a complaint of discrimination, a person might need to “visually observe” themselves, fit themselves into a “race” or “ethnicity” or other human category, and carry the burden of proof. To carry the burden of proof means to produce evidence that substantiates the claim that the employer (or someone in the organization) “visually observed” them and was unjust because of those “visual observations”. That’s a lot of rationalizing and no reasoning! Discrimination is like the disease of bigotry. The federal government intends to inoculate the American employee by introducing the infectious agent of “you are different” for their records in order to include the “differents” into the workforce.
Implications and Consequences (what follows, costs and benefits)
If I am correct, the implications of using “race” and “ethnicity” as standards to reason through unjust actions only promotes more ineffective thinking. It sets no expectations for reasonableness from the employer and the complainant in a workplace context. In other words, “race” and “ethnicity” are dysfunctional criteria because it is effective in some areas, wildly ineffective in others, and mixed most of the time. For example, Dr. Elder in The Thinker’s Guide to Analytic Thinking states that “much of our everyday decision-making is based on poor ‘sociological’ thinking. For example, we often uncritically conform to peer groups when we should question them or note their contradictions and inconsistencies”.
In other words, the “poorness” is what is uncritical, not the sociological aspect of the thinking, according to Dr. Elder. Thus, the quality of sociological thinking can only be improved by using intellectual standards like, clarity. How clear something is at the beginning will be different as to how clear something is after working through the standard. For example, taking a concept like “race” is like taking concept like “terrorist” and “trying to get clear about it by asking yourself about the implications of being a terrorist: What would someone who is a terrorist do? What would a terrorist refrain from doing? Is there anything you can think of that people who are terrorists would have to do (if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be terrorists)?
Answering questions like these helps you focus on the concept terrorism”, said Dr. Gerald Nosich in Learning to Think Things Through. If we want to think through the concept of “race”: What would someone who is categorized as a certain race do? What would that someone refrain from doing? Is there anything you can’t think of that people of a certain race would have to do (if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be of that race)? The benefits of being clear is saying what you mean, being clear in your mind, and anticipate what others will not understand. What will happen to me as I journey down the path of ‘getting clarity’ on concepts such as “race” and “ethnicity” are the implications and consequences.
Information (data, evidence, observations)
The information needed to solve the problem of bigotry is not collecting information about specific human groups and the characteristics they do and do not share. The information needed will come from the basic laws and theories of the 13th amendment, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the 1954 decision of Brown vs. the Board of Education, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Although these laws are now-historical case studies, they were no doubt subject to the same human problems in their own times. Although they are also subject to revisionist readings of history, they may generally be considered among the most objective and natural sources of data on the design process of the United States of America that are available. So, developing a capacity for historical judgement of past failures of past solutions to past problems is the best source in identifying better and worse answers.
In other words, the most important source of judgement lies in learning from one’s mistakes and those of others. Seeking information for social problems is like seeking information for design engineering problems. “Since all design necessarily must conform to both technical and nontechnical constraints, the most meaningful data on the design process tend to be those which place a given design in a contemporary context. And since failures contain more unambiguous information than successes, the most fruitful data that any designer can be provided are case studies of failure or the explicit avoidance of failure”, said Dr. Henry Petroski in Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error of Judgement in Engineering. In this case, these past laws within their context provide the most fruitful data and case studies of failure of a prejudiced system of government.
Even if I suggested to change the arbitrary, human categories from Standard Form 181 to intellectual character traits, the best I could do in stating a new problem is to anticipate how it might possibly go wrong. I would anticipate how it might go wrong by scanning all the ways in which other solutions have gone wrong in the past. In other words, the analysis and assessment of historical failures is the best way to understand how to move forward.
If the problem is an unreasonable attachment to prejudice and intolerance of human beings with certain beliefs and characteristics, then the information that needs to be scanned are the failed attempts to improve critical thinking, creativity, academic success, and stress management in the education system — the system built for all youth in the United States of America. If these changes take place, our future leaders most involved with the design of our social infrastructure will surely have a broad and sound range of judgement as the project of improvement demands. As citizens, or law makers, or employers, or just plain observers, we cannot control the upbringing, the circumstances, and choices available to our youth but we can control (or have a say at least) on the standards for how well our education system functions and serves youth.
Concepts (organizing ideas, categories)
My logic of the contemporary bigot does not mean there is only one such logic — there are several in fact. Each with its own world view, unexamined assumptions, and conclusions and ways of manifesting unreasonable beliefs and prejudice towards others. The fundamental concepts most prevalent in a human being who is intolerant of any ideas other than his or her own are defense mechanisms, values, and beliefs. For example, Noble Manhattan, a professional training and coaching company, explains values, beliefs, and identity below:
Values are who we are. What we value determines what life means to us and what actions we take. Values are the supporting framework for our beliefs and are strongly connected to our identity. Where do values come from? They are linked to our identity and beliefs and often they are developed on an unconscious level. Unconscious values often come from our family, our backgrounds, our teachers and our peer group and are developed and strengthened as we ourselves develop. When we honor our values on a regular and consistent basis, life is good, life is fulfilling, life is clear. Now when a value is dishonored, this can generate stress.
Sometimes, that stress manifests as pain or anxiety. We tend to create individual defense mechanisms as a way to combat pain and anxiety. Anna Freud defined defense mechanisms as “unconscious resources used by the ego” to decrease internal stress ultimately: repression, denial, projection, displacement, regression, and sublimation. The purpose of these defensive mechanisms is to protect us from the pain associated with these feelings. If our identity is intertwined with arbitrary human categories such as “race” and “ethnicity” it is no surprise that pain or anxiety will manifest when our identity is challenged in some way. Unfortunately, governments use human categories such as “race” and “ethnicity” as a means for employees to identify with or be identified and to identify adolescents in the education system. Since all human-beings have core values, beliefs, and defense mechanisms, then all human beings are capable of bigotry, prejudice, unreasonable attachment to beliefs and opinions to some degree. For this reason, it is no surprise that pre-defined categories of human beings in the United States are on opposite extremes in many important issues. At the same time, all human beings carry the responsibility to find out what matters most to them, self-manage, and understand what will bring balance and inner peace.
Conclusions, Interpretations (inferences, solutions, decisions arrived at)
Being a bigot is deciding to be unreasonable, prejudiced, and intolerant of other ideas and others who are different from them according to Oxford Languages and Google. My conclusion is that the contemporary bigot over-identifies over matters the bigot cares about. The bigot neglects to replace wrong thoughts with affirmative thoughts full of true understanding and an appreciation of reality. The bigot does not face the world optimistically while treating reality with respect. “In order to achieve right detachment, you need to cultivate a compassionate appreciation for the human predicament, strength of conviction, clarity of intention, and clarity of mind”, said Dr. Eric Maisel in Performance Anxiety.
In other words, the bigot does not detach from their identity as a bigot. For example, two of the most accepted prejudiced groups in history, the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, could not see their targets as their fellow creatures, who are exactly their equals, mortals like themselves who have entered and will pass through this mortal coil. The Nazi would not detach themselves from their chosen identity as a Nazi to understand what being a Nazi meant to them individually and personally. If a Nazi could detach themselves from their identity as a Nazi, I wonder what mattered to them in their identity as a human being?
Did they have the capacity to understand the human predicament, develop the strength of conviction, define their individual life purposes, and have the freedom to let certain emotions show? During the Second World War, did Germany have a social infrastructure that allowed them the freedom to develop and live by core values and principles as human beings? I imagine most of them were stuck. Being stuck is like standing at the podium, facing your audience, and seeing every single one of them as your judge. Detachment is like standing at the podium, facing your audience and smiling at them because you have compassionate appreciation for their humanness.
In a similar way, the Ku Klux Klan, a widely accepted prejudiced group in the United States, arose after the American Civil War. The Reconstruction Era provided a context when a category of human beings were no longer considered legal property to another category of human beings. In other words, human beings were no longer master and slave to other human beings without conviction according to the 13th amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
In fact, a group of human beings were considered human beings for the first time under the law. Would a Ku Klux Klan member in 1865 have the capacity to detach themselves from the “superior white race” identity when the infrastructure of the country recently had a slave-based economy, drove out other human-beings from their ancestral lands, and raised mutiny against their mother country less than a century ago and won? In order for the Ku Klux Klan member in 1865 to cure their mistaken identification and over-investment with transitory events and states of mind, the Ku Klux Klan member would have had to live in another point in history. Up to 1865, the United States of America did not have the social, economic, and legal infrastructure to provide the freedom needed to expand the citizen’s capacity to understand the human predicament. In other words, the Ku Klux Klan member did not have the capacity for compassionate appreciation of their fellow human. They could not say and believe they are not their skin color, they are not their government-defined race, and they are more than their actions. The Ku Klux Klan members of 1865 were human beings that consciously chose to commit atrocious acts to other human beings and unconsciously absorbed what they were taught by their country at the time.
The Ku Klux Klan is an extreme example of bigotry in American history and the consequences of their actions still echoes to present day. The United States continues to categorize human beings based on arbitrary characteristics that were created around 1865. For example, Standard Form 181 states and defines each “race” category at the federal level for federal agencies to “visually observe” if not voluntarily provided by the employee.
In other words, American employees are required to identify or be identified to a “race” and “ethnicity” in a federal workplace context. “When we evaluate a piece of reasoning, what we are interested in is whether that reasoning is relevant or important to deciding that question at issue”, said Dr. Gerald Nosich in Learning to Think Things Through. I wonder if the question at issue in a workplace context is to ensure that federal employment agencies hire and retain people with relevant, important skills and abilities to help the workplace function successfully? Or to ensure that employment agencies have a specific amount of people in each “race” and “ethnicity” category? Does the American citizen of 2024 have the capacity to detach from their designated “race” and/or “category”they might identify with? If they do, how do we help our youth grow to understand the human predicament, develop the strength of conviction, define their own individual life purposes, and have the freedom to let their emotions show?
The solution to eliminating bigotry lies in helping our youth get unstuck. By unstuck I mean helping youth gain the freedom to focus on building capacity in pursuing creative endeavors, achieving academic success, managing stress, and improving critical thinking. A better question at issue is: What can we do to ensure that our smart teens learn the skills and abilities which help them function successfully in school and in their daily decision-making?
For example, we can help a smart teen get unstuck by helping them make a change, helping them through the highs and lows of the changing process, helping them reach their highest potential for a more authentic and valuable life, and helping them design relationships with mutual responsibility. If we fail to solve this problem, the smart teen will remain stuck in this unnecessary stress and confusion that plagues adults who remained stuck. They won’t give themselves the space to practice letting go of pressures that do not serve them and those pressures will govern their decisions and actions. These smart teens will be CEOs, presidents, senators, managers, scientists, policemen and women, military leaders, teachers, principals, and parents to the next generation. Let’s give them a non-judgmental, non-directional space to let go of worries, think critically, and find their “right” answer themselves. Helping youth is like helping ourselves build a stronger capacity for clarity of mind and clarity of intention for our individual futures — win-win!
Point of View (frame of reference, perspective)
Writing is something I do because it supports my way of being. Writing about bigotry in America, another categorizing idea, takes some careful wording, careful analysis of logic, and careful assessment for clarity. Intellectual standards such as precision, accuracy, relevance, depth, breadth, importance, and sufficiency are the rest of the standards for assessing a high-quality, critical writing piece. Clarity, however, is the gateway standard for thinking well. My writing piece cannot be assessed for precision, accuracy, relevance, depth, breadth, importance, and sufficiency without being clear first.
As a trauma survivor, loss survivor, deep sadness survivor, sexual-assault survivor, prison survivor, violence survivor, bullying survivor, clarity of the mind and clarity of intention is the first thing that breaks under severe pressure — clarity is what fails. As a former structural engineer, I conceptualize failure under pressure as a stress point on a beam. Every engineering calculation is really a failure calculation. According to Dr. Henry Petroski in Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgement in Engineering, “the single most fruitful source of lessons in engineering judgement exist in the case of histories of failures, which point incontrovertibly to examples of bad judgement and therefore provide guideposts for negotiating around the pitfalls in the design process itself”. The design process, in this case, is the process in improving critical thinking and creativity, managing stress, and achieving academic success (if you’re in school). If clarity is the first thing that goes under stress, then clarity is the first thing I have to fight like hell to get back. I will only get it back by observing how and what caused clarity to fail in the first place.
Alternatives (other possibilities, options, choices)
“Minorities”, “majority”, “disadvantaged”, “privilege”, “dominant”, “discrimination” are modern labels used in contemporary research to describe unjust acts among different categories of human beings. Such labels imply that the human being behind these labels have less responsibility and more dependency on the perceived power the category carries. For example, Dr. Karren Knowlton, an Assistant Professor in Organizational Behavior at the University of Texas at Dallas said, “Workplace discrimination remains a toxic force for historically disadvantaged groups such as women, blacks, and Native Americans. Conventional wisdom tells us minorities will have an easier time if they have allies in a dominant group; for example, heterosexual white men, who wield much of the power and influence in large U.S. companies. But how does this play out in real life?” in the article Can Minorities Trust Co-Workers Who Want to Help? of Wharton’s Idea Lab. Dr. Knowlton’s point of view seems to shift responsibility for successful outcomes from the adult behind the “minority” label to the adult behind the “ally” label, which inadvertently augments dependency on the adult labeled “ally”, and decreases the freedom of the adult labeled “minority”. Dr. Knowlton’s intention is to help refine the models of analysis in how organizations behave. These organization strive for “workplace equality”; however, the most efficient way to improve the design for “workplace equality” and to reduce the overall effort to maintain “workplace equality” is to refine the methods of data checking and not to refine the models of analysis. Although refining the methods of data checking is ideal, human nature and our reluctance to be perfectly candid about our own errors is reality. In other words, we don’t like calling out our own errors and failures. Might the next sociological objective in Organizational Psychology be to collect data from case studies of failure or the explicit avoidance of failure in organizations?
Another way of looking at the difference between refining methods of analysis and methods of data checking is with this fictional example: Two students are seen fighting on the school playground. One student is a 5th grader, who is larger in size, older, and stronger than the 4th grade student, who is smaller in size, younger, and less strong. At first glance, it is possible that the 5th grade student is guilty of beating up the 4th grade student because the label “larger” “stronger” and “older” implies more responsibility for control of one’s actions versus the 4th grade student.
In this case, using categories “larger”, “smaller”, “older”, “younger” and its interpretation to reason a claim of responsibility are the methods of analysis. What if we received new information? A couple of hours before the fight, the 4th grader spread rumors about the 5th grader causing a riot of students to humiliate the 5th grader in the cafeteria. In this case, it would be wise to re-check the methods of checking data. If both students are minors fighting in a schoolyard, the responsibility lies on the system where the fight took place and the decision makers — The adults in charge of the school, not the students who depend on the adults for education. Where did the failure take place, and could it have been avoided? How could the school have helped avoid the harmful social and physical interaction between the two students?
Context (setting, background)
The context of this writing is based on my personal history in arguing against unjust actions. The difficulty in writing arguments is not the complexity in analyzing my logic but the criteria the governing system establishes to base arguments on. For example, I submitted a complaint to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the past for an employer’s unjust and unfair actions. Since I made the complaint, the burden of proof lied with me. In other words, it was my responsibility to produce evidence to substantiate the claim. My options for defining the reason for the alleged discrimination were the following: Race, Color, Religion, Sex, Genetic Information, National Origin, Age, Disability, Retaliation, and Sexual Orientation.
I felt as if I was required to fit my worldview, my identities, my personal life into one or more of those categories. Once I did that, it was also my responsibility to supply evidence that persuaded the EEOC my employer discriminated against me because of my assigned category. For this reason, I wondered if my worth as a human-being in my country was only based on a statistic. It is like fitting a square peg into a circular hole. In order for it to go through, I would need to force the peg through the hole and shave off some of the material along with it. Fitting into a label, in this context, is like shaving whole parts of myself just so I could argue for what is fair to me and for me. Is that just?
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If you’re interested in creativity coaching with me, contact me at [email protected]. For further information, check out my site at www.thebutronmethod.com
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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