Monday, July 15, 2013

Suspicious

Having or showing a cautious distrust of someone or something.

When one reads that Merriam-Webster definition closely it is from the perspective of owing the feeling.

Having or showing a cautious distrust of someone or something.

When one types in the word suspicious into Google with no other descriptors this is what results.

It is a Caucasian man with suspicion on his mind as expressed by his eyes. The reason I bring this up is because I have a theory and it is based in 'learned perception.'

Learning usually means some level of emotional competency.

The picture is characterizing a person in control of the suspicion. Remember that. This Caucasian man IS suspicious and has control of that suspicion. Got it?

 The limbic system (or paleomammalian brain) is a complex set of brain structures that lies on both sides of the thalamus, right under the cerebrum. It is not a separate system, but a collection of structures from the telencephalon, diencephalon, and mesencephalon.

The limbic system includes the hippocampus, amygdala, anterior thalamic nuclei, septum, habenula, limbic cortex and fornix.
It supports a variety of functions, including emotion, behavior, motivation, long-term memory, and olfaction.

I am not complaining about Google. The search engine is random. I trust that randomness. It has never failed to prove to be random when asking for results.


Ready?

When I type in suspicious hoodie, this is what I get. And this is the most benign picture I could find. But, the race changes throughout the experiment, as unscientific as it is.

This black man is not in charge of being suspicious, he is the victim of those suspicious of him. That is huge. A single word when used in relation to a piece of clothing loses the meaning of the word completely. 

It has been in recent decades the limbic system has been studied for it's impact on the human brain, how it operates and how that translates into learning and behavior.

For as long as I can remember emotional learning of fear and suspicion was played out on television and movies by black men. The emotional learning of generations of Americans when it comes to fear and suspicion has leveled approval at the cost of the Black American Man.

I could go on and on about the socio-economic oppression that has resulted by all that but it is mute. We have a prison system full of Black American Men with little or no recourse to change their lives. That isn't the point. When a emotional learning of fear or suspicion occurs it lasts for a lifetime. It is sometimes called PTSD depending on it's depth. If one follows the theory I propose there is profound need for removal of stereotypes of all kinds across the spectrum of our media and learning of each other. 

There was once a Supreme Court Judge that demanded busing for a balanced learning experience of our children. The reason was not so much to state assets had to be equal for equal learning, but, more important was to bring about an understanding we are all Americans, born into equal circumstances. He was brilliant.

What occurred over the decades since that Supreme Court decision was segregation. Separate, but, equal SOMETIMES. The idea suspicion and fear is dark and black and manifests in particular ways as perceived by the average American is manifesting from somewhere. It is learned.

We have a problem. Because if I am right, over the decades this has occurred was an engrained image of suspicion, fear and hate that will last yet generations even if we change everything today and right now. 

The saving grace in all this is that there has been incredible insight over the decades Americans have struggled with their suspicions. "To Kill a Mockingbird" was a masterpiece to bring about social awareness. It is not a  minor movie. It has a great deal of depth to the need for our society to change.

If we can learn to be suspicious, in fear and hate. Then we can unlearn it. We desperately, as a nation, need to unlearn it. We need to remove the long engrained image in media of the nameless, faceless Black Man. It has to stop.