Brown eyes, blue eyes

We carry around with us biases and assumptions; ways in which we see what is normal to us and how our world works.

Part of how our mind works is to see patterns and apply rules.  Our brain does this quickly because it’s a useful survival trick; we only need to make that association with danger once to avoid that danger in the future. False positives don’t matter so much when it’s a matter of life and death.

Many years later, but nothing in terms of evolutionary scale, we’ve still got this as modern humans. Sometimes it’s helpful (fire bad, don’t walk in front of cars etc), but other times we can end up with things like phobias and other perhaps less unhelpful assumptions or bias, and those ore ‘laws’ that we stick with until we challenge them. Our upbringing can also reinforce these rules and again we might not realise something isn’t the norm until we leave home.

Another factor is that when we’re in a position of privilege in the world we might not even notice this is happening and might not think to challenge it.

There was a recent episode of the BBC’s Doctor Who, Dot & Bubble, that brought this into a story for a family audience. I don’t really want to ruin if you haven’t seen it, but I think it was a brilliant way of introducing the concept of unconscious privilege to kids and helping us start that conversation with them. (ymmv,. adult viewers).

This week I was reminded of a famous social experiment by teacher Jane Elliott called ‘brown eyes, blue eyes’, that you might have heard of. It was first done in the classroom with kids, but it’s been repeated in different contexts quite successfully. People attending are seperated by eye colour. Those with blue eyes are treated preferentially, and those with brown eyes are explicitly referred to as inferior, less intelligent, and dismissed. People with brown eyes become within the context of the situation a discriminated class.

Now in reality, eye colour has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence, but (fascinatingly) the privileged class were quite prepared to defend their position and dismiss objections. Meanwhile the discriminated group may start to lose confidence or rail against the unfairness of the situation and get nowhere. Now, the point of the experiment, apply that to race. A mic drop for people that might never have thought about their privilege based on arbitrary characteristics and how that bias affects how they see the world.

You can actually watch how this plays out in an episode of Oprah where (reversing the eye colour) they did this to the audience of mostly white people, and I’ve included a clip below.

A difficult moment for a lot of people in the audience and among the viewers at home but an important learning experience.

Biases under the surface, whether it’s a result of privilege or something that’s happened to in childhood or more recently, can affect how we see the world, how we respond to challenges, and impact our mental health.

A difficult experience with an ex can colour future interactions with anyone who reminds us of them, sometimes without us even noticing. An accent off someone’s ability in a second language for them might have us treating someone differently (If someone spoke to you with a strong Glasgow accent, how might we react vs someone with RP?).

What might we be holding on to that we’re not even aware of that’s impacting our mental health? What rules might we be applying to how we see the world without even realising that we’re doing it? Counselling can provide a safe, non-judgemental and supportive space to notice this, get to the root of the issue, and move forward.

If you’d like to work on an issue with your mental health, you can get in touch with me via the website or drop me an email directly at mckellarCBT@gmail.com