Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a talk on two Americas (click here for the talk). In that talk, King described an America that many white Americans enjoyed versus a harsh America experienced by many Blacks. The America enjoyed by many white Americans is 'beautiful' and full of opportunities and freedom. The other America has a soul crushing 'ugliness' about it. In the other America, people's homes pose threats to their health and job opportunities are scrace or non-existent.
Multiple Americas still exist today. When explaining to a NYC activist about police treatment of fellow activists, I told her a story of how some of us peace protesters were gently and politely escorted to a police van for participating in civil disobedience. My fellow activist could not believer her ears. She had never seen police act that way when arresting people during protests. But I could believe her stories. After all, I met two fellow activists from another city who received the brunt of police violence for their activities including a dislocation of the elbow. So on the one hand, my one set of acquaintances and friends are astounded when people resist the police because they have only seen the police as acting to protect. On the other hand, my other set of acquaintances and friends automatically see the police as a threat because of past experiences of either themselves or their friends.
And what applies to the two Americas observed by King and the two police forces experienced by myself and my one set of acquaintances, we have multiple worlds. We experience either no direct effect or immediate benefits from many of our nation's foreign policies. but those who had to live under the reign of Augusto Pinochet or much of the reign of Saddam Hussein, or who lived through the terrorism sponsored by the US in Nicaragua or in Afghanistan during the 1980s experienced the other side of American foreign policies. We should note that the "freedom fighters," Reagan's name for them, whom we sponsored in Afghanistan included Osama bin Laden.
In short, we often don't understand the objectionable behaviors of others because we aren't living in the same nation or world as those whom we disapprove of. The conservative reaction to the National Anthem protests by NFL players provides an important example. While many conservatives become indignant over what they can only regard as disrespect for the flag and the troops, those football players saw a completely different America in their past or see one in either their present lives or in the lives of their friends and family. So when they hear of police abuse against someone of their own race, they see an urgency, and rightly so, to speak out against that abuse.
It is quite simple, those who experience the underprivilege of living in America or the world want to join those of us who are privileged. And whether we will accept their application for membership depends on whether those applicants will act as if they have known privilege their whole lives. In reality, whether we will see a peaceful migration of those who are underprivileged to our privileged status depends on whether we will seek to understand their behavior and attitudes not necessarily by walking a mile in their shoes, but in adequately exposing ourselves to the realities of life experienced by them. And though this model has us and them in it, there is no need to see this as an us vs. them scenario.
However, there is a problem with the above proposal. For us to adequately expose ourselves to the realities of life experienced by others, we come face to face with the fact that some of that which has been so beneficial to us, has acted as a curse on others. That is true whether we are talking about the police, Capitalism, America and its foreign policies including the use of our troops, etc. That something that has helped us has hurt others creates cognitive dissonance in us. And that is usually where the story ends for some who cite the presence of cognitive dissonance.
But that is not where the story ends for the person who earlier described the existence of cognitive dissonance, Leon Festinger. That is because Festinger went on to describe the typical human response to such dissonance. That response tends to resolve the discomfort by expending the least energy possible. Since change requires the most energy, people tend to respond to such dissonance by finding excuses to maintain their past attitudes. And the first economical, in terms of energy, way to resolve the dissonance is to find ways to blame the side that do not share our experiences. So when us law-biding citizens who have favorable experiences with the police hear of policemen who abuse others, our tendency is to first blame the victims of police violence. Or for those of us who have done well in America's economic system, our first response to those who live in poverty is to find fault with them. So while changing requires the most energy, discrediting those who create dissonance in our minds is the easiest and, perhaps the preferred, way of responding to those whose experiences with our sacred cows do not match our own.
So the trick for us who are privileged when we hear the suffering of those who are underprivileged is to resist the knee-jerk reaction of blaming blaming them. It's not that they never share any blame for their situation. It is that when our first response is blaming others, we are not paying adequate attention to those who suffer. And perhaps we do that because what really separates some of the privileged from the underprivileged is the difference in situations. That in the end, those of us who are privileged are just as good or bad as those who are underprivileged. And perhaps that is what creates the greatest cognitive dissonance in us.
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