So school is in! I have just recently started a Organizational Behavior class in which we are required to watch videos and apply them to the subject we are learning. The very first video was a TED Talk called "Inclusion, Exclusion, Illusion and Collusion" - Dr. Helen Turnbull. And, man, this is worth watching by EVERYONE.
Dr, Turnbull touches upon the two seemingly simple theories of the Blind Spot and Inclusion. There is nothing simple about the layers of our lives that are, in fact, discretely distorted by the Blind Spots in all of us. To lay it in short terms, blind spots are predispositions towards categorizing someone's character based off of culture, religion, sex and, yes, skin color, are among the many things that cause Blind Spots in our life.
More attention needs to be paid to how this affects our schools. And here is a short story to illustrate this dense idea: My siblings and I had just moved to our new home in Kentucky. My mom joined the military and it felt like soon we were being taken from SOUTH FLORIDA to a place I had only known through emergency cramming of names of the 50 states for high school and Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC). I was not only disappointed by my KFC experience in Kentucky but, also, by my peers, school administrators, and teachers.
My peers asked me to join their "gangs". Not knowing that I was JUST a nerdy kid who enjoyed his classes and didn't actively pursue such things. But I looked the part. My school administrators saw it fit to pull me out of my classes and test me to see if I was proficient enough to not go to ESOL. Not knowing that I had a deep love for MY English language. But I looked the part.
Last one I promise! My teachers, one in particular, would spend the entire time I was in that school trying to recruit me for the Soccer Team. Because I looked the part. What's so bad about the soccer team? Nothing. What's wrong about being Latino and loving soccer? Nothing at all. What's wrong is that this man never said a word to me. I hadn't played soccer since 7th grade, and even that was minimal. He never asked me if that's what I wanted to do.
Ponder on why a teacher would not recognize me for my potential in writing or chess? Why wasn't I labeled to anything else other than a ESOL kid, who is probably in a gang and probably is naturally gifted at soccer. Why was nothing else expected from me in my short semester stay there? Because I didn't look the part.
These are all examples of Blind Spots. Slight biases we all have towards different groups of people. I hold no grudge to those people because we ALL have these tendencies. Complaining about discrimination won't change things. How then? How do we find these Blind Spots? How do we stop them from distorting our perception of someone?
Anytime you may find yourself feeling a Caucasian man cannot empathize to discrimination or feeling that African American kid as too well-spoken to be black. He's a Republican he must be racist. She's a Liberal she must be a socialist. Any presumed flaw of a stranger based on absolutely no evidence of their character is a blind spots my friends. I hope you dive deeper into how you include and exclude others. A mind that is never questioned is not a mind worth having.
Turnbull, H., Dr. (2013). TEDx Talks: Inclusion, Exclusion, Illusion and
Collusion : Helen Turnbull at TEDxDelrayBeach. Retrieved August 26,
2016, from
