How do We Humanize Humans

I’ve been thinking about this question for over thirty years?

Somehow, asking how we humanize humans feels important and wrong at the same time.

I am someone who has lived in different countries. When I returned, I had a hard time sharing stories from my life and travel. Every part of my life in Japan and India was different from life in the United States. Friends and family couldn't understand what I went through.

I’ve been trying to bridge this understanding in the work that I do. I share the voices of people of color, different genders, people who make different life choices.

But sharing the voices of others is not enough.

WE NEED MORE STORIES

With time I came to realize that we need more than a diverse set of voices in our media.

We need a diverse set of creators.

Our biases run so deep, it is hard to mediate for them by including more voices and more people of color in our media.

Our entire story framework can be wrong and we might have no idea it is wrong. If we do know it is off we might not know how to correct it.

CAUTIONARY TALE: THE ANALOGIES WE CHOOSE

Back in 2014, I had an idea for a short video highlighting the inequalities created by the federal transportation investment priorities which fund infrastructure expansion.

I researched how funds go to new highways and new developments versus maintenance of existing roads and public buses.

In America, we see the ramifications of this. Throughout the years, new infrastructure was being built while other infrastructure was breaking.

I spent months with my head down, researching and writing a script designed to highlight the need to change this faulty funding model.

I came up with the analogy of a house with a leaky roof.

The Analogy
What would happen if you got a housing loan but you could only use it to build out a new addition to the home rather than fix your leaking roof?

Excited, I shared the script with a local advocacy group hoping to partner with them. I’d do the work, scripting, finding funding, working with the animation team, and they could share the video.

However, I was told that the housing analogy wouldn’t work given the systemic racism in housing practices which prevented many black people from buying homes. Black people around the United States were impacted by red-lining, where banks refused to give housing loans to people of color in neighborhoods that were primarily white.

What I had thought would be an image that would bring a common understanding of the situation turned out to be an image that brought up an entirely different narrative for a set of people I had hoped to empower.

TUNING OUR EARS

People of color have been creating their own media for decades, we haven’t been tuning in to their channels.

Rarely are groups truly invisible, even very marginal groups, especially in the age of social media.

Of course, we can’t necessarily know details about every group but if we are writing about one it is our responsibility to do some research. And if we hear an opinion about someone from a group different than our own, before jumping to conclusions, I’d love to see people get into the habit of checking different sources first.

We are all living in information/media bubbles and these bubbles stretch far beyond the politics we consume.

During the pandemic lockdown, I started looking outside my own podcast bubble to discover voices new to me. Now I try to make a practice of every few weeks or months, to listen to podcasts from other voices at least a few times a month.

LESSONS FROM REVERSE CULTURE SHOCK

It is something difficult to do when the people we talk to have wildly different experiences than our own.

When I returned from India I felt like I returned from a different universe rather than from an ocean away.

Many people asked me how I lived with so much poverty.

How could I explain living in India?

I didn’t think about poverty. I was interested in the structural impacts of colonialism. I was interested in new neocolonial practices of austerity and opening markets to businesses in the west. I was steeped in the culture of over 1200 years. The history I was reading was changing my view of the world.

When I returned I couldn’t boil down two and a half years of study, making friends, travel, learning a new language, and changing my world into a few easy-to-digest sentences.

Others looked at India and saw poverty, they saw poor people. I saw the vast tapestry of humans.

THE IMPORTANCE OF LISTENING

One way we humanize humans is to listen to their stories.

Listening is like an elixir.

Listening is something we do less and less these days and yet it takes so little time. Twenty minutes can be enough for someone to feel heard and for the listener to begin to unwrap the gold that is within that person’s life experience.

Today, who can you listen to? Find a podcast or read a blog post told by someone outside of your normal circle.

See what gold you find.