Learning from the past.

This past weekend, I visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York City with my son, his friend, and his friend’s family. As we moved through the exhibits, I was struck by the amount of change that has happened in the world and in our understanding of our world. Things that we once thought were fact now have additional evidence to show that our original thoughts were incorrect.

Here is an embarrassing fact: when I was a sophomore in high school and I took biology, I stayed after class to tell my teacher that what he was teaching us was wrong because I knew for a fact that life began in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve and that women were created from the rib of Adam. I believed that what I had been told was fact and I feel like there is so much of that happening in our world today.

Belief is powerful because beliefs often inform our actions without any additional thought. Belief can be manipulated, and the media uses that to influence our actions, our buying patterns, and the things we talk about every day. The soundbites that we hear aren’t enough information to be new learning, but they are enough to influence our beliefs. There is something called “confirmation bias” that means we often take things that we hear and align them to what we already believe or don’t believe, so those soundbites confirm our beliefs, and we turn that into fact.

When I young, we learned about dinosaurs, but much of what we learned has now been proven by scientists to be fiction. We learned about different cultures, and everything that we learned had been whitewashed by white textbook writers. We learned that there were nine planets, and then there were eight, and suddenly there are billions of galaxies that once we could not even imagine. We learned that George Washington chopped down the cherry tree and told the truth because he was an honest man. We learned that what we were learning was the “right” things to be learning.

We were never taught to question.

We didn’t ask why? We didn’t dig deeper. We believed that television stereotypes were fact. We didn’t question.

And that is the fundamental problem – we have to ask ourselves why we believe what we believe to be factual. Learn new information. Read opposing views. Listen to multiple points of view. Talk with people who have different experiences than you.

I have a Bachelor’s Degree and two Master’s Degrees, and I have been unlearning the things that I grew up believing to be true for over twenty-five years now. One of the most important aspects of unlearning that we have to address is our beliefs about culture and race. Reflecting on our own beliefs about our own culture, other culture, and race can be uncomfortable, and that is okay. Asking yourself to reflect with an open mind and take in new information is an important part of the process of growth.

Did you know that the government created a PR campaign during the Civil Rights Movement labeling Asian families as the “model minority?” Did you know that prisons rented out inmates(the majority of whom were black) for manual labor, including harvesting cotton, well after the abolishment of slavery and the Civil War? Whether we are talking about the climate crisis, the political landscape, or the injustices against people of color and people who are different, we need to reflect on what we believe and ask ourselves to learn about why we believe that. The answers may surprise you and the new learning could change your perspective and your interactions with others.