When You Can’t See The Hatred In Plain Sight
Why We Keep Failing To Acknowledge And See What’s Right Before Our Eyes
We have a problem. We may not perceive it as much to the same degree, to the same magnitude, and scope, but it’s there hidden in plain sight. And no this isn’t one of those visually puzzling exercises that warrant focus and concentration to resolve. We may not recognize it because we are not expecting to see it from certain persons, or in certain places nor anticipate it episodically occurring in things we collectively either enjoy or endure.
Our inattentional blindness to racism and its deleterious effects on society leaves us in a stupor over what is plaguing us right before our eyes. Some will read this far and immediately click on to the next simply by mistakenly thinking this is SEP — “Somebody Else’s Problem”. Because there are Civil Rights laws in place the incidences you see and hear about merely become isolated, even as it proliferates, and will be addressed by somebody else who’s job it is to do so with the appropriate punishment. Far too often however this instance of bystander effect or apathy simply exacerbates the problem. That is sad and disappointing on so many levels because it renders you no longer receptive to the information. Therefore the recurrence of attitudes and behaviors that spawn racism essentially becomes a blind spot to the hatred staring you right in the face.
An SEP is something we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot.
The Somebody Else’s Problem field… relies on people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.
This is not SEP. This is very much our problem and it is due to our inattentional blindness to what is both tangibly and intangibly obvious. Trump is also our problem, even though many seemingly have this blindspot when it comes to his incompetence and corruptive unstatesmanlike behavior. Because Trump is president the comedy of errors on display is seen as rookie mistakes or better yet instances that evoke plausible deniability rather than the more factually transparent entertaining schadenfreude of provocations in casual othering. It has far reaching detrimental consequences to our national security, our democracy, and to our very own sensibilities as Americans. Yet most of us will deny seeing it this way.
Many scholarly studies on the topic of inattentional blindness tend to excuse forms of racism like maladjusted social cohesion and inimical activity as a factor of innate human nature. Nah. This is fiction. The antagonism associated with imperious group membership is psychologically constructed, and not at all a natural occurrence in human behavior. As highly social beings we are interdependent and interconnected in countless ways both big and small and to the extent of how we interrelate to one another it has profoundly affected us socioeconomically. It would be hard to dismiss this fact as the catylyst for our evolutionary persistence. I wish there were more time and energy spent finding rationale to repair rather than there are inducements to fracture social ties.
On Friday, he boasted “Trump stock market rally is far outpacing past U.S. presidents,” and he vowed that the “BEST IS YET TO COME!” Trump is making the economy and stock market a key focus on his reelection campaign. He often likes to claim this is the “best” or an “unprecedented” scenario, even when that is not the case.
While the stock market has performed well under Trump, it is not an unprecedented performance. Trump’s stock market returns still lag behind Obama and Clinton at this point in their first terms.
If you think or view our economy as impressive moving at such a slow seesawing clip as impressive then where do you think this economy would be at in terms of pace and development were it based on the strength of its true diversity and inclusion that mirrors the world it wants to do business with? It isn’t imaginable because the system is geared to advantage some at the expense of disadvantaging others.
Diversity remains an unfulfilled promised in a variety of elite industries, including tech and finance as well as at big media companies like The New York Times.
Direct an indirect racial trauma cuts both ways and how we try to dismiss it or choose to avoid it rather than acknowledge it and treat it does have defeatist implications to the overall well-being of our citizenry. This sort of socialization impairs or dulls the mind. A society plagued by a caustic social construct can make rash and baseless decisions politically that contradict democracy and disinvite unity.
In 1910, black farmers made up about 14 percent of American farmers, owning over 14 million acres. In 2012, only about 1.5 percent of American farmers were black, and most had smaller farms — about a quarter of the size of the average white-owned farm, according to the Department of Agriculture.
Under the current administration we have come full circle on post-racial America — as it were. President Trump is charismatic in his derision of others and in his contempt for constitutional law. He is considered the Knight of faith ordained by evangelicals to salvage and lead their racial ideology. This harkens back to what America was intended for, how our democratic institutions were designed and how they were predicated on what was sophistically construed as self-evident in the way it substantiates social stratification via racilization under lawful hierarchical privilege and entitlement.
And if you can’t see that…well?!?
Quite conspicuous is the inattentional blindnesss of nearly half of the voting population ever seen since Donald Trump began his campaign conveniently disguised or camouflaged as populism. Blame populism and not hatred’s invidious racializations was used to quiet such an alarming sequence of events that year.
“America’s elites deserve Donald Trump,” suggested an article in The Week, blaming the businessman’s rise on the inability of Democrats and Republicans to meet the needs of middle-class whites. BuzzFeed floated the notion that “America can’t stop watching Donald Trump” because he’s better than most American reality TV. A recent Washington Post piece explored “the uniquely American appeal of Trump’s favorite insult.” Then there’s Rolling Stone’s investigation into “how America made Donald Trump unstoppable.” (The answer, according to Matt Taibbi: The “flaw in the American Death Star” is that “it doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.”)
There are many instances of callousness in media journalism that promote and obscure inattentional blindness to their audience. Even when race is brought up they forget to include its direct correlation to racism. The two concepts are one, and the same. If we as Americans are suppose to be primarily concerned with only the “middle-class whites” group membership and their imperious state in the U.S. then we fail to see the fear and hatred in the racism that such a proposition implies. In a report published by the Brookings Institution the middle class is in fact more and more race-plural.
Who is the middle class? What does the changing racial composition of the middle class mean for politics, or policy? Our goal here is to provide some empirical grounding to this debate. We describe the changing racial composition of a group we define as the middle class: those between the 20th and 60th percentiles of the income distribution. The middle class according to this definition was predominantly white in 1980, but is only just majority white (56 percent) today, and will be race-plural (what some label “majority minority,” a phrase we dislike) by 2042 (see Note 1). Within the next quarter century, we estimate that whites will no longer be the majority of the middle class, as Hispanics and other minority groups age into the adult population (see Note 2).¹
This means that the concerns of a shrinking middle class have been distorted by race to ignore the rise of minorities to this rank in American society. And as this rise becomes more and more prominent the economic influence has dwindled making it more than just a political concern. What you don’t see, or don’t expect to see is clearly in your face. It is how minority inclusion has factored in these calculations and has caused resentment because of trends that become more race plural for the middle class as it becomes less influential economically. Why is that?
The “economic influence” of the middle class has also dropped sharply over time, said the OECD report, which was published on April 10. Across the OECD, middle incomes have increased by just 0.3% per year, on average, over the past decade. By comparison, in the decade before the financial crisis, middle incomes grew by 1.6% per year, and by 1% the decade before that.²
For the sake of brevity I will limit my case in point. What drives and expands the middle class is certainly not the gig economy, but a career oriented economy — one that offers job security, opportunity, equal pay, and growth. Such demands warrant transparency from the corporations that receive all types of subsidies, enticements, and tax advantages from the government — also known as corporate welfare. However due to the persistent numbers of discrimination lawsuits filed against companies that lack diversity and representation in the US you can once again glean what is clearly in your face.
For the Fed, where three quarters of its research economists are men and most are white, facing up to the lack of women and minorities among these employees isn’t just a matter of appearances. A staff that better reflects the U.S. population could limit the potential for groupthink or blind spots that hinder the central bank’s assessment of how the economy is changing.
In the last few years, competitors Wells Fargo & Co. and Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch paid racial-discrimination settlements for $35.5 million and $160 million, respectively.
And yet the federal response to this is to eliminate an Obama-era rule (no surprise here) that would have not only put pressure on companies to be more diverse but also provide more transparencey and lessen the likelihood of discrimination suits, inequality, and the shrinking of the middle class.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said Wednesday it plans to shelve an Obama-era rule to collect pay data in what Democratic lawmakers and advocates said was a setback to efforts to achieve equal pay for women and people of color.
The decision — yet another twist in the years-long fight to get employers to share more data about how they pay their employees — marks another win for the business community and the Trump administration’s deregulation agenda.
The EEOC is charged with enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws related to job applicants and employees.
It is more than just the irony here it is the fact that we clearly don’t want to address how race and racism wreaks havoc on our progress and civility with and toward one another, respectively.
The hate crimes are also significant to the inattentional blindness we face in tragic moments spawned by imperious group memberships in the U.S. that are formed specifically out of race and its correlation to racism.
These people are not petty criminals they are motivated by an ignorance of ignorance and prefer to air their grievances and resentments through hate. They are the inverse of white supremacist proups acting imperious towards others for reasons that simply amount to hate. It gets stupider and stupider.
This woman is not insane. Her actions are a manifestation of irrational grievances motivated by hatred and ignorance (not wanting to know better) which simply came to a head, and for which she just happened to get caught. Many, like her, simply perform these acts in their heads as part of their wild imagination rather than actuate contemptuous offences based solely on racializations. Some joke about doing heinous acts — again based solely on racializations — like these as a more subdued release and then act as if nothing racially untoward was transgressed in anyway.
Hate is apparent. It is all around us and is conveyed in every mode imaginable planted by a ill-conceived nation. When we fail to recognize it by race which correlates to racism we get groupthink infestations among the populace that spread hate-filled viruses that do nothing but harm and attack our whole being. Withering away form the inside out we appear unrecognizable as a nation of immigrants. We are watching the same thing over and over again, yet fail to see the common denominator.
And Trump says the best is yet to come😐😑😐.
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