Making use of racism and other forms of disrespect

The excerpt below is from http://cnn.com. I am posting it not only because it is an interesting and inspiring piece of US history but also perhaps instructive for Diddly readers.  If someone is keeping secrets from you, they respect you at one level. If they tell you everything, they don’t respect you at some level.   The reverse could also said to be true,  especially in partnerships such as marraige . However,  when we find ourselves in adversarial situations, we can gain an advantage by trying to be no more threatening than a piece of furniture.

WASHINGTON (CNN) – William Jackson was a slave in the home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis during the Civil War. It turns out he was also a spy for the Union Army, providing key secrets to the North about the Confederacy.

William Jackson, a slave, listened closely to Jefferson Davis’ conversations and leaked them to the North.

Jackson was Davis’ house servant and personal coachman. He learned high-level details about Confederate battle plans and movements because Davis saw him as a “piece of furniture” — not a human, according to Ken Dagler, author of “Black Dispatches,” which explores espionage by America’s slaves.

“Because of his role as a menial servant, he simply was ignored,” Dagler said. “So Jefferson Davis would hold conversations with military and Confederate civilian officials in his presence.”

Dagler has written extensively on the issue for the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence .

Keeping our heads off the ground by having them up our ass

We’d never get through the world if we knew it as it is: enormous and chaotic. We’d need a brain so large that we couldn’t keep our heads off the ground. The brain’s simplification of reality means that anything that gets into the mind is immediately overemphasized, whether it is an emotional slight, a change in the weather, or a matter of statecraft. So we give the most recent news that greatest weight in decision making. This  leads to frequent  and dramatic fluctuations in our thoughts and moods, and our fragile minds almost leave us little choice but to delude ourselves most of the time.

NO ONE FACES REALITY.

We all react to a simplified, filtered model of the world, a personal story we tell ourselves with respect to the world and our place in it.

From Healthy Pleasures by Robert Ornstein and David Sobel.

See www.ishkbooks.com

More than a few white RI kids prefer Obama “because he’s black”

My kids and I were discussing the election, and they starting talking about the popularity of Obama in their school. They are 10 and 12. I asked them why kids say they like Obama, and they both said that many say “…it is because he is black.” I ask him if they say it as a joke. They say they are serious.

Now, voting on someone based on race is also an adult problem. But lets call it what it is – racism. These kids probably have no idea that they are engaging in racist thinking.

Kids often lean politically with their parents, but they often don’t know why. So when you ask them, they will look for the most obvious difference between the candidates.

But it is a slippery slope. Positive stereotypes are also racist. I also wonder if some of these kids are afraid of being thoughy of as racist is they choose a white candidate over Obama.

Stereotype threat and math tests

A group of university students were given a hard math test. The men outperformed the women. A second group of students were given exactly the same test, but told beforehand that gender differences had never been found in men and women on this particular test. When the cloud of stereotype threat was dispersed in this way, the women did every bit as well as the men…revealing the truth about stereotype threat to vulnerable students can set them free of its foreboding presence. Other studies with other groups of women and black students have shown similar findings.”(FINE)