By Steve Boston
We have all had the experience of looking through a window at the surroundings outside when suddenly at some point we recognize that the window we were looking through was actually dirty, and on closer examination wonder how we had not seen all the dust and smudge marks before. Our vision was impaired without really realizing it. Often we can look through the same window countless times before coming to this conclusion. Upon cleaning it we then marvel at the clarity of the view that had been marred before and was obstructed by our own lack of attention and unknowingness.
Many of us don’t recognize that some of the ideas and beliefs that we hold are like the dirt and smudge on a window that we are so accustomed to looking through that they become a part of our world view and never realize that the window of our vision is even dirty, and that our day-to-day experience is being obstructed by our own ‘dirty vision.’
The ‘window’ that many whites look through when viewing black people has been dirtied by an unenlightened mindset that originated several hundred years ago that essentially said that blacks were inferior to whites, that their actions were driven by wild and evil impulses, were prone to savage behavior, were uncivilized and thus needed to be cordoned off in sections of town and controlled so that their savage impulses would not be unleashed on society.
These beliefs were given birth by a primitive idea about the colors white and black.and their association with good and evil. Religiously speaking, white has often been associated with goodness, illumination, enlightenment, angelic beings,love and goodness. Black signified fear, the unconscious, devilish beings, the unknown, sin, hate, and ultimately. evil.
These beliefs still persist and continue to invisibly affect the minds of many. We must realize that these notions have long been cast onto skin color, where they don’t belong, and that desperately need to be examined and changed.
The colors of our skin, intuitively speaking, are to remind all of us of something else. Brown and black skin are spiritual symbols. Black represents the depth of spirit. There are stories in old lore of spiritual beings that contained such a depth of inner nature that their light shined as a deep black/blue color, almost impossible to describe. Brown represents the spiritual nature of the earth, the giver of life, and everything that grows from it. If we want to assign meanings to color, let’s place them where they ought to be and not project false ideas of color where they don’t belong.
Policemen and women are individuals. They want to protect. They want to do the right thing. They want to be heroic. Few, if any of these brave men and women have the intent to kill. Rather, they have the intent to save lives. In the cases of police shootings of black men, one of the factors that lies invisibly beneath the surface of events is a hidden set of false beliefs that many of us carry to one degree or another, and that go unrecognized to our conscious minds, These beliefs generate actions, that in retrospect to the occurrence of a tragic event, have disastrous consequences.
No one can go back through time and right the wrongs that these beliefs have generated, but what can be done is a cleaning house of those ideas that created this whole mess to begin with, and finally take away the hypnotic hold that they still have on the minds of so many.
Steve Boston is a television producer,
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