Behind the Seen

Today we’re going to talk about expectations, and how our expectations guide so many of our daily actions and how we see and interact with the world. So what are expectations? And what happens when we forfeit parts of ourselves to conform to unhealthy expectations put on us by others? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's episode coincides with Columbus Day, a day dedicated to honoring a man for his contributions to history, but who also committed horrific atrocities in the name of colonization. How should history judge such unsavory characters? We'll discuss how we form ideas about people's reputations, and how too often we take snapshots of people's lives—oftentimes their worst moments—and use those to ma...

We all know that we inherit physical characteristics from our parents, but new understandings around a relatively new field called epigenetics, meaning “outside of genetics," shows how we can also inherit our parents fears, stress, and anxieties that even they themselves inherited from their own parents. In this episode, co-hosts Mark Bauer and Branden Polk discuss how that trauma passed down from...

Privilege is a word given to an idea that says there are certain advantages that some people have access to based solely on their race, gender or economic status. These advantages are wholly unearned because we were born into them. We inherited opportunities from decisions that other people made. The most obvious ones are those our parents made, but also the decisions those in society have made le...

In this episode, we delve a little deeper into what it means to actually listen. It’s one thing to hear someone, but it’s another thing to actually understand what they are trying to communicate.  Assuming that you two are speaking the same language, a variety of factors can get in the way of listening. You have the speaker, who is trying to communicate from their perspective and life experiences,...

We’ve talked a lot about discomfort and tension when we encounter things that are different than us. This episode will go a little deeper into the actual psychology of that fear. Practicing getting over that fear is like building and stretching any muscle—it requires repetition. And continually pushing the boundaries of what you can overcome unlocks a whole new perspective on life when you aren’t...

For this episode, it’s important that we talk about justification—or the excuses we make—when we’re confronted with our biases. If the last three episodes have caused you any kind of shame, guilt or anxiety, our typical reaction when we experience that kind of discomfort is to put it on somebody else, usually the person who pointed out our wrongness in the first place. We become the best defenders...

In this episode, we try to de-stigmatize the stereotype of the "angry black person." We have this idea that civil discourse means we can’t be passionate and angry, and so when dialogue rises to that level, white people use it as an excuse to disengage. But political dialogue can often get heated, and we rarely shy away from it when we're emphatic about highlighting an issue that's important to us....

In the first episode, we talked about what is at the root of misunderstandings and the snap judgements we make about people based entirely on the information we’re provided about their outward identities. Those outward identities never tell the full story about who that person is behind the seen, and when we’re confronted with those misunderstandings it creates tension between what we think we kno...

For this first episode, we introduce who we are, discuss what we’re trying to accomplish and lay some ground rules for the rest of the series. Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is contribute to dialogue that will help produce racial harmony. We know that there are still terribly, dark, hateful and racist people in the world, but our goal isn’t necessarily to talk to them. The people we’re trying...