Seeing Through the Eyes of a Stranger

Today a woman knocked on my door looking for my neighbor. Knowing how intimidating it is to knock on a stranger’s door, I invited conversation, and discovered that we were both authors in a similar field. 

This woman’s name is Barbara. She’s Black, and our conversation came around to her experience as a Black woman in America. She shared how stressful it is simply being Black here. She’s a nurse, and she said “I’m fat because I’m stressed out all the time. I gained twenty pounds over the past year, because I’m just dealing with so much stress.” She shared that many of her family or peers have died by age 60 due to various forms of stress. It’s hard for a Black woman, she told me, to find a good relationship because of the crisis Black men are dealing with. (Although we may naturally think about this as a crisis for Black men, could it be thought of instead as a crisis for white people, coming to terms with the causes and consequences of our privilege?) In her words, “Good men just aren’t available.” I’ve learned from watching Montoya Lavette that Black men experience pain, shame, emasculation, and demoralization through the systemic racism they experience each day.

I’ve heard Black friends tell me universally that they are exhausted and stressed by never knowing whether or not what is happening to you is because you're black. Is the waiter ignoring you because your Black? Did you get passed over for that job interview because your Black?

Barbara says she is exhausted, frustrated, always on edge, always looking out for some unexpected problem, and always on her guard. This is her experience as a Black woman in America, and our conversation brought home for me what her experience must be like.

Seeing life through another’s eyes

Empathy is the ability to look at a situation through another person's eyes. Let’s be clear on what this means, because it’s not as simple as it sounds. Looking through another person’s eyes means looking without your own filters. 

We each develop filters as we grow and mature. How well are you able to see without those filters? It’s very hard! Having empathy means letting go of the assessments and judgments which give us our personal understanding of the world. Having empathy means not only removing your own filters—what certain body language means, what makes you feel appreciated or defensive—but also taking on someone else’s filters—e.g. what is it like to be always watching your back. In my upcoming book Leap to Wholeness I dive into this notion of personal filters and discover how truly difficult—but possible—it is to identify them and let them go.

In order to have a meaningful opinion on an issue, I think one must be able to look at that experience through the eyes of another person. One must be able to shift one’s filters around to see different perspectives.

For instance, if I am a white person with a negative opinion of the Black Lives Matter movement, how hard have I pushed myself to look at things through the eyes of a Black person? No matter how angry I might feel about the impact of recent protests in our communities, if we can try on different filters we can begin to see other sides to the story. Anger is a stop along the road, it is not the destination. The place we are trying to arrive at is a broken-open heartache for the suffering of everybody. With anger, there is a comfortable landing place, where we feel like we know who is right and who is wrong. With anger, we can compartmentalize and shut out the information that doesn’t support our worldview. 

But with empathy, there is no comfortable place to land. There is no shutting off the pain, for pain exists in the world and we can’t just get rid of it. Instead of trying to change it, we can expand our capacity to be uncertain, to let go of our own opinion and become more receptive. We allow others to heal by just witnessing them in their difficulty without judgement.

Recently a Black friend had an experience driving home from vacation in Nevada City—a place my family also likes to go for vacation—when she had to stop to make sure her car was not overheating. In just the few minutes she was stopped by the side of the road, a white man drove up and asked, “Can I help you?” His tone made it clear that she was not welcome in this part of town. Having myself returned from a similar vacation along that same drive home before, I caught a momentary glimpse of the filters through which she sees the world. For me, this would have been a comfortable and easy drive home. I would have felt perfectly safe. But for my friend, it was an exhausting experience of being constantly on the lookout.

Of course, there is not one single Black experience, and I don’t intend to characterize or put into a box other people’s experiences. I think it is important for whites and non-people of color to be better able to feel the Black experience within ourselves and develop more empathy with Black people. 

Living with unfairness

Really seeing and feeling what it might be like to be Black—without the filters I have picked up as a white man, without my history as a white man, without my white middle-class upbringing, without my own safety net or protective guardrails of what it means to be me, without my privileged self-assurance and feeling of belonging—is really hard. When I catch a glimpse of it, I feel a vacant hole in my chest. Grief. 

What is it like to live every day with unfairness? I find it so difficult to live with even one unfair situation, e.g. when someone else less qualified gets picked for a promotion, or when someone behind me in line at the store gets special treatment. Experiencing unfairness is really hard and painful! 

We can look at unfairness through the language of the grief response that we talked about in my last blog post on An Incomplete Cycle of Grief. Each time something unfair happens, we grieve. Even daily disappointments and frustrations lead to an experience of grief. We go through, ideally, the Kubler-Ross/Kessler six stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, and meaning-making. It’s important to realize that going through this cycle takes work. The grieving cycle can be exhausting. Especially exhausting is the step of acceptance, coming to terms with a reality that you don't want. It takes a lot out of us.

So experiencing unfairness takes its toll on our peace of mind. Think of a time when someone got recognized for work that you did. Or maybe a court decision or policy decision that you just knew was wrong. When we experience unfairness and have no means of recourse, it weighs us down. When we have no way to fix the problem, no way to voice our pain or seek redress, it hurts in a profound way.

I have a story of this from second grade that remains etched in my memory. I asked the head teacher if I could use the bathroom, and he said no. A few minutes later the assistant teacher noticed that I needed to go to the bathroom and gave me permission, so I went. When I came back the head teacher got really mad at me, telling me it was against the rules to ask the assistant teacher after I'd already asked the teacher. But I hadn’t done that! The assistant teacher had expressly asked me if I needed to use the bathroom. I've never forgotten the injustice of that interaction. He never bothered to understand my position.

Given my own mild experiences with unfairness, to really comprehend the level of frustration and exhaustion that a Black person might feel in our white-centric culture is hard.

It’s a hard problem

Let me digress into science for a minute. In mathematics there's a fascinating field of study of how hard it is to solve certain mathematical problems. Some problems, of class P, are solvable within a reasonable amount of time using standard algorithms. Other problems, of class NP, take exponential time. This means the problem compounds on itself so quickly that it becomes unsolvable with any known methods. These problems are called “NP hard”, and are so incredibly difficult to solve that we may never solve them.

As a metaphor, maybe this can help underscore the nature of the problems Black people face. There are so many pieces to the puzzle, so many details of life in which systemic prejudice leads to frustration, difficulty, discomfort, stress, anger, resentment, uncertainty, insecurity, shame, and other difficult emotions that it is not possible to escape the problem. This is why, as a non-person of color, I feel like my opinion on these issues needs to be left out of the conversation. I simply cannot comprehend the number of factors that compound the problem. This is an NP-hard problem, and my brain cannot really understand. Instead, other faculties like empathy and compassion are required.

Plenty of Black people succeed, of course. Many Black people build a financially and socially successful life within white America. But this success doesn't imply that a person doesn’t still experience oppression. Wildly popular physicist Neil Degrasse Tyson, a Black man, shared recently about his own stories of getting profiled by police. Fame and success didn’t change this for him.

Inequity is not a Black person’s problem but a white person’s problem. How do we let go of our attachment to the things in our lives which perpetuate unfairness? How do we let go of our inadequate personal opinions on race and open ourselves to unconditional empathy? The problem can't be solved from within the Black community, it must also be taken up within the white community. In my opinion, dealing with systemic racism as white people involves releasing prejudices and assessments which compromise our worldview. It involves letting go of the desire for black and white clarity and opening ourselves to murky nuanced details. It involves rejecting the appeal of thinking we actually understand what life is like for Black people. It means forfeiting our right to have an opinion about issues which require the heart, not the head, in order to be understood. 

It is my view that we need to look through the eyes of others and hear through the ears of others, trying to understand their filters and drop our own. Instead of opinions, we need empathy.