Happy Birthday 2011

Many years ago I resolved never to bother with New Year's resolutions, and I've stuck with it ever since. Haha

But seriously, best wishes and positive vibrations to those out in the blog world and beyond.

A Beautiful Lie 30 Seconds to Mars HD

Good morning world! Thinking today about reality. It's a beautiful lie.

Babes, Bikes, and Battles

BBB. What is BBB? In Brazil, BBB is the acronym for the much loved Big Brother Brazil program now in its 11^th season. As a prime-time hit in almost 70 countries, Big Brother has held a steady domination in the reality tv market, garnering support from drama seekers and closet peeping toms. The show has a simple premise. Stick a bunch of misfits into a large house, lock the door for three months, and record every social interaction that takes place. To keep things compelling, the shows producers throw in a cash prize of a million dollars for the last contestant standing, who through savviness or charm or political know-how somehow comes out alive.

From a sociological and demographic perspective, the success of the show may have something to do with the joy of watching a clash of cultures (or what happens to people in close confinement who come from different social backgrounds). It’s a bit like taking a Martha Stewart, a meth baking hillbilly, three nuns, and a monkey, and throwing them into a jail cell for three long and dicey months. The ultimate drama manifests in who allies with who and why.

In my own reality tv show of life, BBB has an entirely different meaning. While I was out drinking a lovely whip cream frappuccino last night, I started thinking about the things that excite me, you know, the things that make me go all happy powdered sugar donut on the inside. It may just have been the caffeine going to my head, but I realized that you can tell a lot about a person by how they answer the question: What makes you happy?

Keep in mind I’m not asking the question: What makes you ultimately happy? This will produce an entirely different set of answers, because what ultimately makes us happy is harder to define and a bit more philosophical in nature (I’m going to devote my next blog post to answering this one). With the former question however, I’m more interested in superficial moments of glee—the rope swing process of emotional ecstasy where we feel happiness at the height of the arc, and then quickly fall back to normalcy as we swing back down.

So to answer this mark of self-identification, I must return to BBB.

Babes

Yes, call me cliché, but I am a fan of attractive women. Who isn’t really? Research has demonstrated time and again that there are tremendous social and economic benefits to being attractive. Attractive people are paid more, are judged more intelligent and will receive more attention in most facets of life. Studies suggest that even infants prefer pretty faces, which is funny because who really wants to be judged by an infant!? This phenomenon of pre-judging a person (without consciously realizing it) through the perception of physical traits is called the halo effect, and it is a powerful force in most if not all societies. I got to thinking about my own cognitive bias in regards to attractive people the other day, and that led me to the glorious wiki page on physical attraction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_attraction

What an interesting reading! Wiki tells us that there appears to be universal standards regarding attractiveness both within and across cultures and ethnic groups (although I would argue there are often cultural filters at work which produce beauty standards in opposition to this universal norm). Some interesting tidbits that I read:

• Women, on average, tend to be more attracted to men who display a high-degree of facial symmetry, masculine facial dimorphism, are taller than them and who have a relatively narrow waist, a V-shaped torso, and broad shoulders.

• Men, overall, tend to be attracted by women who are shorter than them, have a youthful appearance and exhibit features such as a symmetrical face, full breasts, full lips, and a low waist-hip ratio.

• Studies have shown that ovulating heterosexual women and homosexual men prefer faces with masculine traits associated with increased exposure to testosterone (during key developmental stages), such as heavy brows, prominent chins, chiseled jaw lines, and broad cheekbones. The masculinity of male faces (and the femininity of female faces) is described as a sexual dimorphism. Female respondents in the follicular phase of their menstrual cycle (n = 55) were significantly more likely to choose a masculine face than those in menses and luteal phases (n = 84), (or in those taking hormonal contraception) It is suggested that the masculinity of facial features is a reliable indication of good health, or, alternatively, that dominant and masculine-looking males are more likely to achieve high status. Also, females tend to prefer masculine facial traits more for short-term partners, than for long-term partners.

• A number of double-blind studies have found that women prefer the scent of men who are rated as facially attractive. For example, a study by Anja Rikowski and Karl Grammerdid had individuals rate the scent of t-shirts slept in by test subjects. The photographs of those subjects were independently rated, and Rikowski and Grammar found that both males and females were more attracted to the natural scent of individuals who had been rated by consensus as facially attractive. It has also been shown that women have a preference for the scent of men with more symmetrical faces, and that womens' preference for the scent of more symmetrical men is strongest during the most fertile period of their menstrual cycle. Within the set of normally cycling women, individual women's preference for male facial symmetry correlated with their probability of conception.^[29]

….Anyway, I find these details to be remarkably interesting, not so much because of my own fixture on physical attraction, but rather as a fulfillment of curiosity on what makes the social system move—i.e. why we act the way we act in the presence of an attractive person. Knowing the why ultimately give us power to refuse these natural forces, to not ascribe positive traits to people that don’t necessarily deserve them (in job interviews, dating, political candidates, etc.).

Bikes

Let’s get something straight. My personal affinity for babes does not make me a social whore. Quite the contrary. While I will admit to a natural biological predisposition towards babeness, I don’t necessarily condone sexual promiscuity or cheating. People often use these ‘biological arguments’ to condone malevolent social behavior, especially guys. In today’s modern age, having multiple babes (guys or girls) can lead to any number of misfortunate circumstances, things like STD’s, cervical cancer, violence, children with unwanted partners, and an inability to cultivate profound relationships with other people.

In my opinion, we need to find healthy ways to deal with repressed sexual desire. Some people play pool, other people drink beer. I ride motorcycles. ;- )

I’m not sure exactly what it is that makes a motorcycle so sexual. Perhaps it’s the visceral nature of the experience, the way you feel all of your senses – the wind in your hair – and live in the moment. Perhaps it’s the rather startling sensation of 1000cc’s of power vibrating between your legs. Whatever it is, motorcycles seem to be an effective way (though not always safe) to deal with ones testosterone.

My first babe was an old 1981 Yamaha cruiser. Not too sexy but practical. Then I moved on to the first love of my life, Josephine. Riding her through the windy back roads of the Colorado Rockies was a truly liberating experience. Now I have my sites set on a new “girl”, a 2010 BMW 1000 RR sport bike. I scheme of getting crafty, removing the fairing and painting her with Polynesian tribal decals. A boy can dream right?

Battles

The last area of my BBB is stuck somewhere between romantic notions of the past and healthy living. It is my decade’s long fixation with battles, with grabbing antiquated equipment and facing off with an oppositional force. On the delicate continuum of social status, I definitely scream nerd with this one. But I’m ok with that. Swords are my medium for physical happiness, the reason I go to the gym, run, and cross train other martial arts. I find that there is no better metaphor for conquering personal fear than with a direct conflict with another human being (which inevitably becomes a face off with yourself).

Here is one of my fights with my Kenjutsu group at the end of the year. I am the guy on the right, living very happy and in the moment.

So that’s it. These are my BBB’s, my momentary artificially flavored mediums of happiness. What are yours?

Merry!

Merry Christmas-Hanukkah-Kwanzaa-Pagan-Consumer Day Y'all!

A Week in Pictures

A week has passed and my Boulder friends Diane and Paul have come and gone. It's Christmas eve, 95 degrees, and the girl and I have decided to sleep off the day. We enjoyed our tour guide efforts with my friends, running around the pre-holiday chaos of Salvador, but are good and ready to take this vacation a bit more slowly. We only have 13 days until my parents arrive, until we fire up the tour guide energies once again, and are determined to a) stay lazy and b) spend less money.

Having our friends here was fun. I enjoyed the chance to see our city with fresh eyes and to reinvigorate my American identity. We did many exciting Salvador things like drinking chopp in Rio Vermelho, running around the Pelourinho, beach time in Porto da Barra, and escaping the city noise at Praia do Forte and Imbassai. It was your typical fun in the sun, beer, chilled coconuts and salty meat, tropical adventure.

For now, I will dream of a white Christmas and of spending time with family. As much as I'm happy to be here, the holiday season just doesn't feel the same without them.

Celebrating birthdays and Vivi's graduation.

No better way to do so than with friends and karaoke.

All the better to bring our Boulderites along with us.

Dance, lady, dance!

This was our hardest semester yet and a bit of r&r much deserved.

I did get to spend some time with my ex which was you know kind of great.

Turtles in a half shell. Turtle power.

Coolest wall paper to date. Download and use at your leisure.

I dare you to try and get me out of that bed.

Acroyoga junkies. They danced in the air and then...

Threw us around!

It was like a strange mix of challenging gravity and couples therapy.

We found this article on the beach; honestly the strangest little micro universe I have ever seen. It was a girl's shoe covered in barnacles. The clammy little devils would slurp their tongues out of their shell. Very creepy.

Yeah vacation!

December

Looking up at my tropical sky I can see the snow falling. I can see it falling in Michigan, staring out my living room window into the sleepy limbs of the woods. I can see it falling in South Carolina, when in third grade I ran into the classroom screaming, “Snow, snow, it’s snowing!!!” I can see it on that Monday morning in Colorado when the Flat Irons were slightly dusted like powdered donuts, resting quietly in the winter air. Here the snow falls in the mind, tingling the skin in melted clumps of memories long past. Here Christmas arrives all too furtively.

This is the last week before winter break, and both Vivi and I are excited to get out of school. This last semester has been a real trial for both of us, with agonizing months of work, on top of work, on top of school. Vivi is graduating this semester and had to complete some of the most arduous coursework to date. I kept myself busy studying for my comprehensive master’s exam, which I officially aced a few weeks past. All and all we are happy to finally have our heads above water, and excited about the month long break just ahead of us.

In January, my parents are finally making their way down to Brazil. I’m very excited about their trip, and have planned our itinerary down to the letter. This will be the first time in almost five decades that my dad returns to his motherland. I can’t wait to see their faces, freshly arrived off their secluded monastery of a farm in Oklahoma, only to be thrust head first into the chaotic mass of sun, and song, and setting that is Bahia. We will spend a few days in the city, a few days on the island, and a few days in Chapada, a real whirlwind tour of all the northeast has to offer.

Until then, we will be working on what we’ve been working on for the last 8 months, our mountain pile of bureaucracy, our bereavement of imperial powers who stare skeptically at Vivi and I in wonder. It’s been a long journey that I have avoided for the most part on this blog, but that I may come to recount in its proper place and time. Just know, for now, that an exit plan is in place as we prepare for our own dance and twirl out of Brazil.

Master Ban at work on another barbecue.

Sunsets at Porto.

No comment.

No comment.

Black Friday

They say that in America the streets are paved with gold. They say that America is the land of opportunity and that if you’re gonna make it, you’ll make it there. Some even say, with the power of compound interest, you (yes you) can be a millionaire. Say you have $100.00 and it earns 5% interest each year, you'll have $105.00 at the end of the first year. But at the end of the second year, you'll have $110.25. Not only did you earn $5.00 on the $100.00 you initially deposited—your original "principal"—but you also earned an extra $0.25 on the $5.00 in interest. Twenty-five cents may not sound like much at first, but it adds up over time. Even if you never add another dime to that account, in 10 years you'll have over $162.00, and in 25 years you'll have almost $340.00. Not a powerful example, I know, but let’s say you save $10,000 in a retirement plan. What will your investment be worth after 40 years, if you don’t make any additional contributions? Assuming an expected rate of return of 9 percent, the total approximate value of your investment would double to $20,000 in 8 years, $40,000 in 16 years, and $80,000 in 24 years, $160,000 in 32 years, and $320,000 in 40 years.


Translation, if I had saved small and started early, I could be a millionaire by the time I retired.

The problem is I didn’t, and the older I get the more the power of my compound interest weakens. Here in Brazil, I feel even more powerless. Despite the fact that the Brazilian economy is growing, things are not all cupcakes and butterflies and sunshine as the Brazilian media often portrays.

The truth is, for those of us on the bottom end of the economic gab, the cost of living and the dismal salaries are savings prohibitive. I see my girl working three jobs, leaving the house at 7 in the morning and coming back at 9 at night (this includes working every Saturday). At the end of the month, despite the fact that we live rather humbly, don’t have a car, limit our cell phone use, etc., there IS NO money left over. We can’t save, we can’t build, and that starts to really wear on you.


In time, I think we could turn things around. We could find better jobs, be more disciplined with our savings, and maybe buy a used car. We could work as teachers at an international school, maybe open our own business. The problem is, without the proper US based certifications, and with our difficulties saving money, we can’t get there from here. Despite America’s current financial troubles it would still be easier for us to build in the “land of opportunity”, and to attain that wondrous status of middle class. Given the necessary elements of discipline, hard work, and a little luck, I think we could do better than in Brazil.

In this sense, the time is nigh. If we are going to do this thing, we want to do it right. It is well past the hour to get our financial life in shape—to make a concerted and focused effort to save and to begin to build our empire. For this we need a plan, which is finally beginning to materialize:

1. Don't do what most Americans do (i.e. avoid the worship of stuff) 2. Pay off all debt finishing in December (the borrower is the servant to the lender and we don't want to be slaves) 3. Make a proactive monthly budget and stick to it (if you don't control your money it controls you) 4. Put $10,000 into an emergency “when shit happens” account 5. Find work where we are naturally gifted and work hard (get rich quick is stay poor trying) 6. Always live beneath our means (i.e. maintain humble lifestyle even with success) 7. Diversify our investments; invest in mutual funds 8. Save! And learn how to bargain hunt (patience is key) 9. Learn the art of negotiation and pay for things with cash 10. Take baby steps (prioritize plan and move slowly)

Who knows what the future holds? It’s time to open the gate and see where this puppy goes.

I am thankful for:

1) The birds and the bees 2) Blueberry smoothies 3) Positive uncommon people 4) Being intimidated by my girlfriends uncanny intelligence and beauty 5) The original Mario Kart on SNES 6) Pizza parties 7) Everyone that lived on Yale Rd. in Boulder 8) Michael Dehn of Seattle 9) Diversity 10) White Russians 11) Cheesy breadsticks from Bilbo’s 12) Equating motorcycles with sexuality 13) My P-Town Kzoo homies 14) Creative expression through movement 15) William Earnest Henly’s poem “Invictus” 16) Covering things with cheese 17) Your momma jokes from the 90’s 18) Daniels-Hof-Meer 19) Palm trees 20) Playing “pitch” with the Johnson’s 21) Anthropology 22) Hot onions off the grill 23) Miyamoto Musashi's Book of the Five Rings 22) Rocking chairs 23) Electric guitars 24) Evolution 25) Flexible egos 26) The Matrix 27) The products of “Google” 28) World citizenship 29) Museum exhibits 30) Using the movie ‘Shawshank Redemption’ for containment metaphors 31) Stitch the Dog 32) My music collection 33) Shem Johnson’s instinctual coolness 34) My first trippy experience: Alice in Wonderland 35) Ponderosa Pine 36) Taos Pizza Outback 37) Geeks that play with swords 38) Abraham Lincoln 39) Marxist Educational Philosophies 40) Salsa 41) Being fundamentally open to new experiences 42) Pirates 43) Horror flicks like ‘Silent Hill’ 44) Alec Johnson 45) Churrasco 46) Ban and Alison 47) Islands 48) The soundtrack to Braveheart 49) The ease of rapping in Latin 50) Making spitting noises at the dog Baltar 51) Bah! 52) The smell of libraries 53) Dry weather 54) Both of my grandmothers 55) The way ‘Coldplay’ makes me feel 56) Role models like Charles Howard who have life mission statements 57) Whip cream in cans, yes! 58) Any phrase with the word ‘monkey’ 59) Good parents 60) Good parents 61) Good parents 62) The soothing effects of Bob Marley 63) Thai massage 64) My cabin in New Mexico 65) Julie and Charlie and maybe their dog 66) Ipods 67) Dave Chappelle 68) Cinnamon-sugar almonds 69) Michigan fall colors 70) Jeffrey Giering’s life energy 71) Mountain biking through groomed snow 72) My poop flooding house caught naked story 73) Using a language with the best swear words 74) Life possibility 75) Well crafted Beer 76) Sociability of Brazilians 77) Who sunk my battleship and hungry, hungry hippos 78) Explorations of consciousness 79) Finding lost friends on the internets 80) Ass slapping (i.e. Good gamings) 81) Devin’s beautiful baby Roman 82) Italian hand gestures 83) Tequila and clubs 84) My little soldier 85) Maynard James Keenan 86) How much I suck at Halo 87) Sriracha the king of hot sauces 88) National Public Radio 89) Nonconformists 90) Finding purpose 91) Creative writing 92) Malcolm Gladwell’s wit and hair 93) Philly Cheese Steak sandwiches 94) Japanese persistence 95) Democracy in proper doses 96) Being flexible in my belief system 97) Watching people ‘epic fail’ 98) Cherry fucking cheesecake 99) Bluemoon beer 100) You, probably.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

This is what happens...

when you teach your lady to box.



I have my Masters Degree comprehensive exams coming up next week. Until that's taken care of this whole blogging thing is out.

Mr. Leo

In case you didn't know, 'Mr. Leo' is my professional name. I'm not entirely sure how it happened, how I found myself a teacher/assistant in the 5th grade. It probably has something to do with my move to Brazil, my desperate need to find work, or my experience in museum/reenactment/historical education. To be honest, I never intended to become a primary school educator, to thrust on the mask of educational authority, to give voice to convention, tradition, and all that America holds dear. For the most part, my high school experience turned me off to a career in primary school. PHS, the acronym for my prison, was a place that I found intellectually stifling. I hated the stratified atmosphere—how being different, or smart, or inclusive was uncool. The high school experience for me was really just a mild irritating distraction, a place I had to trudge through in order to eventually do my own thing. It was only in college that I really plugged in, that I discovered a sense of curiosity about the world, a knack for study, and a legitimate drive to learn more. If you would have told me five years ago that I would be back “in the system”, playing educator to 10 year old kids, I would have laughed.

That said, here I am, day in and day out, playing professor to the munchkin kind. My job at the international school where I work is to essentially help the main teacher in the classroom (think teacher slave). Some days I cut out paper, make copies, draw, or supervise the kids on the field. If I’m lucky, I get a chance to teach a class, lead discussions, and interact on a more cerebral level. I find the menial work beneath me, though tolerable, knowing that it is a means to an end in attaining my Masters degree. If I stay in education, I think I’ll probably end up on a less conventional track—perhaps as an exhibit designer, cultural/heritage tour operator, researcher, writer, or, god willing, professor.

But for know, its play land with the kiddos, and there are some definite perks to the job. I enjoy forming relationships with my students, experiencing life from their perspective where soccer, and friends, and study are the obstacles of the day. It’s gratifying to help other human beings think critically, to reason beyond conventional wisdom, and to build fluency in words and ideas.

Better still is the feedback that one gets as a teacher. Today I received an unexpected (ridiculously funny letter) written by a student. Their assignment was to write about a person they admire. Here is what she wrote:

Mr. Leo Some people change what they want to do many times in their life. When Mr. Leo, my teacher, was my age, he wanted to be a paleontologist, like me. When he was in college, though, he discovered he really wanted to be an archaeologist, also like me. Mr. Leo, even though he isn’t what he hoped to be before, is still happy. He might not have the most interesting job, but he acts like he just absolutely adores teaching fifth grade.

Our teacher looks the same every day. He has furry hair on his almost bald head, even though he is very young. He has piercing blue eyes, elf-like ears, in which he has two round earrings. He has a Shakespeare beard on his pointy chin, broad shoulders and a T-shirt hiding his secret tattoos on his strong arms. His long jeans hide his legs, and blue sandals show his huge toes.

The school did a good job hiring Mr. Leo. Here are all the reasons I got.

1. Mr. Leo can be very serious and mad but he’s mostly all smiles.
2. He takes time to explain things to you and doesn’t get mad or annoyed if you don’t get it at first.
3. He smells like pizza right out of the oven.

Ugggghhhhh. How is that not unbelievably adorable? I love my students.

Masters Degree blah blahness

Even I am impressed with the sheer awesomeness of my bulletin boards. Yes, I do bulletin boards.

Student drawing (ugly Leo)

Student drawing (bling bling Leo)

Student drawing (erudite Leo)

My Life is an Onion

Have you ever had the longing to revisit the past, to search through the virtual memories of your hard drive—both intangible and real? I started taking digital pictures back in 2003, a couple of years before I created this blog. It’s a strange experience to look back, to put on some ambient music and gaze at the you of years gone by. I look different. There is a rounder tilt to my face, less wrinkles, less sun spots, and a slight shift of fear behind my eyes. I see a boy, not quite yet a man, trying to make his way in the world, fully invested in his life, though not entirely sure what that life should be. I see friends, work, school, my relationship, it's so strange. Like looking at someone who is both me and not me, a memory faded.

Thought: Our lives they move so quickly. We rise up out of the soil, stretch out towards the sun. Our faces change, small and hairless, that find girth, strength, and weight, only to sink back down, the certainty of change our only stability as we rise and fall and fall again.

Thought: It’s odd to think that we are the first generation of humans with the technology to capture the past. One swift blink, snap, and that moment is frozen in time. My life is now a series of folders, layers of some great cosmic onion that can be peeled off year by year. Imagine, should the human race continue to blunder on, your future sons and daughters – generations hence – might stumble on those folders, catch a glimpse of you, their great great grand something sipping on some tea.

Thought: And this journal, cooler still! Maybe I can write for the rest of my life. Maybe the future will know me through the very words that I’m typing now. Alas, perhaps I should feel remiss for not introducing myself sooner. Hello future me, my sons and daughters. Enjoy these words and these pictures. They were my life.

If I can send one message from the past, above and beyond anything I have written before, it is to cherish your life. It is yours, your chance to shine beneath the sun, your cosmic onion.

(If this post makes no sense I do apologize. I was having a moment)

Bring it On

I just had my weekday night dinner salad and the taste of hot sauce and vinegar still lingers in my mouth. There is a slight breeze moving through the apartment, and I am thanking mother nature, or father time, or something larger than myself that summer hasn’t yet arrived. My next door neighbors have just started clapping en masse and earlier I heard them killing a chicken, so it looks like another night of Candomblé. I sure would love African rituals if I was studying them for field work, or academic enlightenment, or just to get smarter, but as things now stand I am still their cranky ass light sleeping neighbor who thinks he should “dormir” and eat more fiber. Or something.

Click and watch this you so deserve it.

So life into an autumn that is not an autumn moves on. No leaves fall here. No woods in transition. Just calm spring breezes and the coconuts that fall into them. Life has, for the most part, been pretty good of late. My routine most days is something along the lines of 6am, god it’s early, run, run, run down the steps of the hill, eat two eggs, grab van, drink coffee, stare at facebook, play with kids, yell at kids, wish there was someplace quiet to avoid kids, grab van, come home, make salad, go to bed. Some days, a slight detail will change—the color of my lunch lasagna, or the way a student looks at me and smiles.

My body continues to run my slightly-more-thirty-ass-than-twenty-ass self into the ground. It’s been two months now that I have been in a back crisis, looking for ways to avoid my 24 hour pain. I was diagnosed with a degenerative herniated disc last year, after about five years of suffering from intermittent pain. Now, I can’t sit for more than an hour without my body protesting my spine, and have tried solving this problem by getting rid of chairs altogether (my work computer is now on a shelf that I stand and stare at all day long). Physical therapy, stretching, exercise, nothing seems to be working, and I have gone so far as to (ahem, happy hippy territory) read pseudo-scientific medical literature claiming that back pain is an “emotional symptom” and not a “physical abnormality”. What to do, what to do?

In order to break up the routine, Vivi and I joined a boxing gym and are soooo very much in love with doing it. I’ve always had mad respect for boxers because they train REAL, they train HARD, and their abs can put your flabby fat curve of happiness to shame. Our gym is this crowded little room off the beach that smells like sweat and is full of red faced aggressive looking people. When I went into the place for the first time, I became “apaixonado”, in love with the grit and seriousness of the place. Our trainer, Cristiano, is one funny but mean son of a bitch. He’s the kind of guy that will force you to do 100 push ups, 100 sit ups, 100 combinations on the bag, all while smiling and cracking his whip. When he starts to notice that people are getting tired, he screams in his loudest voice, “SOME ONE TIRED IN HERE?!” If you respond “no” it’s back to the mat, and if the answer is “yes”, well, it’s back to the mat. He is such a bastard, I love him.

So that’s it. So much happening. So much not happening. I feel like I am in a time vortex that never really moves on. Salvador has become just that place where I live. Nothing necessarily all together special, but still respectable and fun. My parents arrive in three months (the last time my dad stepped foot in Brazil was 45 some odd years ago), and I’m getting pumped about their visit. Some days, I’m kind of ready to go home, buy a cell phone, buy a car, maybe even get fatter, but then I remember that my home is here and that tomorrow is just another day.

Hey look, it's election day!

We try hard not to be cool. We try and we fail.

Smile.

Bahianas and their hair.

More time gone by.

Unconcious Racism

The year is 2010. It has been over six decades since the height of the African-American civil rights movement in the United States. The notion that people are fundamentally different, taxonomically stratified, that racial qualities such as skin color can determine a persons worth is long past. After all, we’ve fought our great war. 620,000 hard working, blue blooded, dyed in the wool Americans were killed over States rights, over the discrepancy of constitutional promises and what it really means to be free. We’ve had our time of struggle, battling out the demons of Jim Crow, suffrage, educational segregation, and all other systematic masquerades of inequality.

The year is 2010 and we stand on the threshold of a new day. The dirty polarization of white versus black, good versus evil, the bitter versus the blessed flies in the face of our modernity. We are a new people – a melting pot of colors – who have moved past the great obsession of dividing and subdividing and sub-sub-dividing the human race. Even Jesus, after all, is taking on a new face, is moving away from the Nordic blond hair blue eyed image into a darker confluence of possible Arab, Armean, Berber, Roman, Greek, African, or Persian ancestry.


It is 2010 and things are different. I don’t have to be afraid of how the world views my “bi-racial” relationship, of the taboo mixing of racial lines, of the fact that my progeny would be neither black nor white, but something in between. Conscious racism, the kind of thing you might have seen in the movie Crash, is a thing of the past. People don’t judge other people based on the color of their skin? I mean, we have a black president, a product of Ann Soetoro, a white anthropology geek from the Midwest and Barack Hussein Obama, Harvard graduate and senior governmental economist from Kenya. We understand that the proportion of melanin in your skin has absolutely no biological connection with your intelligence or potential. People have changed. Times have changed. It’s a new day.

Or is it?


I was recently drawn to a book by one of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell, who is phenomenal at writing essays that challenge conventional wisdom and perception. This particular book, Blink, is about our adaptive unconscious mind, or the primitive part of our brain (which we often call intuition) that rapidly judges situations based on a narrow window of experience. Gladwell describes the ability to think fast as “thin-slicing”, and believes that it often produces spontaneous decisions that are as good if not better than carefully planned and considered ones. Take dating, for example. Isn’t it interesting how we can somehow feel out our date in the first ten seconds of meeting him or her, and that we intuitively know if they are right or wrong for us before ever getting to know them?

Gladwell tells the story of a firefighter in Cleveland who answered a routine call with his men. It was in a kitchen in the back of a one-story house in a residential neighborhood. The firefighters broke down the door, laid down their hose, and began dousing the fire with water. It should have abated, but it did not. As the fire lieutenant recalls, he suddenly thought to himself, "There's something wrong here," and he immediately ordered his men out. Moments after they fled, the floor they had been standing on collapsed. The fire had been in the basement, not the kitchen as it appeared. When asked how he knew to get out, the fireman thought it was ESP. What is interesting to Gladwell is that the fireman could not immediately explain how he knew to get out. From what Gladwell calls "the locked door" in our brains, the fireman just "blinked" and made the right decision. In fact, if the fireman had deliberated on the facts he was seeing, he would have likely lost his life and the lives of his men. Gladwell gives a wide range of examples of how thin-slicing in contexts such as gambling, war, and predicting divorce can be useful, and how having too much information – “paralysis by analysis” – can be detrimental.

The down side of our ability to thin slice is that it forms the unconscious basis for our stereotypes, and the social energy for a great deal of racist thought. Not only do we thin-slice situations, but we thin-slice people based on their body language, manner of dress, mannerisms, and skin color. This last factor is extremely powerful in a society that has a strong pro-white pattern of associations, where white = beauty, purity, and goodness, and black = ugly, impure, and bad. In North America, more than any country that I know, we are surrounded by cultural messages that link white with positive things (standard of beauty, intelligence, power) and black with negative things (crime, social decay, immorality). This image is constantly being reinforced, in the newspaper, in our entertainment, and it can’t help but affect our unconscious associations.

Gladwell gives the example of a job interview. He says that these unconscious associations will affect the way you behave in the presence of a black person. “It’s not going to affect what you’ll choose to say or feel or do. In all likelihood, you won’t be aware that you are behaving any differently than you would around a white person. But chances are you’ll lean forward less, turn away slightly from him or her, be a bit less expressive, maintain less eye contact, stand a little farther away, smile a lot less. The black applicant is going to pick up on that uncertainty and distance, and that will make him a little less certain of himself, a little less confident, a little less friendly. And what will you think then? You may get a gut feeling that the applicant really doesn’t have what it takes, or maybe that he is a bit standoffish, or maybe he doesn’t really want a job.” You see where this is heading?

This means that, despite the fact that it is 2010 and we may have made progress in regards to stamping down forms of conscious racism, unconscious racism is still deeply entrenched in our collective psyche. Even when we are consciously opposed to racism, our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated conscious values.

This is a reality that, if Vivi and I come to the States, we will have to face. I have no illusions about this. The good news is, WE CAN CHANGE. We are not locked into our thin-slicing. “Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions. If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way – who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites – it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you CHANGE YOUR LIFE so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with the best of their culture." This is something I have actively pursued in my life, and feel that it is of grave importance on the road to equality.

So in conclusion, the year is 2010. Our hope, ultimately, is in each other.

Midnight Rant

I used to think Candomblé ceremonies were cute, anthropologically speaking. Now, when my neighbors start setting off fireworks at 2 in the morning, when they start drinking beer and screaming their patsy little heads off, I feel like matching their African chants with a prayer of my own. Where in god's name is my paintball gun?! Pricks.

End of Winter Clips

Just some comings and goings.