Black lives matter… and what next?

Yesterday was Juneteenth. Maybe for the first time this year, you were aware of what that day means for this country and for our history. Maybe you’ve been protesting in the streets, taking to social media to share information and videos, or been having difficult conversations with others.

So now what?

It’s hard to know what is the next thing to do. Or even scarier, the ‘right thing’ to do. Regardless of where you are in your journey and where you fall on the spectrum of the various narratives about racial injustice and systemic racism, here are some concrete next steps that you CAN do.

1. Acknowledge You Have Biases

It’s important to remember that it’s absolutely impossible to be without biases. Having biases doesn’t make you bad, it makes you human! It’s just the way our brains are wired. Our brains are processing tremendous amounts of stimuli at any given moment - what we see, hear, smell, touch, taste, even if we’re thirsty or full. To help us make sense of our world and environment, our brains learned to categorize things and put labels on things. Otherwise, processing every single information as novel would overload our brains, and there wouldn’t be any mental resources to do anything else.

So biases are just inherently a part of the structure that our brains created to help us. And biases and prejudices are some of the side effects of the automatic categorization that our brain engages in. So don’t put the pressure on yourself that you need to be without prejudice, and without bias. There’s no shame or judgment for being a human being with biases.

2. Learn your Implicit Biases

Having biases is not bad, it’s inherently human. However, we can communicate our biases with our actions that can be harmful and hurtful to the people around us. And that could happen even with the best of intentions. Remember, you can have good intentions and still cause harm. To minimize the risk of that, we can learn about our own biases. The reason is simple - if we are not aware of what influences our thoughts, behaviors, and beliefs, then how could we ever hope to change them or do something different?

How can we do that? Thankfully there are many resources available on the internet to guide in this journey. Project Implicit is a resource maintained by Harvard University for people to learn about their implicit biases on a multitude of topics, such as transgender, sexuality, skin tone, Asian American, race, religion, and age, amongst others. You can take a short ‘quiz’ that can help you determine your biases around certain groups of people.

3. Make the Implicit Explicit

The primacy effect also shows us that as humans, we tend to give more weight to information presented earlier when we are forming opinions and making decisions. And the information that we get in the primacy of opinion forming doesn’t have to be explicitly presented. Even implicitly presented material, such as body language, systems, and subtle cues, all work to shape our opinions, beliefs, and decisions about a certain topic. Understanding this phenomenon can help us understand how and why we hold the opinions and beliefs that we do.

Now that you have a better understanding of your implicit biases, take some energy and time to explicitly understand how you are being influenced by them. Understanding ourselves, and specifically our implicit biases, can help us exert more intention and purpose in our behaviors and actions, rather than being unknowingly influenced by our implicit biases. Here’s a silly example - maybe in Step 2, you learned that you are implicitly biased against the color purple. Without that knowledge, you could have gone your entire life never having tried anything purple-adjacent: grapes, acai bowls, the Lakers. Now that you know your implicit bias, you can explicitly make different decisions when confronted with the color purple. Maybe you try some grape juice and hate it, and try purple yams and love them. There is no expected result from knowing your implicit biases. It’s just the difference of being controlled by your biases, or you controlling them.

4. Seek to Understand Others

You are in every literal sense of the word, a one of a kind. Even if you have identical twins, there is no one in existence who is the exact same person as you. That means that you are inevitably going to come across others who do not share your values, beliefs, thoughts, and opinions. Once that happens, take a moment to slow down, take a deep breath, and try to genuinely understand. I don’t mean ‘understand their points of view so I can point out the flaws in their argument and convince them I’m right’. But instead, a genuine curiosity and desire to understand their experience and points of view.

People naturally desire to be understood. When someone approaches us with a stance of wanting to change our minds, before even trying to hear our story, we naturally get defensive. Maybe you can relate with a childhood experience - has your caretaker ever punished you or gave you consequences for something that you didn’t feel was your fault? And they didn’t even care to hear your side? How did you feel? Probably mistreated, like your opinions don’t matter, and there is only one truth, and your truth is irrelevant. Now, when we feel that our experiences and beliefs are in danger of being invalidated, we get into overdrive to protect not only our opinions, but ourselves. So to have a genuine engagement with anybody about any topic, it’s important that you approach others as people to be understood, not people to be changed or influenced.

5. Share your Thoughts and Ideas

Once you have made the effort to understand the other person, share your thoughts and ideas with them. Hopefully they will provide you with the same courtesy and respect that you have shown them, and be genuinely interested in hearing your perspective. But even if they are not, the most and best you can do is to share your perspective, and why and how you came to that conclusion.

Are there any quantitative data that support your opinions and beliefs? This can help illuminate the difference realities that exist than the one they are aware of. How about lived experiences of other people that helped you form and shape your opinions? What have you heard from others that have influenced your journey in decision making that could also support them in theirs? Lastly, what about your own lived personal experience? This is a vulnerable thing, because once we share, we expose ourselves to be invalidated. There is pain in sharing our story with others in an effort to be understood, and for our experiences to be dismissed and negated. But, you can’t control what other people believe and how they act, but you can share about your beliefs and your ideas.

6. Accept the Outcome

Maybe the conclusion is to ‘agree to disagree’. As frustrating as that may be, sometimes, that may be the furthest we get in our conversations with others. Remember, the goal was never to change their mind, it was to understand and be understood. And whatever the conclusion is from your conversation, accept that it is what it is. Unfortunately, we cannot control what others think or do, and it’s not in anybody’s power or control to orchestrate a desired perfect end result. Know that you are just one participant in an interaction, and just as you are an autonomous human being with your own thoughts and ideas, so are everybody else that you are interacting with.

6. Know your Limits

Listen to yourself, to your body. It can be exhausting and emotionally taxing to be engaged with such acute awareness. Take a step back if you need to, and take care of yourself as your body tells you to. It’s not bad to recognize and respect your limits. That’s the healthy thing to do. And this conversation we are having is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. And you are not doing anybody favors if you burn out and can’t continue in the race. So relieve yourself of any expectation or pressure that you need to engage at a certain level at all times.

However you employ these steps, surround yourself with friends and loved ones. Those who can support you in your journey, and can share that experience with you. It can be a very painful and distressing journey, especially if you’ve never confronted it before. Be checking in with yourself throughout the journey, and don’t hesitate to rely on others as you need, as often as you need. And as always, don’t have any expectations to where you ‘should’ end up. Just take the journey and see where it takes you.