It was 2012. I had been attending beauty college and within a course focused on beauty treatments I was given extra, unrequested lessons about minority groups. Mainly ethnic minorities and sexualities. These things are very much part of day-to-day teaching in schools today. That these groups are constantly attack by vicious far-right groups. And I thoroughly believed in it and wanted justice for them.
I had grown up with epilepsy and for me, not so much at school, but going into the work place I discovered I would be discriminated against. I would lose job opportunities because I didn’t drive my own vehicle, even where there was no advertising for such a requirement. I got sacked from one job for having a seizure on their premises. Suddenly my work had been described as ‘below standards’. Of course I had learned I was being released from my duties in an underhanded way for discriminative reasons. So certainly, I believed in justice for those discriminated against. And I believed in it strongly. I still do.
Just about anything was being considered racist or homophobic in this education I received in my beauty training. I did however accept that on the basis that my feelings had been hurt from the bullying and discrimination I had received. What I hadn’t considered, was that hurt feelings was very different to prevention of earning a living based on a disability, race or sexuality. I completely stand up for those who want to earn a living and are prevented from doing so because of such things. That wasn’t what I was being taught. At least I don’t think I was.
Within the teaching programming, and it is programming, we are asked to think of times when we faced discrimination. For a class predominantly consisting of white people, then it should be understood, those educating us in discrimination, racism and homophobia well and truly understand we will have faced bullying ourselves. We know this because we are asked to think back to a time when we faced injustice so as to empathise with minority groups and their hurt feelings of not being accepted.
The programme accepts, that yes, even white people face injustices and we should turn to those injustices so as to empathise with others who do too. In hindsight, asking people to relate some of their most intimate memories of injustice to the hurt feelings of minority people who may or may not be treated poorly for that reason, is incredibly manipulative. And asking them to compare those moments of injustice, not matter what they are, to the hurt feelings of someone like myself who lost a job after having a seizure on work premises or a black person who was bullied because of their skin colour is vicious.
Not only does it psychologically undermine that persons worst moments in their life, which could have been child abuse, neglect, rape, assault quite literally anything, it also asks them to compare that moment, to someone else’s moments. True, that person may have faced great personal suffering. But our injustice’s are not comparable. They are not a rating mechanism, where elements of your own injustice counter the severity of that injustice. Be that because you are considered a privileged person because you have more money, or you have ‘privileged’ skin colour, privileged generation. The reasons for denying people their injustices are legitimate are ever increasing.
Really, asking people as individuals to think of their most horrific memories to rummage up empathy for an idea, a possibility, such as another societal group of possible personal grief, thereby undermining that personal grief to a group is really incredibly evil. What is so shocking to me, is that psychologists, those ‘professionals’ in ‘health’ ‘care’ never intervened to stop such manipulation.
I have always been sceptical of psychologists and their profession. The history of how they were used in the Nazi era kept me in that mindset about them. However, I had never considered how passive they are within society today. Clearly they turn a blind eye to emotional manipulation through their own training as I expect they most certainly must have gone through similar training I received on my beauty course, just to a far greater and lengthier extent. And yet they either turned a blind eye to it so as to received their qualification, they believed in the idea of comparing certain peroples injustices with others or like myself were completely brainwashed into believing this was okay.
I would suggest that the programming asking people, individuals to use empathy in such a way that undermined their own awful experiences so as to empathise a group was long understood that it would be emotionally abusive to those within the programming. In this case, an entire society. Emotional abuse is well understood within psychology and also recognised within schools and other public sectors. For this reason, I do not believe this programming is by mistake.
So having empathy is an important thing. Being empathetic is a necessary thing but using empathy for comparative reasons as we have been doing so as to undermine the native people is outright vicious. And psychologists should have stepped up in opposition to this a long time ago. The fact that they never did, explains where society is headed. Prepare for the worst. This is going to get nasty.