1. What Enables Your Values-Based Action? Awareness of Others
Last class we discussed how self-awareness enables us to live by our values. We did this by reviewing and re-calibrating our inner moral compass. Today we are going to explore a corollary form of awareness—the awareness of others.
Katharine Baker, PhD
OLLI Spring 2017, Vanderbilt University

2. Awareness of Others Society, Culture, Systems
SLIDE: Awareness of Others
We are each an individual but we are also embedded in: Society, Culture, Systems, Institutions, Organizations, Groups and Professional & Personal Relationships
Our identity is a self-story we tell ourselves, but it is also formed through our relationships. No man is an island, as the poet John Donne famously wrote. We are individual and we are communal all at the same time.
So when increasing our awareness, we are wise to consider our individual actions AND the ways our context and relationships affect us. We may be trying our best as individuals to be moral people while participating in groups that we don’t realize are swaying us in a wrong direction. For example, a full awareness of racism includes the individual, institution and systemic aspects of that moral problem. Listen to these definitions….
Individual Racism: Individual racism includes actions toward another person that express prejudice, hate or bias based on race.
Institutional Racism: Institutional racism refers to the policies and practices within and across institutions that, intentionally or not, produce outcomes that chronically favor a particular racial group or put it at a disadvantage. For example, institutional racism can be found in school disciplinary policies in which students of color are punished at much higher rates than white students.
Systemic or Structural Racism: A system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various ways to perpetuate racial group inequity. Systemic racism identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with “whiteness” and disadvantages associated with “color” to endure and adapt over time. Structural racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose to practice. Instead it has been a feature of the social, economic and political systems in which we all exist.
So a full picture of racism includes both individual and communal aspects—we must have self-awareness AND awareness of others.
Society, Culture, Systems
Institutions, Organizations, Groups
Professional & Personal Relationships

3. Empathy: feeling with others
SLIDE: Empathy: feeling with others
When we are most fully aware of others, we have empathy, one of the components of emotional intelligence as described by Daniel Goleman. We are going to watch a video that illustrates the full awareness of others that empathy entails. Brene Brown explains that empathy has four qualities:
Perspective taking: the ability to recognize the perspective of another person
Staying out of judgment
Recognizing emotion in other people and
Communicating your understanding of their feelings
Let’s see how she illustrates these suggestions. [3 minute video

4. SLIDE: Intellectual Empathy
“What makes something better is connection.” Professor Maureen Linker explains it further, focusing in on the intellectual aspects of empathy—she says:
What is intellectual empathy? …When we empathize, we imagine what it is like to feel what another person is feeling in a particular situation. Empathy is different in this way from sympathy, which is a feeling for a person without having to really understand what it is that person is actually experiencing.
…Empathy is not the same as actually walking in someone else’s shoes or feeling another’s pain, because we don’t actually face the same circumstances a person faces when we empathize with her or him. Instead, we have to creatively imagine what it feels like by projecting ourselves into that person’s situation. This is why a robust self-awareness helps us to empathize more effectively. We have to imagine being who we are in very different kinds of circumstances and then imagine how we would feel (13).
Linker’s book applies intellectual empathy to the way we deal with differences in our social identities. What does that mean?

5. Social Identity SLIDE: Social Identity
The term social identity refers to those aspects of our self-identity that relate to our membership in social groups. So, for example, my social identity includes the fact that I am a professor, a member in the academic community. And I am an Episcopalian, a member of a religious group, and I am a white woman, a member of a certain racial category, and so forth. Some of these aspects of my identity were chosen by me, some were assigned or attributed to me by others.
Linker says: “Social identity is not strictly defined by an individual but comes about through the interactions that an individual has within a social system. Some aspects of our social identity correspond with the way we see ourselves, but others have to do with the way we are seen by others.”
This process of identity formation can be creative or destructive, as I bet we have all experienced. Another part of my social identity is the fact that I am a divorced, single woman. My independence is celebrated by me and my single girlfriends, but some of my married friends worry that I’m becoming a crazy cat lady, to cite a stereotype I find odious because y’all my cats rock. But seriously, I appreciate my married friends being concerned about me but I don’t appreciate the way they seem to believe that something is wrong with me. They are biased and blinded by their beliefs that being married is the best way to be—they are so embedded in their particular situation that they can’t understand something different from it.

6. Blind Spots & Bias SLIDE: Blind Spots & Bias
As we discussed earlier, when we were thinking about what disables us from following the guidance of our inner moral compass, we can be led astray by our blind spots and biases. Linker warns us that what gets in the way of our creative imagination of others’ experiences are cognitive biases. She says they are “habits of thinking and reasoning that may make it easier to take in and organize information but may nevertheless get in the way of adequately assessing evidence and considering alternative points of view. Cognitive biases often serve to preserve our existing web of belief rather than making it more flexible and open to new sources of information (194).”
And as we know from Jonathan Haidt and his moral foundations theory, gut reactions tend to take the lead in our moral judgments. Linker adds this insight: “When it comes to our beliefs about social identities such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, religion, etc., the interaction between content and emotion is strong and sometimes volatile. For this reason, these are some of the most difficult beliefs for us to examine critically and empathetically” (38).
But examine them we must, because blind spots and biases make some realities invisible to us, realities of which we must be aware if we are to be morally intelligent in our relationships and communities. One skill of intellectual empathy, according to Linker, is understanding the invisibility of privilege.

7. SLIDE: Understanding the Invisibility of Privilege
We usually think of “privilege” as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. In order to add awareness of others to this understanding, we need to add that “privilege” can also be defined as a state of being able to have dominance over others because of some aspect of one’s social identity, such as gender or race.
Linker defines privilege as: “A position of social advantage based on aspects of our social identity that have nothing to do with merit or hard work but instead involve unearned social benefits based on a history of social injustice” (198). Note the moral implications in that definition—she says that the privilege is based on a history of social injustice.
And, that injustice is continued because people often cannot see their privilege—it is invisible to them because it is deemed “normal” or “just the way things are.” For example, Linker notes how hard it might be for a Christian to understand the privilege resulting from the fact that Christmas is a national holiday. What evidence is there for this privilege? RESPONSE. Yes, everybody gets a day off for the Christian holiday but not on days of significance for other religions. Christianity is prioritized more highly than other religions in this way, but we Christians don’t usually see that until it is pointed out to us. We are usually oblivious to the fact that our religious privilege makes life easier for us and harder for others.
Linker gives us the metaphor of an EZ Pass to illustrate privilege. On an EZ pass highway, drivers with special permits gain easy access in and out of stopping points such as toll booths and exits. In the same way, privilege makes it every easy for some of us to travel on the road of rights and opportunities while those with social disadvantage are slowed down and held up frequently.
Another woman professor provides a similar metaphor—she says privilege is like an invisible backpack of helpful tools for getting ahead in life. Her name is Peggy McIntosh and she is esteemed for writing one of the first significant articles on White Privilege.

8.  SLIDE: WHITE PRIVILEGE
A professor at Wellesley College, Peggy McIntosh noticed that her male colleagues did not think of themselves as sexist because they each, as individuals, knew that they had a professional advantage as males, and therefore did nothing to hold their women colleagues back in the workplace. Yet they were still participating in an inequitable system—one that disadvantaged women by putting men at advantage. The privilege of being male was oppressive to women in that system. Until the system changed, McIntosh’s colleagues were still guilty of participating in sexism but they didn’t see their complicity.
Turning such systemic examination on herself, McIntosh realized that she was probably unaware in similar ways of her own privilege. She writes:
…As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage. I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.
I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those conditions that I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic location, though of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can tell, my African American coworkers, friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place and line of work cannot count on most of these conditions.
Several of the conditions she identifies are in your handout—she wrote this article in 1988 so some small progress has been made on some of the conditions but three I still find compelling are:
I can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.
I can be sure that if I ask to talk to "the person in charge" I will be facing a person of my race.
I can choose blemish cover or bandages in flesh color that more or less matches my skin.
When I first learned about McIntosh’s work, I was astounded by that last condition. It had never ever occurred to me that band aids should come in various colors if they are meant to match skin tones. My own assumption of the normality of whiteness was made plain to me by that fact.
Along with our biases, the invisibility of privilege makes it hard for us to seek out evidence that might disconfirm our erroneous beliefs, such as social stereotypes. So, we have to keep our moral antennae up to detect when our privilege may be causing problems for others, and we must work to change the systems that sustain privilege for some and oppression for others.
McIntosh says, “Disapproving of the systems won't be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitude. But a "white" skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate but cannot end, these problems.”
Making such problems visible instead of invisible is a first step. Sometimes the ways that people are oppressed remain invisible to us because we assume that their social identity is fully apparent when we consider obvious traits such as race, gender and class. We must be careful not to box people into overly simple categories—identity is multi-faceted and therefore complex. Another skill of intellectual empathy, according to Linker, is knowing that social identity is intersectional.
Let me explain.

9. Knowing that social identity is intersectional
SLIDE: Knowing that social identity is intersectional
Social identity includes many facets that intersect (race, gender, class, etc.)
Due to those intersections, advantage and disadvantage can occur simultaneously
Our multi-faceted identity provides points of potential intersection with others
Our identities include many traits and circumstances, both privilege and oppression, and multiple facets across social differences such as race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and so forth. For example, as a woman, I may not have had the professional advantage of many men—I may have experienced some oppression based on my gender. However, on the other hand, I have had the immense privilege of higher education, which confers significant advantage for me over other people, including men, who have not had that privilege. So my particular identity is an intersection between my gender and my education, which means I am both advantaged and disadvanted in certain ways.
So there is rich potential in looking for ways in which our own identities intersect with others. We can look for connections best when we transcend limiting social categories, blind spots and biases.
Social identity includes many facets that intersect (race, gender, class, etc.)
Due to those intersections, advantage and disadvantage can occur simultaneously
Our multi-faceted identity provides points of potential intersection with others

10. Vernā Myers, diversity advocate
Vernā Myers is dedicated to promoting meaningful, lasting diversity in the workplace. Full bio
Vernā Myers, diversity advocate
SLIDE: Verna Myers (18 minute video)
Diversity advocate Vernā Myers calls us to action in overcoming our biases. She asks us to take three steps in improving our relationships with those who are different from us.
First, we must own our blind spots and bias. We have to keep questioning ourselves to identify again and again our privilege and our part in oppressing others. Verna says: “We gotta get out of denial. Stop trying to be good people. We need real people.” She urges us to ask ourselves “Who do you trust? Who are you afraid of? Who do you implicitly feel connected to? Who do you run away from?”
Second, we can look for intersections with those who seem very “other” than us. What part of your social identity intersects with, or corresponds to, some aspect of the other’s? Verna suggests asking, “Who's in your circle? Who's missing? How many authentic relationships do you have with others who are different from you?”
Third, when we see or hear somebody being limited by a blind spot or bias, we have to speak up and gently help them expand their perspective by taking another’s. In doing so, we can practice compassion because we know that we are imperfect in our moral intelligence as well. We have our own biases and blind spots; we too need to keep questioning and learning.
OK now I will let Verna share these ideas with you in her own way, from her own particular perspective, in a TED talk. 18 minute video – Ver-NAH Myers How to Overcome our Biases? Walk Boldly Toward Them