When was the last time you judged a whole person, dismissed them, or put them on a high pedestal, knowing only one thing about them? They’re a Chinese-American doctor. They’re a black man in jail. They’re a white male CEO. Their body shape is at least as thick as it is wide. They think exactly the way you do about something really important to you. They think the opposite, and loudly.
“Mamala and the Senator”
Most of us probably know Kamala Harris more as the senator, the attorney general, and the district attorney than the maternal figure to her stepchildren, the avid home chef, and the joyful, laughing woman among friends. How do we reconcile these divergent aspects of her humanity? What does this bring up for each of us? What biases does her wholeness as a person trigger?
Some of us want to see women mainly as maternal, domestic figures. We value the feminine as nurturer and caregiver, the personal glue that holds individual family units together. Others of us also cheered when we watched Senator Harris in action, interrogating hearing witnesses with firey eye contact and direct language, not letting them deflect, obfuscate, or gaslight. Some of us cannot reconcile these divergent sides of a woman, cannot imagine their synergistic integration embodied and applied in leadership, especially at the highest level. That’s too bad, because any leader–man, woman, or otherwise–must own all parts of themselves to lead to their full potential. The strong and the soft, the masculine and the feminine, the committed and the flexible, the differentiated and the attuned–these polar and balancing aspects of our nature make us whole humans. People who live in their wholeness lead by example, by inspiration, by resonance with the wholeness of those they lead. They are leaders because we are moved to follow them; we feel their integrity and want it, aspire to it for ourselves.
Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent. Name a professsion. Name a state, a generation, an eye color, and all of its associations in your mind. It’s okay to think of stereotypes. The brain operates on pattern recognition and shortcut heuristics; we could not live effectively without these automatic systems in place. We just need to guard against leaning on them so heavily that we oversimplify and overgeneralize our fellow humans.
What a narrow, uninteresting, and unfulfilling life when we only see people as categories. Red, Blue, old, young, rich, poor, male, female. What happens to our heuristics when we encounter contradictions? Maybe gay people should not be conservative? Asians should not be loud and demanding? How do we react to the unexpected, the new, the unknown? Too often we fear it. It’s perceived as a threat–to our own expectations, identities, and emotional security. Fear can then sublimate to denial, anger, blame, exclusion, and violence.
What happens when we hold space for one another’s incongruous, confounding, enigmatic, vibrant, and distinctive wholeness, ourselves included? Maybe then we can say, “I don’t fully understand us, and I choose to see us–all of us–anyway, and be with the parts I don’t yet get, because the longer I’m with us, either it will get clearer or I’ll just accept what I cannot know and figure out how to live in civility, if not harmony, with the whole of us.”
None of us is defined by only one aspect of our identity. And yet we so easily identify others this way. What a disservice to one another’s full humanity. Even when it’s positive–“You’re a doctor, wow, you must be the smartest person!”–it’s still reductive. And when it’s negative–“All Trump supporters hate women and people of color”–it is destructive, no question, even when we think we protect and defend the good.
Holding wholeness means getting and staying curious. It means being honest with ourselves and holding ourselves accountable to our biases and how they manifest in thought, perception, words, action, and relationship. It means practicing self-compassion for all of this, and extending empathy and compassion to others struggling with their own self-honesty and -delusion.
May we endeavor to see one another’s full humanity in every encounter. May we withhold judgment, even for a moment, a breath. May we move through the world with an attitude of ‘together’, all of me with all of you, inextricable, interdependent, ad infinitum.
I Hold Wholeness for Us.
Healing Through Connection 
Love this. Very appropriate reading for November 5th. Excellent points.
I also like how you make it “okay” for us to have “knee-jerk” stereotypes/reactions. It doesn’t mean that you believe in them or follow-through with them, but some of these thoughts have been instilled in us from previous generations, and we can’t beat ourselves up for those thoughts. Again, you don’t nurture or ruminate on the belief, but it may be natural that it pops in.
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Thank you Sue! And sorry for my late reply. Yes, accepting all of ourselves, biases and prejudices and all, is where true connection starts. I think DEI initiatives really miss the mark when they are perceived (or intended) to be trying to rid us of our biases. 🤦🏻♀️ This is not possible, and just pits people against one another in judgement and conflict. The goal needs to be self-awareness and then self-regulation. Understand our biases, own them, then decide how we will carry and manage them. They do manifest insidiously, and in order to see it in ourselves, to overcome the dissonance that I, a decent person, have prejudices that could hurt others in ways I don’t know, requires incredible psychological safety and trust. I see so many on the left judging and shaming even the smallest, inadvertent expressions of bias that I am absolutely not surprised that people reject efforts to ‘correct’. 🤦🏻♀️ The intentions everywhere are usually benign, even altruistic (though also in self-ego stroking ways), and yet the impacts can be so damaging. *sigh*
Oh well, it’s a lifelong practice. And unless we live alone and never leave home, we have endless opportunities to practice with other humans every day. 😊 Thanks again for reading, Sue! 🙏🏼🥰
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Hello Catherine. Again, your blog post is very thoughtful. You are hitting on the soft underbelly of why the conventional DEI model is flawed. I will explain myself.
The worth of a person is not bound up, as you are rightly pointing out, in their color, nationality, ethnicity, gender, age, politics, body size or a host of other “identities” that we can associate with people. An individual’s worth starts with that they are a person! As a person each of us is deserving of respect and dignity. Second, our worth is also based on our behaviors and demonstrated virtues—highly generalized virtues, such as integrity, patience, self-regulating, decency, tolerance, general amiableness, law abiding, compassion, hard working etc. Notice none of these relate to our identity nor personal belief system or lifestyles.
Notice further that these are values that transcend our differences. Values and virtues that can (and long have) bound us together as human beings and fellow citizens. One or another person might differ by various identities but nevertheless adhere to a common set of values that when firmly held result in interpersonal and social cohesion—notwithstanding various other differences. The alternative, to reduce people as you say, to narrow and sometimes irrational categories, ultimately leads us further to social disunion.
Love your posts!
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Thanks again Jamie!
Hmmmm… 🤔
“integrity, patience, self-regulating, decency, tolerance, general amiableness, law abiding, compassion, hard working etc. Notice none of these relate to our identity nor personal belief system or lifestyles”…. Is it true that none of these relate to our identities or personal beliefs?
And worth based on behaviors and demonstrated virtues… 🥴 I need to sit down and understand how you and I define ‘worth’ as it relates to humans.. yes, foundationally unassailable worth by virtue of existing—and then how do we assign and value worthiness?
…common values, yes I think generally. But we prioritize them very differently, to the point of violence to defend when they compete. 🫣
I think when I think of wholeness, I’m reminding myself to suspend competition in values hierarchy and just get us to see one another as equally worthy to engage in the discussion… or something like that. It’s hard to respond to complex comments, I’m learning as I write these replies! 🤔
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Hi Catherine!
One thing I really enjoy about this medium is it permits more thoughtful reflection and nuance. At the same time sensitive to your time. A few embellishments (that I should have done the first time around!).
I was/am embracing your notion of “wholeness.” I very much agree that we are best served by thinking about other people based on the totality of their personality and qualities. I acknowledge though that I went off on a tangent in my reference to “DEI” that you were not addressing directly. But it was by extension that it seemed relevant, not to refute your comments but to reinforce them!
Diversity (the most relevant in this instance) is a common part of our daily parlance and in many organizations these days. But as that notion is often applied and discussed it often pertains to various forms of “identity”, e.g., race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, body type, sexual orientation, etc. These notions I think are symptomatic of not considering individuals in their totality or wholeness was my intended embellishment of your comments.
By the way, my use of the word “worth” when talking about virtues was a poor choice—“merit” or “meritorious” would have been better.
I found a recent example helpful when I was thinking about this. Say we (any of us) meet a person for the first time. We exchange pleasantries and of course treat that person with dignity and respect—it is fitting and proper we do so. Assume we work or associate with this person on a regular basis. However, over time we find they are the opposite of some of the generalized virtues I referenced—assume they are not trustworthy, are unfriendly, lack self-control, are intolerant, cruel and generally discourteous. We would all likely conclude this is not a nice person. Moreover, we would do so irrespective of their politics, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation etc. The reason of course would be their conduct. Their behavior would transcend their identity and lack the merit, the essential virtues we expect from each other as mature adults.
I have created a bleak portrayal for effect, but you get my point. To be clear, I am not saying we have such unrealistic expectations of each other that we all have to score a “10” on the virtue meter to be “worthy.” To be sure not! Nor that we need to rank order these virtues necessarily. We are all fallen angels, thus the reason tolerance is so important. Every day we each try to do the best we can and some days are certainly better than others that’s for sure. There is always more for us to do.
The main point is that ultimately consider and evaluate each other on our wholeness, the totality of demonstrated qualities that make us better people as you rightly are emphasizing.
All the best!
Jamie
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OMG Jamie, your engagement is this blogger’s dream! Thank you for these detailed comments. Since we know each other in real life and have opportunities to meet in person, I will save most of my responses for that forum. But our exchange here inspires part of tonight’s post! 🙂 Stay tuned, let’s see if I can pull it off! 😀 -cc
–Edited to add: Nope, wrote about something else tonight. More on my other idea later, maybe. 😉
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