SDS 358: Racism and Discrimination

Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast everybody, super excited to have you back here on the show. In his seminars, Tony Robbins talks about the three levels of mastery. The cognitive or intellectual mastery of a topic, concept, skill, whatever it is. This is the cognitive or intellectual mastery. There’s emotional mastery and there’s the physical mastery. And he gives the example of walking along a street and seeing a fence and on the fence seeing a sign: Be aware there’s a dog inside. There’s an angry dog inside this fence. So as soon as you read that sign you have an intellectual or a cognitive mastery of that topic. You understand that there is likely a dog behind this fence and it’s probably not a good idea to climb over this fence. 

Now, where does level two come in? Well, if you were to climb over this fence or start climbing, if you were to start climbing this fence and the dog jumped out of a bush behind the fence and scared you and started barking, you’d get a fright. You would feel certain feelings in your body, you’d feel fear, you would feel adrenaline, you’d want to run, you’d feel all these things happening at the same time in your body. And that’s welcome to level two of mastery, you have emotional mastery over the concept that there’s a dog behind the fence, behind this particular fence. And so now you’re even less likely to climb over the fence in the future. 

Now where does level three come in? Well, level three comes in if you were to start climbing and actually climb over the fence, jump on the other side, and then the dog jumped out of the bush and then the dog bit you on the leg or on your butt. And that’s when you would not only feel fear, but you’ll actually feel physical pain. You would have damage, you’d have consequences to your physical body. Well, that’s level three of mastery and of this topic, of this concept that there’s a dog behind that particular fence and now you are even less likely to climb over the fence than in any of the previous scenarios. 

So these levels of mastery, they portray not just to dogs and fences, but pretty much to anything in our life. We can understand cognitively, you understand something on an emotional level or we can understand something on a physical level and the deeper you go, the better your understanding, the better your comprehension of a certain topic. So what does this have to do with today’s topic of racism and discrimination? 

Well, I recently understood for myself that I had never actually understood and mastered the topic of racism and discrimination on a level deeper than level one. I’ve always understood level one, cognitively and intellectually why it’s bad and what it is and why it shouldn’t be in the world. But I’ve never actually felt it emotionally or physically. And recently that actually changed for me. So here’s the little story of how this changed for me. 

About four weeks ago, my girlfriend and I went to Argentina. We’ve always wanted to go to South America. I’ve always wanted to spend some more time in the South America. Actually, Hadelin was supposed to come as well, but things changed in his personal life so he wasn’t able to make it. Anyway, so my girlfriend and I went to Buenos Aires and there we caught up with Diane, who is one of our team members at SuperDataScience, and we spent some time with her. Diane and I did some work together. And also we were there to experience what it is, what is Buenos Aires. All the tango and beautiful music and beautiful streets and cafes and just walking around the place. Also, we were supposed to go to a glacier later on to see it. But then this whole situation with the coronavirus expanded or grew much faster or very fast and the pandemic happened and everything started to go into lockdown. 

And just before Argentina went into lockdown, or Buenos Aires specifically went into lockdown, we were there but already people were feeling this. The fear that there’s this pandemic and that you got to wash your hands and that you got to be careful and so on. And specifically what I noticed is that because we were walking around the streets and it’s clear that we have white skin and we don’t belong there, we are tourists, we are foreigners, people started looking at us differently. And okay, well that’s no big deal. People are just looking at us differently. Of course there may be concern. But already that felt a little bit uncomfortable. So because we look different, because we have a different skin color to the local population there, we were being treated or at least regarded different. 

And so this is where I started mastering this topic of, mastering is probably a wrong word, we started understanding this topic of racism on a different level, on an emotional level. Where I was actually feeling it on myself. And so you feel a bit judged. And here I want to describe. So if you’re like me, if you previously had never actually felt it on an emotional level, I want to describe what it feels like. It feels like you’re being judged and it feels like you’re being watched and like people are talking about you behind your back, that type of thing. But it’s kind of like, it’s kind of okay. It felt okay for the start. But then things started getting worse.

And I clearly remember we went into this one cafe once just to grab some smoothies to have for breakfast or lunch. I don’t remember what it was. So we went in the cafe and we already felt like everybody’s watching us. And so half the cafes were closed at the time, half the cafes were open, but you had to wash your hands, be careful, sanitize your hands. So we went to this cafe, we sat down and everybody’s kind of like a little bit uncomfortable watching us. Like one waiter comes up to us and they ask us, “How long have you been in the country?” And the rule there was that it wasn’t locked down, you weren’t supposed to stay at home, but they were very cautious about people who had been in the country for less than 14 days. Because if you are in the country for less than 14 days then you’re likely that maybe you still have the virus. You brought it from another place and you can get everybody else sick. 

We were in the country at the time about 12 days. So the waiter said it’s fine, but still then their manager wasn’t happy. And so in all this time we’re sitting there feeling judged, we’re feeling unwelcome, we’re feeling that people are like looking at us differently just because of the color of our skin. And then one of the managers came up to us and she apologized and said, “You have to leave because you’re foreigners and you can’t be here. You can get other people sick.” And so what I’m saying here is that of course I don’t want to say that Argentenians or people in Buenos Aires or in that cafe are racist. Not at all. Like I totally understand where this comes from. It’s totally warranted. This is a very scary situation and clearly you want to protect. They were very polite and very apologetic that we have to leave the establishment and so on. So that’s not my point here. 

The point here is that how I felt. Just because of having a different color skin and being subject to … To some extent that is discrimination. That’s the definition of discrimination. When you differentiate by certain factors. We were being discriminated because of the color of our skin. It felt, so again it felt like we had been judged, we didn’t feel welcome and really wanted to leave. The feeling we had was like we’re doing something wrong. When all we did is went into a cafe, sat down to have a smoothie. And it’s a terrible feeling. It’s a terrible feeling and we wanted to leave. And so like you feel so bad. You can’t enjoy life. You can’t enjoy the food you have. You can’t enjoy the conversation. 

You constantly have to look behind your back and what are other people, why are other people judging you in this way? And we left Buenos Aires. In fact, we were lucky to leave on time before all of the flights or many of the flights got canceled. And in this case we were lucky that we can leave or we were lucky that … Or this was just a scenario. Of course, it’s got the pandemic, to do with pandemic. I’m not blaming anybody whatsoever. Totally understand where this is coming from. But imagine this. We could leave. We felt unwelcome. We felt judged. We felt that we don’t belong here. We don’t want to be here. And we could leave. We can go to our home countries. We have a place to go. 

But imagine people who don’t have a place to go. For whom this is their home. Who people who live in that country, whatever the country is. It can be in Europe, it can be in America, it can be in Africa, it can be in Australia, it can be anywhere. Racism and discrimination can happen in any country and not just because of skin color. It can be because of gender. It can be because of sexual preferences. It can be because of race. It can be because of whatever. There are many factors that a person can be discriminated against. Not just race. And yeah, so imagine people for whom this is their home. They were born there. They consider this to be their home. And they feel like that all the time. They feel judged, unwelcome, people watching them, people talking about them. They feel like they’re doing something wrong. They feel that they want to leave, but they can’t. They have nowhere to go. It’s a terrible feeling. 

And for me this was a huge realization that all my life, maybe I experienced this back when I was a child, when I was growing up in Africa. Maybe I remember I was being the only Russian kid in that school. Maybe to some extent. But those times are gone and I don’t really remember that. But feeling this now as an adult, on myself, it did not feel good at all. So I just want to get this message out there that we all understand on a cognitive level. We hope we all understand on an intellectual level, that racism and discrimination are terrible things and should not be in our world. 

But once you experience it on an emotional level, and some people even experience it on a physical level. Some people get physically abused because of their race or because of other factors that they can be discriminated against. That must feel even more terrible. And just getting a glimpse of this feeling, we did not feel good. So hopefully I can convey this emotion across this audio to those of us who haven’t experienced this before and what I would love for us to all strive is to make our communities safer. Whether it is your home community, your local city community, your data science community, your friendship circles. Let’s make them safer. 

Because it’s hard to explain, but try imagining those feelings of always constantly or for a prolonged period of time feeling unwelcome. Feeling like you want to leave. That’s how, I guess, that’s how some people feel in these situations. So lets all work together to make data science and even our own communities, wherever we are, to make these better places and to get rid of any kind of racism and discrimination as much as we can and lead by example and make people, help people feel welcomed and that they are doing the right thing. That everybody can live their lives no matter where you’re from, how you look, what your preferences are, that we can all live our lives equally. 

Hopefully this message will hit home. Let’s all work together and make our world a better place. And on that note, my friends, I look forward to seeing you back here next time. And until then, happy analyzing.