ASM102 Racial Bias, Suffering, and Evangelical Sex

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racial bias suffering and evangelical

sex

all that and more on this week's episode

of ask science

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welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life i'm back on tour and recording from a hotel room and uh going to lots and lots of events so if you'd like to see if i'm going to be in a city near you just go to asksciencemike.com and click on events but for now we've got a show to do so let's get it started [Music] hey science mike my name is erica and i have a question for you about my face and makeup uh recently i've kind of decided to wear less makeup and sometimes i won't wear any at all and having worn makeup for several years i can see a huge difference between what my face looks like with makeup and without it but recently i've noticed that my husband cannot tell the difference between my face with makeup and my face without it and now i know what a lot of people are thinking he's not lying and to be fair when i do wear makeup i don't wear very much but still the the difference is very noticeable to me so i was wondering if you could explain kind of the science behind um how we see and why what my husband sees when he looks at my face is different than what i see when i look at my face and why the person who sees me and my face more than anyone else in the world is not able to identify changes that seem very obvious like when i put paint on my face that changes the way my futures look and when they don't so really interested to hear your answer and thanks so much for all you do so this is a really great question because the way our brains interpret visual information is a complex and basically a collection of hacks so the the very lush panoramic view you have of the world is not what your eyes perceive you only have detailed vision in a small circle in the center of your vision and everything that moves out from there gets quite blurry and you can tell if you try to read something uh you know take a piece of paper with writing on it and make sure you can read it and then just kind of look away from it where it's just slightly into your peripheral vision you'll find you can no longer read that text you know you're very nearly colorblind toward the edge of your peripheral vision color sensitivity is dramatically reduced the farther away you get from the center of your visual field and even uh in your little eye movements called sakads when you scan across the room or a piece of paper you have these little involuntary eye movements called cicadas and you basically go blind during cycads but you don't realize it because your brain fills in the gaps for you your brain paints the edge of your vision from your memory so the moment you know the gold lamp stays gold in your peripheral vision because the brain is tracking the color for you and most of our visual processing occurs in the brain's visual cortex way in the back of your skull but when we look at how the brain processes faces we find that involves a network that involves the temporal and occipital lobes with a little extra activity on the right side of the brain and that it is somewhat distinct from other forms of visual processing our brains don't recognize faces the way we think they do right you're not remembering skin tone and hair color and all those features scientists are demonstrating that your brain mainly relies on distance cues the distance between the eyes how centered or off-centered the eyes are compared to the nose the distance of the nostrils to each other to the eyes to the mouth the width of the mouth and you form basically this very simple mathematical model of a face i i read one uh article about a year ago that said this mechanism may be why sometimes we see faces in the environment if you see cues that could look like nostrils a mouth and an eye or two that that part of your brain says oh that's a face i need to remember it but then the rest of your visual processing system goes no that's definitely not a face so the recognition system is very rapid and distinct from you know maybe systems in the brain we might call observational systems that view a scene more carefully so we're incredibly sensitive to changes in our own faces because we look at it all the time and you're also the person that puts on your makeup so you have paid a lot of attention in order to get makeup on your face your face may be the face your husband sees most in the world and so we could hypothesize that his recognition system is very fast in knowing who you are but once recognized he doesn't always look deeply this is a pretty typical human behavior it happens to me i recognize my wife quickly and sometimes jenny will linger or twirl and then i realize something has changed and i need to look closer now interestingly enough there's a disorder called face blindness where damage to this recognition network has occurred either through a stroke or brain injury and it makes people unable to recognize faces it doesn't mean they can't see faces or eyes or ears or noses or skin tone or beards or whatever it just means their brain can no longer form this mathematical model of a face to an identity so it's called face blindness and that disorder honestly has helped us understand how brains recognize faces but there's another form of very common blindness called change blindness and change blindness is when dramatic changes occur in someone's field of vision and they don't notice so for example you can be looking at a picture and we can block the screen out momentarily and during the blackout change something significant in the photo and many people won't see it you might have seen this in youtube pranks or television shows where they'll replace a store clerk while someone's making a transaction you know they'll lean down to write their checkbook and they'll quickly swap out a completely different person wearing the same thing and the customer doesn't notice it's called change blindness so if i had to guess what's happening the science of why your husband doesn't know when you're wearing makeup or why i sometimes don't know when my wife has gotten a haircut is because my recognition network and your husband's recognition network does what it's supposed to do quickly combined with some amount of change blindness and i wouldn't equate that to a lack of caring at all i think this is is probably unavoidable as people become familiar with each other but i think it also extends an important invitation to all of us that in our most cherished relationships sometimes we need to take the time to stop and look more closely our second question came in via email and it reads dear science mike as a only recently post-evangelical person i have been like a lot of your listeners in a state of deconstruction and reconfiguring my faith in this process as i've divorced myself from a lot of the theologies proposed by traditional evangelicalism but have found specifically the issue of sexuality to be a huge hang up and roadblock for me having grown up in the heart of purity culture and having heard those same messages about sex reinforced throughout most of my adult life in church it's been an extraordinarily difficult dimension of my life to navigate as a single person i have a ton of shame guilt and even resentment towards myself about my sexuality can you talk about the science of the psychological consequences of sexual repression from a christian perspective how would you develop a sexual ethic for single christian folks who want to do sexuality with integrity but don't want to be changed to the legalistic sometimes sex sex-fearing impulses of evangelicalism thanks for everything uh well that's a great question and one that comes in a lot i think you can make a a case in the social sciences certainly that the repression fear-based uh ethos of of much of protestant and even catholic christianity is destructive uh we describe our sexual impulses as uncontrollable things that must be wrestled with and the consequences of of sexual desire and sexual enjoyment and gratification as destructive or sinful but it does lead to some some strange behaviors i think it uh plays a huge role in sexual assault because men have been told their sex drives are uncontrollable and that women's bodies are impossible to resist whereas you know i think it's much more fair to say that men and women both have sex drives they both can control their sex drives and women just have bodies like men we just we just have these bodies they're not intrinsically sexual or exclusively i suppose they are intrinsically sexual um but this repressed approach this demonization of sexuality leads to a hyper-sexualization um and an objectification now my reading of feminist scholars is probably showing here uh but uh yeah i think the consequences of the sexual ethos are damaging and born out of a system of marriage designed to protect women as valuable property that's where the marriage norms and edicts in the old testament and new testament come from the preservation of property rights with women is property women aren't property we've learned that thank goodness what a great growth and expansion of human knowledge and ethics we know women aren't property and many of us are realizing that women are not inferior or subject to men so we have this new assumption of an egalitarian some might say eagletarian uh society what do we do with that well the bad news is i don't know what the new sexual ethic looks like i made a commitment to one woman in december 2000 and we've had a exclusive thing going on since then but i have thought a lot about pre-marital sex and topics like that because i get so many questions on the show about it and i think whatever system we build to try to create a christ-centered sexuality if such a thing is possible for a christ honoring sexuality is probably a better way to say that i think there's three pillars of any such approach i think the first is consent where whatever happens happens with the explicit and complete consent of all parties involved including the fact that uh i think it's reasonable to say some can't offer consent people who are unconscious can't offer consent people who are on the lower end of a power dynamic can't offer complete consent that would include children but consent is is the first of the three pillars uh i think the second would be fidelity honoring commitments so i get a lot of emails from people who want to have multiple romantic partners at a time and if that's what you want to do i think you have a moral obligation to lay that on the table and not be sneaky about it and and so i think fidelity is important and i think the norm for most people today is felony means like just it's just two people in a relationship that may change over time i don't know but right now it seems two folks is close to the norm and then the final pillar would be safety their different sexual behaviors have different amounts of risk more partners more risk no protection more risk and some specific sex acts are more risky than other sex acts and so i think you owe it to yourself to be informed about the consequences of different sexual behaviors to make decisions about sex that are safe or safer um and and when we look at those three things together consent fidelity and safety it actually can help us make sexual decisions in what is becoming a more ambiguous ambiguous i can't say that word uh landscape so when my wife and i have sex we've both consented to it i don't have sex with other people infidelity to my commitment to her and i i think anything we do is kind of automatically safe that's not that's not true for everyone so i would look at those kind of three points and um ultimately if we talk about a christ honoring sexuality then even in our expression of sexual passion and energy that would be something that contributes to peace in the world right that's what the work of christ is so that's another way to kind of judge your sexual behaviors and desires is do they create or destroy peace in the world and other than that embrace who you are embrace your sexuality the fact that you have sexual desires is not evil or wrong or sinful the fact that you enjoy sexual encounters is not wrong or sinful it is how you were designed explicitly designed sex is a huge part of who we are as people most of us i mean uh some of our asexual friends don't have these experiences or desires but for most of us sex is just a huge part of life so embrace it enjoy it celebrate it but also be smart be safe [Music] hi signs mike my name is jessica i'm from richmond virginia and i think your program is brilliant so thank you um so i do some work regarding social justice and racial equality and things surrounding that and i feel like in the united states it's easy to think that our racial issues are just unique to our nation and i'm learning more and more that that's really not true and um i feel like in so many different areas in the world it just is a thing where lighter skin is just preferred over darker even in like the history of the aboriginal people in australia or currently like in jamaica um skin bleaching has just become a cultural norm and things like that there's like fixation that humans have on skin and complexion and i'm wondering if there are any theories surrounding that or like neurological studies or like there are these ancient stories of origin from where this comes from or anything like that i'd just be curious to hear your thoughts so um thank you okay that's a really interesting question and um [Music] i've got links to three different articles you might enjoy this week on the show notes at asksciencemike.com that will explore this a little more deeply but i read a lot i read a lot of papers to try to get a great answer here there's not a universal academic consensus and in different cultures at different times in history different factors have been at play in this preference towards lighter skin which absolutely exists it is documented there's things like the implicit bias testing that harvard's been doing which is really amazing work where they help measure people's unconscious bias but even above that the the biases we're aware of there's a very clear global preference towards lighter skin in many cultures the best theory uh the one i found the most convincing about some of the roots of this is our development as a species into an agrarian economy so we start growing food instead of hunting and gathering it and then uh to layer on more advanced forms of agrarian society that have some form of labor and capital difference with or without currency but in that situation as soon as you can have slaves or workers that are a lower social caste or class than land owners you begin to have physical differences develop between the affluent and the working the effluents spend more time indoors away from the sun and therefore what they have lighter skin than people who work all day in the sun and are exposed to the sun and probably aren't fed as well and that starts creating a desire to be like the lighter skinned people because we're social mammals and we're always looking for visual cues for who has status in our tribe or troop or society right so it becomes reinforced that the land owners are the powerful the wealthy the desirable that has continued um and then was kind of blown up uh in larger scales in different cultures in america you know our economy was literally built on this division where pale skinned europeans were primarily land owners and dark-skinned people from africa were slave labor and so you had this incredible dichotomy and skin tone and social status and even after the civil war even after emancipation the jim crow south made sure that those attitudes are alive and well in america today and so when we have unconscious racial bias and we create media television shows and movies and advertisements uh we tend to feature a lot of light skinned faces in that media disproportionately we highlight those faces and then through capitalism we export those images across the globe so although every culture has a unique history of how light skin became favored i think the degree of reinforcement that's happening today is especially influenced by american racial bias as exported through capitalism and media so we are putting white smiling faces on screens and billboards all over the world and reinforcing these unconscious implicit biases so i think that means it's it's really important to intentionally subvert this because it's it's not fair in any stretch of the imagination to favor lighter-skinned people and i hope i hope everyone listens to this program can accept that without further justification it's not fair for a young child to be born with dark skin and face discrimination or fewer life opportunities as a result of simply being born with darker skin so what can we do well we can intentionally consume media that highlights darker skin tones you know to some degree i'm an outsider when i watch the television show blackish but i love it it's hilarious and it also means that for the duration of watching this program my brain is saying what darker skinned people being elevated in the way our society elevates people there are also techniques you can use to undermine or recondition yourself against implicit biases i'd encourage you to check out uh the link on sciencemike.com to learn more about that that's a new behavioral science and developing rapidly but all is not lost there's hope here we can learn to decondition or minimize our unconscious bias while intentionally working against our conscious biases by making different decisions and how we consume media who we associate with ultimately i think with intention and working together we can eliminate this global preference towards lighter skin [Music] here's our last question that came in through email here's a story for a storyteller i had my first existential crisis when i was almost five it was my first memory my family went to the family cemetery from memorial day and i recognized a stone that had my same birth date and last name my parents gently told me how my twin brother died during birth but they were very lucky and happy that i lived a few days later mom saw me drawing a tombstone with crayons in my child's mind i thought i would die soon and i wanted to have a headstone similar to my twin mom again gently explained that i would live for a long long time so i didn't need to worry about such things you know all too well that if you live in a southern baptist county in the south the question if you die tomorrow do you know where you will spend eternity is so prevalent that it's plastered on billboards that's true by the way i've literally seen it on billboards i gave my life to jesus when i was so young because i wanted to spend eternity with anthony my twin being aware of my own mortality at such a young age was a strange experience and i would think to myself often that most people waste their precious time my faith and my life in school was decent i too was a nerd and i didn't find school academically challenging my four years in college were a blast off the charts i majored in chemistry my faith was strong i worked at baptist church camps during summers i accepted my first position as a chemist for proctor and gamble in cincinnati and i was so overwhelmed by city life i had an engagement that didn't work out and i experienced deep depression for the first time in a few short months god would send my wife to be i saved myself for marriage since i thought god would reward me with a wonderful wife we had our ups and downs just like every couple and we had three loverly children a girl then boy girl twins i truly thought that my twins were a gift from god to reconcile for my twins death after 12 years of marriage i was blindsided with divorce papers i learned about no fault divorce laws i learned that i could not stop a divorce i learned my wife was having an affair and the courts were indifferent to adultery it was an ugly costly and annihilating divorce she got the house and the kids i got an apartment with weekend visitation i still called the experience my emotional holocaust where everything i was and everything i believed was burned to absolutely nothing jesus was a lie and god was dead after grieving for a year i began dating again eventually i would meet my cheryl and i would learn what a soul mate really meant i told cheryl that i never wanted to marry again and she was agreeable to a small commitment ceremony we chose to move to dallas when the recession took my job and severely cut her pay although my ex-wife promised i could still see my kids we would end up in the courtroom again i have only seen my children three or four days for each year since 2010 and now they are like strangers just as i was about to consider faith again cheryl died on a business trip good friday 2013. i knew she had plans all weekend so i wasn't worried until monday i called the local sheriff's office to request a courtesy call and her furnished condo the deputy called 30 minutes later to confirm my worst fears and i had the daunting task of calling cheryl's family on april 1st i can still hear the voice of her daughter calling me back screaming over the phone that this was just a cruel april fool's joke i'm sorry baby girl your mom is gone cheryl was 46 years old and god was surely dead i could not believe that god existed anymore if he did exist he certainly did not care about me or the entire human race as a child i believe that god placed me here to be an exemplary husband and father today i only believe in a spinoza type god only because the beauty of nature can be breathtaking i have no desire to be a husband due to family court laws and i don't know my own children i spent my life following the rules and i have nothing to show for it question why am i here p.s i am so glad i found you listening to your podcasts makes the spiritual skeptic not feel so alone my best andy andy i roll my eyes every time i hear someone say everything happens for a reason that god has a plan for your life the reason my eyes involuntarily roll at those well-intentioned phrases is because i know there are people who have life experiences like you where you've done your best to be a good person to be honest and to love others and life has been bad i can't imagine not seeing my children so my heart aches when i read your letter and i i'm not saying i understand what you're going through i don't i think if you were to open the bible and read job or lamentations you would have an insight into those scriptures that i'm not capable of why are you here i have no idea i don't know why any of us are here and i don't think anyone knows why we're here i think a lot of people claim to know why we're here the most beautiful thing i discovered in my years of atheism was the philosophy of humanism the idea that in the absence of some objective meaning humans can create their own they can decide why they are here and for a couple of years i was a humanist who was here to address suffering in the world and then i met god in a bright blinding light and that bright blinding light did not answer the question why we are here it just let me know that we are loved now i don't know if you know my story or not but right before i saw that light i was literally shouting at god because of stories like yours if you're real god and you love us how does this [ \_\_ ] happen god didn't answer me god just surrounded me with love andy i want to surround you with love i don't know you but i love you and as the folks on patreon who donate money every month for the show to exist read your letter i got comment after comment from people from dallas who want to have coffee with you and we have a together group in dallas who would like to include you and immerse you in community so that you may know two things that you are not alone and that you are loved i don't know if everything happens for a reason i don't know why you are here but i know that everything has a response and andy i know that you've been kicked when you're down and there's a lot of us who would like to be a good neighbor for you i think you need to grieve i think you need to cry i think you need to work through a lot of really reasonable justifiable anger i think you need to be enabled to go down a long journey towards forgiveness forgiveness towards god forgiveness towards your ex-wife forgiveness towards cheryl and not because you need to forgive them to be righteous that's not what i'm talking about you've got to be able to forgive them so that you can care for yourself you have suffered tremendously your suffering is my greatest objection to a loving god but i perhaps foolishly lean into that mystery of love that impossible love because it makes me lean in to stories like yours and not lean away so andy um shoot me an email tweet me whatever get in touch with me and i'd love to connect you with people in dallas who will sit with you face to face and hear your story and surround you with community and be the good samaritan because today andy you're the one on the side of the road you're the one who the righteous have passed by so let us love you andy because you are not [Music] alone

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