If You Believe: How Perception Becomes Reality

My biggest laugh in recent months came not when I was watching Bill Maher's show on HBO, "Saturday Night Live," or the new sitcom "Blackish." Instead I was watching a news show that was focused on politics. When the commentator said that the Republican party chairman had kissed Donald Trump's ring in order to persuade him to sign the pledge to support the Republican nominee, I laughed loudly for several minutes. I wasn't laughing at the party chairman or Trump the Clown, although he can still occasionally make me laugh; I was laughing because I suddenly realized what the phrase "kiss the ring" means. In the days before the ring-kissing comment, I had been debating a conservative on Google+ who had argued that Obama bowed and kissed the ring of the Saudi King. He had included a video clip of the alleged incident, but I pointed out that we couldn't see Obama kissing the King's ring. We did see the President bending down in what appeared to be a rather awkwardly deep bow to the King, but the man standing beside Obama blocked our view so that we couldn't see what the President was actually doing. After our first exchange, the conservative posted another video of the alleged ring-kissing incident and claimed that this time we could clearly see Obama kissing the ring. We could not; it was the same scene, but under this video was posted the comment "Obama kisses the King's ring." I told my conservative opponent that whoever posted the video was probably being sarcastic, and I now wondered if Obama might have been picking something up that he or the King dropped instead of bowing in that scene. The next day, I heard the ring-kissing comment. When I explained to my opponent, who was still insisting that Obama was bowing and did, in fact, kiss the ring, what I had discovered about that phrase, that it meant apple-polishing, sucking up, or brown-nosing, he dropped the argument but never admitted that he had been fooled by his biases into believing that he saw something that he didn't actually see.

My debate opponent's belief that he saw something that didn't happen is an extreme example of how we all tend not only to believe what we need or want to believe but to see what we expect, need, or want to see. I've argued in other social media comments that the people who believe that Obama is a Muslim from Kenya or that Trump is going to deport all of the Mexican-Americans and Muslims, thus stopping the browning of America, are suffering from a vile form of dementia called racism. Racism, like dementia, I argue, is immune to facts and logic.

Another example of how we allow our biased perception to become reality also happened on Google+, where the commenters are less politically correct than on other social media sites, and focused more directly on race and racism. When I joined the conversation, a white woman was debating a white man and a black woman about white privilege versus black victimization. The white woman thought that the whites were the victims, and blacks were privileged. She made some valid points, such as that only whites tend to be seen as racist and that blacks are viewed as cooler than whites. In fact, I pointed out that blacks are generally seen as both cooler and warmer than whites. But some of her arguments were bizarre. She claimed that whites were seen as nerds and not athletic. First of all, I didn't understand why whites being seen as nerds and not as athletic as blacks would be a sign of oppression, but maybe that's because I am a nerdy teacher. Second, I thought she was wrong. One of the most iconic nerds is the black television character Steve Urkel, and I said that the nonwhite clockmaker who was suspended from school recently because the teachers thought his clock was a bomb was clearly a nerd. I also pointed out that whites were more athletic than blacks in certain sports, such as hockey, race car driving, swimming, and (despite Serena and Tiger) golf and tennis. But the point where this angry white woman really showed that she was "blind and could not see" was her argument that blacks could break the law and whites couldn't. What!? I asked her how many unarmed whites did she know that had been shot by police for committing crimes. How many were arrested and "committed suicide"? I was so shocked by her clearly inaccurate perception that I forgot to ask her if she knew the percentage of blacks who were incarcerated in comparison with whites. I ended my lecture by agreeing with the white woman that blacks could sometimes "play the victim," as she suggested, mentioning the inappropriate complaints about black actors not receiving Oscar nominations this year (this conversation happened before the inappropriate politically correct nonsense about the UCLA students blackening their face to play Kanye West), but then said that I was astounded that white people could see themselves and not blacks as victims, given our histories in America. Her silence made me hope that she had seen the light and was maybe a bit ashamed by her earlier suggestion that blacks were privileged and whites were victims.

While I'm more likely to chastise racists who have been blinded by their biases, I've encountered liberals with the same problem. Seeing an opportunity to push my "Fitzgerald was influenced by Johnson" argument, I joined a Goodreads conversation focused on a list of important books to read that Fitzgerald had made in the late thirties. Some of the multiculturalists who joined the debate criticized Fitzgerald for not including more women and nonwhite writers. I agreed with the people who pointed out that we shouldn't judge Fitzgerald by today's standards, even though I thought the Fitzgerald defenders were a bit too defensive and snarky in their responses. But one feminist deserved the verbal slap that she received when she criticized Fitzgerald for not including on his circa 1936 list a feminist novel that was not yet written when he died. Okay, Fitzgerald was a drunk and a racist, but we can't criticize him for not having read and recommended a book that was written when he was "dust in the wind."

Because of our tendency to believe what we want or need to believe, there are people who believe that our President is a Muslim from Kenya, that Donald Trump, who doesn't have one grandparent born in America, is Captain America and will stop the browning of America by deporting the Latinos and Muslims, that only white people are racists, that only black people have been oppressed, that only women can be victimized, and only men can victimize, that only black people can sing (have you heard Michael McDonald?) or dance (have you seen the Houghs?), and that America was great when it was whiter.

To avoid embarrassing ourselves on social media as some of my debate opponents have, we all need to remember that we see the world through race, gender, generation, class, and regional biases that sometimes blind us to the truth. If we know what our biases are, we are less likely to mistake our biased perceptions for reality. We are less likely to see the President kissing a ring or to believe that white people are more victimized by the justice system than blacks are.