Making Sense of the Irrational
- Jennifer Bright
- Jun 5, 2025
- 6 min read
Before moving on to the 6th and final blog in this series, I want to share an insight that helped to explain something that had perplexed me for some time.
A couple of summers ago I came face to face with one of my greatest fears — Having vermin in my vicinity. With restaurants closed due to Covid and usual sources of food not as available, I began to hear reports on our neighbourhood WhatsApp group of the occasional rat being spotted in back gardens. Along with a fear of heights (which is very inconvenient as someone who loves mountains), I have a phobia of vermin. When I saw evidence of them, my immediate visceral reaction was terror. They must be gone. Kill. Destroy. I later realized that there was zero thought. It was an instantaneous reflex action. An irrational, survival, instinctive reaction. The reptilian brain kicked in while the pre-frontal cortex that would have allowed me some space to respond rather than react was nowhere in sight.
As I couldn’t control the movements of the critters, I took as many precautions as I could (e.g. having holes cemented up) to make sure that at least none of them could enter my home. I later realized that I could either live in fear of one finding a way in or I could see if I could find a way to be less afraid — or ideally not afraid at all.
In my more rational moments, one of my guiding beliefs is that we live in a friendly rather than a hostile universe and that whatever we experience, however distressing, is ultimately here to help me in some way that I’ll eventually come to see. So once I’d calmed down (and had had the holes blocked up!) I began to investigate this terror. This dread. This instinct to exterminate without thought. When I looked at this reaction, I was shocked. I consider myself a compassionate person, but not when it came to these creatures, clearly. Seek and destroy was my instinctive MO. What was the situation here to reveal to me? What was the opportunity here? And, as I was musing, this is what I wrote in my journal: “It reveals the depth of my fear; the fact that deep down I don’t feel safe; it’s giving me the opportunity to change that and to live from a less fearful place”.
I saw that the fear arose from ‘othering’, seeing them as alien and destestable; frightening. And then I had an epiphany, and I wrote: Is this how some people feel about Black bodies???? Is this how the population has been conditioned to react? That would explain the phenomenon of the police being called on people of African heritage just for living — for shooting someone just because they’re jogging (Armaud Aubery), or walking (Trayvon Martin), or sleeping in their own bed (Breonna Taylor), or eating ice cream on their own sofa (Botham Jean) or more recently, Sonya Massey, also in her own home or, or, or. Sheer fear. Utter contraction. Danger. Destroy.
I recently watched an eye-opening conversation, part of the Wisdom of Trauma series , during which one of the participants, neuroscientist and education philosopher, Sara King, made the point that the stress response is built into the autonomic nervous system (autonomic meaning automatic, I learned). Perceiving a threat results in an immediate and automatic visceral reaction. In the same conversation, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Daniel Siegel, spoke about “an inter-generational genetic susceptibility” to engage in “in-group/out-group” distinctions. I think understanding this ‘othering’ as an automatic survival mechanism is crucial. I see it as crucial as:
it helps to explain some of the irrational behaviours BaratundeThurston documents in his thought-provoking TEDx talk, ‘How to deconstruct racism, one headline at a time’, behaviours that seem intended to penalize people for “living while Black”;
it brings to light the longstanding and ongoing propaganda against bodies that are not seen as White and makes explicit the misrepresentation of Black bodies as threatening, scary and violent — and to be protected against.
Safety is a fundamental human need, second only to the physiological needs of food, water and sleep according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, so being in the vicinity of a perceived danger will be alarming. Having fear (of anything) running through the nervous system is going to keep us on alert; it’s not going to allow us to be open-hearted and curious and accepting of others. Living in a fearful state, which so easily can tip over in hatred, will produce the exact situations we see playing out in so many societies. It’s worth noting that the same practice of scapegoating a group to portray them as ‘delinquent’, a ‘problem’ or as ‘other’ happens all over the world. We have only to look at Australia and the Aboriginal peoples; US and Canada and Native Americans; Finland or Sweden and the Sami, France and North Africans; Rwanda and the Hutsi and the Tutsi populations. I could go on. It’s a strategy, a mechanism, for awarding or withholding privileges and absolutely nothing to do with the actual attributes of the groups themselves.
In alerting individuals to the fact that perceived threats are registered viscerally and instantaneously and that, specifically, whole societies are programmed to see danger when a Black body is in the vicinity, each of us can take responsibility for questioning our assumptions and can take steps to re-programme ourselves.
I feel it’s important to underline that none of us who fall prey to these mis-perceptions are to blame. They are the product of centuries of carefully and cleverly crafted messages, reinforced daily by media headlines and reporting. We’d be forgiven for thinking that danger is lurking on every corner, yet does y/our lived experience bear that out? We’d also be forgiven for thinking that news reports are designed to keep us in a perpetual state of fear and antagonism towards others (each other) — and those others can be just about anyone (welfare ‘scroungers’; drug addicts; upper classes; lower classes; migrants; the rich; the poor; asylum seekers; private school educated; state educated; middle-aged White men; young Black men etc etc); — take just about any demographic or set of metrics and we can find negative representations that we’ve been asked to buy into at one time or another. Isn’t that interesting? It’s almost as if the purpose is to divide and rule in perpetuity. Just as with the ‘forever wars’, so many of which are fuelled through propaganda, we’re encouraged to be permanently at war — in our minds, if not in body — with each other.
At some point we need to realise that the amount of melanin in our skin is neither a valid source of pride nor of identification. It just is. As I’ve said in a previous blog, it’s as random as stratifying society according to hair or eye colour — or the length of the little finger. I see it as essential that we recognize the mischief and the programming for what it is and to decide to move towards a much higher set of values that allow us to identify on the basis of our common core humanity. (This is not to negate the achievements of the Black is Beautiful and Black Pride movements. I see these as developing out of a need to counter a narrative that was and is all too familiar.)
It’s time to leave behind points of identification that keep us locked in this place of division. It’s time to aspire to much higher values based on a vision of unity. I’m not naiive enough to think that changing how we see ourselves and other humans, or even other species, can be achieved in one fell swoop, that it can be achieved without intention, as well as application and dedication. Without some collective grieving. But I do believe it can be done.
One method I use to free myself and disrupt business as usual is to refuse to call myself Black. I’ll refer to myself in relation to my cultural or ethnic heritage (Caribbean heritage or Jamaican parentage), but not in relation to a racialised group that’s been chosen for me and that’s not even real. If the context requires some physical identification of myself or others, I’m training myself to say racialised as Black. I experimented with the term Black-bodied for a while and might return to it. Given that language is such a powerful tool in perpetuating stories, belief systems and perceptions, changing the language we use to represent ourselves or describe each other is a small but powerful way to disrupt the narrative and break the spell of our cultural conditioning. No they are neither black, nor Black. They may be Black-bodied or racialised as Black (RAB) — and much more besides. No, they are not mixed race; as part of the human race they are dual-heritage or mixed heritage. And if for whatever reason I need to use the term ‘race’, I’ll use air quotes which can then lead to a conversation.
I was recently in an online conversation around this topic with an ethnically mixed group and, music to my ears, one of the women said she no longer mentions the colour of the person she’s talking about, and when on one occasion she was questioned about this she told us her response was: “Well, I never mention that you wear glasses, so what the difference?” In the name of all that’s good, let this be the world we’re moving into.
There’s one more blog yet to write to close out this series. Now that the 5th anniversary of the death of George Floyd has passed, I want to reflect on where we are now and what, if anything, I’ve learned that might serve us going forward.
