"Comfort and Delusion Hypothesis": Managing our Addiction to Racism (v2)

The photos above are of Asif Noorani and myself. We choose photos of us as children because we need to get vulnerable to effect change and we seek to take a human approach to this delicate topic. As fellow consultants and strategists in the brands and insight industry, our early discussions about the possible cross over in our disciplines began in Tokyo, almost 20 years ago.??It was against the backdrop of this hierarchical, exclusionary culture we also began our blended exploration of identity and race.??I find it hard to think of a better location than this.??We started formulating the Comfort and Delusion hypothesis in conversations around racism during lockdown Zoom sessions almost exactly two years ago in aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. Police brutality, institutional racism and the treatment of black people in white societies was back on the agenda.?

Social media was alive with pronouncements with strong opinions flying back and forth. Of course, people of colour were triggered by the video, traumatised by the details of his death and angered by the spate of police murders and by the continued impunity of white police officers. What we also saw were the ways in which non BIPOC unaffected by racism found it difficult to fully empathise. This was typified by ignorant statements or by insensitivity to those who were triggered by the Floyd incident.?Some found it hard to understand why the #AllLivesMatter statement was offensive to those affected. Indeed, we noticed it felt to us that some inveighing against #BLM were themselves triggered and found it hard to grasp why their interlocutors were so exercised. How to explain this empathy gap?

We also noticed that in this febrile atmosphere, everything was seen via the lens of ideology and the so-called #culturewars. We wanted to bracket off the polarisation and to explore a nagging question on our own way.?Why do well-meaning people engage in behaviours that end up perpetuating racism?

Having no idea what to expect, we created a webinar on Event Brite and in July 2020 we presented on Zoom:?Racism the Unknowns: Comfort & Delusion?on Zoom. We had no idea what the response would be.?We showed through examples how the insensitivity and micro aggressions people of colour are often subjected to often stem from an empathy gap engendered by delusion, ignorance of history, the ways asymmetric power is exercised and that comfort is a default coping mechanism that prevents people becoming aware of this uncomfortable fact. The response to our content was both encouraging and enthusiastic.?

We repeated the exercise in December 2020 at the request of the Independent Consultants Group at a training session: the response was similar. We then left the topic and got on with other things. However, in 2022 with things apparently ‘returning to normal’ post the tough pandemic we realised something wasn’t right. In the race debate it’s easy to think we’ve made lots of progress.?We didn’t expect comfort or delusion to magically disappear and over the last almost 2 years a number of things have, despite our sincerest wishes to the contrary, unfortunately demonstrated their persistence...

We have a think piece and a webinar planned for later in the summer. The piece is too long for publication in full but here is the rough plan of flow:

BACKGROUND

• Both of us brown, privately educated not belonging to any one community
• Tokyo – the place of alienation, xenophobia & exclusion where we bonded
• BBC work we used semiotics and behavioural science to analyse content
• Death of George Floyd the catalyst but too much platitude and polarisation
• We developed C&D based on lived experience and its social science bases

ADDICTION PARADIGMS

• Both comfort delusion persist in the world various factors
• Analogy of addiction: harmful behaviours, hard to stop them
• Addiction: ‘curious mental twist’ & ‘compulsive comfort seeking’

ASIF: CULTURAL FIT: AFFINITY BIAS & FLUENCY HEURISTIC

• Affinity bias = we prefer people who remind us of ourselves
• 2016 recruitment: candidate not hired cause had 'not been skiing'
• Fluency heuristic – easy, attractive, social and timely – enables interventions
• Not passing the 'cricket test' how Culture fit alone maintains status quo.

ASIF: FILTERING OUT: COGNITIVE DISSONANCE & CONFIRMATION BIAS

• Cognitive Dissonance??- reading opposite views is brain painful
• Anecdote: US visit immigration, reaction of Asif and his Jewish wife
• Confirmation Bias: selective exposure, perception and retention
• White supremacy – not challenging pronunciation of my name

ASIF: RATIONALISATIONS: MORAL CREDENTIALLING & OFFSETTING

• Virtue signalling is well known less known is moral credentialling
• Moral opprobrium and the social anxiety of being called racist
• More deeds and bad deeds and balancing: via Barack Obama story
• Not doing activism around B in BAME when had the chance to do so

CHRIS: DISCRIMINATION: THE FALSE SIGNIFIER PROBLEM

• Melanin, negative signifieds, distorted judgement
• The anti-black images that feed the unconscious bias
• Patrick Hutchinson – exceptional that proves the rule
• Anecdote: are you sure this black man can fly this plane?

CHRIS: APPROPRIATION OF COOL: THE EMPOWERMENT DELUSION

• #BlackOutTuesday and brandwagonism post Floyd?
• Black and brownwashing and performative allyship
• Celebrating black excellence is another distraction
• Anecdote: will being into hip-hop help me to belong?

CHRIS: THE EMPATHY GAP: AND THE SEMIOTIC SQUARE OF RACISM

• Talking to my Dad about 'the N word' and its uses
• Paranoia, playing the race card and plausible deniability?
• Was it just an honest mistake? ambiguity and non parallax
• Ideology, hyper-sensitivity and the perennial empathy gap?

We seek to support DEI?leaders in their various internal challenges and want to be part of the conversation on education around anti-racism. Let us know if you'd like us to join the dialogue and to share this with your organisation.

Chris Arning and Asif Noorani