Blind spots

Earlier this week a few of the sisters were chatting at breakfast about the work of a neuroscientist I had read about. He is working on an optical prosthesis: a kind of tiny camera and projector set-up that would replace a diseased retina. As long as the optic nerve is still healthy, there is a founded hope of recreating some kind of vision. Amazing! One of the sisters reminded us of the fact that we all have a natural blind spot where the optic nerve meets the retina and how it is possible to notice more or less where that spot falls.

The University of Washington “Neuroscience for Kids” feature offers this online technique for “seeing” your blind spot. (For these graphics to work you need to be using a full-screen browser, or download the images to your computer. Alternately, go to the University website and download their pdf!) Close your right eye, and from about 20 inches away, focus with your left on the cross. Continue to focus on the cross while drawing nearer to the image. At a certain distance, the dot will simply vanish.

Of course, we don't just have blind spots in our eyes. Our lives are full of them. Sometimes those blind spots are innocuous things we have learned to take for granted. Other times, they are hurtful things that we are protecting ourselves from. It could be an area of sin in our life that we are just not willing to repent of. (As the song goes, "[I] was blind, but now I see".) Sometimes whole cultures have blind spots, which may be both taken for granted (“just the way things are”) and hurtful things we are protecting ourselves from as a society (or being protected from: it depends where we are in that society).

An interesting thing about our visual blind spot is that our brains fill it in so that we do not “mind the gap.” See what happens in this image where there is an actual gap: Close your right eye, and with the left, from about 20 inches away, focus on the dot. Continue to focus on the dot as you draw nearer to the image. At a certain point, the two disconnected bars will seem to be joined.

The killing of George Floyd on May 25 was not an isolated incident. It was the third killing of a Black person in the name of law enforcement to reach national headlines in as many months. In a way, the three deaths merged into one huge, crushing event. Even for me, geographically and in a sense sociologically distant as I was, the experience was jolting. "What on earth is going on?" 

Mr. Floyd's death, and the killings that preceded and (sadly) followed it would not have unleashed the reactions they did if they had not revealed what was, for many Americans, the “blind spot” of racism. Of course, it was only a blind spot for “many,” since racism has been a fact of life for those who have been on the receiving end of it for generations. As a society, we can now no longer deny the disconnect, although there are still a surprising number of people who will preface an opinion about race issues with, "I'm not a racist." 

Dr Anthony Bradley, a professor, author, and theologian-in-residence at NYC's Redeemer Presbyterian Church, detailed in a Twitter thread the naive racism he experiences as a matter of course in New York City. Dr Bradley is neither a conservative nor a progressive. As a theologian, he is regularly assumed to be Anglican or Eastern Orthodox. He doesn't fit into the typical boxes or categories. So when Dr Bradley posts, I pay attention. Here are his observations about reform in policing, which I found very frank, balanced, and hope-filled. (No blind spot there.) After an attack on a Black man in the woods of Indiana, Bradley tweeted this:

White people, please be careful where you take your black friends. We literally cannot go everywhere you can. I've missed a lot of "retreats" because they were off in the woods somewhere. We just don't have the same mobility freedoms.

I didn't see that coming. It was in my blind spot. (The FBI is now investigating the assault as a possible hate crime.)

You know what to do: Close your right eye while focusing on the cross from 20 inches away. As you get closer, you will notice that the vertical bars fill in the empty hole on the left. 

Image from University of Washington "Neuroscience for Kids"

Our brains are so adept at protecting us from recognizing our blind spots that they can even fill in missing patterns! Maybe this fill-in the blanks quality is why people like me may have to be instructed in a rather step-by-step manner about what terms like "systemic racism" mean. (I had to go out of my way to learn about this, because with the many terms being used right now it can be hard to discern established sociological findings from agenda-driven language.) What I learned is that it can be easy for someone in a position of relative stability to look at the way things work (for me or for those "like me") and think that there is something natural about our system of streets, districts, licensing requirements and so forth. We can't see any place where the lines don't meet. But "systemic racism" means that people of a different race encounter those missing pieces continuously. And that they do is, as the geeks would say, a feature, not a bug of how our social systems work in their regard.

I found the following historical explanation of how we got to some of the most "systemic" of the racist systems in the US to be very helpful. It's a bit long, so I recommend just watching the first 8 or so minutes. (This video was produced and is narrated by Phil Vischer. Remember Veggie Tales? That was his, too.)

This clicked for me and showed me at least some of my blind spots. By the grace of God, I was willing not to put a defensive wall around my understanding. That's only a first step, of course, but a vitally important one. Jesus didn't have much patience for spiritually blind people who insisted that their vision was perfectly fine. "Your sin remains," he told them. (See John 9:41.)

The first 8 minutes of the video was enough to show me that much of what I had simply assumed was a natural way of functioning in our society had been coldly calculated with an eye to racial exclusion. The chaos in our streets, the suffering in our poorest neighborhoods (including the disproportionate numbers of deaths from COVID-10), the sense of hopelessness even among children, is the rotten fruit of blatant cruelty that was unwilling to see in persons of another race a brother or sister made in God's image.

And only God can cure that kind of blindness.