Only A Dream

[eyelessgame]

There is a very common self-brainwashing technique - I've seen it used in everything from professional circles to people talking frankly about their experiences with evangelism - related to imposter syndrome, most commonly described as "fake it till you make it".

You know you're not the thing you want to be - you're not in that headspace - so the thing to do, it argues, is just *pretend* you are, and over time you will brainwash yourself into being it. Pretend you have confidence, for example, and over time you will, almost without realizing it, gain confidence.

Needless to say it often doesn't work - though some have argued that everything about civilization depends to some extent on it - you express an ideal you don't live up to, but constantly challenge yourself to reach it, because otherwise you won't even try, and nothing will get better.

I had one of the closest things I've ever had to a religious experience at the House of Mary in Turkey, contemplating lies, and the real edifices built around lies and the authentic lives lived in the service of lies, and how important it must be to choose our lies carefully.

But this only works sometimes. It works for sure if the only thing you lack is confidence. If on the other hand you declare a problem is solved and it's actually not, it doesn't solve itself. If you lack something besides confidence, besides just mindset - if there is a real deficiency or broken process, and you just ignore it by denying it's there - it will fester, it will blow up in your face.

If there are problems beyond just a mindset, you have to *admit and address* the problems. No one likes to do that. Admitting your own deficiencies is humiliating. And addressing it takes enormous work, and sometimes you will fail.

And I think about all this on this day particularly, because one of my children, in fourth grade, came home one day and told us the story of American race relations as it was taught to them in school.

"White people used to think black people were inferior. But then Martin Luther King Jr. gave his 'I Have A Dream' speech in Washington, and then white people realized black people weren't inferior."

That was it. When you distill it down to a ten-year-old's confident and innocent declaration, it's preposterous on its face.

But it took me a minute to realize *this is how a lot of white Americans think it happened.*

I think the mainstream belief of white America, among my generation, has been something not a good deal more sophisticated than that one statement.

If you are white and in your fifties, you almost certainly grew up thinking racism was a problem America "used to have". It was a problem the Sixties, supposedly, *solved* - and more and more, over time, it became a truism that the problem was specifically solved by Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech.

Put that way, of course, no thinking adult would admit to believing one speech altered the entire country. And of course there were real regulatory and legal changes made, gradually and painfully and in the face of strident and violent opposition, that did tear down explicit barriers that used to exist.

But somehow we were all conditioned not to ask the obvious question...

If racism is a thing of the past, and since one speech could not, of course, magically end racism by itself, *at what point do you believe racism actually ended*? If you grew up thinking that racism was a thing of the past, what event actually caused it to become a thing of the past?

There wasn't one. We just stopped admitting it was there.

We faked it.

There's really no getting around that.

We faked it. Some of us, to be sure, faked it in the sincere hope that by *declaring* the impulses of bigotry to be neanderthal, uncivilized, old-fashioned, mistaken, stupid beliefs no longer held by any worthwhile person, over time they would actually become so - and that the economic inequalities that centuries of bigotry and oppression had generated could just be erased... as - after all - America was a land of opportunity, surely. Remove the official barriers, declare minds changed, and they will change, and equity will follow.

We faked it, in the hope that we would make it.

But remember, that only works when all you lack is confidence.

if you lack something besides confidence, besides just mindset - if there is a real deficiency or broken process, and you just ignore it by denying it's there - it will fester, it will blow up in your face.

The carving of MLKJ is unfinished. He half-emerges from unyielding stone.

There is more work to do, and we must first admit the deficiency.