The protests across the United States have gotten me thinking about the many conversations I’ve had with my son and stepdaughter about race. They also have renewed my questions about what it means to be “the other” in society and what Bowen theory has to say about that.
My family is racially mixed. My husband and I are white, but we have a Guatemalan son and two biracial (African American and white) grandchildren.
When our son was growing up and as my stepdaughter was raising her biracial children, my position was that what happened in our home was the most important determinant of success in life. If I worked diligently enough to practice Bowen theory, if I kept my eye on differentiation of self, our son would have the emotional wherewithal to withstand whatever he encountered in school or elsewhere. The same would be true if we kept in good contact with the grandchildren and their parents.
Given my own level of differentiation, that was a rocky proposition from the start. Let’s just say there were times I could have conducted myself more in accordance with theory. But even with the reality that I could have been a far more mature parent and that our home could have been a better environment for a child to thrive, I came to understand over time that my focus on theory improperly discounted the affects that racism in society has on a person. I discounted the impact of the group on an individual.
I now know that it matters in some meaningful way that my son and grandchildren inhabit different worldsthan I by dint of their looks — even accounting for the differences in gender and age. It seems obvious now, but it was a fact that I long resisted accepting, and only have become truly aware of over the past half decade or so.
n his book, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Robert Sapolsky talks about how quickly the human brain automatically makes decisions about a stranger, and whether that person belongs or represents a threat. It happens in a matter of seconds, before we consciously recognize our reaction, if we ever do recognize it.
People in a majority white society respond differently to someone with my son’s combination of high cheekbones, almond eyes and bronze skin than they do to whites of conventional looks. That affects the opportunities that come our way, and the assumptions people make in their dealings with us. It can affect the expectations of teachers and coaches, the friends you make and the response of their parents. And it certainly affects how police respond to you.
For many years, I refused to focus on my son’s stories of racial insults delivered by his peers, just as I chose not to focus on the abuse and deprivation he suffered during his first nearly 5 years in Guatemala before I adopted him. I also kept my attention on the quality of my relationship with the grandchildren’s mother, rather than on her complaints of racial discrimination against her children on the school bus and in the classroom.
But I now believe that all mattered much more than my practice of Bowen theory allowed. I did not adequately account for the social environment children experience outside the home. I emphasize that it is my practice of Bowen theory that is deficient, not the theory itself, even as I ask myself if focusing on differentiation of self is enough.
The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates offered a powerful explainer of structural racism in his 2014 article, The Case for Reparations, published in The Atlantic in 2014. He described a system set up for persons of color to fail in every way that counts, both as individuals and as a community. At the same time, majority members of society — in particular, white owners of property and capital — extracted benefits from their struggles.
History offers examples of extraordinary African American men and women whose achievements belied the circumstances from which they came. How are we to understand Frederick Douglas, the escaped slave who became a nationally recognized scholar and abolition leader, or Paul Robeson, the son of a former slave who in 1919 not only graduated from law school at Rutger’s but also gave the student commencement speech? What are we to make today of Barack Obama, Corey Booker, Kamal Harris and the mayors of several major American cities who are not only black, but female? Is differentiation of self alone the explanation for their functioning in the public sphere? Did their parents leave them freer to grow and thrive?
When I watch the protests on TV and hear the chants, when I stand among protesters — as I did on Sunday and Tuesday — and experience the anger they expressed, I think of the times I turned a deaf ear to my son, believing that somehow Bowen theory as I practiced it would help lead him through those times when others called him a “Guat” and invited him to mow their lawn because that’s what Guats do.
I am a flawed practitioner of Bowen theory, for sure. But I wonder if theory has been sufficiently developed take into account the powerful societal forces involved in being “the other.”