Change Your Brain Every Day - How Putting Yourself First Can Prevent Racist Thinking - Pt. 2 with Miles McPherson

Episode Date: September 11, 2018

Many people say they don’t see color, but they then go to the beach to try to get a tan to improve their looks. The lack of honesty in how we see and how we treat others can be the biggest barrier to a healthy racially integrated society. In the second episode of a series on racism and the brain, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen speak with Miles McPherson, former NFL player and pastor of The Rock church in San Diego, about taking an inward focus to help you understand others.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Welcome back. We are still with Pastor Miles McPherson, and we are talking about racism in the brain. And it's so interesting. This topic is actually fascinating because it really is, like I've never seen our nation more divided than it is now politically, racially. This, you know, the blacks against cops.

And I mean, it's really sad. At what point or how can we step back and go, look, we're Americans first. We're people first. How can we help each other? What will it take? And Miles has a brand new book called The Third Option, Hope for a Racially Divided Nation. I've seen the YouTube talk you did on this. It's brilliant. And I love what you said about so many people go to Hawaii.

They try to get brown skin. Right, right. They try to get dark skin because they think they're going to get a date. And yet if you're born that way, you're criminalized. Yeah, if you get a tan in Hawaii, it's beautiful and celebrated. If you get a tan in the womb, it's invalidated. Isn't that weird? That's a great expression.

To some, to some. But you get the point. And when people say they don't see color in that um and when people say they don't see color in that illustration uh when people say they don't see color but when you get a tan you want people to see that color you do it so it is seen but yet you there are other colors you say you don't see um so anyway this you asked a question this book is about honor. And in every race conversation, it's about us versus them. You have to pick a side of division that pits you against somebody. And this book is all about how do I honor what we have in common, which is the image of God.

And as you know, we're 90-something percent genetically exactly the same. We're more similar. 99.7. And I put fives on my little sapon here. 99.7% the same, but yet we focus on how we're different. That 0.3%. Yeah. 0.3%.

No, 0.3. 0.3. And even if that's the difference, I mean, even some of that, even what really makes us look different is probably less than that. But this is talking about how has racism destroyed my ability to see you and honor you as a human being? Fear, culture, ignorance, blind spots, not understanding what love is. And how do I restore my ability to honor you and put a priceless value on you as a human being? So what triggered you to write this book? You know, all my life life because I lived in two

different worlds and I was born in 1960 so I remember Martin Luther King and that and the struggling and listen when I was a little kid we had black and white TV and it was only white it was very few black little little black on the black and white TV and when someone black in one TV we would we were glued like when Michael Jackson was gonna come on TV, the world stopped. It was a big deal. So you grow up your whole life in that struggle,

feeling inferior, feeling pushed down your whole life. Isn't that interesting? It would be terrible. When three years ago, when I got a chance to write a book, when I put a proposal in, I wrote one of the chapters on racism. It was gonna be a book on other things and race being one of them. And they said, would you write a book, the whole book on it? I said,

please, can I do that? Um, but I've always, every time I got a opportunity to preach on race, because something happened in culture or when, like when OJ was acquitted and the community was, the nation was divided. I cried that night. Just the division broke my heart. It's like, man. And it's just, it's been a burden on my life. So when I got an opportunity to write it, I said, I want to write a book that's going to solve this. Because my church is 20,000 people. We look like the United Nations every Sunday.

And I see it every Sunday for 18 years. It's awesome, though. It's awesome. And people can get along. And so I wrote a book to try to provide people tools on how to get along. I like that. I can't wait to read it. It's really interesting. And your church also has a lot of military people. And so I grew up in a very white San Fernando Valley, but I was Lebanese. And at a time when the Arab-Israeli wars were raging, and so I got singled out in a negative way. 1976, I won the California state champion for peace oratory on our speech team.

I was arguing for a two-state solution. But whenever I'd go to a tournament where there was a higher population of Jewish judges, they always flunked me. I came in 45th or something. I grew up with a similar thing. But where I really learned about integrating races was when I joined the military in 1972, because it didn't matter. You got promoted based on how you performed, not by the color of your skin. But that hasn't always been true in the military. That's not always been true. But that hasn't always been true in the military. That's not always been true.

No, it certainly wasn't true in World War I or World War II or the Civil War. Yeah, I just don't want to address that because a lot of people are going to be offended. But now, and I think you see that in your church because there's a high military population in San Diego, is they're all over the board. Yeah. So what will it take for us to focus on someone's character more than their color? Yeah, so this book is all about how to honor the other person, but it starts with honoring me. Okay. And acknowledging that I made an image of God, and the image of God in you is not inferior or superior to mine. I can acknowledge the image of God in you.

I can acknowledge that you have character, that you have the ability to have a relationship with me, that you have dreams, you have pursuits, you have pain. I need to acknowledge and place a price's value on my ability to have compassion for you, to understand you, to be patient with you. I have to start with me. What are my blind spots? What are my issues? How am I not seeing you? Because if I don't honor you, when I say honor you, place a priceless value on your respect, you love you.

I'm living below how I was designed to live. So that's on me. So the first thing to do is find out about me. The first 11 chapters of the 18 are all about me. It's divided by me, you, we. So the first 11 chapters are what do I need to learn about my fears, my understanding what love is, my understanding of my blind spots, how am I offending people not knowing? And are there people in my life who are different than me that I can ask, am I being offensive? If all your viewers and listeners went to someone who is different, a Mexican, black, white person, and said, is there anything I say or do that's offensive?

It doesn't make me a racist. I think we talked about in the first segment, you can be racially offensive without being a racist. Is there something I do? Ask your friends. Are there insensitive things I say? Yeah, like what I said to my friend, Jasmine. So when I said that to her, it was offensive.

I could see her face. I'm like, oh. And I picked up on it. I was smart enough to pick up on I'm commenting and acting like I know something I know nothing about because I don't think it should be that way. But that's offensive to someone who has experienced something that's different from what I'm saying. But it doesn't make you a racist. No. If anything, I was feeling the opposite.

But that's such an important point. I was feeling almost like protecting. And labeling, which are one of the ants that we talk about here all the time, the automatic negative thoughts, is so common in this conversation. If I can pigeonhole you, then I don't actually have to deal with you. Exactly. The greatest commandment is to love my neighbor as myself. But if you're the other, you're not my group, you're not my neighbor, so I don't have to love my neighbor as myself but if you're the other you're not my group you're not my neighbor so i don't have to love you and so when you think about all the people that you see

on television that are different think of the labels you put on them oh i do it every day i don't even deny that i'm judgmental like it's not against but not against color i'm gonna give this you for free yeah no it's not for me it's not color. It's about things you do in society. And I know I'm that way. Right. So I have to like, you hurt a child. I'm sorry. The death penalty in my mind is not a bad thing.

So I'm just. Well, which also comes from past experience. It does. Of being hurt. Right. So often our buttons come from our history. And as we're going to talk about in the next podcast, it actually may not be our history. It may be the history of our parents or our grandparents because things get transmitted more than just the color of your eyes and how tall you are. Right.

And if you think about the people we label, think about what you really know about them. I don't. And I don't know what they've been through. They could have been hurt as a child. All I can think about in that moment is you did this to that person and that's unacceptable. And you're talking about the child molesters. I'm talking about whether they're Mexican, black or white. And we think, okay, those people are like that.

Or that person is like that. Well, and I grew up in a home where that was the norm. So my stepfather, who was from Montana, and we used to get in some rip-roaring fights. So when I was little, I didn't know. You're just told this and you don't understand. And there were very few black people in my community, in my school. And I would hear that he was always telling racial jokes, racist jokes.

And I didn't really know, right? But it never felt quite right. But I never didn't really know the right wrong part of it. You know, it's like, it's how your family is. It's what you're told. And then all of a sudden, one day I was like, wait, I experienced enough of the world. I'm like, this really feels yucky to me.

It doesn't feel right. And I addressed it with him. We actually got into a huge fight over it. And cause he was trying to tell me I'm wrong. And I'm like, I don't understand how you can be so racist. He goes, I'm not racist. I hate everybody the same. How is that? Okay. Like, I don't understand. You know what I mean? But we used to actually- That goes with the first 11 chapters of the third option. It's all, it's about him. It's all about him.

I just like- More than it is about other people, but I grew up with that and it's toxic. Oh, it is. You have a lot of, you have a lot of growing up to do when you leave home. If you grow up in an environment like that, right? You have to really do soul searching of your own. And that's where this has to start again, without condemning myself. How can I be more honoring? It's not about avoiding being racist. It's about

learning how to be more honoring. And those are two different things. Because people can walk on eggshells. I don't want to say the wrong thing. I don't want to do the wrong thing. That's a scary way to live. But they can see that too. I feel like people see when you're not authentic. Well, maybe not authentic or if you're in fear because I really don't want to offend. Oh, okay. That's okay. That's more authentic. It's authentic, but it's not where you want to live.

You want to live where, no, I am going to intentionally figure out how to honor you, how to speak life to you. And so instead of saying, okay, don't be racist, it's more about how do I honor? I like that. That's a very different perspective. Yeah, because if I come to you and I say, look, hey man, and you're different from me, and I'm like, hey, how you doing?

And I ask people all the time where they're from. If you're sincere, people shouldn't be offended by that. I mean, the average person is like, you know, I appreciate you wanting to know about me versus being scared. Do I say this? Do I say that? It's like people say, do I say black African-American?

Just be sincere. Right. I mean, even if- That is a good, I've actually always had that question. I'm not exactly sure. You know, in some parts of the country, it's different. But if you're sincere, if you're sincere and you're just speaking, people are going to be, okay, whatever. But it's when you start walking on eggshells where you are stressed out. This is more about how do I be intentionally honoring versus avoiding saying the wrong thing. Right. No, I actually like that. And so the third option is, you know, it goes from me to you.

To honor. To honor. We, yes. Yes. The book is me. And then the second section is you. And the third section is we. Now, in every section, it talks about how I can honor.

That's really the thread that goes through it. I really like that. How we can honor. And I have a question because this is my own question. And that goes with happiness. People don't know that, that when we're connected, we're happy. When we're disconnected, we're in fear and isolated. When we come back, we're going to talk about the brain

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