Dr. Carl Hart's new book is High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society [his previous book is Drugs, Society, and Human Behavior, 2012, the 15th edition of a textbook]. 

Hart's memoir (he grew up in a tough, drug-riddled Miami neighborhood) examines the interconnected relationships among drugs, pleasure, choice, and motivation, from the social and a neuroscientific perspective. The book offers new and "eye-opening" insights into our ideas about race, poverty, and drugs - and highlights why the current "war on drugs" has failed.

This is his Google Talk on his work and his book.

Carl Hart - "HIGH PRICE: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society"

Published on Jul 22, 2013

High Price is the harrowing and inspiring memoir of neuroscientist Carl Hart, a man who grew up in one of Miami's toughest neighborhoods and, determined to make a difference as an adult, tirelessly applies his scientific training to help save real lives.

In this provocative and eye-opening memoir, Dr. Carl Hart recalls his journey of self-discovery, how he escaped a life of crime and drugs and avoided becoming one of the crack addicts he now studies. Interweaving past and present, Hart goes beyond the hype as he examines the relationship between drugs and pleasure, choice, and motivation, both in the brain and in society. His findings shed new light on common ideas about race, poverty, and drugs, and explain why current policies are failing.

Dr. Hart is an Associate Professor of Psychology in both the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology at Columbia University, and Director of the Residential Studies and Methamphetamine Research Laboratories at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. A major focus of Dr. Hart's research is to understand complex interactions between drugs of abuse and the neurobiology and environmental factors that mediate human behavior and physiology.

He is the author or co-author of dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles in the area of neuropsychopharmacology, co-author of the textbook, Drugs, Society, and Human Behavior, and a member of a NIH review group. Dr. Hart was recently elected to Fellow status by the American Psychological Association (Division 28) for his outstanding contribution to the field of psychology, specifically psychopharmacology and substance abuse.

David Kaufman - President Obama Should Embrace His Bi-Racial Heritage

President Barack Obama's Parents

Writing at The Daily Beast, David Kaufman argues that Barack Obama should begin talking about his bi-racial, bi-cultural background during his second term, something that has been largely ignored by the media and has not been addressed by Obama himself.

I think I agree with this proposition, but for different reasons than Kaufman outlines here.

I believe it's understandable that he has identified as black. He grew up in Hawaii, Indonesia, and the United States, nearly always being the darkest person in his school and in his community. From an early age he was more aware of his skin color (especially living most of his life with his white mother and, later, her parents) than most people from single-race families. In almost every way, aside from adopting his mother's religion, he has seemingly identified more with his father than his mother.

However, being bi-racial and bi-cultural gives Obama a platform to discuss the divisiveness that currently is dividing the country along partisan lines. He represents the merging of two races, two cultures (American and Kenyan), and two religions (Christianity from his mother and Islam from his father). Obama has spoken about his childhood:

Of his early childhood, Obama recalled, "That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind."[9] He described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.[22] Reflecting later on his years in Honolulu, Obama wrote: "The opportunity that Hawaii offered—to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect—became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear."[23]

He is the embodiment of a multicultural worldview and he can use that experience as a platform to speak in a way no other President has been able about what America has always struggle to embody itself - the great melting pot of the world.

Obama Should Talk About Being Biracial

Jan 20, 2013
By David Kaufman

The President identifies as black, but David Kaufman hopes that during his second term, he’ll also discuss his biracial heritage.

Four years after he first entered the White House, there’s no longer anything surprising about calling Barack Obama—America’s first black president—a “transformational” leader. Yet the full extent of Obama’s transformational potential has yet to be realized in one realm: his biracial heritage.

A woman has her picture taken in front of Chuck Close portraits of Barack Obama at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty)

Obama’s 1995 book Dreams from my Father makes clear that his identity was influenced as much—if not more—by his Caucasian mother than his absentee African father. But since he won the Democratic nomination in 2008, both Obama and the media seem to have shut the closet door on his multi-culti background. With his black wife and children by his side, Obama certainly represents an aspirational—and much-needed—African-American cultural ideal. But with one half of his family history so conspicuously overlooked, whether by circumstance or design, that ideal is not the entire story of his identity.

“To a certain extent, I think it’s been an act,” San Francisco State University Professor Andrew Jolivette—editor of Obama and the Biracial Factor, a collection of essays—says of the president’s mono-racial messaging. “The President has been afraid to speak more openly about being biracial because it could be read in so many different ways.”

Indeed, both blacks and whites seem equally uneasy with more complex views of Obama’s ethnic origins. Cornel West and Jesse Jackson, for instance, have both suggested that Obama is somehow not black enough. And with African-American voters perceived as hostile to the Obama-as-biracial narrative, touting the President’s Caucasian other half could easily have cost him crucial election support. “There’s a political constituency for African-American voters, which is why Obama wanted to present himself as a black candidate,” says Stanford Law Professor Ralph Richard Banks, author of Is Marriage for White People?. “There’s not much of a political constituency for a biracial candidate.”

Yet whites, too—particularly the mostly white mainstream media—have been noticeably quiet on this topic. Back in 2008, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof raised the issue, asking, “Should we call Obama ‘black’ or ‘biracial’?” Though he declined to answer the question himself, he observed that “the convention in America has been that someone who is biracial is considered black, and that’s the standard that we in the news media generally hew to.”

With so few journalists actually asking the President about being mixed-race, Obama has conversely had very little to tell them. Or maybe because he’s so publicly—and repeatedly—identified as black in the past, the President simply feels he has nothing left to reveal. “Some might suggest he’s purposely not talking about it, but perhaps his mixed heritage is no longer some on-going restless question for Obama,” suggests Michele Elam, Professor in the Department of English and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford. “I don’t think he’s repressing his mixed heritage or capitulating to the ‘one-drop’ rule,” Elam continues. “For Obama, the choice to identify as black has never been merely about biology or blood ... He sees blackness as containing differences of experience and ancestry.”

“There’s a feeling among some mixed people that they’ve been cheated out of a hero.”

But whether or not Obama continues to struggle with his identity, it remains an important topic for many Americans. Last summer, Morgan Freeman said that Obama is “not America’s first black president—he’s America’s first mixed-race president.” More recently, several stories have struck hard at the racial amnesia that has mostly defined our perception of the President.

More than 1.8 million Americans identified as mixed black/white in the 2010 census—an increase of 134 percent over the previous decade. Overall, more than 9 million Americans identified as biracial—up 34 percent from 2000. As this cohort matures in both age and influence, Jolivette suggests that they could more aggressively claim the president as their own. “There’s a feeling among some mixed people that they’ve been cheated out of a hero,” he says.

Obama, too, has been cheated in the process—robbed by political necessity of the opportunity to speak to the multi-racial reality increasingly defining America. Nonetheless, the President’s biracial origins and cosmopolitan, culture-rich past seem to inform much of his upcoming agenda—from immigration reform to economic equality. Which arguably makes now the perfect time for Obama to finally realize his transformational potential on this topic by speaking more about it.

“Overlooking or ignoring the fullness and complexity of Obama’s ethnicity keeps this conversation stagnant and very 20th century,” says Jolivette. “And Obama wants nothing more than to truly be a 21st century president.”


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~ David Kaufman is a New York-based writer who regularly contributes to publications such as Monocle, Time, The Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

From Yes! Magazine - an excellent interview with author, poet, activist, and multiple award winning novelist Alice Walker, an American icon. She is known for her magic realism, but more important perhaps is her commitment to social justice.

Alice Walker: “Go to the Places That Scare You”

The acclaimed novelist on why a life worth living is a life worth fighting for. 

 

by Valerie Schloredt

posted Oct 02, 2012

Photo by Harley Soltes.

Alice Walker is a poet, essayist, and commentator, but she’s best known for her prodigious accomplishments as a writer of literary fiction. Her novel The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1983 and quickly became a classic of world literature. Set in an African-American community in the rural South during the decades before World War II, the novel is told in letters written by Celie, a woman who survives oppression and abuse with her spirit not only intact, but transcendent.

Walker’s writing is characterized by an ever-present awareness of injustice and inequality. But whether describing political struggle—as in Meridian, which deals with the civil rights movement—or meditating on the human relationship to nature and animals, as in her latest book, The Chicken Chronicles, her work conveys the possibility of change. In Walker’s vision, grace is available through love and a deep connection to the beauty of the world.

 

Walker was born in the segregated South, the eighth child in a family who made their living as sharecroppers in Georgia. She came of age during the civil rights movement, and emerged early in her career as a defining voice in feminism and an advocate for African-American women writers. She is a prominent activist who has worked, marched, traveled, and spoken out to support the causes of justice, peace, and the welfare of the earth.

Alice Walker spoke to YES! about the challenges of working for change, and the possibility of living with awareness—and joy.

Valerie Schloredt: Over the past few days I’ve been immersed in your work, and I’ve been wondering how you do it. Being able to move someone to tears with a few words on a page is extraordinary to me.

Alice Walker: I want very much for you to feel for whoever I’m talking about, or whatever I’m talking about. Because it is only by empathy being aroused that we change. That is the power of writing. I’ve experienced exactly what you’re saying, reading other writers. I remember the book I first had that experience with was Jane Eyre, being right there with Jane, and understanding, yes, we have to change these horrible institutions where they abuse children. Today, I’m the supporter of an orphanage in Kenya. And one of the reasons comes from having been so moved by reading about Jane at Lowood.

Schloredt: It’s interesting to hear about what you read as a child, because some of your best-known work, like The Color Purple, draws on the stories of your ancestors and your family and aspects of the world you knew as a child.

Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth
A new documentary on how the poet, activist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author 

has changed the world with her words.

Walker: I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder. We were way out in the country, and why wouldn’t you just absolutely wonder at the splendor of nature? It’s true I had various sufferings, but nothing really compares to understanding that you live in a place that, moment by moment, is incredible. That your mother could say, “I think we’ll have tea tonight,” pull up a sassafras root, take it home, boil it, and you have sassafras tea. I mean, it’s such a miraculous universe. For a child, this magic is something that supports us, even through the hard times.

Schloredt: Do you go back to your childhood home?

Walker: It doesn’t exist.

Schloredt: No?

Walker: No. And there were many of them. We lived in shacks. Each year the people who owned the land (that they had stolen from the Indians), after they had taken the labor for the year, forced us to another shack. How could people do that, to people that they recognized as people? They did this to babies, they did this to small children, they could look at the people they were exploiting and actually see that they were working them into ill health and early death. It didn’t stop them.

 

The most beautiful parts of the area that I lived in are now an enclave of upper-class white housing tracts with a huge golf course. They built a road that went right through the front yard of our church. Most of the people moved to cities, they moved to projects. So, it doesn’t exist.

Schloredt: Something I wanted to ask after listening to you talk last night [at the YES! celebration in Seattle], is the idea that some people don’t experience empathy, and don’t have a conscience that bothers them when they’re treating people extremely badly. Where can progressives go with that idea? How do we relate to knowing that?

Walker: You relate to it by being honest. We’re sitting back thinking that every single person has a conscience, if you could just reach it. Why should we believe that? I mean, what would make you actually believe that? Certainly not the history of the world as we know it. So it’s about trying to understand the history of the world, how it’s been shaped, and by whom, and for what purposes.

Understanding trumps compassion at this point. When people are forcing you out of your home, starving your children, destroying your planet—you should bring understanding of them to bear. Not everybody is loving of children, not everybody cares about the ocean. I think if we collectively decide that we are going to confront this, we have a chance. Because humanity is very smart, and we’d like to survive. And we’re not going to survive the way we’re going. I think we know that.

Schloredt: Your novels are among those books that cause people to say, “This book changed my life,” or “This book changed my way of thinking.” For me the book of yours that really did something to my way of thinking was Meridian.

That is a very powerful book. One thing that really affected me was the description of the cost of racism to the psyche, what a struggle it is to fight such embedded injustice. I think I saw you as the character Meridian. Are you—have you got some Meridian in you?

Walker: I think all people who struggle at the risk of their lives have some Meridian in them. It’s an acceptance of a kind of suffering. You hope that something will come of it, but there’s no way of knowing. What I didn’t realize was so close to me was how Meridian gets really sick as she encounters various struggles. She’s using every ounce of her will, her intelligence, her heart, her soul. It often leaves her debilitated. And that has certainly been true in my life. And it’s something that I have to accept.

 

In Jackson, Mississippi, during the civil rights movement, the mayor had a tank that the town bought just to use against us. So there’s the possibility of the tank running over you, and you have to stand there. So I understood that, well, this is probably going to mean a few weeks of just being immobilized. And then you figure out ways to recuperate.

It’s learning to accept that the cost is great. It would have to be, because we’re talking about emotional intelligence and growth and stretching yourself, reaching for the sun, kind of as if you were a plant. It’s a difficult thing to change the world, your neighborhood, your family, your self.

Schloredt: Not only is Meridian risking her life, like the other civil rights activists in the South, but there’s also internal oppression, an inner struggle the characters deal with.

Walker: The inner struggle is extremely difficult for all of us, because we all have faults, severe ones, that we will struggle with forever. One of the things that I like about Meridian is that it is about how we like to have almost a stereotype about leaders and revolutionaries and world-changers, that they are always whole. It’s wise to accept that [human faults] are inevitable. Factor that in and keep going.

Schloredt: I love the passage where Meridian visits a black church after the assassination of Martin Luther King and finds that they’ve incorporated his rhetoric into the sermon.

Walker: This is the segment where B.B. King is in the stained-glass window with a sword—where the people needed to incorporate, as far as I was concerned at the time, a bit more militancy. More awareness of what you’re up against, and confronting that with real clarity. In some ways it’s the same issue that we’re talking about. You have to go to the places that scare you so that you can see: What do you really believe? Who are you really? Are you prepared to take this all the way to wherever the truth leads you and accept that you have to figure out different ways of confronting reality?

Schloredt: I wanted to ask you about Occupy and uprisings in the Middle East. You’ve been politically active over your lifetime. Is there advice that you would give to people who are organizing now in the United States?

Walker: If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions, and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it. You have to go wherever you need to go, and you have to be wherever you need to be, and place yourself there against the forces that would distort you and destroy you.

I love the uprisings, I love the Occupy movement, and I think the young people especially are doing something that is very natural. It is natural to want to have a future. It is very natural to want to live in peace and joy. What is lovely about this time is the awareness that is sweeping the planet. People are just waking up, every moment.

Schloredt: One thing that I worry about for progressives is that we are often distracted from effective direct action by the project of improving ourselves, of being good.

Walker: And also, “good” in that sense can sometimes be very facile. And a good cover, you know, “I’m doing good, so I don’t have to change very much.” But I think for most Americans, the change that’s required is huge.

Schloredt: How do we make that change happen?

Walker: Well, you know, you’re doing it. I think YES! Magazine is part of what’s changing people’s consciousness. And I think the spread of Buddhism—the retreat centers, the meditation practice—has had a huge impact on people’s consciousness. Americans learning Buddhist tradition has helped a lot of people understand that they actually have a power that is theirs. They have their own mind. It’s not somebody else’s mind, and it’s not controllable, unless you permit it. That’s a foundation for huge change.

Schloredt: Your writing has, I’m sure, also changed consciousnesses. How does it feel to know that your work has in some way changed the world?

Walker: Well, it’s a gift the universe has permitted you to achieve—but it’s not just dropped in your lap, you have to really work for it. For instance, years ago when I wrote Possessing the Secret of Joy, the campaign against female genital mutilation [FGM] was a dangerous subject. There was a great deal of flak about my wanting to address it.

 

I wrote the book, and then Pratibha Parmar and I made the film [Warrior Marks, a documentary about FGM], and lugged it around Africa, and London, New York, all over. It allowed women who had no voice about FGM to speak. Progress is slow, and sometimes it’s discouraging. It’s like knocking on doors in the South asking people to vote, and they’re terrified of voting. And then seeing over the course of years that people started understanding that they had a right to reject the practice of FGM, that they had a voice. I feel grateful that I could be an instrument to stop any kind of suffering. I mean, what a joy.

Schloredt: In your novels you describe profound suffering and pain, but there is also often the potential for reconciliation and healing. If you could create healing and reconciliation for something that’s happening in our country today, what would it be?

Walker: I think the War on Terror is really absurd, especially coming from a country that is founded on terrorism. The hypocrisy of that is corrosive, and we should not accept it. There is no way to stop terrorism if you insist on making enemies of most of the people on the planet. Why should they care about you? All they feel is fear.

So I would stop the War on Terror, and I would start making peace with the peoples of the planet by trying to understand them. I would like us to be able to say, “If that happened to me, I would feel exactly the way you do. And what can we do from here, from this understanding? What can we do together?” 

---

Valerie Schloredt interviewed Alice Walker for It's Your Body, the Fall 2012 issue of YES! Magazine. Valerie is associate editor of YES! Magazine.

 

Malcolm X: Criminal, Minister, Humanist, Martyr

It's interesting to me that the title of this review article on a book about Malcolm X traces his development (in Spiral Dynamics terms) from egocentric power drives (criminal) to authoritarian religious figure (Minister) to rational equal rights crusader (humanist) and, finally - with the awareness that he one day would be killed - to sacrifice his life for the future of his cause (martyr).

I wonder if the author of the review has any awareness of the developmental framework.

Malcolm X: Criminal, Minister, Humanist, Martyr

By TOURÉ

Published: June 17, 2011

“His aura was too bright,” the poet Maya Angelou said of her first meeting with Malcolm X. “His masculine force affected me physically. A hot desert storm eddied around him and rushed to me, making my skin contract, and my pores slam shut.” Malcolm X had that same sort of bone-deep, visceral impact on America. He got under everyone’s skin — either in the sense that he seeped into your pores and transformed you the way the great love of your life does, or in the sense that he annoyed or scared the living hell out of you. There is no middle ground with Malcolm. If you hate him or distrust him, you should consider giving him another try: officers assigned to monitor the wiretaps on his phones sometimes ended up being flipped, because close listening led them to believe that his programs and philosophies were sensible and righteous and that law enforcement agencies should not have been working against him at all. And while Malcolm’s ideas changed America, his life journey has captivated us even more. He went from a petty criminal and drug user to a long-term prisoner to an influential minister to a separatist political activist to a humanist to a martyr. Throughout his life he continually grew upward, unafraid to challenge or refute what he believed, giving hope that any of us can rise above even our deepest convictions to become better people.

Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos, Malcolm X in 1961.

MALCOLM X: A Life of Reinvention

By Manning Marable
Illustrated. 594 pp. Viking. $30.

Related

• Excerpt: ‘Malcolm X’ (April 2, 2011)
• Link by Link: A Digital Critique of a Famous Autobiography (May 9, 2011)
• On Eve of Redefining Malcolm X, Biographer Dies (April 2, 2011)
• Manning Marable, Historian and Social Critic, Dies at 60 (April 2, 2011)
• Books of The Times: ‘Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention’ by Manning Marable (April 8, 2011)

The prime document that has kept Malcolm’s story alive over the dec­ades since his assassination in 1965 is “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” That book has changed countless lives and made Malcolm a central influence on generations of black men who admire his force, his courage, his brilliance, and his way of merging the protean trickster and the bold intellectual activist and the inspiring preacher. But all autobiographies are, in part, lies. They rely on memory, which is notoriously fallible, and are shaped by self-image. They don’t really tell us who you are but whom you want the world to see you as. Did Malcolm X consciously lie in his autobiography? In some cases, yes — he wanted us to believe he was a bigger criminal than he actually was, so that his growth into a Nation of Islam figure would seem a much more dramatic change. He also wanted us to think it was a friend who did sexual things with another man and not Malcolm himself. Sometimes he just left out details that didn’t fit his political agenda or the literary agenda of his co-author, Alex Haley. Some of those choices were right for what they were creating.

For a more complete and unvarnished — yet still inspiring — version of Malcolm’s life, there’s “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” by the late Columbia scholar Manning Marable. It’s the product of more than 10 years of work and draws on Malcolm’s letters and diaries; the results of surveillance conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York Police Department; and interviews with Malcolm’s contemporaries, including Minister Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader, whom Marable talked to for nine hours. Farrakhan has said that Malcolm was like “the father I never had.”

The loudest rumor before the book’s release was that it would shed light on Malcolm’s secret homosexual past. When he’s a young hustler, we find him apparently being paid to do things with one rich, older white man, but this moment is brief and anticlimactic and does not convey the impression that Malcolm was bisexual. Besides, there are far more titillating things in this book, which dives deep into Malcolm’s sex life. Marable obtained a letter Malcolm wrote in 1959 to Elijah Muhammad, then the leader of the Nation of Islam, in which he complains about his wife, Betty Shabazz: “At a time when I was going all out to keep her satisfied (sexually), one day she told me that we were incompatible sexually because I had never given her any real satisfaction.” Marable describes Malcolm as a virulent misogynist and a horribly neglectful husband who repeatedly got his wife pregnant, perhaps to keep her from making good on threats to cuckold him, and also made a habit of leaving for days or months immediately after the birth of each child.

That’s a Malcolm we all haven’t seen before. Meanwhile, the Malcolm we do know starts coming into view far earlier than expected, given that he’s known for metamorphosis. Born in Omaha in 1925, Malcolm was drilled as a child in the principles of Marcus Garvey — nationalism, separatism, Pan-Africanism, black pride, self-reliance, economic self-­empowerment — by his parents, Earl and Louise Little. Malcolm’s father was a particularly powerful role model: a devoted Garveyite who in 1930s Michigan stood up for what was right for black people, even in the face of death threats, and then paid for his bravery with a gruesome end. The apple did not fall far at all. And as a young man working the streets of Harlem, Malcolm came to know most of the stars of ’40s jazz and absorbed their example, learning to use pace, tone and space in jazz­like ways and perhaps to become a sort of jazzman of the spoken word. “He lived the existence of an itinerant musician,” Marable writes, “traveling constantly from city to city, standing night after night on the stage, manipulating his melodic tenor voice as an instrument. He was consciously a performer, who presented himself as the vessel for conveying the anger and impatience the black masses felt.”

As Malcolm moved away from the insular religiosity of the Nation of Islam, which at the time counseled members not to vote, and into political issues, his relationship with Elijah Muhammad began to rupture. Many know that Muhammad’s womanizing — the married minister fathered children with several young women — was one cause of the break between them, but few know how close their sexual paths ran. Evelyn Williams, one of the most fascinating characters in the book, fell in love with Malcolm when he was a street hustler, then moved to Harlem and joined the Nation after he became a minister. Malcolm proposed to her but changed his mind days later. After he became engaged to Betty, Williams ran screaming from the mosque. She was soon sent to Chicago to work for Muhammad and later had his baby.

That must have been painful for Malcolm, but Marable does not cite Muhammad’s womanizing as the main reason Malcolm broke with the Nation. Instead, he points to an incident in Los Angeles in 1962, when police officers burst into a mosque and shot seven Nation members, killing one and paralyzing another. Malcolm moved to create a squad that would assassinate members of the Los Angeles Police Department, and when Muhammad vetoed that idea, Malcolm lost faith in him, wondering if he really cared about his people’s lives. Right there the bond was irreparably shattered. Later, Malcolm told Farrakhan, a protégé turned rival, about Muhammad’s affairs, a conversation Farrakhan said he would have to report to the minister. This set Malcolm’s death spiral in motion.

Malcolm saw the end coming months in advance. He said, “There are a lot of people after me. . . . They’re bound to get me.” He spoke of living like a man who was already dead. He survived narrowly several times and yet did nothing to insulate himself. He could’ve moved to Africa for a few years, could’ve used armed bodyguards, could’ve had the audiences at his rallies searched, could’ve carried a weapon. But he did nothing, even as his inner circle screamed that he needed protection. Some who were close to him wonder if Malcolm wanted to die or if he had embraced death as an inevitability. Marable names the men who killed Malcolm and describes his last moments in such excruciatingly visual detail that it could bring tears or cause nightmares. He makes it plain that Nation of Islam figures ordered the killing, planned it and carried it out, but he also speculates that both the man who ordered it and the man who fired the fatal shot may have been F.B.I. informants. Did the bureau have Malcolm killed? Did it stand by and knowingly let him be killed? Marable is unsure.

As the book reveals, the F.B.I. struggled with how to deal with Malcolm — i.e., how to discredit him — because he was so disciplined, so law-­abiding and too smart to actually create the violence that would allow him to be arrested. Marable shows us Malcolm in Africa, watched by the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and points out “the David-versus-Goliath dimension”: “Malcolm had few resources and was traveling without bodyguards, yet the attorney general and the F.B.I. director were so fearful of what he alone might accomplish that they searched for any plausible grounds to arrest and pros­ecute him upon his return.” Of course, they found nothing. Similarly, an exhaustive biographer combing through Malcolm’s days pulls away the curtain to show us the entirety of his life, and the emperor remains clothed. He has some failings, but Malcolm is still the empowering figure his autobiography showed us he was.

Touré’s new book, “Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now,” will be published in September.

Tags: Malcolm X, Criminal, Minister, Humanist, Martyr, Toure, New York Times, books, reviews, race, culture, civil rights, history, Nationa of Islam, MALCOLM X: A Life of Reinvention, Manning Marable, separatism, political activist, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley, Betty Shabazz

Refuting Satoshi Kanazawa's "Objective Attractiveness" Analysis

If you follow any of the psychology blogs, you no doubt have read recently about Satoshi Kanazawa's supposed "Objective Attractiveness" analysis at his Psychology Today blog, The Scientific Fundamentalist, in which he claimed that African-American women are "objectively" less attractive.

The article has been removed from the Psychology Today site, but you can still read it here.

The response to his post has been nothing short of incendiary - in an earlier century he may well have been forced to leave the village and live alone in the wilderness.

At Scientific American, guest blogger Khadijah Britton dissects the original post with a little more distance than some of the early responses were able to employ.

The Data Are In Regarding Satoshi Kanazawa

By Khadijah Britton | May 23, 2011

A Hard Look at Last Week's "Objective Attractiveness" Analysis in Psychology Today

If what I say is wrong (because it is illogical or lacks credible scientific evidence), then it is my problem. If what I say offends you, it is your problem."—Satoshi Kanazawa

Satoshi Kanazawa has a problem.

It is hard to believe that it was merely a week ago today that I first encountered Satoshi Kanazawa; given all that I have read, thought and talked about him this week, it feels like a year. For those of you who haven't been following this saga online, or aren't regular readers of Psychology Today: last Sunday, Satoshi Kanazawa, PhD, Evolutionary Biologist and professor at London School of Economics posed (and purported to answer) an incendiary question on his Psychology Today blog: "Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?"

Though the post has been removed from the site, you can now see it here. In the post, Kanazawa promises his readers a scientific analysis of public data showing objective evidence of Black women's status as the least attractive group among all humans. In other words, he promises to wave a magic wand, say "Factor Analysis!" and make racist conclusions appear before your (bluest) eyes.

As it turns out, Kanazawa is a repeat offender, with years of roundly criticized and heartily debunked pseudoscience-based shock-jockery under his belt. Despite this, he is still posting on the blog of a reputable mainstream publication, still teaching at a respected university and still serving on the editorial board of one of his discipline's peer-reviewed research journals. Though, possibly not for long: this particular post's racist hypothesis offended many, unleashing serious righteous outrage across the internet: social media users raced to blog, tweet and even petition demanding that Psychology Today remove Kanazawa as a contributor to their Web site and magazine. Psychology Today removed the post late Sunday night, and Monday morning the largest student organization in London (representing 120,000 students) unanimously called for Kanazawa's dismissal.

Over the past week, a handful of Kanazawa's fellow bloggers at Psychology Today have posted insightful and at times scientifically-grounded critiques of his research question and methodology. Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman has even done an independent statistical analysis of the data set Kanazawa uses to "prove" his theory, beating me to publication by a couple of days but coming to the same conclusions I have derived from my own independent analysis.

Independent evaluation of an article's data analysis is a critical step in deconstructing scientific inquiry, and one the mainstream media rarely undertakes. As the founder of a science journalism nonprofit – and therefore an aspiring entrant into the mainstream media ranks – I am alarmed by this. Whether we agree with Kanazawa's assertion or are horrified by it, we cannot report on it without actually comparing his hypothesis to the evidence. Yet, as the London Guardian warned us back in 2005:

...[s]tatistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn't about something being true or not true: that's a humanities graduate parody. It's about the error bar, statistical significance, it's about how reliable and valid the experiment was, it's about coming to a verdict, about a hypothesis, on the back of lots of bits of evidence.

In his blog post, non-journalist Kaufman [and his co-author on the post, Jelte Wicherts, who also wrote up a much more complete, technical analysis of the dataset here] did a reporter's job, explaining why Kanazawa's statistical analysis was bunk, independently analyzing the Add Health data set (freely available here or here for anyone to analyze!) to find that Kanazawa's conclusion that Black women are the least attractive was incorrect, even if you buy into his idea that the Add Health data set was a reasonable sample from which to ground such an assessment. See Kanazawa's graph, which is magical thinking in the guise of factor analysis:

and Kaufman's graph, which makes sense:

Like Kaufman, I take great issue with Kanazawa's use of a study on adolescent health and behavior to explain human attractiveness or lack thereof. The Add Health Study begins tracking its study participants at the age of twelve, and Kaufman wisely limits his analysis to that including participants who could reasonably be considered adults.

I am disturbed by the fact that the Add Health study's adult researchers even answered the question of how attractive they rated these youth. I am even more deeply disturbed by the idea that we are to extrapolate a general theory of desirability from these adult interviewers' subjective assessment of the children's attractiveness. Kaufman's analysis may be correct, but having run the analysis as well, I feel even more strongly that this data set is a completely inappropriate basis for Kanazawa's analysis.

Brian Hughes, of The Science Bit, agrees. Hughes' critique focuses on the lack of race and sex data of the interviewers, as well as the ambiguity around the number of interviewers used – it is a worthwhile read. Hughes also points out that the Add Health data set fails to report the race of the interviewer, or any facts about the interviewer at all. For example, there is no data to analyze to help us determine if interviewers preferred interviewees of their same race.

As Robert Kurzban comments in his Psychology Today blog retort to Kanazawa, "Rhodes et al. (2005) argued that if people prefer faces that constitute an average of the faces that they experience, then, as they put it, faces 'should be more attractive when their component faces come from a familiar, own-race population.' They indeed showed some evidence for an 'own race' effect." Hence, in knowing the race of the interviewer and the interviewee, we might actually be able to learn whether this held true and add to the body of scholarly knowledge.

Kaufman and other bloggers also address Kanazawa's painful contortion of factor analysis, which I agree is laughable. He looks at three measurements of the same test taken at three different time points and creates a one-factor model, with the one factor being "objective attractiveness." This is, of course, founded on the principle that an attractiveness rating handed out by interviewers in a study on adolescent health and well-being is actually measuring something that we can agree is "objective attractiveness."

He then says that by merging these three measurements for each interviewee into one factor, he can use factor analysis to get at that "objective attractiveness" while minimizing any error. This is just plain false. Factor analysis cannot get rid of measurement error. If it could, we'd all be using it all the time, and we'd get rid of all measurement error, and scientific studies wouldn't need to be replicated.

What his factor analysis might be saying is that over time, individuals were rated relatively consistently by interviewers on what the study called attractiveness. Without knowing anything about the interviewers, we have no idea whether this is significant. The beauty – and danger – of factor analysis is that the statistician running the analysis gets to define the factors, and there are an infinite number of factor solutions to any given problem - or at least, no unique solutions.

Kanazawa continues by looking at the attractiveness mean values for women by racial group, also as measured by the interviewer, and, seeing a difference in the overall attractiveness rating as broken down by these arbitrary racial groups (which somehow fail to include "Hispanic," despite all other study data including that category), concludes that since there are differences between groups, then the reason for that difference in the rating of attractiveness by interviewers over time is due to race.

But that is a logical fallacy. We have no idea why the interviewers felt differently about different youth in the study – correlation is not causation. In fact, according to Kaufman's reading of the data, correlation might not even really be correlation:

The low convergence of ratings finding suggests that in this very large and representative dataset, beauty is mostly in the eye of the beholder. What we are looking at here are simple ratings of attractiveness by interviewers whose tastes differ rather strongly. For instance, one interviewer (no. 153) rated 32 women as looking "about average," while another interviewer (no. 237) found almost all 18 women he rated to be "unattractive."

Kanazawa also correlates Black female self-perception of attractiveness as being higher than Black female rated attractiveness, despite there being no one-to-one relationship between self-identification of race and perceived race. The two could be completely different: for example, I could self-identify as Hispanic but my interviewer, seeing my dark skin, might perceive me as Black. Hence, Kanazawa's conclusions are nonsensical.

Kanazawa surmises that Black women's lower attractiveness might be due to low estrogen and high testosterone. Yet, high estrogen levels and low testosterone is a leading cause of fibroids, which significantly impact Black women, especially Black women who are overweight. Also, Black women have been found to have higher levels of estrogen in a study on breast cancer. Finally, Kanazawa offended his fellow Psychology Today bloggers in 2008 with his post, "The power of female choice: Fat chicks get laid more." The thesis there contradicts his supporting theory here. It leads me to wonder if this is all just some grand practical joke.

I see a more central flaw with Kanazawa's method beyond its creepiness, reliance on unscientific conjecture or abuse of factor analysis. Since the interviewers' assessment data was never intended to be used for an analysis such as Kanazawa's, the survey was not designed to capture that information. In fact, nowhere in the study monograph, nowhere on the website and nowhere in the study design materials is the interviewer's assessment of the interviewee's attractiveness mentioned. (I emailed the study designers to ask why they collected this information in the first place, and will update this post below if they answer.)

Why was the study undertaken? According to the study website, it was in response to a mandate by the US Congress inthe NIH Revitalization Act of 1993, where Congress asked a division of the NIH to "provide information about the health and well-being of adolescents in our country and about the behaviors that promote adolescent health or that put health at risk" with "a focus on how communities influenced the health of adolescents."

The Add Health study measures hundreds of variables. One has to wonder: why pick only race? Especially when the results of your "study" are so unabashedly weak? Seeing that Kanazawa based his findings on such a tenuously related study, I wonder how many other studies he scoured for evidence to support his point. This sort of "fishing" for results to support your finding leads to bad science, period.

I agree with Psychology Today blogger, Sam Sommers, PhD, of Tufts University, when he concludes:

Like it or not, the burden is higher when you're a scientist blogging about science. And anyone who can only think of one explanation for an observed difference in a data set might simply be incapable of meeting that high burden.

To quote Kanazawa, a little bit of logic goes a long way. Seeing that his work is rife with logical errors, Kanazawa should be criticizing himself.

I drafted this post after spending a couple of days sorting through my emotions on Kanazawa's work. Seeing that the man clearly relishes his role as an agent provocateur, I knew I could not impact him or those who respond to his work from a place of emotion. He has made that much clear.

From my incessant reading of blog responses and comments, I have encountered the sentiment that because Kanazawa's question was immoral to ask, his results are invalid. I agree with my heart and soul that the way he framed his so-called "research question" is offensive, racist and harmful. As I tweeted after reading Kanazawa's post, "Imagine a little Black girl reading this filth. [Toni Morrison's novel] The Bluest Eye is not history to her. It's reality." I want to protect that little girl – and wish I could heal all the little girls that came before her and grew up into beautiful women like this one, made to feel ugly by a racist society. I stand in solidarity with Black women and hope you will heed this blog's cry to stand stronger than ever in self-love.

The intent behind a question can establish an immoral line of inquiry and instigate immoral research methods (see the Nazi doctors' experiments). But a question itself is not evil. Scandalous, offensive and sometimes frightening questions are often at the root of important scientific inquiry. When supported by data significant enough to support them, these questions drive us toward the truth (see, e.g., "the Earth is round").

I agree with Psychology Today blogger Mikhail Lyubansky, PhD, when he says, "[e]xtraordinary claims ... require extraordinary evidence and editorial oversight." This does not lead us to censorship; it means requiring that an inquiry bring us closer to – not farther from – the truth. Kanazawa does not earn censure with the political incorrectness of his question, but earns social and scientific irrelevance through the weakness of his research. This irrelevance earns Kanazawa a special place in hell in today's link-driven media economy – one where no one will hear him scream. One week later, neither Kanazawa nor Psychology Today's editors has published any official defense, apology or explanation. The silence is deafening.

About the Author: Khadijah M. Britton, JD, is founder of BetterBio, a Massachusetts-registered nonprofit and fiscally sponsored project of the 501(c)(3) Fractured Atlas whose mission is to empower journalism that reinforces the intimate connection between life and science. BetterBio provides a platform for comprehensive science reporting, challenging us to ask hard questions and debunk dangerous myths while addressing our collective social responsibility. Khadijah also serves as a post-graduate research fellow in antibiotic policy under Professor Kevin Outterson at Boston University School of Law while she completes her Master's in Public Health at Boston University School of Public Health and studies for the bar exam.

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Tags: Science, objectivity, race, beauty, Psychology, Scientific American, Khadijah Britton, The Data Are In Regarding Satoshi Kanazawa, Psychology Today, evolutionary biology, Objective Attractiveness, Analysis, Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?, The Add Health Study, racism

The Brain and Race -Two Articles

Two interesting articles on how the brain responds to race. This first article seems to suggest that ethnocentricity is hard-wired into the brain. But then I have to wonder if they included worldview or ego stage in the study, what might the outcome be from that?

Race and Empathy Matter on Neural Level

ScienceDaily (Apr. 27, 2010) — Race matters on a neurological level when it comes to empathy for African-Americans in distress, according to a new Northwestern University study.

In a rare neuroscience look at racial minorities, the study shows that African-Americans showed greater empathy for African-Americans facing adversity -- in this case for victims of Hurricane Katrina -- than Caucasians demonstrated for Caucasian-Americans in pain.

"We found that everybody reported empathy toward the Hurricane Katrina victims," said Joan Y. Chiao, assistant professor of psychology and author of the study. "But African-Americans additionally showed greater empathic response to other African-Americans in emotional pain."

The more African-Americans identified as African-American the more likely they were to show greater empathic preference for African-Americans, the study showed.

Initially, Chiao thought that both African-Americans and Caucasian-Americans would either show no pattern of in-group bias or both show some sort of preference.

The take-home point to Chiao: our ability to identify with another person dramatically changes how much we can feel the pain of another and how much we're willing to help them.

"It's just that feeling of that person is like me, or that person is similar to me," she said. "That experience can really lead to what we're calling 'extraordinary empathy and altruistic motivation.' It's empathy and altruistic motivation above and beyond what you would do for another human."

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the study included an equal number of African-American and Caucasian-American study participants. They were shown pictures depicting either African-American or Caucasian-American individuals in a painful (i.e. in the midst of a natural disaster) or neutral (attending an outdoor picnic).

"We think this is really interesting because it suggests mechanisms by which we can enhance our empathy and altruistic motivation simply by finding ways in which we have commonality across individuals and across groups," Chiao said.

Chiao, who works at one of only two labs in the world dedicated to cultural and social neuroscience, is particularly interested in how social identities related to gender or race modulate the biological process underlying feeling and reason. (The Social and Cultural Neuroscience Lab at Northwestern).

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Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by Northwestern University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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Journal Reference:

1. Vani A. Mathur, Tokiko Harada, Trixie Lipke, Joan Y. Chiao. Neural basis of extraordinary empathy and altruistic motivation. NeuroImage, 2010; DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.03.025

Here is the second article - this article offers the same outcome as the previous study. But again, I wonder what would happen if they factored in racial identity development, or ego stages?

Human Brain Recognizes and Reacts to Race

ScienceDaily (Apr. 27, 2010) — The human brain fires differently when dealing with people outside of one's own race, according to new research out of the University of Toronto Scarborough.

This research, conducted by social neuroscientists at University of Toronto-Scarborough, explored the sensitivity of the "mirror-neuron-system" to race and ethnicity. The researchers had study participants view a series of videos while hooked up to electroencephalogram (EEG) machines. The participants -- all white -- watched simple videos in which men of different races picked up a glass and took a sip of water. They watched white, black, South Asian and East Asian men perform the task.

Typically, when people observe others perform a simple task, their motor cortex region fires similarly to when they are performing the task themselves. However, the U of T research team, led by PhD student Jennifer Gutsell and Assistant Professor Dr. Michael Inzlicht, found that participants' motor cortex was significantly less likely to fire when they watched the visible minority men perform the simple task. In some cases when participants watched the non-white men performing the task, their brains actually registered as little activity as when they watched a blank screen.

"Previous research shows people are less likely to feel connected to people outside their own ethnic groups, and we wanted to know why," says Gutsell. "What we found is that there is a basic difference in the way peoples' brains react to those from other ethnic backgrounds. Observing someone of a different race produced significantly less motor-cortex activity than observing a person of one's own race. In other words, people were less likely to mentally simulate the actions of other-race than same-race people"

The trend was even more pronounced for participants who scored high on a test measuring subtle racism, says Gutsell.

"The so-called mirror-neuron-system is thought to be an important building block for empathy by allowing people to 'mirror' other people's actions and emotions; our research indicates that this basic building block is less reactive to people who belong to a different race than you," says Inzlicht.

However, the team says cognitive perspective taking exercises, for example, can increase empathy and understanding, thereby offering hope to reduce prejudice. Gutsell and Inzlicht are now investigating if this form of perspective-taking can have measurable effects in the brain.

The team's findings are published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by University of Toronto, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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Journal Reference:

1. Jennifer N. Gutsell, Michael Inzlicht. Empathy constrained: Prejudice predicts reduced mental simulation of actions during observation of outgroups. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2010; DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2010.03.011

Tags: Psychology, brain, race, empathy, science daily, Jennifer N. Gutsell, Michael Inzlicht, Empathy constrained, Prejudice predicts reduced mental simulation of actions during observation of outgroups, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, neuroscience, Vani A. Mathur, Tokiko Harada, Trixie Lipke, Joan Y. Chiao, Neural basis of extraordinary empathy and altruistic motivation, NeuroImage

When social fear is missing, so are racial stereotypes

This is cool - it seems to be proof that racial stereotyping and prejudice are fear-based behaviors, not rational, not genetic - LEARNED, as are nearly all fears (including fear of predators in animals, which we might tend to think are innate fears).

When social fear is missing, so are racial stereotypes

April 12, 2010

Children with the genetic condition known as Williams syndrome have unusually friendly natures because they lack the sense of fear that the rest of us feel in many social situations. Now, a study reported in the April 13th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, suggests that children with Williams Syndrome are missing something else the rest of us have from a very tender age: the proclivity to stereotype others based on their race.

The findings support the notion that social fear is at the root of racial stereotypes. The researchers say the results might also aid in the development of interventions designed to reduce discriminatory attitudes and behavior towards vulnerable or marginalized groups of society.

"This is the first study to report the absence of racial stereotypes in any human population," said Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim/University of Heidelberg, who coauthored the paper with Andreia Santos and Christine Deruelle of the Mediterranean Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in Marseille.

Previous studies have shown that stereotypes are found ubiquitously in typically developing children—as early as age 3—as they are in adults, Meyer-Lindenberg explained. Even children with autism display racial stereotypes, despite profound difficulties in daily social interaction and a general failure to show adapted social knowledge.

In their study, the researchers showed children a series of vignettes with people differing in race or gender and asked the children to assign positive or negative features to those pictured. Typical children made strongly stereotypical assignments both for sex roles and for race, confirming the results of previous studies. On the other hand, children with Williams syndrome showed no evidence for racial bias.

"The unique hypersociable profile of individuals with Williams syndrome often leads them to consider that everybody in the world is their friend," Meyer-Lindenberg said. "In previous work, we have shown that processing of social threat is deficient in people with the syndrome. Based on this, we suspected that they would not show a particular preference for own-race versus other-race characters. The finding that racial stereotypes in children with Williams syndrome were completely absent was nevertheless surprising in its degree."

The children with Williams syndrome did make stereotypical sex role assignments just like normal children. That finding suggests that different forms of stereotyping arise from different brain mechanisms, the researchers say, and that those mechanisms are selectively affected in some way by the genetic alteration that causes Williams syndrome (the loss of about 26 genes on chromosome 7).

More information: Meyer-Lindenberg et al.: “Absent racial stereotypes in Williams syndrome: Dissociable genetic influences on social bias.” Publishing in Current Biology 20, 7, April 13, 2010. http://www.current-biology.com

Because racism is still ubiquitous in America (despite Obama's claims about a post-racial country), this research is interesting.

In this new article, we see that how people handle racism is crucial to its impact on their lives. We can't ignore it, and we shouldn't ignore it - doing so makes things worse for the victims of racism.

Ignoring racism makes distress worse, study finds

April 6, 2010 by Elaine Bible

A 1930s photograph of a hotel entrance with a sign reading “Positively no Filipinos allowed.” This blatant racism stands in contrast to the subtle 'everyday racism' that Professor Alvin Alvarez has found still exists today.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Subtle forms of racism are part of the fabric of life, according to Professor of Counseling Alvin Alvarez, but the way people choose to cope with racist incidents can influence how much distress they feel.

Alvarez' latest study, published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology, found that denying or ignoring racial discrimination leads to greater psychological distress, including anxiety and depression, and lowers self-esteem.

"We found that some coping methods are healthier than others for dealing with everyday racism," Alvarez said. "When people deny or trivialize racist encounters, they can actually make themselves feel worse, amplifying the distress caused by the incident."

The study focused on what is referred to as 'everyday racism' -- subtle, commonplace forms of discrimination, such as being ignored, ridiculed or treated differently.

"These are incidents that may seem innocent and small, but cumulatively they can have a powerful impact on an individual's mental health," Alvarez said. "Trying to ignore these insidious incidents could become taxing and debilitating over time, chipping away at a person's spirit."

Alvarez surveyed 199 Filipino-American adults, both men and women, in the Bay Area and found that 99 percent of participants had experienced at least one incident of everyday racism in the last year.

The findings challenge the stereotype of Filipino-Americans as 'model minorities' -- ethnic groups that are typically successful in society and believed to no longer experience discrimination. "What's striking is we found that racism is still happening to Filipinos," Alvarez said. "Therapists need to look beyond the frequent portrayal of Asian Americans as model minorities and help clients assess what their best coping strategy could be, depending on their resources, what's feasible and who they could turn to for support."

While further research is needed to determine what makes a healthy coping method, the study did find that for men, dealing with racism in an active way, such as reporting incidents to authorities or challenging the perpetrator, was associated with decreased distress and increased self-esteem. For women, ignoring racism was linked to increased distress, but no significant correlation was found between other coping methods and psychological distress.

The study was published in the April 2010 issue of the Journal of Counseling Psychology and was co-authored by Linda Juang, associate professor of psychology at SF State.

Tags: Psychology, race, racism, society, stereotypes, PhysOrg, Williams syndrome, social bias, Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, Andreia Santos, Christine Deruelle, Alvin Alvarez, distress, Ignoring racism makes distress worse

The Cultural Self in Integral Psychotherapy: Narratives of Multiplicity and Multicultural Counseling

This is the first paper for my new class in Social and Multicultural Foundations in Counseling. We were given four rather vague questions and I chose to go my own way with the assignment. So of course, I went where my interests are right now, integral theory, cultural psychology, and the narrative construction of the self. We were limited to five pages (double spaced), which is little more than a long abstract in my world, so this is a little different than the one I handed in, a little longer, though not nearly long enough.

The Cultural Self in Integral Psychotherapy:

Narratives of Multiplicity and Multicultural Counseling

Looking back through the history of developmental psychology, there have been dozens of models that attempt to quantify and delineate various stage models of human traits and abilities. For example, Piaget examined cognitive development (Piaget, 1950), Kohlberg and Gilligan examined moral development (Kohlberg, 1981; Gilligan, 1982), Loevinger outlined ego development (Loevinger, 1976), and Jenny Wade has created a developmental model for overall consciousness that incorporates many of the other models (Wade, 1996). When each model’s developmental stages are lined up side by side, the combination of cognitive skills, moral levels, ego stages, and so on, combine to form worldviews that reflect the way a person holding that worldview conceives of the world (see Forman, 2010, figure 6.1 for further examples of the specific traits forming worldviews).

Ken Wilber’s Integral Psychology (2000) offers the most complete synthesis of the various developmental models, more than 200 from Western psychology and Eastern religion, and synthesizes from them a system of worldviews ranging from the most primitive to non-dual consciousness (p. 197-217). In general, the stages can be simplified to pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional, or pre-personal, personal, and post-personal, or pre-modern, modern, and post-modern (Wilber, 2000; 2007). Within the respective worldviews, pre-conventional stage people tend to be egocentric, conventional stage people tend to be ethnocentric, and post-conventional stage people tend to be world-centric. As people move up the developmental ladder, their perspective moves from kinship and tribal affiliations (power drives), to race and cultural affiliations (authoritarian), to seeing self as a member of a group encompassing all living beings (egalitarian) (Beck & Cowan, 1996).

David Berreby (2005) refers to the ways that people group themselves as kinds (p. 15), suggesting that “Human kinds are infinitely divisible: examine one, and you find inside it subcategories and, inside those, still more” (p. 15). Berreby presents some arguments that the “codes” that generate this type of grouping behavior are “built-in,” (p. 101), and there may be some truth to that position, as evidenced by some arguments coming from evolutionary psychology (Rushton, 2005; see anything by Steven Pinker). However, the relatively recent cultural psychology movement (Benson, 2001) offers a more integrative understanding of why human beings chose to group themselves in various ways, from the simplest family-based groups of hunter-gathers, to the most complex worldcentric views of the Dalai Lama.

Both integral psychotherapy and cultural psychology are the cutting edge of psychological theory, and within these models ideas of race, religion, gender, sexuality, and other forms of us vs. them thinking are based partly in biology, partly in culture, and mostly in the intersection between the two, the psyche. More importantly, this composite self is also located in space and time so that where and when a person lives also shapes their development, and consequently, their worldview. Precisely stated: “self is primarily a psychological system of location designed by evolution and culture for negotiating our ways through human worlds” Benson, p. xi). As therapists, we become more effective when we fully grasp the complexity of interactions between neuroscience, genetics, culture, and social structures that creates the individual sitting in the consulting room with us.

To provide an example of how the idea of a culturally created values system functions, many of the Germans who killed Jews during the Nazi reign followed orders without question, while often defying Nazi edicts in other areas, suggesting a deeply held anti-Semitic racial attitude in Germany at that time (Benson, 158) rather than a forced obedience as sometimes argued by those who committed these crimes. Another example involves the Chukchee people in the far north of Russia, as observed by Vladimir Bogoraz (Bruner, 1986). In this culture, objects from outside the culture are defined as “disgusting” and produced nausea in members of the culture. This may be one of the clearest examples of how emotions and responses are culturally created (p. 116-117).

A Multiplicity of Narratives and Narratives of Multiplicity

The newest research suggests that no child is born hating any person or anything; in fact, they are born knowing that other people are like them (Gopnik, 2009, p. 45), but they also notice differences in skin color and hair, for example (Anti-Defamation League, 2001, para. 3). However, one of our first lessons about the world, one that initiates the development of a unique self, is that there is difference between the child and the care-giver, the self-other split (Siegel, 1999, p. 101-102). From that point onward, a person’s perception of the world is built upon this self-other duality, which reaches its fullest expression in Martin Buber’s I and Thou (1950). What becomes “other” for each person depends on that person’s development (for example, kids naturally form in-group/out-group dynamics as they enter their teen years), and what they are taught is “other” by family, peers, teachers, and the culture.

Because the self and its values are culturally constructed, and hate may be a perfectly normal emotion within Western culture (Corcoran, 2003), what we hate is learned from our psycho-culturally context, the time, place, and people around whom we grow up. In each of the three generalized developmental realms, why we hate takes on a different narrative structure. For example, at pre-conventional stages we hate the “other” because s/he is from a different kin-group, worships different ancestors, eats different foods, and so on (as represented by the Chukchee people mentioned above). Contact with others tends to be limited for people at this stage because they live in traditionally tribal cultures or as isolated groups within a larger culture. At the conventional stages, we hate the “other” because their skin is a different color, their religion is different, they pledge allegiance to a different flag, and so on. This grouping of “kinds” is more common in larger groups, including nation-states, major religions, and racial out-groups, not to mention political parties, fans of sport teams, and so on. Finally, hate is less pervasive in the post-conventional stages, but early on in this developmental realm we find those who hate people who hate, or those who dislike all hierarchal developmental models because they define people (which is in itself a contradiction in that such a statement creates a hierarchy). Since so few people have a majority of developmental lines in post-conventional, post-formal, or post-personal stages, there are few people who do not experience hate in some form or another.

For each developmental stage, there is a multiplicity of narratives for how one relates to the world. It is becoming increasingly common and viable to talk about reality as a narrative construction as we increasingly learn that people think verbally and construct their sense of reality in words and symbols.

As I have argued extensively elsewhere, we organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative—stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on. Narrative is a conventional form, transmitted culturally and constrained by each individual's level of mastery and by his conglomerate of prosthetic devices, colleagues, and mentors. (Bruner, 1991, p. 4)

Considering the variety of developmental stages [at least five general stages are fairly common right now on the planet (Beck & Cowan, 1996)], and the variety of narratives possible within each stage, based on environment, time, cultural influences, and the biological make-up of the individual, there are many, many narratives of reality. Consequently, there are equally as many narratives of hate.

However, returning to the post-conventional stages, we find those entering into these more relativistic stages embracing more multiplicity in their narratives of reality. It is in these stages where we first encounter multicultural sensitivity, civil rights, religious tolerance, gender parity, and other issues involving innate equality (Wilber, 2000, p. 158-173). These post-modern stages seek to be inclusive, to reduce the marginalization of the “other,” and to limit the intolerance of rationality and its desire to squash the irrational or non-rational (Wilber, 2000, p.159). Multicultural sensitivity in psychotherapy also stems from this postmodern inclination toward inclusion.

Becoming a Multicultural Therapist

Not all of us have reached the post-conventional stages of development, so how do we develop this sensitivity and inclusiveness as therapists? There are two very good processes through which we can discover, work with, and reduce our unconscious prejudices. The first one is the 3-2-1 shadow process developed by Ken Wilber and his staff at the Integral Institute and presented in the Integral Life Practice book (2008, p. 41-66). The model is based in simple Jungian shadow work, but takes it a step further by including a 1^st person, 2^nd person, and 3^rd person perspective for each shadow issue.

Because our own feelings of prejudice are likely repressed or exiled, we will want to begin with the 3^rd person perspective, talking to or about an “it,” for example, homophobia. As we can begin to understand the feelings from this distance, we can then begin talking to the homophobia, expressing our feelings toward it and about it. When this becomes easier and more comfortable, we can then talk from the homophobia, expressing our perception of its needs and fears. In this way, we truly get to know our repressed energies around any given shadow material. It’s a very effective approach.

The other option is Byron Katie’s The Work (Byron Katie, Inc., 2010). This is a very simple form of shadow work (“process of inquiry”), which relies on four simple questions and a “turn around.”

Is it true? Can you absolutely know that it's true? How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought? Who would you be without the thought? (Byron Katie, Inc., 2010, Section 2)

Once you have looked at your issue, for example racism, through the lens of the four questions, you are ready to turn it around—here is an example:

For example, "Paul doesn't understand me" can be turned around to "Paul does understand me." Another turnaround is "I don't understand Paul." A third is "I don't understand myself." (Byron Katie, Inc., 2010, Section 2)

Katie warns that we should be careful with these in that they can reveal material we were not aware of holding in the dark closet of our psyches.

If more therapists did their own shadow work and sought out higher developmental levels of awareness, our clients would be better served. However, this is not the case in our profession. When it is, as Fuertes, Bartolomeo & Matthew Nichols (2001) point out in relation to teaching multicultural competencies, agencies and individuals perform better in this realm. But we must also do the deep work to become aware of and detached from our own interior narratives of hatred, discomfort, or bias. Until we do that work for ourselves, no amount of cognitive behavior intervention/skills development will makes us truly comfortable and open to multiplicity in our clients.

As we do become more aware of our own inner biases, we tend to move away from biased language and become more comfortable with a multiplicity view of culture and how people are shaped by their own unique genetics, cultural experience, social status and the ways these forces have shaped their lives. We must try to resist political correctness simply to be politically correct—clients will see through this and feel patronized—rather, we must generate a compassionate embrace of cultural, gender, racial, and religious differences.

References

Anti-Defamation League. (2001). Hate is learned and can be “unlearned”. Retrieved from http://www.adl.org/issue_education/hateprejudice/Prejudice2.asp

Beck, D. E., & Cowan, C. C. (1996). Spiral dynamics: Mastering values, leadership, and change. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

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Berreby, D. (2005). Us and them: Understanding your tribal mind. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Bruner, J. (1991). The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry, 18(August). doi: 0093-1896/91/1801-0002

Bruner, J. S. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Buber, M. (1950). I and Thou. Edinburgh, England: Morrison and Gibb Limited.

Byron Katie, Inc.. (2010). What is the work? . Retrieved from http://www.thework.com/thework.asp

Corcoran, P. (2003, September). Good, healthy hate: Frontier of the negative emotions. Paper presented at the Australasian Political Studies Association Conference, University of Tasmania, Hobart.

Forman, M. (2010). A guide to integral psychotherapy: Complexity, integration, and spirituality in practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York.

Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gopnik, A. (2009, August 1). When we were butterflies. New Scientist, 203(2719), 44-45. Retrieved from New Scientist Archive database

Kohlberg, L. (1981). The philosophy of moral development: Moral stages and the idea of justice (essays on moral development, volume 1). San Fancisco: Harper & Row.

Loevinger, J. (1976). Ego development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Piaget, J. (1950). Psychology of intelligence. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

Rushton, J. P. (2005). Ethnic nationalism, evolutionaryEthnic nationalism, evolutionary psychology and Genetic Similarity Theory. Nations and Nationalism, 11(4), 489–507. Retrieved from http://fwd4.me/Ds8

Siegel, D. J. (1999). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are. New York: Guilford Press.

Wade, J. (1996). Changes of mind: A holonomic theory of the evolution of consciousness. Albany, NY: State University Press of New York.

Wilber, K. (2000). Integral psychology (1st ed.). Boston: Shambhala Publications.

Wilber, K. (2007). Integral spirituality: A startling new role for religion in the modern and postmodern world. Boston: Shambhala Publications.

Wilber, K., Patten, T., Leonard, A., & Morrelli, M. (2008). Integral life practice. Boston: Shambhala Publications.

Tags: culture, Psychology, race, postmodernism, Integral, The Cultural Self in Integral Psychotherapy, Narratives of Multiplicity, Multicultural Counseling, Ken Wilber, integral psychotherapy, Spiral Dynamics, cultural psychology, narrative self, worldviews, developmental stages, Jerome Bruner, shadow work, The Work, Byron Katie