10) A Call to Embrace
Some of you may have noticed that this post is a week late. I didn't forget . . . I've just had a difficult time writing this last "10 of 10". I suppose that I wanted this last blog to feel conclusive, like I could just wrap up all the messy issues I've been writing about in a nice neat little bow and present them here with a "Happy Holidays! Hope you enjoyed reading!" message, or something equally cheerful. You'll be glad to know I gave up on that idea. But I did spend a lot of time thinking about what I've written so far, and what seems to have resonated the most with you, my readers. I've also tried to consider what I'm writing in the larger context of what's happening in the country today. I decided that I wanted to share some stories with you that don't directly have anything to do with healthcare, but are very connected to the issues I've raised. Before the stories . . . a theory.
I've talked about a lot of systemic problems in this blog, problems that can seem so complex, so overwhelming, that it can be tempting to just close our eyes to all of it. But I want to posit a slightly different point of view - that there are really just two layers to all of these problems, a top and bottom layer. In my experience, most of us spend about 98% of our time on the top layer, solving the "process problems" - resource distribution, value, efficiency, growth, customer satisfaction, etc. But I'd like to suggest that the really intractable problems, the ones that receive less attention, that feed into nearly every issue in the top layer, boil down to just one thing - do the human beings in these systems trust each other? Do they see one another? And ultimately, are they willing to cross whatever barriers may exist between them?
Here's the story I want to share, and why I feel so strongly about people's ability to see or not see one another. When I was about 21, I experienced an almost 180 degree shift in how I viewed the world, and how I viewed people. Although I can never go back to being the person I was before that happened, I can still remember a lot about that person, and the way she used to think about things. It makes me a whole lot more understanding about people who think differently from me now . . . because I used to think differently from me. If 16-year-old Rachel Weissburg had met 26-year-old Rachel Weissburg, they would have equally horrified each other! Lately, when writing this blog, that 16-year-old has come to mind quite a bit, and I think the reason is because she reminds me of how easily I might have gone through my life . . . if circumstances had worked out differently, if I hadn't met the people I had met, if I hadn't gone to the college I did, or developed relationships with people who challenged my belief system . . . how easily I might have gone through my life without the ability to really see people.
It's not that I was an unkind person. Not at all. But I was raised in a home and environment that gave me a very carefully defined view of the world, that taught me to think categorically about people and issues. It was when I got to college that I met people who helped me to think differently, to expand my worldview. But there was one experience in particular, my junior year, that had the greatest impact. At the time, I was a teaching assistant for one of my theology professors, who was revising a book he'd published previously about Israel, and Palestinian Christians in particular. I was helping him update the beginning of the book, which contained some overall history of the modern state of Israel.
That project changed my life. I spent hours upon countless hours researching the history of the country - far more than I needed to for the book. The more I learned about both sides of the conflict, the more I felt like I understood and could even sympathize with both perspectives. It probably sounds strange (it certainly does to me and I'm the one saying it), but at the time, this realization - that I could acknowledge truth in opposing arguments - scared the bejeezus out of me. I had been raised to believe that truth was absolute - always black and white; the ability to see grey made me me feel distinctly uncomfortable. It wasn't until years later that I could recognize the enormity of how this one assignment changed the whole course of my life, and to be grateful for it.
Around the same time I was researching and writing about the Middle East, I was introduced to the writing of Miroslav Volf, a Croatian theologian, and his book, Exclusion and Embrace. It was the perfect book for me at that point in my intellectual and theological journey, as I was wrestling with letting go of my "us vs. them" mentality while still trying to maintain moral clarity. The premise of Exclusion and Embrace is that individuals and societies are prone to treat "otherness", simply being different, as a problem that must be dealt with in some way. This is what Volf labels as "exclusion", and he explores at length the many reasons we do it, such as someone looking different from us, having something we want, or challenging our status quo. I am particularly struck by this one penetrating insight by Volf: "We assimilate or eject strangers in order to ward off the perceived threat of chaotic waters rushing in." (pg. 78, emphasis mine) On a purely biological level, we eject/reject/distrust strangers because they threaten our way of life and therefore our survival.
Volf presents "embrace" - the act of reconciliation and healing - as the anecdote to the problem of exclusion. As a Christian theologian, he presents the story of Jesus' life as the ultimate act of embrace - not only because of his commitment to the outcasts in his society, but more importantly because of his willingness to die in place of people who hated him. The apostle Paul in the New Testament refers to the Christian story as a "scandal" because it doesn't make any sense. It turns all of our instincts for survival on their head. When we want to exclude, even for perfectly legitimate reasons, it calls us to embrace.
For Volf, this theology was anything but hypothetical. He wrote his book in response to a direct question he was asked by someone in his native country, "But can you embrace a cetnik?" It was 1993, and this term referred to the Serbian fighters who had decimated his native Croatia, herded thousands into concentration camps, committed mass rape, burned down churches, and killed men, women, and children. Volf realized that his honest answer at that point was no, he could not. But as a Christian, he wanted to be able to say yes. The book was his own personal struggle to answer the question, "How do you embrace your enemy?"
I think today's modern society needs to hear and grapple with these questions. Whatever religion or non-religion we practice, Volf's message still applies. For each system we are trying to fix in our society, solutions always begin by paying attention to each other - and I mean really paying attention. There is so much anger in America right now - anger, and disappointment, and a desire to be proven right, to "one up" our political opponent, or whoever we are competing with. And we flatter ourselves that we have truth, that we have right in our corner, so we're justified in feeling this sense of certainty. And we're justified in condemning "the other". But this just feeds the shaming cycle. It's a constant circle that goes round and round and causes more pain. Only by embracing the other can this cycle be stopped.
In 21st century America, the word "tolerance" is used a lot.* We are asked to "show tolerance" to people who think differently from us, or look different, etc. But let me tell you why I think tolerance may not be the answer we're looking for. The literal definition of tolerate is "to allow the existence of" or "to endure without repugnance; to put up with". Is this really what we want to encourage in our society? Putting up with each other without repugnance? Where does that leave us when real conflict occurs? My issue with tolerance is that it leaves room for silence and indifference. The Jewish population in pre-World War II Germany were tolerated . . and then everyone just looked the other way when they disappeared. As Volf explains it, to embrace is to "open the arms, wait, close the arms, and open them again." (p. 141) It's active; not passive. The few brave Germans who embraced Jews took them into their homes, or found ways to keep them out of the gas chambers.
Michelle Alexander, in her stunning book, The New Jim Crow, talks about about how the modern concept of "colorblindness" has done more damage than repair to race relations in this country. Alexander makes the case that by claiming to be "colorblind," society has committed mass injustices against African Americans, and gotten away with it. "Saying that one does not care about race is offered as an exculpatory virtue, when in fact it can be a form of cruelty. It is precisely because we, as a nation, have not cared much about African Americans that we have allowed our criminal justice system to create a new racial undercaste." (Alexander, p. 241)
It's always easier to identify sins of commission, rather than omission. But I think what Alexander is saying is that it's the sins of omission, practiced by a large swath of society, that are actually the greater problem. Tolerance is a good thing when it's an active choice. When it becomes passive, when it becomes a turning away . . a choice not to engage, because it's hard and uncomfortable to do the work of creating trust, that's when it can be dangerous. It's dangerous for two reasons. The first I've already mentioned; the lack of action on behalf of others who need it is what allows systemic injustice to occur. The second problem is is that we are never really alone. Meaning . . . whatever barriers that exist between us and another person - whether it's class, gender, religion, race, etc. - that we are choosing not to address (but simply to tolerate) - are still very much alive in our conscious and subconscious brains. And real life doesn't give us the luxury of operating in bubbles. We have to engage - every day, with all sorts of people, in a myriad of ways. And how we think about others, how we choose to interact with them, can have devastating repercussions. Let's look at one example of how our conscious and subconscious thinking about "the other" - in a system designed to serve and protect - can go awry, and what can be done to fix it.
With the invention of smartphones, a seemingly ubiquitous pattern of behavior by police - discharging their weapon on unarmed black citizens - was suddenly being documented by other citizens and forced into the public eye. This is perhaps the most grievous example of a system failing the very people it is meant to "protect and serve", and while there are obviously huge differences between law enforcement and the healthcare system, the similarity that I'd like to call your attention to is the moment of trust or distrust - that decisive "do I include or exclude you?" that police often make in a split second, that providers often make in 30 seconds or less with their patients. In both situations, you have someone with power, in a hierarchical system, choosing how to interact with someone who is outside of that system, and yet dependent on it.
The Tampa Bay Times released a powerful investigative report this year, titled, "Why Cops Shoot" - the most comprehensive compilation of police shooting data to date (no one really tracks police shootings consistently, which is part of the problem - as the Times points out**). The paper had made a decision after the shooting of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO, to compile data on police shootings in Florida, between the years of 2009-2014, rather than relying on anecdotal media stories. According to their report, "Florida's police shot 827 people in those six years, or about one every 2 1/2 days. More than half - 434 - were fatal. Each year had about the same number of shootings, an average of 138. Nearly a fifth of the people shot - 156 - were unarmed; no gun, no knife, no vehicle. And half of those were black, in a state where blacks make up just 15 percent of the population. That means unarmed black people were nearly eight times as likely to be shot by police than whites."
Radiolab aired two episodes on the Tampa Bay Times' findings. In Shots Fired, Part 1, there's an interesting conversation that the Times' reporter, Ben Montgomery, has with Daytona's Police Chief, Mike Chitwood, about the tactics Chitwood has used to train his officers and reduce both the number of shootings overall in Daytona and specifically the number of white officers shooting black citizens. Unlike the rest of the state, Daytona's ticket and arrest ratio breaks roughly along its racial demographic lines of 60/40, and in a four year period, with a population of 62,000 and many visitors - spring breakers, biker events, etc. - there were only 4 police shootings. (4 shootings in 4 years, in a state that averages a shooting every 2 1/2 days!) Montgomery wanted to know how they achieved this. What was Daytona doing differently?
The first thing Police Chief Chitwood did when the police shooting stories starting hitting the news was send his officers to "Race and Policing Training", where they learned two important things: 1) "We are a racist country", and 2) "We all have bias." In other words, he created a narrative that helped his officers become self-aware of their tendency to exclude, to place people on the outside.
The next thing he did was focus on the biology of what happens when police officers are in a hostile situation, and there is the opportunity to shoot. Chitwood had his officers tactically re-trained, with an emphasis on slowing down and creating space between them and the person they were interacting with - things like not putting their finger on the trigger but rather having it on the side of the gun, to give their pre-frontal cortex a second longer to provide important information before their emotional amygdala screamed a decision at them. (i.e. he's holding a gun! shoot! oh no! it's just a cell phone! don't shoot!)
Related to this, Chitwood talks about how important it is to hire people who have been in a physical fight, who understand how their body and brain will react when they are under stress and feeling fear. He likes hiring veterans for this reason, because they are already trained for just this type of scenario. He also prefers hiring people whose previous jobs have put them in the community on a daily basis, such as bouncers at a bar. Bouncers not only have experience with physical altercation, but they've gotten to know the people in the community one-on-one. Person X who may have committed a crime becomes Joe who comes in every Monday to watch the game, has a few too many, but is basically a decent guy.
There's a powerful story that Chitwood uses in his officer training, an example of how to deescalate and avoid a shooting, that you can hear if you listen to the podcast. Two officers are called to the scene when a mentally ill black man who is off his meds is reported in the street, shirtless, waving a large knife. The officers warn him several times to put the knife down, which he doesn't. He actually advances on them, still holding the knife. At this point, and it happens so quickly it's easy to miss, you can hear one of the officers say, "Derek, put the knife down." Before you even register the significance of that brief sentence, the same officer yells, "Taser taser taser!" Derek falls down, the knife gets taken away, and you can hear the officer chiding him for not immediately dropping the knife. But remarkably, unlike the hundreds of other similar cases that you can read about in the Tampa Bay Times report - of other mentally ill people shot by police - no one is hurt. Later in the show, Mike Chitwood is out driving in the community and you can hear him calling out a hello to Derek, who's now back on his meds, fully clothed, no knife, who yells back a greeting.
While there are no silver bullets for building trust on a mass scale, what we do have are these rare examples of micro-cultures that exist within larger systems (e.g. the Daytona Police Force; HIV care, etc.) that are tackling their challenges head on, and paying attention to each other - the workers in the system - and the people they are meant to serve. They are moving beyond tolerance and colorblindness to healing acts of embrace. This is where we should be looking for answers to our system problems. While I do believe that change is possible - we have to really want it. Change is always like swimming upstream. It is hard, and few enjoy it. But I've told some of my stories in the hope that it will inspire you, my readers, to tell yours. I also hope it will encourage all of us to use whatever authority we have - and everyone has authority! - to be a change agent. What if we questioned a little more? Proposed an alternative plan? Made the brave choice, the risky choice? Turned towards the person we don't know, rather than away? Started a conversation?
*I want to clarify that there are some organizations, such as Teaching Tolerance, that are doing really meaningful work in bias training, prejudice awareness, and social justice education. This is not what I am referring to when I talk about tolerance as a meaningless abstract concept; I could just as easily call this organization Teaching Embrace.
**According to the Police Executive Research Forum (of which Police Chief Mike Chitwood is a member), The Washington Post and The Guardian have both started to track police shootings on a national scope
“The deeply flawed nature of colorblindness, as a governing principle, is evidenced by the fact that the public consensus supporting mass incarceration is officially colorblind. It purports to see black and brown men not as black and brown, but simply as men - raceless men - who have failed miserably to play by the rules the rest of us follow quite naturally. The fact that so many black and brown men are rounded up for drug crimes that go largely ignored when committed by whites is unseen. Our collective colorblindness prevents us from seeing this basic fact. ”