Bill Clinton, Race, and Johari

Former President Bill Clinton has been in Africa this week. Kate Snow put together a 13 minute 50 second interview for ABC News. Kate Snow’s emotional interview is worth the time.

The part of Clinton’s interview that was most publicized was his statement, “I am not a racist.” Since January media focus has remained on the comments Bill Clinton made after Hillary Clinton lost to Barack Obama in the South Carolina primary. He downplayed her loss by saying, “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ‘84 and ‘88.” The comment, for whatever reasons we might want to attribute to it, was not well received. I believe Bill Clinton is not a racist. Whether or not his comment associating Jackson and Obama was racist is a question that everyone has to judge in their own way.

Since racist is a charged word with different meanings for different people, it might be interesting to rephrase questions of racism in several ways. For example, try these.

• Am I a racist?
• Do I intend to be a racist?
• Are my actions racist? my thoughts?
• Are my emotional responses to people altered based on race? (It is important to note that there is no genetic marker that would allow a person to be identified as a member of a particular race. Race is an artificial, social construct.)
• Have my attitudes about race changed over my lifetime?
• Have I discarded racist attitudes that I might have had in the past?

Now those are not all the same question.

Would responses to those questions be the same if we defined racism as discrimination based on race as the answers would be if we defined racism as the view that race determines inherent ability and capacity to succeed? Then what would it mean to say, “I am not a racist.” Are you ready to go on national television to present your views? Which of the six questions would you like to answer? Which definition of racism would you like to use? I am convinced that we cannot know even our own answers.

The Clinton interview is yesterday’s news, but it brought to mind a concept I heard first 25 years ago: the Johari window. The Johari window can help us see why we may not be able to know everything about ourselves, including whether or not we are racist. The Johari window is a concept from psychology elaborated by Joe and Harry (Joseph Luft and Harry Ingraham, who else?) in the 1950s. It divides the person into 4 quadrants,

• our public part that we and everyone else knows (We and others know our name and eye color.)
• our blind spots that others know but we don’t (Others know we have spinach in our teeth but we don’t know it.)
• our facades that we know and we don’t want known (Well, why would I tell you that?! It’s a secret I’m keeping, and if I told you, it would move into the public part.)
• and the unknowns (Neither your nor I know these, but one day they may be discovered or elaborated by one or both of us. This unknown area is sometimes equated with creativity and dreams.)

Each person has a unique size to each quadrant. The way we see ourselves is often quite different than how others see us. The University of San Francisco presents a brief, readable elaboration that is informative and entertaining. Wikipedia’s site is not as exciting. The Johari window is a tool used by business, personal growth professionals, and the United States Air Force. If you’d like to hear someone talk about the Johari window, try the ad-laden video from MetaCafe.

So if I wanted to say something about myself like I am (you pick one) not a racist; perceptive; friendly; always cheerful in the morning; the hardest working person on the planet; forgiving, or anything else that is subjective, I’d do well to a) remember the Johari window and b) ask my friends and others.

photo by flickr by yuheitomi