I’m going to let you into a key psychological trick that coaches use to get inside the head of our clients when they can’t or won’t say what they really think. We ask “so, what do other people think?”, or similar linguist devices that don’t directly ask for their own opinion.
Here’s the thing. When you say what “other people” think, you are really saying what YOU think.
Yes, there are degrees to this, but as you read on, particularly if you are white, there will be a degree to which what you read that makes you uncomfortable. As with my post yesterday, “Be a Point of Light“, please get comfortable being uncomfortable with this.
The example I am going to give again comes from John Amaechi.
John’s example around “what do other people think?” is stark and shocking.
Tortoise – Participative Journalism
Last week John and I were both on a weekly news meeting of Tortoise, a membership news organisation that is doing amazing and humble work investigating around some key themes for our world and engaging way beyond their great cadre of journalists to find themes and information, keying in on their wide and open membership base.
For more on Tortoise and how brilliantly they are engaging over Zoom in this pandemic world, see this post: “What can you do better online than offline?“.
This particular Tortoise weekly news meeting had a great panel brought in to talk about US policing. After the panel spoke, the moderator, James Harding, then brought in the audience. I’ll let you see me on camera first, then please do focus on John’s contribution, it is very powerful.
Source rather than Outcome
As a regular in the audience, James called on me early on, so I quickly made a point (yes, in under a minute, rare for me!) as follows (and yes, a link to me on camera first, a rarity). So, link to my one minute, then a transcript, then on to John Amaechi.
Well my point to you normally, James, is that Tortoise is a “Slow News” organization, so let’s always keep the focus on the Source rather than the Outcome.
This is a really important conversation and some amazing things coming out, and fundamentally being UK -entric having lived in the Americas until the last three years just two things.
The education system in the UK skirts the 300 years of empire and slavery and colonialism. It makes out like it’s benevolent. It’s time for white people in this country to get really, really uncomfortable with racism being a spectrum that we’re all on.
To get educated, to read books such as this {holding up “Natives” by Akala) books by Akala, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Afua Hirsch, many other Black British writers, and just get really uncomfortable and just, I’m concerned that in this fantastic conversation about US policing (we do have a British ex-police representative) that we don’t get uncomfortable enough. We basically go “but it’s okay we’re fine over here”, so that’s really my point.
Now on to John Amaechi’s stunning contribution
Words “other people” use to describe Black identity
My team for the last few years has been doing research in (I’m a psychologist) in white-collar environments asking people about their associations that they make..It’s very difficult to make change when some of the more obvious labels, stereotypes and challenges.. it’s very hard to make change if you deny it.
So, we ask people the question “what do you associate with” and then we give them a label: Black, Asian, something else, and it’s really interesting that when you ask people what do YOU think, you with the device answering this question, bearing in mind we’ve got 10,000 respondents from white-collar environments, the answer that they give (I’m looking at the word cloud now) that the top five or six answers is:
Beautiful, Strong, Athletic, Proud, Music, Sports
So not exactly a broad swathe of ideas around black people in this case but at least you couldn’t roundly say that it’s negative. It feels stereotypical but it’s not negative. But then, you ask these same 10,000 people what do you know “other people” associate with black people and then all of a sudden the answer is:
Criminal, Athletic, Poor, Inferior, Uneducated, Gangs, Dangerous, Lazy, Violent, Scary
Those are the top answers from 10,000 people who work in white-collar environments. This tells us very clearly that whilst there are differences in the kind of sophistication of language about racism in America and the United Kingdom (I’ve lived in both places pretty much equally across my life), but isn’t really the entirety of the problem, because the problem is maintained by the reasonable who are unwilling to acknowledge the fact that if you can pull out of your brain the answer to the second question then it’s very likely that it makes the first answer a lie
..and the truth is when you do this we have not been able to find the “other people”. We keep on asking people these two questions and we can’t find these “other people” that everybody is talking about, so where are they?
..and the truth is but we want to believe they’re reading “the Mail” or we want to believe they’re in the South of America only or we want to believe they’re, I don’t know, but this, along with the other areas we’re talking about here of police reform, the fact that we can’t make change is because reasonable well-intentioned people are unwilling to see how with their everyday behaviours, when they cross the street when they see a black person, when they put their hand on the wallet when they’re in a lift with a black person, how they’re contributing to this atmosphere that creates
John Amaechi
In all my years of coaching, I have never seen such a stark example between the answers to any question asking “what do you think?” and “what do “other people” think?”. I hope you feel shocked by this.
So, please ask yourself one question as you finish considering this post.