Intuition may be smart, and it may in extremis be smarter than social conditioning, but how many of us actually know how to respond to that intuition?
Yeah. Yeah, this. I remember this from reading this years ago: "Wait, but my intuition sucks, and I know it does... so how do I give in to it, exactly?"
But in which category do racially-motivated fears go? Studies consistently show that white Americans have a physiological fear response to the sight of African-American men in particular situations.
As I said it's been years since I read this book, and I agree with you about trying to divvy up into categories something that is more messy than he makes it out to be, but I'd say it goes in the category (mostly) of worry, yeah? I mean, if you've personally experienced that black people tend to beat you up and white people don't, then, yeah, fear response. But for most of us -- and I do mean us; I was brought up in a racially-charged culture (Southeastern US; Asian coded as "white" in my town) -- it was a systematic being told what black people were and were not like that had nothing to do with the actual reactions of actual black people.
And I think it's the same sort of thing when it's dinned into me every day by the media that if I let my child talk to strangers that Terrible Things Could Happen. Both induce physiological responses in me that I know rationally are incorrect, and (again, if I remember correctly, which I might not) it seems to me that this is the thing he's mostly complaining about (though again, I totally agree that he's a little too blase and clean-cut about the whole thing, and does not at all discuss race in particular).
(I bring up the media thing because I loved this part of the book, where he talks about how the media just exacerbates this whole problem.)
But sometimes we don't see. And the way De Becker tries to teach readers to process in-the-moment what he can only reconstruct in example post facto strikes me as pretty problematic.
Yeah -- I agree. My husband tends to be pretty good about observing things (though not necessarily people -- I'm talking about things like when he realized something was wrong with our car even though he wasn't driving, even though I had no idea), and he doesn't always know what he sees and he can't explain it (he still can't explain why he suddenly lunged over to look at the gauges), except perhaps that he's better at picking up deviations from the norm.
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Intuition may be smart, and it may in extremis be smarter than social conditioning, but how many of us actually know how to respond to that intuition?
Yeah. Yeah, this. I remember this from reading this years ago: "Wait, but my intuition sucks, and I know it does... so how do I give in to it, exactly?"
But in which category do racially-motivated fears go? Studies consistently show that white Americans have a physiological fear response to the sight of African-American men in particular situations.
As I said it's been years since I read this book, and I agree with you about trying to divvy up into categories something that is more messy than he makes it out to be, but I'd say it goes in the category (mostly) of worry, yeah? I mean, if you've personally experienced that black people tend to beat you up and white people don't, then, yeah, fear response. But for most of us -- and I do mean us; I was brought up in a racially-charged culture (Southeastern US; Asian coded as "white" in my town) -- it was a systematic being told what black people were and were not like that had nothing to do with the actual reactions of actual black people.
And I think it's the same sort of thing when it's dinned into me every day by the media that if I let my child talk to strangers that Terrible Things Could Happen. Both induce physiological responses in me that I know rationally are incorrect, and (again, if I remember correctly, which I might not) it seems to me that this is the thing he's mostly complaining about (though again, I totally agree that he's a little too blase and clean-cut about the whole thing, and does not at all discuss race in particular).
(I bring up the media thing because I loved this part of the book, where he talks about how the media just exacerbates this whole problem.)
But sometimes we don't see. And the way De Becker tries to teach readers to process in-the-moment what he can only reconstruct in example post facto strikes me as pretty problematic.
Yeah -- I agree. My husband tends to be pretty good about observing things (though not necessarily people -- I'm talking about things like when he realized something was wrong with our car even though he wasn't driving, even though I had no idea), and he doesn't always know what he sees and he can't explain it (he still can't explain why he suddenly lunged over to look at the gauges), except perhaps that he's better at picking up deviations from the norm.