The different aspects of one's life do not evolve in sealed compartments. If your boss sexually harasses you at work, it's likely that your productivity will suffer from it (because you will become anxious, paranoid, etc). And it might very well put a stress on your family life too, because like it or not every element of your life is interlinked.
It's very easy to see how racism can influence -negatively or positively- one's academic performance too. If you have to work longer hours at your job to support yourself because institutional racism means you earn less $/hour than your white counterpart (fictitious situation - I don't actually know if it's any true), it means you have less time to study for class. If you're anxious to go to class because you are regularly yelled racial slurs at by fratboys on campus, it might restrict your ability to concentrate during class and exams, or you ability to attend class period, and restricts your work spaces (if you need to avoid the library for such reasons, e.g.). If your teacher is a neonazi who teaches in his/her history class that the Holocaust never occurred, a Jewish student might not feel inclined to support such claims in their work/exams, and thus suffer academically (or have to drop out).
It might seem far-fetched (especially the last example), yet it is a reality for many minority students in the country.
I took a Womanist theology course a few years ago as an elective. For those of you who don't know what it is - google it - the name isn't intuitive. I was the only non-black person in the entire class, and we had some very interesting discussions. I learned a TREMENDOUS amount of information regarding the Black culture and how they perceive and handle everyday life in America.
Every day I would hear anecdotes from the various class members as they attempted to help me understand what life was like for a Black American. One of the largest recurring themes I saw during our discussions involved differences in perception - it was fascinating. For example, one of the Black women in the class told me: "How would you feel if the cashier at a store refused to even touch your hand when handing you your change back?" This statement was met with a lot of "mmm hmm", obviously indicating that this was a fairly universal phenomenon among the other classmates. This shocked me, because my immediate thought was "This happens to me all the time!" I had never thought anything of it, because I too don't enjoy rubbing hands with every stranger I meet. If I had been that cashier, I would've tried to avoid making contact (as much as possible without making it awkward) with every customer I met.
This is interesting because two different races of people had two
completely different perspectives on why something happened. One group chalked it up to bias/racism, while the other group chalked it up to normal behavior / logic (i.e. I don't want germs) / chance (sometimes your hands touch, sometimes they don't - who really pays attention to this anyhow?). An incident so minute, so small, so "insignificant" could make the world of difference.
This did two things for me:
1. It made me hyper-aware of touching minorities hands for a while. Any time I had even the slightest expectation of making skin contact, you bet I was all over that. In all seriousness though, it made me realize how my actions (actions that are inconsequential to
me) could be perceived as rude by other races, even when I had no bad intentions. This, in my mind, presents an important ethical question: am I expected to change my behavior in these sorts of scenarios? I'm not sure. Thoughts? If you think no, does your answer change as a physician treating patients?
2. It made me realize that a huge part of racism is perception - you see what you want to see. I explained that a lot of the scenarios that my classmates were presenting were likely not induced by racism or the color of their skin, and even people like myself also frequently experienced similar treatment. The difference? Perception.
For the record, I'm not trying to say all of these experiences are not real and/or not merited. However, a large number of them
probably are.
This presents us all with a personal choice - how do you want to live life? Do we want to constantly be searching for negative reasons that make us feel bad? Do we want to give people the benefit of the doubt or assume the worst? For you Christian folk out there, think about how Christianity would handle this problem. There are many things in life that are not in our control, but our attitude isn't one of them. We're all guilty of putting the blame on others from time to time - it makes life more tolerable. But if we get into a habit of seeing bad things all over the place - especially when there's no
real, good reason to think this way - we need to take a step back and question our masochism. (This is similar to getting jealous of a significant other when there's absolutely no logical reason to be jealous - the feeling builds and builds, for no reason other than the fact that you're psyching yourself out).
You make your own happiness in this world. I think life is too short to go around assuming the worst about people. Even if people
do do something that is almost undoubtedly an intentional judgmental, rude, or racist action - assume the best. Don't do it for them, do it for you.
"The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood." Voltaire
