In the midst of an important election season that some people believe will test the very foundations of democracy, it’s still good for our collective mental state to get distracted with laughter.
I saw a meme last week that made me smile:
“OK. So I understand that my body can’t digest corn and that’s fine. My issue is that I fuckin’ chewed it! How the hell is it coming back out in the shape of corn! What are they not telling us?”
It’s a joke most of us heard or told as kids in one version or another.
But it got me thinking. Isn’t that how we form our biases?
Over and over, we’re fed false ideas about our Black brothers and sisters.
The Black man as a dangerous criminal. The Black woman as a loud, unhinged complainer.
It’s been on our news screens, movies, TV and books for generations, even if it finally is starting to change some.
Worse than that, we’re also denied a complete picture of the contributions of Black people.
While Black History Month is nice, let’s face it: the rest of our educational system omits important contributions of Black people. Sure, we were taught about a few civil rights giants and slave escapees, but not much about the scientific, medical and other contributions of African Americans.
People like Garrett Morgan (traffic light), Alexander Miles (automatic elevator doors), Lewis Latimer (invented how to keep Edison’s light bulb on), Sarah Boone (ironing board), and Marie Van Brittan Brown (video home security system).
Our news reinforces this omission by ensuring that Black people are vastly underrepresented as experts to comment on a particular topic.
Black men and women are also underrepresented on TV as users of computers and other technology.
Even video games that have finally begun featuring Black people in roles other than gangsters often fail to include Black people as active, playable characters.
Pile on top of that that Africa is regularly shown to us as primitive.
For generations, the continent was (and still is sometimes) featured as fictionally smaller than it is in real life. In fact, it’s bigger than the U.S., India, Japan, Europe and China combined.
Our many forms of media followed this by making Africa look like it’s just one big jungle, when in reality there are many cities there as well. They made it look like Africans were never educated, when in fact the first major library was founded in Africa.
That’d all be enough to impact our minds, but then most of our heroes have been white men since childhood. When gods are featured as white, when purity and goodness are the definition of white, it doubles down on our internal thoughts about race.
While most of us don’t consciously add all of this up and conclude that Black people are bad or incapable, that mass amount of false and racist narrative goes right through our mental digestive system.
Not surprisingly, when it finally comes out, it’s in the same form as it went in. It shows up in our words and conduct the same way we swallowed it.
Racist.
It’s our mental corn.
Whether we’re white, Black, or anything else, unless we become aware of what’s transpired. Unless we take time to educate ourselves.
And more importantly, unless we take time to expand our social and friends circles to include people who are different than ourselves, which usually contradicts our digested lies and misinformation.
We’ll continue to let our unconscious biases against others dictate our everyday actions and reactions to events, issues, and how we think about and interact with our fellow humans.
Let’s face it. Our bodies and minds were not meant to digest corn or racism.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Jeffrey Kass' work on Medium.