Filed under: General Semantics/Communication
WORDS AS SYMBOLIC COMMUNICATION IN THE HEALTHCARE SETTING
By Christopher Bear Beam, M.A.
I wish I could take language
And fold it like cool, moist rags.
I would lay words on your forehead.
I would wrap words on your wrists.
“There, there,” my words would say—
or something better.
I would ask them to murmur,
“Hush” and “Shh, shhh, it’s all right.”
I would ask them to hold you all night.
I wish I could take language
And daub and soothe and cool
Where fever blisters and burns,
Where fever turns yourself against you.
I wish I could take language
And heal the words that were the wounds
You have no names for.
Julia Cameron
I have worked in healthcare and social service settings for about three decades. In fact, when I first became interested in General Semantics, my motivation was for very practical reasons. I was working at that time for a small, community-based social service agency that served youth and families. What attracted me to General Semantics in this setting was how practical and “down to earth” GS principles could work in the everyday lives of adolescents as they moved through this part of their human journey.
Essentially, as I now view it, General Semantics assists us in aligning ourselves with the evident and observable structure of life existing in our environment and the rest of the universe.
Then, over two decades later, I worked in a highly clinical setting: I was a resident, hospital chaplain. Much of my role was being a ‘non anxious’ presence in the lives of people who were going through healthcare crises in their lives. It was in this setting that I began to realize how our intensional models of thinking contribute to more stress and anxiety in our lives. For example, to say, “I’m a cancer patient,” may be highly problematic for someone who thinks that this is all they are in every domain of their life: a sick person who is lives with a death sentence.
The use of extensional models of thinking, on the other hand, may help a person to “incrementalize” their illness. For instance, to say, “I have a tumor in my lungs that the surgeons need to remove; a consensus of my doctors say that this can be done
effectively and successfully through surgery. I have elected to do this surgery.”
Extensionalizing and incrementalizing are ways of thinking that bring us to more manageable and realistic expectations; the AA concept of ‘one day at a time’ is a good example of this.
The difference, General Semantics teaches us, between intensonal and extensional reasoning is that the former focuses on what we think “about the abouts.” By that, I mean if a person is told they’re terminal, and have six months to live, for many folks there may arise feelings of vulnerability, loss of autonomy and control, loss of one’s body functions and health, and fear. Where do I go in my own mind with these thoughts as I interpret them? Extensional reasoning uses more of a scientific, rational and objective form of evaluation. Eastern traditions would perhaps use the word detachment from our emotional reactions and acceptance of the world as it functions. This is also an acceptance of life viewed as sickness, health, stress, peace, birth, life, and death. These are all realities of the structure of how life functions in natural systems and human systems. Humans do have emotions and reactions to stresses, and these aren’t to be minimized, but just accepted and given liberation by detachment and letting go.
Emotional attachment leads to compulsive assumptions and behaviors that leave us stuck in unhealthy places.
As a chaplain I would often try to help people in the hospital, who happened to be sick in various ways, to “think out loud,” by asking them questions about their illness, how they felt about it, what they were thinking about what the medical staff had related to them (this in itself gives a helpful understanding since it leads to thinking “about the abouts”), and how others were relating to them due to the illness. This might encompass what friends, family members, and healthcare professionals were saying and feeling about where they were in life in that present moment. Then, I might reframe the illness by using different symbols and metaphors hopefully leading to a new way of perceiving the illness itself. Finally, if there were scientific data available that could be used to point to the realities of the illness, I would use that information.
Today, after a number of years of doing this work, I have concluded that those people who work in the field of the Healing Arts often are not equipped with the understanding of how their words are symbolic forms of communication having great import in their client’s minds. Since they are often seen as the experts in the field (this is starting to change as healthcare moves to more of participatory process, but there still are huge gaps in its practice) there is a primary accountability for taking the lead in communicating in a healthy way. I guess what I’m also saying is that it would be helpful for medical professionals to learn the principles of General Semantics that would give them more tools to work with in dialoguing with the people they serve. Another way of saying this is that it would give them a supportive means of symbol making that leads to more healthy outcomes.
Since the patient-doctor relationship (healers together)–points towards the need for trust and respect, the consumers of healthcare services need also to understand about how they react to what they hear from those in the healthcare field. Staff is responsible for this as well. People who are patients have a need to trust the staff who, for the most part, want to use as an emblematic credo ‘do no harm;’ they also need to trust how they think about what information they are given. For this to happen it’s helpful to develop critical minds for understanding one’s own emotions and thought processes, and a way to evaluate and interpret the messages they hear from the staff. Of course, this is one of the missions of General Semantics.
I have learned from the field of Family Systems Theory, developed by Murray Bowen, first working with schizophrenic families in clinical settings, that stress and anxiety can cause incredible role and communication patterns to be put in place in the family system. These patterns reach stages of concretization that set in motion ways of being in the family and the world. They often do lead to “crazymaking” thoughts and behaviors in the way they are demonstrated in the family and outside of it. Natural Systems educate us to know that humans are amazingly resilient and highly adaptive to surviving life’s stresses. Often illness itself may be used as a coping mechanism in a dysfunctional family system.
Another component to how things go down in a healthcare setting is the ability to catch an overview of the entire communicative context. Items such as the medical environment, one’s conditioning in perceiving hospitals and doctors, one’s mood at the time of diagnosis, whether a person has strong or weak family and social support, the manner in which the medical staff treats a sick person on a daily basis, an individual’s private non-verbal feelings and images about the doctors and other medical staff (does the doctor look like your mean Uncle Joe or your sweet Aunt Betty?), the scientific data about one’s illness at the time, the procedures and prognosis of various regimens of healing, one’s religious beliefs about healing and illness, and perhaps most importantly, is the food good or bad at the hospital?! All of these factors present themselves in transactional processes between patients and healthcare professionals.
To illustrate an example of what I’m getting at I would like to share with you a personal example. I’m hoping that you see me as a credible witness to the symbolic communication involved in these interactions, because I, too, am a Qualified Mental Health Professional. I am always changing, testing, observing how these dynamics are being played out as I attempt to serve people with major Mental Health diagnoses. Person A is not the same today as he/she was yesterday, or will be tomorrow. So dating is a positive strategy that may be used by those of us who work in the helping professions.
I have a some serious diagnoses. I have liver disease, clinical depression and Hepatitis C. I have been going to the VA system for medical care for these chronic illnesses. A system also communicates a cultural way, an emotional process evolves within the system, and people are impacted by it. Most people recognize that the Department of Veteran Affairs is under funded through Federal monies. Many services have been trimmed back, and even returning Vets from Iraq question whether they will receive sound treatment for physical injuries as well as PTSD (Post Traumatic Shock Syndrome). Rates of suicide are on the rise among military personnel returning from Iraq. So there is a natural “push back” by many clients of this system, and a wondering whether the system itself really appreciates the service they gave their country. Will they receive the best medical care available for serving their country?
I am a Vietnam Era Vet, and have been attempting to receive effective treatment for my Hep C. I have noticed that continuity of care is lacking if one moves to different places, and transferes to other VA clinics. In my case, I have concluded that I have ‘fallen through the cracks.’ I have received services between two major cities in Texas.
Recently I had an appointment with a Nurse Practicioner (apparently they have no liver doctor at this clinic) who is the main staff person in the clinic who works with patients who have Hep C. As she reviewed my latest blood test results, she told me, “Looks like you have advanced liver disease now. It also looks like you have a tumor on your liver. It’s inoperable, but there are some other treatments available.” She mentioned nothing to me about the possibility of a liver transplant. But she did tell me in somewhat of a matter-of-fact way, “You should get your remains in order.”
The whole conversation took me by surprise and left me feeling numb and off-balance. In short, I found myself speechless. At a time when I should have asked her a lot of questions, in my mental confusion, I couldn’t find the words to articulate what I wanted to know. She made an appointment for me to have a CAT Scan done thirteen days away; I would have to travel to another VA hospital for the imaging services since mine didn’t have the equipment to do the test.
After I left her office, I felt fear growing in my gut, and began to think in very intensional ways. I also began to simply “be” with what I was feeling at the time, and tried to let my fear drift away like smoke from a fire that was burning out. Gradually, I began to accept whatever emerged as my own personal reality. I thought of the Serenity Prayer: God help me accept what I can’t change, to change what is in my power to change, and the wisdom to know the difference (my paraphrase).
What did she mean by the phrase, ‘Get your remains in order.’ What does “remains” mean? If I’m supposed to do this now, I’m not a bag of assorted remains, but it’s a given that I am a whole person who can choose, plan, make a plan for death, tie up loose ends in my life, say good-bye to my family, etc. Even upon death, we are still persons, perhaps in some other form, but still persons (my own assumption). The word “remains” triggered the memory of my mom and sister and me taking my deceased dad’s cremated ashes to a park overlooking Lake Michigan in a suburb north of Chicago. Feelings of sadness for the loss of my dad were mixed with others, a sense of incompletion in our relationship, but also with feelings of release and liberation as we scattered his “remains” into the lake.
On the other side, the word “remains” may be seen as the lowest common denominator of human constituency. There are the parts of a corpse or a biologically alive being that can be labeled, categorized, and observed. Other aspects of one’s spiritual essence are not scientifically observed, even though we’ve learned much from recent mind-body research.
The intensional part of my thinking that poked out its nepharious head was first of all fearing the words I had just listened to; I had a negative and critical attitude toward the Nurse Practitioner and her sterile, and what seemed to me to be, indifferent demeanor. I felt no sense of caring compassion from her. In terms of General Semantics, I think many healthcare professionals view this kind of news as a kind of package they must give to the patient. ‘Here it is—I’m giving you this package of bad news aka your diagnosis.” This is objectifying an illness as if it’s a being or object, rather than an organic or inorganic process at work in one’s body. It’s a play on this idea: sickness is like a marble that you swallow. It becomes an integral part of you, even though it has no shape or form we can point to and say “this is cancer,” like we might say, “this is a dog,” or “this is a horse.”
I am a person that is constantly dealing with and trying to manage my own anxiety about life and its events. One of the most experiential and qualitative ways I know of is to think more extensionally. It’s a way that helps me to counteract my own intensional spirals that feel as if they’re running downhill; so often the outcome of this thinking is a feeling of hopelessness, demoralization, depression, and immobilization. My wife and I realized, in this case, that we needed more extensional information and data so that we could see a more scientific picture of the effects of my liver disease.
We drove to the clinic that was about an hour away, waited six hours in the ER, and finally saw a doctor. This doctor also happened to be a liver doctor. He was calming, compassionate, and answered our questions. He ordered an Ultrasound for me, and afterwards, he came back to give us the results. He reported to us that there was no mass that could be seen in the liver. Both Pamela and I let out sighs of relief that felt like hot air under pressure being released from a balloon or tire. Compacted stress and anxiety was released into the atmosphere. The doctor told us that he wanted to still have me do a CAT Scan because it’s a different kind of test from an Ultrasound,
but he assured us that the Ultrasound gave a ninety-nine percent view of what was happening in my liver.
I write about this personal example of a health crisis in order to show that we can process such news utilizing General Semantics principles. I emphasize the word process because any illness or influx of life-giving energy is in process, just as we are as human beings. We are not events, but we are organisms-as-a-whole-in-environments that constantly flow, shake, move, ebb-and-flow, grow and degenerate. I encourage everyone to do more study on the nature of intensional and extensional forms of reasoning, especially using them when given news of major, life-changing proportions. Bruce Kodish and Susan Presby-Kodish’s book Driving Yourself Sane gives an excellent explanation of these two modes of thought, and would be good supportive reference to my explanations here. With more knowledge of General Semantics we may be better equipped with the tools to confront stressors revolving around our personal health and that of others who we love.
References
Cameron, Julia. (1992). The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. P. 204. New York: Tarcher/Putnam Books.
Information unavailable on the book cited by Bruce Kodish and Susan-Presby Kodish. This book may be ordered from the Institute of General Semantics (www.generalsemantics.org).
© Christopher Bear Beam, M.A. June, 2009
Biography: Christopher Bear Beam has been using General Semantics constructs for over thirty years as a Human Services professional and Qualified Mental Health Professional. As a group facilitator he co-leads anti-racism groups and integrates his knowledge and experience of General Semantics within the environment of transactional change in this area. He is the author of three books, and is a poet/spoken word artist. One of his books, The Golden Window of Silence: A Way of Becoming More Fully Human, explores the meaning created and communicated by silence. It can be ordered by going to www.xlibris.com. In 2008 he co-founded a Texas Nonprofit Corporation called Sunbear Community Alliance whose mission is fostering intercultural understanding through the Arts and Social education. More information a bout SCA can be gained by going to www.chrisbearbeam.com and clicking on the “training” icon. Christopher Bear Beam may be reached by email at cosmicbeam@hotmail.com.
Filed under: Written Word and Spoken Notions
THE DOVE AND THE CARDINAL
Two things happened to me this morning, yes, two. I was sitting on the patio, minding my own business in the coolish breezes of early morning just before the sun rises and the moon sets.
I sat in a chair with my eyes closed. I drifted somewhere between breathing in and out, and the temperate reverie of sleep. I was nervous for her, and felt self-conscious when my eyes opened and looked at her.
I think it was guilt; the next sound I heard was the gentle flapping of what I knew to be dove wings, and I felt her tender feet just lighting, but not with full weight, on my head, then she flew away back up towards the roof.
We looked at one another like each
Of us were just awakened from a dream\both of us were minimally speechless. All I could imagine is that the dove thought my head was a nest, my hair the lightened grey, close to the color of the lava that floated down from Mt.Saint Helens, only a couple of shades for the lighter.
She looked at me incredulously with
Her big, round, brown eyes that shine
Her caring to me each day of my life,
And said, “You had a dove sitting on your head!” “That’s right,” I replied, “it must have thought I was her nest her homing instincts were off today.”
A dove? A symbol of peace. A dove
Landing on Jesus’ head showing he
Walked the way of peace. Me. Bear?
A sign that I am a peacemaker, a son
Of consolation, a bringer-together-of-people and a boundary crosser.
These are not borders that have sign posts marking their separation, but these are the inner maps explaining the territory as we read them with our hearts and wisdom.
After this happened, we looked over to a tree where a male cardinal was feeding a baby in the nest. Cardinals are our totem of partnership, and we know that males will do chores that aren’t done by other male birds in the winged family of brothers and sisters.
In other words, cardinals are androgynous, males and females changing roles as the need arises so this is also our goal/to do what we need to do, in the moment, is to be free just like the cardinals, because we’re not here to play a role\we’re here to make the best love moves we can with those we love.
Creation is inborn in the earth, the sky, the water, each sentient and non-sentient being so when we see the handwriting of a leave’s waste, it’s time to listen to each case to hear
The stories of their experience, since their experience is ours also and inside the acorn is the message, written more eloquently/ unlike the missive in a fortune cookie.
© Christopher Bear Beam, M.A. June, 2009
Filed under: Written Word and Spoken Notions
Some Things are Moving So Rapidly On Our Senses We Can’t Rely
Darkness becomes me.
I’m sitting in this darkness
waiting for a word
when a stick cracks in the distance
resonating across the forest.
They say you can’t wait passively or quiescently
Waiting for an Advent call.
So I listen a little more.
All by myself in the dark
without a night light,
hearing the attic giants playing in dirt above the bedroom.
I await a message.
The message comes in full sunlight,
at the Riverside Park one day,
as the dogs outrun their masters
with willful and joyous barks, I listen and hear
decibels above common hearing
I feel the word coming in my heart.
My senses run my life just like dogs
chasing the newest friend or a heaved Frisbee
the word cleaves, cuts open marrow out of my bones.
I see how attached to my senses
I really am.
So fallible. So asleep at times.
But it is my senses, so wanting to own me,
that shared the message in the park,
in its subliminal form. Come follow us.
Now I’m awake because I’ve heard the Advent call
as I’m waiting for the coming of sanity and revelation
inside my own breathing skin
I wait like a dog bowing on its front legs
before she runs for the cat or the squirrel
for the thrill of the high of chase and catch.
Today in the sun and dirt where the dogs shit,
the smell so strong that it assaults my nose,
running up to my brain shaking my dream state loose
and out of the dream I come.
Many gods the senses show.
She knows I follow their flow
and attach to them like bees to pollen
or a chrysalis to its sticky sleep shack.
But I, a true lover, devote myself to
allowing the senses to run unattached, free like the dogs;
for restraint of the senses (the more I squeeze the more
active they swell),
shoots the arrows of suffering in all directions, some call it hell.
Our relationship with fullness of life
is forever ours and She/He
will always serve us in the best
way possible—simmering our senses
in this devoted soup of friendship.
There is a sweet taste in this
dyadic dance,
the teacher and student,
Atman lives in each being—transcendental pleasure, the true self,
in the senses of each being in love,
and loved sensuously with the true self, something different
than the coarse matter of human life.
I hear the word, I embrace the lesson.
Sweet honey does come from the
darkest crevice of the rock
and those who will taste life
will drink honey from the rock.
© Christopher Bear Beam, MA 12/06/08
Filed under: Culture
I recommend seeing the new movie Revolutionary Road, starring Leonardo De Caprio and Kate Winslet. In some ways I’m a sucker for stories rooted in the Fifties, having been born in 1949, and growing up during the Fifties.
Watching this flick reminded me of so many things: people living their lives emotionally “shut down,” the many taboos that folks didn’t speak about openly, in tandem with the surrounding air of family secrets entrenched in so many families of that era.
Looking back at this historical time phase, it’s very easy to observe and label these kinds of cultural road signs. We have our own contemporary ones today. An interesting question to ask yourself is: what are ours? Perhaps one of them is that we are so much more open, that we are now ‘in your face’ about our issues, and we’re more prone to take dramatic risks in our lives. There is much more openness about our resistance to authority. Our time might be called socially regressed aka Murray Bowen, creator of Family Systems Theory.
In this film, the wife and husband (Winslet and De Caprio) are just beginning a family, and have moved to the suburbs to see if they can play out the American Dream. Yet both of them have the sense of uncertainty about what this new kind of life is all about. You can feel the inner boredom, the restlessness, and their pointed questions about the genuine consistency of life, and how to see themselves in it. ‘What is all of this really for,’ they seem to be asking themselves.
The wife in the story is the protagonist who sees the need for herself and her husband, and instigates an idea to move to Paris. Underneath the lines, though, is her growing depression, and the feeling of being trapped within this mapped out life. Both of them may think they know the map, but the territory definitely escapes them.
Her husband is a “company man” who works for a company that his father worked for. He thinks about how meaningless his father’s life had been but buries it underneath his skin by having an affair and abusing alcohol. He doesn’t want the same thing his father got, but he doesn’t really know what he wants. He is a chameleon that appears to change his convictions and ideas with others’ influence and persuasion. He is the man lost on an Atlantic City boardwalk walking alone with no gravity pulling him to the center of the earth.
For this writer the primary emotional component of their relationship is anger and rage. They rage at each other and blame each other for their own entrapment. In one powerful scene, Kate Winslet’s character tells her husband that she had thought they were special and that this life was supposed to be different because of their specialness. She blurts out that all of this emptiness wasn’t supposed to be happening to them.
In this scene we may see the source of so much inner anger, frustration, and blaming others for one’s own problems. The source of anger often is the gap between our own expectations and what is really going on in the world around us. Our expectations are so often simply the idealized, non-realistic, and highly valued norms of what makes us happy, successful or a failure. By “highly valued” I mean that we set such high and perfectionistic values/goals for ourselves by our mutilating self-talk, we tell ourselves that we are failures, we aren’t happy, and that our lives must be nil and useless. Thus, using these standards we are either successful or in a place of failure. This is either/or thinking. This sets the stage for existential depression, discouragement and demoralization.
This incongruence can only cause anger and a sense of being thwarted in one’s life pursuits. The problem is not the other person, but it’s our own thinking that is maladaptive. It’s the illusion of the expectation being reality, not life itself. It’s the rift between our conceptually constructed ideas of ‘what life is supposed to be like’ and what really is. If one can’t see this or accept it, it rattles our emotional cages and we’re in for the fight of our lives—the result of no acceptance is a creeping anger that grows like a troll under the bridge until it bursts out in a hail storm of un-sanity.
Finally, as the film is nearing its end, there is a certain fait accompli. I thought that De Caprio was going to commit his wife to a psychiatric hospital. At point, he calls her “crazy.” Our white, male conditioning has trained us in our sexism well. Male superiority says that women are crazy, sick, over emotional, protected, sheltered, unintelligent, and morally bad. This is the white male system will do everything in its power to maintain control and perpetuate women as being inferior.
In fact, during the Fifties, psychiatry and psychology had been co-opted by the robber baron class. This privileged class of neo-faith-healers didn’t seem to recognize the mental illness of depression. The wife, from what we observe in the film, was going through a clinical depression. Many times anger is hidden within the presenting problem of depression. We might say depression is anger turned inwards on oneself. Women were particularly prone to depression including Post Partum Depression. They were taught by the White Male System to know their place, and that place was at home raising families. Yet as they raised families their role didn’t stop at being mom; they had many other talents, skills and gifts. Because there was a ‘code of silence’ about this, they felt fearful of communicatively expressing their emotions about the faulty expectations spoken of above.
A good example of this is my own mom. In our old home movies, my primary memory is of her fading back out of the picture into the kitchen. But mom worked for the War Department in WW II doing the kind of work that demanded high intelligence. She is a poet, writer, visual and textile artist, and has a very intuitive sense about people and life. She is a thinker, and she can hold her own in an argument or discussion, even now at the age of ninety-one.
Her working ethos when raising her own family was that of ‘the wind beneath my wings.’ These were my father’s wings. He was dad, the leader, the boss, and it was expected that he stood out as the most capable. Her role was to be the wind that would lift her children and husband into the Land of Success, like the role Kate Winslet played in the film. It strikes me that this kind of sexism is pernicious, because it oppresses the authentic thoughts and abilities of both men and women.
In the end, the wife dies just before childbirth. The conclusion of the film is the metaphor for life during the Fifties. She had sacrificed and given everything for her family, but she gave her true self away as well. Stereotypes are the lazy and sloppy thoughts of ignorant people who are so numb to themselves, they would rather die than living to be who they really are.
Last Sunday, a Kansas doctor who worked in an abortion clinic was gunned down in his own church. Dr. Tiller worked for an abortion clinic performing abortions near Witchita, Kansas. He was brutally killed, in front of his pastor, perhaps family, friends and the one he understood to be God, or his Higher Power.
Women have abortions for many reasons, and it’s the inherent right of each woman to decide whether she should have one or not. It isn’t an inherent right to murder a doctor, in church or anywhere, despite what religious rationalization perpetrators of such actions may use in defence of their actions.
And here’s another problem surrounding Dr. Tiller’s execution: when anyone prevents someone from entering an abortion clinic, it’s a federal offence. The alleged suspect, Scott Roeder, had “super glued” the doors of the clinic shut. In fact, two times in the week just prior to the assasination of Dr. Tiller, the suspect/offender was seen doing the same thing as well as in 2000.
Both the local police and the FBI were notified by the manager of the clinic; a local detective came out and interviewed the manager. The FBI said they would investigate the situation, but apparently didn’t take immediate action even though the alleged perpetrator had a well-known record of terrorizing the clinic. The manager believes if they had taken immediate action, Dr. Tiller would be alive today.
The Federal Government despite a new administration that is overturning many of the horrendous laws and policies of the Bush Administration, must ensure that its policies of non-terrorism carried out through federal law is actuated at the street level. Beyond this, they have the responsibility and accountability to the American people to protect the civil rights of all people–this includes women who choose to have abortions–with the fullest legal means available.
The U.S. has a historically/hypocritcal record of telling other countries about their violations of human rights, but not practicing this in fact itself at home. Each time any human right is not defended and prosecuted to the extent of the law, it gives extremist groups, such as anti-abortion groups, the promiscuous permission to keep doing what they’ve been doing despite the repugnance most Americans feel when it comes to extremists taking the law into their own hands; in doing so they blatantly and flagrantly take life by assasinations of abortion doctors, and laugh at the inherent human right of all people to live safely and free from attack by terrorists such as anti-abortion guerillas. Clinics are vandalized and in one case a doctor was shot through his kitchen window–shot dead.
Each abrogation of any civil or human right must be squarely interrupted and legally prosecuted for what it really is, the rape of the Body Politic. It has been stated before, if we stand by in silence and passivity while these perpetrators keep terrorizing anyone at all, then one day they will come for us simply because we are human beings who speak truth to power in the name of freedom for all peoples everywhere.
We can’t allow apathy and ignorant assumptions based on inaccurate information to stop us in our tracks inhibiting us in defending the human rights of all, especially American citizens.
© Christopher Bear Beam, MA
June 5, 2009
(this selection was authored by Bear for a collaborative project between the Houston Public Library and the Center for the Healing of Racism, Houston, TX)
Where Do I Go to Check In My White Male Privilege?
I want to thank you for choosing to read me. I hope you find me educational, provocative, and challenging.
I grew up in the fifties in Chicago, IL. My father was a religious, but I could never meet his standards of perfection. This was probably a good thing, because I became a nonconformist, and began to question a lot of things early in life. I’ve always been very intuitive and sensitive to the emotional process of the environments with which I was interacting. But like every other white male in society, I also absorbed and was conditioned to think and act a certain way.
For example, I remember in our old home movies, that my mother was mainly seen as retreating into the kitchen. I guess she had adapted to the White Male System (WMS), not to mention moving from Kentucky to Illinois. Mom was a very bright and creative person. She graduated from Barnard College in NYC, and went on to work in a very specialized job in DC for the War Dept.
Dad was highly intelligent as well, but came from a very different background. He was raised in Illinois farm country; he graduated H.S. at 16 and went to the University of Illinois. After graduation from Officer’s Candidate school he served in the military in WWII as a Leutenant in the Navy. Both of them were products of their backgrounds and their generation.
My grandparents lived in Kentucky and were people of wealth. Our family would visit them about twice a year. They lived more affluently than we did back in Chicago. Hoppy and Grammy employed Katherine and Mary Ann as maids in their home. I came to love them, and they loved me unconditionally; it seemed they understood the problems of a young white boy’s role in the family and of my life. Sometimes I would ride with my grandmother to take them back to their homes. The sight of old-school millhouses, run down and dilapidated, didn’t make sense to my little boy’s mind. I started asking myself why I lived so differently from them, and I did this because I really loved them. I asked myself why there was such a gap in the money people had to live.
I returned to my Chicago, suburban home, and began to notice how each morning African American maids and domestics would get off the buses about two blocks from my home, each one of them wearing a certain kind of uniform, some white, some brown and white, some with other colors. Their dialect was so different from mine, the way they carried themselves, the way they acted, the words they used, the songs they sang to themselves/all of this was a new awareness/leaving me with the question of why they did the housework, and we hired them to do it.
Gradually, in my conditioning as a white male, I began to equate what I observed in African American’s behavior as being a sign of less intelligence. I was being set up by the WMS to see them as so foreign to my existence that they didn’t really seem to be real at all; this was all supported by stereotypes of AAs I saw in movies, art, books, magazine articles, comic books, what friends told me, and certain non-verbal messages I picked up from my white family. For example, in Disney movies the music was so often sung and played by people with African American accents. The charactures of these minstrels created a fantasmigorical image of blacks being cartoon characters, not humans.
One example I remember from grade school: one early morning at school, one of the janitors who happened to be white, called me aside and told me, “I want you to see what I found next to the railroad this morning.” Of course, I was all ears at this mysterious statement. He opened a small, white box that looked to me like a box a ring or jewelry would be placed in when it was bought. He slowly opened it, and he said, “I found this n_______’s finger,” after which he proceeded to laugh, probably at the look of incredulity on my face. His overall intent, as I thought about it years later, was that this was so funny because, after all, they aren’t worth much at all, so what’s the problem with finding just a finger.
As I’ve learned more and more about my own unconscious unaware racism and white male privilege, I realized that the janitor could play this ignorant trick using any other targeted group. For instance, he could have put a lock of blonde hair in the box with a woman’s finger targeting “dumb blondes.” It really wouldn’t have mattered because I was safe. I was a member of the group that was on top endlessly striving to keep all the others on the bottom. The purpose of the WMS is to continually enrich ourselves at the expense of all the rest.
The WMS has co-opted all other groups in society. People of color get sucked into it through assimilation: this is how to reach success and enter the “American Dream” in our nation; white women get seduced into it, because this is how to get status, power, and identity; children get duped in our educational system by only getting a flawed picture of history, not the authentic history from the “others’” perspective of colonization and oppression.
Peggy Macintosh, a professor out east, some years ago wrote a seminal article on white privilege. She suggested that white folks in this nation receive benefits, privileges, enrichments, and advantages simply because we were born white. White men, being at the top of the heap, are privileged because they are men, and they have European lineage. These are the unearned privileges—most of us take these for granted—due to fake conditioning and the rewards we get from this privilege that are inherent because we have been blessed not to be a person of color.
When you think about this rationally, stepping back from ‘an emotional commitment to ignorance’ no one can decide what kind of skin they’ll be born in, where they will be born, or whether they will be born into wealth or poverty. White male privilege, then, is a crapshoot, a probability, that have no set of determined possibilities, but is arbitrary and non-scientific in its basis for existence.
Is this a fair way of viewing others who are given the same advantage of skin to cover bones, muscles, tissue, organs, all based on the capricious fact of some being born white, others black, others brown, others red, etc.? A children’s book illustratively shows that when skin is removed most bones look the same.
The term White Male System was used and elaborated on by Ann Schaef, a well-known writer and therapist. She delineates that the WMS is built on five myths:
Myth #1: The White Male System (WMS) is the only thing that exists.
The beliefs and perceptions of other systems—especially the female system—are seen as sick, bad, crazy, stupid, ugly and incompetent.
Myth #2: The WMS is innately superior.
“Superiority can be a killing gift.”
According to the WMS, both superiority and inferiority are birthrights of privilege or the nature of disadvantage.
Myth #3: The WMS knows & understands everything.
Since the WMS thinks this myth is true of its system, in order to perpetuate the myth, the WMS uses stereotypes to keep up the illusion of its reality. This damages those in the WMS because it takes both energy and ignorance to ignore the facts. It most notably hurts women and children.
Myth #4: The WMS believes that it’s possible for humans to possess the complete/comprehensive attributes of logic, rationality, and objectivity, minus emotionality. Thus we get notions such as ‘boys don’t cry,’ ‘don’t cry you pussy;’ this hurts men because it cuts them off from their inner feelings; it hurts women because they also feel they need to stuff their own feelings so as not to be denigrated by men; can we see that the WMS indeed keeps people from living as genuine, whole, and authentic beings?
Myth #5: It’s possible to be a Higher Power.
“Being a deity is not easy though. In fact it can be lethal for WMS persons to deny their own humanity and fallibility. The human mind and body are not designed to stand up under such stress and strain. White men who finally achieve such high stature in their own minds suffer from heart attacks, strokes, ulcers, and high blood pressure. In the end, godhood can kill.”
* Anne Wilson Schaef. (1992).Women’s Reality pp.7-27. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
Earlier I mentioned the WMS. This system has been in place, in our nation, from its inception. The Constitution and Declaration of Independence were written basically by and for wealthy, land-owning, white men. Wealth is passed down trans-migrationally through generations. * (There’s an excellent DVD documentary called Traces of the Trade documenting the DeWolf family history around slavery. This family from Rhode Island became the largest/wealthiest slave-trading family in the country). These white males amassed their wealth on the backs of black slaves. Later, white indentured servants were labeled white because these leaders of the WMS knew one way to control their power base was to use the “divide and conquer” strategy, something they learned from Willie Lynch whom they consulted on their slave/economic/class system.
Why did they do this? To ensure that their power and dominance would go on, at least to the next generation, perhaps never realizing that it would go on for hundreds of years until our present day.
Although there have been changes in our laws around Civil Rights, de jure change is perhaps easier to accomplish than changing social systems. The encoding of white male privilege and institutionalized racism is deeply embedded in our unconsciousness. The path of real change for European Americans requires a life long commitment to healing, and healing is always a messy process. For white racial identity—of the unhealthy kind—to change means more than academically learning some new facts and theories. It means change in the deep structures of who we are—in order to do this it means we have to examine our psycho-emotional-scientific-historical-social heritage: the only way to do this is to know where we came from, where we are now, and what our future is.
I think what all whites need to know, and especially those who are ignorant of the WMS, is that for over 90% of our nation’s history, we have lived under the hierarchy and oppression of slavery and Jim Crow laws. This is a very long time; these customs also invaded the north, so this isn’t to blame one part of the country or another. It teaches us how ubiquitous the WMS actually is.
I admit that I have been a willing recipient of white male privilege. I also realize that privilege isn’t something I can just step away from, or step down from. I am it. I grew up and absorbed by some strange osmosis of social conditioning. I can’t change my skin’s hue. Yet, I can become more aware of how it has made me who I am, so that I may be motivated to emerge as a different kind of white man. I can better perceive how this dynamic is played out around me in society, in social systems, my collusion with them, and think of ways to educate others of European descent. And that’s why I’m the book that I am. At the very least, and most importantly, I can change myself. I may be able to impact others to a more educated understanding of the WMS.
Thinking back over my life, white male privilege has given me these benefits:
ü I lived my early life in a “good” white neighborhood where the homes kept appreciating in value and these assets could provide me other financial benefits
ü This neighborhood didn’t have a high crime rate so I felt a sense of security
ü I went to schools where many resources were found that wouldn’t have been found in other mostly non-white schools
ü I felt safety in my neighborhood because of my school mates and friends looked like me; in my grade school the students were all white with the exception of one Latino American
ü I had access to good healthcare most of my life
ü I had access to money to use when I needed it for most of my life
ü I applied and went to college using grants, scholarships, and other funding to achieve my educational goals without fear of rejection
ü Most of the jobs that I’ve really wanted I knew I had a very real possibility of getting
ü I was able to start working at a young age because many jobs were open to me as a white kid in an all white suburb of Chicago
ü European American adults were plentiful to help me get where I wanted to go, open doors for me, mentor me, and support me in my progression in the WMS.
ü I have been able to receive benefits such as credit cards, auto loans, mortgages on homes, to continue to amass wealth, resources, and other non-financial services, for the most part not feeling I would be denied these benefits
ü I have been able to give these same benefits to my children and family
ü I have received assistance from my family, in receiving what they had received such as education, therapeutic services, family furniture, money for loans, etc. because this wealth had been passed down through generations of living in the WMS
ü When communicating, in a conversation or in a more formal setting, I felt the high of being seen as a person of credibility and honesty; other whites would give me more eye contact if I was with a POC, and generally think I knew more about the given subject I was speaking about
ü As being a member of the WMS Club I have received a certain “Christian Privilege” conditioning me to think of myself as a chosen one, a special one in a special group, with a sense of certainty about my own life and future, while others lived in a state of religious ignorance or superstitition
ü This “Christian Privilege” created a mind set for me; because of my spiritual superiority, I would be happier, wealthier, and live a more comfortable life; I would reap good consequences
These are only a few of the benefits I have received as a white male. There are many others. In a social context, benefits are bestowed and are received by members of the group based on skin color or perhaps names. Privileges are unearned assets and advantages given by being in the group.
As a book, I now close with a poem that I wrote. It’s called White:
This one’s for you
Brothers and sisters of white hue,
The end of racism starts here,
Time to end it, cut off our fear.
Confess to the truth that we all got it
at mama’s breast,
Racism—all of us got it—deep in our chests;
Don’t matter what our intentions, good or bad or none,
Fact is, if we don’t think we have it
The root of our problem rolls on for
This is the source of our shit,
And we need to own it, this is it.
It’s found in our thoughts, deep inside our hearts,
Passed down from generations before us, from the start,
Why not admit it, come clean right now,
Break the cycle of shame,
Stop playin’ this game.
Make the choice to come out of our sleep,
That powers this illness, our crooked disease,
Ease the pain, lift the load, come to the light,
Be race aware, interrupt it, I say
At first sight.
The name of the game is transformation,
The vision of brave heart’s new nation—
To see it, name it, claim it,
Let it go, let it go, let it go,
Chop off the snake’s head whenever it hisses.
© Christopher Bear Beam, MA, 2007
© Christopher Bear Beam, MA
May, 2009
