Tag / racism

by Nathan Coumbe

History is tragedy, not melodrama

One of my professors in college, a tiny little man from the Delta named Dr. Bo Morgan, said one of the most accurate and poignant statements about history to all of us historians-in-training on our first day in his class:

“History is tragedy, not melodrama.”

Melodrama: think of all the westerns from the 1950s and 60s. There were good guys and bad guys. And you could easily see who was who.

Tragedy: real people with real flaws acting the way humans do… And their flaws destroy them in the end.

History isn’t a Western, as much as our politicians would like to treat it that way. There are rarely obvious villains and heroic good guys that you can easily spot. It’s full of good people doing bad things and bad people doing good things. Flawed humans acting as such.

Acknowledging the bad things we’ve done doesn’t harm America. It doesn’t make America or Americans “bad.”

Acknowledging the Holocaust doesn’t make all Germans or Germany bad. Why would recognizing our history of systemic racism or chattel slavery or the destruction of Native Americans harm the US?

If anything, acknowledging it helps us because we can learn from it and improve the present.

There is no point in erasing or hiding any of it except to please a small fringe on one side of the aisle.

And it’s also true that labeling our country as pure evil is equally wrong, something an equally tiny fringe of extreme people on the other side has tried to do as well.

History is tragedy, not melodrama.

This post was inspired by Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter from March 28.

by Nathan Coumbe

Don’t be offended

That’s easy to say when you’re in a group that’s doing most of the offending. 

It’s harder to be someone who must constantly shore up his defenses to take offense without suffering harm. 

Inevitably the latter leads to a reaction against the offenders. Because people want things to change. For their children and the rest of posterity.

“No offense, but…” means someone’s about to be offended.

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by Nathan Coumbe

The Transitive Property of Belief

Time for a math lesson! Bear with me—it matters.

The Transitive Property of Mathematics says this: for all real numbers x, y, and z, if x=y and y=z, then x=z also.

That makes sense, right?

Why am I telling you this? Because this same mathematical property affects all outcomes you experience in life.

Think about it: how you see an aspect of reality affects how you behave. How you behave affects the results you get. Therefore, how you see things affects the results you get. X=Y and Y=Z, so X=Z as well.

Dr. Stephen R. Covey called this the “See-Do-Get Continuum.” How we see the world affects what we do, which affects what we get in life. (You can learn all about it in his monumental work The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.)

Covey likes to say, “How we see the problem is the problem.” In this case, “seeing” could also translate into “believing.”

Here’s an example:

Let’s say you’re a manager and you’ve recently had a few millennials added to your team. If you believe all millennials are lazy and entitled, you’re going to treat them as such. This will so alienate them and undermine your relationship that pretty soon, they’ll start acting out.

Most likely they’ll rebel against you by doing the bare minimum, scraping by because in their minds nothing they do will be good enough to please you anyway. Why should they put out more effort than necessary?

How you saw them affected your behavior towards them, which affected how they behaved (your results). It’s the Pygmalion Effect, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Can you see how this continuum affects us when it come to things like race, gender, or religion? Our beliefs shape our actions; our actions shape our outcomes.

So what’s the bottom line?

If you want to change the world—or maybe just your situation in it—start first by changing your beliefs. Work first on how you see things.

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