Prejudice & Connection

Here are a few thoughts I have about the roots of prejudice and how to transcend them within oneself (using my own experience as a straight white man as an example). And if you don't need to hear from a white man right now, I also understand, but I thought I'd use this platform to connect with anyone interested. Thanks for being here.

Reviews

Thank you for speaking to this. I resonate with everything you shared.

Thank you for sharing an open and honest reflection. I hear ya’. It toll my until I was 70 to learn while in a very deep meditation when I heard a voice tell me ‘“You were born unto yourself, Deenise, not born unto your parents.” This was as I experienced my birth and saw the truth. During the Pandemic, I learned to hear and see with compassion. Not that I wasn’t a gentle warrior but it was a step far deeper.

Charles Im grappling with an Indifferent world. Indifferent friends. Who watch the tiniest of us murdered in the most horrifying ways imaginable. And they carry on their lives as if nothing is happening. I couldn't listen to another Gratitude Meditation this morning. I needed this. I need to bookmark it and listen again. I've lost faith in humanity.

I am appreciating this talk, and your willingness to imagine what life might feel like through another set of glasses. I felt surprisingly emotional to hear your consideration of what it might feel like to have to choose loss again. Thank you for creating this.

This was a truly remarkable essay. Heartfelt thanks to you for expressing something that seems ever-elusive, controversial, deeply personal, and often ineffable. (It’s fortunate that I have an appointment with my chiropractor later today, because my head was nodding so much that I think I may’ve sprained something…)

My supposition is—and you’ll hopefully forgive any presumptuousness, here—that this was written and recorded not too long after a notorious race-hatred-driven murder befell the great city of Minneapolis.

What you so eloquently sort through here, using the terrific rhetorical device/motif of a “pair of glasses,” is a durable self-appraisal that holds particular efficacy and relevancy more than five years hence. This nation is currently enduring paroxysms of “othering” and state-sponsored violence and aggression not seen since we were nearly torn assunder 160 years ago. It has caused to arise in me similar conflicts of the psyche and soul, and so your dutiful unpacking exercise herein is especially helpful.

Verily, I too was issued the categorical ‘style’ of glasses to which you refer, and I also wrestle with the impulse to judge, the zero-sum dichotomy you brilliantly identify, and the constant practice of trying to understand that mysterious connective tissue that binds everyone and every thing.

Charles, you are a tremendous gift to this earth, and the myriad beneficial ways in which you affect, uplift and illuminate others—and prod them to consider their own minds and how they move through life—is something inestimable. Thank you for all that you do.