An interesting connection of the dots from birth to post adolescence...

I found this interesting for a number of reasons including that I did not previously know the background of this public figure. I like his third sentence, "It started before I was born."


"I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting".

-- Steve Jobs

The Sorrow Difference

The opening three paragraphs of Julian Barnes' review of A Widow’s Story: A Memoir by Joyce Carol Oates in the April 7 issue of the New York Review of Books on why mourning is unlike other loss....

In his essay “The Proper Means of Regulating Sorrow,”* Dr. Johnson identifies the dreadful uniqueness of grief among the human passions. Ordinary desires, virtuous or vicious, contain within them the theoretical possibility of their satisfaction:

The miser always imagines that there is a certain sum that will fill his heart to the brim; and every ambitious man, like King Pyrrhus, has an acquisition in his thoughts that is to terminate his labours, after which he shall pass the rest of his life in ease or gaity, in repose or devotion.
But grief, or “sorrow,” is different in kind. Even with painful passions—fear, jealousy, anger—nature always suggests to us a solution, and with it an end to that oppressive feeling:

But for sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells upon objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled.

Advice Column: Dear Sugar...

There is an on line advice column on the daily rumpus that is called Dear Sugar. You can find the column at http://therumpus.net/2010/07/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-44-how-you-get-unstuck/.

Below is a part of Sugar's response to a young woman who had recently miscarried and was grieving the loss of her unborn daughter. The young woman who wrote to Sugar signed her letter, "Stuck" and Sugar wrote about how to get "Unstuck". I have not copied the entire response from Sugar but this excerpt is worth reading...



Several years ago I worked with barely teenage girls in a middle school. Most of them were poor white kids in seventh and eighth grade. Not one of them had a decent father. Their dads were in prison or unknown to them or roving the streets of our city strung out on drugs or fucking them. Their moms were young used and abused drug-and-alcohol addled women who were often abusive themselves. The twenty some girls who were assigned to meet with me as a group and also individually were deemed “at highest risk” by the faculty at the school.

My job title was youth advocate. My approach was unconditional positive regard. My mission was to help the girl youth succeed in spite of the unspeakably harrowing crap stew they’d been simmering in all of their lives. Succeeding in this context meant getting neither pregnant nor locked up before graduating high school. It meant eventually holding down a job at Taco Bell or Wal-Mart. It was only that! It was such a small thing and yet it was enormous. It was like trying to push an eighteen wheeler with your pinkie finger.

I was not technically qualified to be a youth advocate. I’d never worked with youth or counseled anyone. I had degrees in neither education nor psychology. I’d been a waitress who wrote stories every chance I got for most of the preceding years. But for some reason, I wanted this job and so I talked my way into it.

I wasn’t meant to let the girls know I was trying to help them succeed. I was meant to silently, secretly, covertly empower them by taking them to do things they’d never done at places they’d never been. I took them to a rock-climbing gym and to the ballet and to a poetry reading at an independent bookstore. The theory was that if they liked to pull the weight of their blossoming girl bodies up a faux boulder with little pebble-esque plastic hand-and-foot-holds then perhaps they would not get knocked up. If they glommed on to the beauty of art witnessed live—made before their very eyes—they would not become tweakers and steal someone’s wallet and go to jail at the age of fifteen.

Instead, they’d grow up and get a job at Wal-Mart. That was the hope, the goal, the reason I was being paid a salary. And while we did those empowering things, I was meant to talk to them about sex and drugs and boys and mothers and relationships and healthy homework habits and the importance of self-esteem and answer every question they had with honesty and affirm every story they told with unconditional positive regard.

I was scared of them at first. Intimidated. They were thirteen and I was twenty-eight. Almost all of them had one of three names: Crystal, Brittany or Desire. They were distant and scoffing, self-conscious and surly. They were varnished in layers upon layers of girl lotions and potions and hair products that all smelled faintly like watermelon gum. They hated everything and everything was boring and stupid and either totally cool or totally gay and I had to forbid them from using the word gay in that context and explain to them why they shouldn’t say the word gay to mean stupid and they thought I was a total fag for thinking by gay they actually meant gay and then I had to tell them not to say fag and we laughed and after a while I passed around journals I’d purchased for them.

“Do we get to keep these? Do we get to keep these?” they clamored in a great, desperate joyous girl chorus.

“Yes,” I said. “Open them.”

I asked them each to write down three true things about themselves and one lie and then we read them out loud, going around in the circle, guessing which one was the lie, and by the time we were about halfway around the room they all loved me intensely.

Not me. But who I was. Not who I was, but how I held them: with unconditional positive regard.


I had never been the recipient of so much desire. If I had a flower clip in my hair, they wanted to remove the flower clip and put it in their own hair. If I had a pen, they asked if I would give it to them. If I had a sandwich, they wondered if they could have a bite. If I had a purse, they wanted to see what was inside. And most of all they wanted to tell me everything. Everything. Every last thing about their lives. And they did.

Ghastly, horrible, shocking, sad, merciless things. Things that would compel me to squint my eyes as I listened, as if by squinting I could protect myself by hearing it less distinctly. Things that would make me close the door of my office after they left and cry my heart out. Endless stories of abuse and betrayal and absence and devastation and the sort of sorrow that spirals so tightly into an impossible clusterfuck of eternal despair that it doesn’t even look like a spiral anymore.

One of the girls was truly beautiful. She resembled a young Elizabeth Taylor without the curvy hips. Flawlessly luminescent skin. Water blue eyes. Long shimmering black hair. A D-cup rack and the rest of her model thin. She’d just turned 13 when I met her. She’d already fucked five guys and blown ten. She’d lost her virginity at eleven to her mother’s ex-boyfriend, who was now in jail for stealing a TV. Her current lover was thirty-two. He picked her up most days on the edge of the school parking lot. I convinced her to let me take her to Planned Parenthood so she could get a Depo-Provera shot, but when we got there, she did not get the shot. She refused to let the female doctor give her a pelvic exam and the doctor would not give her the shot without one. She cried and cried and cried. She cried with such sharp fear and pain that it was like someone had walked into the room and pressed a hot iron against her gorgeous ass. I said a million consoling, inspiring, empowering things. The female doctor spoke in comforting yet commanding tones. But that girl who had fucked five guys and blown ten by the time she turned thirteen would not recline for three minutes on the examining table in a well-lit room in the company of two women with good intentions.

One girl wore an enormous hooded sweatshirt that went down to her knees with the hood pulled up over her head no matter the temperature. Across her face hung a dense curtain of punk-rock colored hair. It looked like she had two backs of her head and no face. To get around, she tilted her head discreetly in various ways and peeked out the bottom of her hair curtain. She refused to speak for weeks. She was the last person who asked if she could have my pen. Getting to know her was like trying to ingratiate oneself to a feral cat. Nearly impossible. One step forward and a thousand steps back. But when I did—when I tamed her, when she parted her hair and I saw her pale and fragile and acne-covered face—she told me that she slept most nights in a falling down wooden shed near the alley behind the apartment building where she lived with her mom. She did this because she couldn’t take staying inside, where her mother ranted and raved, alcoholic and mentally ill and off her meds and occasionally physically violent. She pulled the sleeves of her hoodie up and showed me the slashes on her arms where she’d repeatedly cut herself with a razor blade because it felt so good.

One girl told me that when her mom’s boyfriend got mad he dragged her into the back yard and turned on the hose and held her face up to the ice cold running water until she almost drowned and then he locked her outside for two hours. It was November. Fortysome degrees. It wasn’t the first time he’d done this. Or the last.

I told the girls that these sorts of things were not okay. That they were unacceptable. Illegal. That I would call someone and that someone would intervene and this would stop. I called the police. I called the state’s child protection services. I called them every day and no one did one thing. Not one person. Not one thing. Ever. No matter how many times that man almost drowned that little girl with a garden hose in the back yard or how many times the thirty-two year old picked up the thirteen-year old with the great rack in the school parking lot or how many times the hooded girl with no face slept in the falling down wood shed in the alley while her mother raged.

I had not lived a sheltered live. I’d had my share of hardships and sorrows. I thought I knew how the world worked, but this I could not believe. I thought that if it was known that bad things were happening to children, those bad things would be stopped. But that is not the sort of society we live in, I realized. There is no such society.

One day when I called child protective services I asked the woman who answered the phone to explain to me exactly why no one was protecting the children and she told me that there was no funding for teenagers who were not in imminent danger because the state was broke and so the thing the child protective services did was make priorities. They intervened quickly with kids under the age of twelve, but for those over twelve they wrote reports when people called and put the reports in a file and put the child’s name on a long list of children who someone would someday perhaps check up on when there was time and money, if there ever was time and money. The good thing about teens, she told me confidentially, was that if it got bad enough at home they usually ran away and there was more funding for runaways.

I hung up the phone feeling like my sternum had cracked open. Before I could even take a breath, in walked the girl whose mother’s boyfriend repeatedly almost drowned her with the garden hose in the back yard. She sat down in the chair near my desk where all the girls sat narrating their horrible stories and she told me another horrible story and I told her something different this time.

I told her it was not okay, that it was unacceptable, that it was illegal and that I would call and report this latest, horrible thing. But I did not tell her it would stop. I did not promise that anyone would intervene. I told her it would likely go on and she’d have to survive it. That she’d have to find a way within herself to not only escape the shit, but to transcend it, and if she wasn’t able to do that, then her whole life would be shit, forever and ever and ever. I told her that escaping the shit would be hard, but that if she wanted to not make her mother’s life her destiny, she had to be the one to make it happen. She had to do more than hold on. She had to reach. She had to want it more than she’d ever wanted anything. She had to grab like a drowning girl for every good thing that came her way and she had to swim like fuck away from every bad thing. She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal.

She seemed to listen, in that desultory and dismissive way that teens do. I said it to every girl who came into my office and sat in the horrible story chair. It became my gospel. It became the thing I said most because it was the thing that was most true.

It is also the most true for you, Stuck, and for any one who has ever had any thing truly horrible happen to them.

You will never stop loving your daughter. You will never forget her. You will always know her name. But she will always be dead. Nobody can intervene and make that right and nobody will. Nobody can take it back with silence or push it away with words. Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live though it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal. Therapists and friends and other people who live on Planet My Baby Died can help you along the way, but the healing—the genuine healing, the actual real deal down-on-your-knees-in-the-mud change—is entirely and absolutely up to you.

That job at the middle school was the best job I ever had, but I only stayed for a year. It was a heavy gig and I was a writer and so I left it for less emotionally taxing forms of employment so I could write. One day seven years after I quit, I ate lunch at a Taco Bell not far from the school where I’d worked with the girls. Just as I was gathering my things to leave, a woman in a Taco Bell uniform approached and said my name. It was the faceless girl who’d lived in the falling down shed. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail now. She was grown up. She was twenty and I was thirty-five.

“Is that you?” I exclaimed and we embraced.

We talked about how she was soon to be promoted to assistant manager at the Taco Bell, about which of the girls from our group she was still in touch with and what they were doing, about how I’d taken her rock climbing and to the ballet and to a poetry reading at an independent bookstore and how she hadn’t done any of those things again.

“I never forgot you, even after all these years,” she told me.

“I’m so proud of you,” I said, squeezing her shoulder.

“I made it,” she said. “Didn’t I?”

“You did,” I said. “You absolutely did.”

I never forgot her either. Her name was Desire.

Chester...

Are we born racist?

The recent sermon below from the First Universalist Church of Youngstown Ohio references some of the systemic and economic underpinnings of racism of America. It also suggests (based on neurological research) that the brain is hard wired to discern (and be wary of) "differences" as part of the fight or flight response system of the amygdala part of the brain. See also: Are We Born Racist? New Insights From Neuroscience and Positive Psychology by Jason Marsh, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton and Jeremy Adam Smith.

Fortunately, hard wired and learned prejudice can be overcome with positive messages and greater understanding of the way oppression works.

The point is that, whether we are born racist or it insidiously emerges through cultural and other messages that are learned after birth, if we do not own our racism - we inflict it.

Sermon: Are We Born Racist?

January 16, 2011

Matt Alspaugh

Are we born racist? Do we have some innate genetic quality that predisposes us toward bias based on skin color? This is a hard topic to take on. I must admit didn't want to take it up this Sunday for Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. day, and yesterday was King's birthday.

But King's work went far beyond race and civil rights, and I want to explore his legacy, but not today. But, calendar challenged as I am, I somehow ended up scheduling this topic, racism, on this day.

I don't want to deny that racism and xenophobia have strong systemic causes. We live in a society that has nationalism and race and racism embedded deep in it. When we think of the interconnected web of existence of which we are a part, (our seventh principle) we need to realize that that interconnected web includes both good and evil. The evil of racism is built into our social and cultural network, and has been with us for centuries.

Skin color racism has not always been with us. In her book, "Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance, and How They Fall", Amy Chua describes how the Roman Empire contended with xenophobia and racism. She notes, "Racism in the modern sense did not exist in Rome. There is little evidence that Romans saw light skin as superior to dark skin, or vice versa."[1] Rather, she notes "the Romans had a particular distaste for peoples of excessive size and height"[2], who they believed were of inferior intelligence.

In America, as in much of the Western World, the development of racism had an economic basis. The UU theologian Thandeka points out that this was a consequence of Southern land-owners doing the economics, and finding that "slaves, though twice the price of purchase of indentured servants, [were] a better long-term investment; both they and their progeny would be in servitude for life, and the amount of time and work extracted from them would be extreme."[3] What this did, however, was decrease work prospects for white indentured servants at the end of their contacts, and these 'freedmen' became a threat to the system. They could ally with black slaves to demand freedom and economic benefits. This did in fact happen. In Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, a mixed group of lower-class whites and slaves attacked and burned Jamestown to the ground.

The elites had to resolve this. The solution to this was racism -- a way to artificially elevate poor whites with respect to blacks. Thandeka notes, "Racial contempt would function as a wall between poor whites and blacks protecting masters and their slave-produced wealth from both lower-class whites and slaves."[4] Like many economic decisions of the 'greed is good' variety, this was a deal with the devil, and as we know, the follow-on consequences have been costly, destructive and difficult to correct, even to this day.

I find it amusing that the representatives who elected to read the Constitution as part of the opening of Congress chose not to read certain parts, rationalizing that those parts were overruled by later amendment.[5] Parts like Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3, which specifies that slaves, as 'other persons' be counted as three-fifths of a person for representation and taxation purposes.[6] I have no doubt that the choice to not read these sections was made largely out of desire that those parts would just go away.

And Carole tells me that the state of Ohio did not finally ratify the 14th amendment to the constitution, giving black citizenship and basic rights, until 2003.

Even the rational process that is science has been corrupted by racism. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould's book "The Mismeasure of Man" explores how some scientists used craniometry -- the measure of brain case size as an argument that race and intelligence were connected. When craniometry was discredited, IQ measurement was used in the same way.[7]

I want to talk today not so much of structural or institutional racism, racism in society, but rather I want to tussle with a harder topic, which is my own racism. This is a bit of a confessional: perhaps some of you may see your own selves in my stories, or not; that is up to you.

I recognize that I am racist. I know this is true! I took the test! Yes, there's a test -- more about that in a moment. But first let me be clear, I don't mean that I espouse white supremacy or anything like that. I simply know I notice skin-tones and make judgments based on such data, not always good judgments.

For about a decade, researchers at Harvard have been exploring race and other forms of bias with a tool called the Implicit Association Test.[8] This is the test I took. You can take it as well on your computer. Just 'google' for the words 'implicit association' and the research website will be the top hit. Or, you can go on our website, UUYO.ORG this afternoon, and find this sermon, which will have the link.

This is how it works. It's a bit like a computer game. After entering some demographic information, you are presented with a screen where you are shown images of black and white faces, intermixed with positive and negative words, words like joy, wonderful, terrible, awful. You are asked to rapidly, as fast as possible, push either the 'e' key or the 'i' key to assign the word or picture to the left or right category. The basic claim is that your reaction time is faster when the association of the words and pictures is strong for you. So if you have a bias toward seeing white skinned people in a positive way, you'll be very fast at the keyboard when both the positive words and the whites are assigned to, say the 'i' key. And that is what happened for me. The test indicated I had a bias toward white preference. Like Malcolm Gladwell, who in his book Blink, describes taking the test several times, and he says, "the result always leaves me feeling a bit creepy".[9] I too have a bit of a sense of creepiness or shame about my result.

Now I know that my nature is more complex than just a test result. I know that, though I don't want to admit it, I encounter people differently based on skin color. I know that this is part of my conditioning in this culture, especially as a kid growing up in the South. I find even today when I travel to parts of the South, or even hear certain Southern accents, I get an uneasy, pit of the stomach feeling that I know is connected to unconscious experience reaching back to childhood. This queasiness is an unsafe feeling, a sense that I have to be careful in what I say or do, lest I transgress the unwritten code of race that permeated my childhood.

In her book, "Learning to be White", Unitarian Universalist theologian Thandeka recounts many stories that white people told her of how, as children, they learned the hidden and shame-based rules of race. Of bringing home African-American playmates to find the parents uncomfortable but without explanation. Of listening to parents make racist comments and feeling uncertain and confused. Of finding parents outraged because they brought home blacks as visitors or dates. Of being forced to choose between terminating an African-American friendship and losing white friends.

Carole told her story of bringing home her husband-to-be to meet her mother, and learning that her mother's cultural conditioning got the best of her higher aspirations. Carole was able to prevail and her mother expanded her world and Carole deepened her relationship with her father as a result.

Sometimes our discomfort around race can play out in interesting ways. A story from my more recent past. When I was in seminary, my class included two amazing and committed African-American men; both are doing good ministry in the UU movement now. I worked with one of them, Leon, on one of our weekly chapel services. These chapel services often pushed the edges of what good worship could be.

Anyway, this particular service was titled "Stress Fracture", and the theme was conflict. As we talked about the theme it became apparent that we needed to confront race as one of the conflicts, and in particular, Leon's sense that I and other white classmates coddled him, put up with his lack of followthrough at times. I had never talked with him about how I felt when he had failed to complete a project we had promised the president of the school, and I had to finish it by myself at the last minute.

I realized my conditioning as a good liberal white guy caused me to silently put up with such behavior without calling Leon on it. Leon reminded me that being called out was what he needed in order to be fully included, to feel fully cared about and cared for. We acted this conflict out in the worship, given us a chance to put this realization out there, for the other classmates as well as for me.

Much of my training on anti-racism has focused on the theological or ethical basis for countering racism. It has been largely prescriptive, moving from ethical precepts like our first principal in Unitarian Universalism, 'Respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person', to more specific guidelines and approaches. Words like shame or guilt of confession come up frequently. I've even talked today of admitting my own racism, and of shame.

The book from which I plagiarized the title of this sermon, "Are We Born Racist?" goes beyond the theological and ethical arguments in an exciting way. The selections in this anthology explore racism in the context of positive psychology, that is, the psychology of normal human behavior.

In one study, researchers use functional MRI to understand brain activity as people encounter race-based situations. Ohio State researcher William Cunningham examined the activity of the amygdala as persons viewed images of black and white faces. Now the amygdala is a very primitive, evolutionarily old part of the brain which is involved in making and remembering quick, emotional decisions -- fight or flight. This research team found that "among whites, black faces trigger amygdala activity only when those faces were seen for a length of time (thirty milliseconds) so short that it amounts to subconscious exposure."[10] However, longer exposure to the images, about than half a second, engaged higher level parts of the brain, "areas associated with inhibition and control. It was as if, in less than half a second, their brains were reining in unwanted prejudices."[11] Further, there is evidence that we can develop this ability to rein in prejudice, and become more egalitarian through practice.[12]

It's well known that people living in oppressed conditions, whether due to racism or socioeconomic class, face increased stress, and their body chemistry changes in unhealthy ways, leading to hypertension, diabetes, and immunological problems.[13]

What is surprising to me is that several studies have shown that people with high levels of racial prejudice also face increased stress whenever they interact with people of other races. Their body chemistry also changes, just as experienced by oppressed people. This is a path to cancer, hypertension, diabetes, and other health problems.[14] So working to reduce one's own embedded racism may provide personal health benefits.

Just a few other interesting findings from psychological research: One research group presented both black and white college students with a standardized test based on the GRE. In one arm of the study, the researchers told the students this was a test of intellectual ability, and in the other arm, they told the students that this was merely a problem solving study, and the test was not on intellectual ability. The result was that blacks did more poorly than whites when cued on intellectual ability, but they preformed equally well when not cued. Similar studies with other groups -- think women and math skills -- yield similar results -- the mere fact that the culture stereotypes a certain group can insidiously affect that group's performance.

Finally, much work has been done trying to understand how people of different races can best work together in teams. It's a complex situation. In one study, white people's attempts to be "strategically color-blind", avoiding race comments, caused black participants to become suspicious of the whites' motives.[15],[16] In other situations, expecting team members to censor offensive language increased performance in a mixed groups. The lessons emerging are that diverse teams work best when they have larger goals that everyone is focused on, and plenty of time and encouragement for talking and understanding one another.

So is there hope for racist people like me? Is there hope for a society like ours with its embedded racism? I think this new scientific work affirms that yes, there is hope. We have work to do, in our own hearts and minds as well as in the society we live in.

And in this work, let us remember words of Martin Luther King, Jr.:

I must confess, my friends, the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will be still rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. There will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. ... Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. …

[And] When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of now way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.[17]

May it be so.

Notes

[1] Amy Chua, "Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance, and How They Fall", 2007, p. 41.

[2] ibid. p. 42.

[3] Thandeka, "Learning to be White", p. 44.

[4] ibid. p. 46.

[5] http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/4002/congress_reads_the_constitution,_tea_party-style/

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_compromise

[7] Stephen Jay Gould "The Mismeasure of Man", 1996, p. 52.

[8] https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

[9] Malcolm Gladwell, Blink, 2005, p. 81.

[10] Susan Fiske in "Are We Born Racist?", 2010, p. 12

[11] ibid.

[12] David Amodio in "Are We Born Racist?", p. 50

[13] Eve Ekman & Jeremy Adam Smith, in "Are We Born Racist?", p. 35

[14] Elizabeth Page Gould, in "Are We Born Racist?", pp. 42-43

[15] Dottie Blias in "Are We Born Racist?", p. 73

[16] http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/apfelbaum%20sommers%20norton.pdf

17 http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/628.html