Adolescents are known for black and white thinking. "All adults are idiots," one might say to the other.
Adolescents aren't alone in their rigidity that allows for stereotyping.
Through my years of listening and working with many oppressed and traumatized people, I've noticed that black and white thinking is a common way of being stuck or getting stuck. To believe that members of a group are all the same as the ones who are oppressors or abusers is a prime example of this.
Ben Franklin, like almost all colonists of his day, owned slaves and didn't see any problem with doing so until he happened to visit a Negro school run by Rev. William Sturgeon of Philadelphia several years before the Revolutionary War. Sturgeon's students, Franklin noted, were just as bright as any white-skinned children he'd ever observed. Because Franklin was a thinking person who was not afraid to entertain new ideas, he began to wrestle with his old belief system, changing his thoughts and attitudes. Eventually, he concluded that slavery was indefensible.
Adolescents use black and white thinking because they are insecure about themselves and the world they live in. They are afraid to trust themselves or to trust others outside of their group. I am convinced it is the same with traumatized people who remain stuck.
Whether we are considering a culture, an institution, or an individual, my own belief in progressive divine revelation leads me to have hope--sometimes faint hope, but a definite hope--that, there are degrees of enlightenment in each of us. Then, to go on believing that, in time, cultures, institutions, and each of us can deal with our fears and blind spots so that we can see more and more clearly.
It is this hope that keeps me sharing with others what I feel about many things, knowing that sometimes I am speaking from a vantage point of power while at other times I may, even inadvertently, be speaking to powers that I do not even know exist.
It is this hope that also keeps me listening.
