The reason why some may never understand

The day after the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Junior died, school teacher Jane Elliott conducted her famous blue-eyes, brown-eyes experiment to reveal the insidious effects of discrimination, in this case, racism.  One thing Elliott was able to show was that if you treat a person with privilege they will prosper, but if you treat a person poorly, they will respond negatively.

This is a phenomenon known as the Pygmalion effect.  Whilst the original psychological study was flawed, what is irrefutable about this concept is people respond to how they’re treated.  This is a ubiquitous trait in all humanity.

Think of this from the perspective of your own life.  Look through the lens of your own experience.  Those times when a person believed in you, you prospered, your confidence was higher, you were more relaxed, and felt more at home in your own skin.  Those times when a person treated you poorly, you were diminished, you lost confidence, you lacked self-belief, and part of you possibly became damaged in a toxic environment.

The reason why some may never understand the pain, the suffering, the lack of confidence, the difficulty in forgiving, the triggering of trauma, etc, is that some people have never been to those places.

Some people were always picked up when they fell, whereas others were rejected and there was no recognition of this.

Privilege has kept some people secluded in supportive environments.  Meanwhile, for others, it was the opposite, it was a life of difficulty, of neglect, of not having needs met.

If you were to put a privileged person into a vulnerable situation for a period of time, they too would respond “poorly,” because the essence of humanity according to the Pygmalion effect is to react and to respond according to how you’re treated.

If you have been treated poorly throughout life, this principle explains why you have reacted in a way that causes you to feel shame.  This is a psychological fact.  The shame is unfair, because had you not been treated poorly you would not have reacted poorly.  Life doesn’t stop there, however.  Every person who has been treated poorly has an opportunity to grow through such adversity, to see those responses as normal, but to recover from those horrible experiences.  Their opportunity is to redeem the shame and increase, bit by bit, on the worthiness that is inherent in their human life.  To reclaim their experience of worthiness.

If you are a person who cannot understand the abysmal behaviour of another, take a moment to step into their shoes, and to empathise.  Whilst you’re not accountable for what they do with their pain, you can treat them with equivalence and respect.  This is just an honouring of another human life, and it is never wrong to do this.  Indeed, what it says to treat someone with equivalence and respect who’s been disadvantaged is you understand there’s a crucial role that an individual’s experience of life plays in life.

Some people will never understand what you have been through, and how that’s translated into your reactions and responses until now or historically.  Jesus certainly understands.  Remember on the cross, when Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.”  (Luke 23:34)  The Saviour of the world was one of the most misunderstood people in human history.

If we can understand that some people may never understand, it somehow resolves something that otherwise irritates us.

We don’t need to convince anyone.  And it heralds the fact that there are people who have an intimate understanding of what we’ve been through and why we reacted.