Being immediately viewed with mistrust and apprehension was a disconcerting experience for me. I was a new veterinary school graduate and my first job was on the West Bank in New Orleans, where our clientele was quite racially diverse. One of the interesting things I noted early on was that some dogs belonging to Black clients were more suspicious than usual of me, a young white dude with a thermometer and a stethoscope. Veterinarians get used to being viewed with some degree of skepticism by their patients, but I prided myself on trying my best to make clients and their animals as comfortable as possible in the exam room. Some of the dogs belonging to Black clients, however, reacted to me with their fight-or-flight systems in high gear as soon as they saw and/or smelled me. I came to understand that I looked and smelled different than the people they were used to being around. In their minds, that made me suspicious, scary, and potentially threatening.
Those early experiences with some of my patients’ reactions have been on my mind lately as I’ve thought about the deep social and political divisions around us. Many use buzz-words, epithets, and openly pejorative labels to signal their disdain for people and ideas that are not like them. They wallow in the overarching idea that their beliefs and their people are good, and those that are different from them and theirs are bad. Kind of like a dog that has only been around Black people reacting badly to a white veterinarian in an exam room. The concept is similar, but the outcome doesn’t have to be.
Like dogs, we big-brained humans harbor deep-seated protective tendencies and predispositions we inherited from our forebears. But, we have an enormous advantage over our canine companions. We have a relatively huge cerebral cortex that allows us, if we choose to use it, to evaluate situations and information, and separate automatic reactions to things that are just “different” from things that are actual threats. Despite the urgings of those who want to keep us suspicious of each other, we are under no obligation to let our deep urges and tendencies rule our thoughts and, especially, our behavior. We each have the ability to evaluate evidence and make behavioral decisions based on facts instead of knee-jerk tendencies or what some opinionater has told us we should think or do.
Imagine how much more productive the exchange of ideas could be if we didn’t allow ourselves to automatically react to the code words and phrases we have been trained by our tribes to consider bad, but instead actually listened to and considered information before deciding on courses of action!
Oh, by the way, through persistence and patience, I managed to gain acceptance from some of those skeptical dogs. Just goes to show you can teach at least some old dogs new tricks! That gives me hope for us humans.
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Tom Colville lives in Fargo.
This letter does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Forum's editorial board nor Forum ownership.
