Change Your Brain Every Day - Is Racism an Evolutionary Construct? - Pt. 1 with Miles McPherson

Episode Date: September 10, 2018

Is it possible to act in a racially offensive way, but not be a racist? In the first episode of a 5-part series on racism and the brain, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen are joined by former NFL star-turned pastor Miles McPherson for an engaging discussion on why we discriminate, and what we can do to change the way we think about 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, everyone. We are so excited. We have our friend, Pastor Myles McPherson here, and he's the author of a brand new book called The Third Option, Hope for a Racially Divided Nation. And we call this week Racism and the Brain. And let me tell you a little bit about Pastor McPherson. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, the second oldest of five children, raised on Long Island, was a professional football player.

In fact, that's how we met. He's part of our NFL study. He went to the University of New Haven. He majored in engineering. That's actually very important and very unusual for a football player. Well, they keep saying major, not graduate. Achieved All-American honors in football, drafted into the NFL, strong athletics run in his family.

His brother, Don McPherson, was the Heisman Trophy runner-up in 1987, played in the NFL for four years, was part of the San Diego Chargers, which, oh my goodness, I've seen so many Chargers who had drug addiction problems. And he developed an addiction to cocaine that put him into a tailspin. After a second season in the NFL after a week-long drug binge. He called out to Jesus Christ, accepted him, and stopped doing drugs in one day. That's amazing. I used to work with Teen Challenge. In fact, that was part of my journey back to the Lord was working with them. So I get that.

I've heard that. Yeah. to the Lord was working with them. So I get that. I've heard that. He worked as a youth pastor for Horizon Christian Fellowship in San Diego, enrolled in Azusa Pacific University, got his Master's of Divinity degree. And in 2000, he felt called by God to start the Rock Church in San Diego, which according to Outreach Magazine, has been consistently one of the nation's fastest growing and largest churches with nearly 15,000 people attending one of the Rock's 21 Sunday services, which I got to speak at a few weeks ago. I was so excited. In addition, it's streamed online, microsites, which you have to talk to us about microsites.

It's so interesting. Radio and TV. And he's done so many other things, but he's the author of this very important new book called The Third Option. So welcome to the Brain Warriors Radio Podcast. Yes, interesting bio. Hey, I'm tired of listening to that. No, and I like it because you relate to our audience in so many different ways. You know,

the NFL and coming and joining our study, the addiction issues. I mean, it's, and now the racial issues. And I think that that's amazing. We can sort of address, you know, things you understand. I've been there, done that. That's great. So before we get into the third option, I want to start by talking about your thoughts on how we got this way. Why are we racially, politically divided in such a nasty way. You know, our sinful nature is all about me. And one of the best ways and most common, easiest ways to divide is how we look. People who look like me, I feel like I have something in common.

And I'm going back to way before slavery in this country, just in general. Yeah, almost biology. It's just sort of a... And we're selfish. So, you know, people like me are better than people like you. And I think at the root of it, when we get into this book, when we think about what we feel about people like me and people not like me, we divide based on that. And I think at the root of it, we can trace it back to that and part of our sinful nature.

Very interesting. And people who are not like me, scare me. Right. And so there's probably something in our genes that say, watch out, be careful. Yeah, I mean, you can speak to the genetic part way better than me. But exactly, the people who, and I write this in the book about how we group, we're all part of groups. And the group that I'm part of, my in-group, those are people like me that I understand very well. I'm accustomed to them. I'm comfortable with them.

Yeah, and it's interesting. I actually did, I wrote about part of that in one of the books I wrote. We are hardwired to do that, to group like that for safety reasons. So before we lived in a society that was civilized, right? That was our survival. Survival meant you grouped, you had to be a part of a group. And if you were part of that group, it meant other groups were automatically your enemy. And you didn't know about that group. So you had anecdotal information, what you saw on the television or one experience, and then you apply all that to that whole group. And then you label them. And so now that's who they are. They're in that corner.

I'm in this corner. And so it's an us versus them mentality, which is what we see today. The third option is that we honor what we have in common. We'll get to that later. See that? And that actually, I love this because I have said this so many times, and I ended up feeling really stupid with one of my friends, a dear friend of mine who's African American.

And I was like, I don't get it. We're all Americans first. And I'm having a hard time. Like, it can't be this bad still in this day and age. And she got a little irritated with me. And I'm like, yeah, that was probably a really ignorant thing to say. I have no business commenting on how bad it is in certain neighborhoods because I've got no idea. But to many of us, it feels like because where we live is safe and clean and whatever, we can't imagine that it still goes on because we wouldn't do it.

Yes, or you don't realize what you do. I think one of the- And that's good. And that's the other thing. I like that. And that's the other thing. One of the big ahas in this whole book was getting people to accept that they can be racially offensive without being a racist. Everyone can.

Without being a racist. Yeah. So because people, if they associate being racially offensive to being a racist, then they deny that they could ever be offensive. So therefore, they deny that they could ever be wrong. Therefore, they deny that what you're saying is bothering you doesn't exist. It's a domino effect. But if I can be racially offensive without being a racist, in other words, I may offend you, and it may not be me.

It may be you. Right. Or I may be saying something that I really sincerely want to help. But you don't realize. Like saying I don't see color. I know people will mean well when they say that. Right. But they shouldn't say it.

But it's sort of silly, right? Yeah, it's sort of silly. Have you been to the Museum of Tolerance in L.A.? Oh, it's fantastic. I went to a Christian college, right? Yeah, it's sort of silly. Have you been to the Museum of Tolerance in LA? Oh, it's fantastic. I went to a Christian college, and they took us as part of our nursing education, because I'm a nurse from Loma Linda.

And they took us there, and it is amazing. It is an amazing museum. I've never seen a Holocaust museum quite like it. So it's very different. It was done in part by, it's Leventhal, but it was also done by Steven Spielberg. So it's very interactive. but there's one part where there's two signs and you're walking

through and it says people who do not discriminate in this line people who do discriminate in this line everyone tries to go through most people try to go through the other side the door won't open the door won't open it's locked and I was like oh it was such a

huge wake-up call because it makes you really stop and go wait do do i do that i discriminate every day against people who i think hurt children or who but the minute you do that you can it can spread right good what was your experience growing up? Well, my grandmother's white. My other grandmothers have Chinese and black. My grandfather's a black. You've got all bases covered. I've got all bases covered. I'm all things to all people. And I grew up in a black neighborhood, and I went to school in a white neighborhood for the first eight years of my schooling.

So I got called all the names in the white neighborhood because I was black. But I got called names in my neighborhood because I wasn't black enough. Right. And so I was kind of like a no man's land growing up. And that was my experiences. I was black, but to some I wasn't black enough. Even still to this day, I get joked about that. I got called all the names, you know, all the N words and white boy and this and that, this and that.

That was my experience. So you really felt it from both ends. I got it from both ends. Even though I am black and identify black and my best friends and family was black, but I have a white grandmother. And what was interesting about my grandmother is that at home, there's all these brown people, light-skinned brown people, and this white lady, and we never knew where she – I never knew, we never knew as kids where she came from.

Oh, interesting. We didn't know her family because when she married my grandfather. They disowned her. They disowned her. And they lived 15 minutes away. We found out later. That's crazy. So they sent her from Jamaica, West Indies, where she grew up.

And she actually knew my other grandmother as a kid. They sent her to Jamaica, Queens, so she wouldn't marry a black Jamaican. And in Jamaica, Queens, she met a black Jamaican in Jamaica, Queens. Oh, my gosh. And married my grandfather. But I grew up knowing people on both sides of the street, which the white neighborhood was on the other side of Ocean Avenue. And they were great kids and had great friends in both neighborhoods,

and they talked about each other. But I knew both of them. That's not interesting. And I said, no, what you're saying about them is not right. Right. You just know a little bit of information because the white kids never came into my neighborhood. And my friends never went into that neighborhood. And it was, you know, it was right across the street.

So, but I went back and forth every day from first to eighth grade going to school. But my friends in the white neighborhood would never come to my house. That's fascinating. When you were in the NFL, what was your experience with racism? You know, certain positions, and it's changed over the years certain positions have had a stereotype of like white players will play quarterback there was very few quarterbacks growing up my brother was a heisman runner-up my brother was the number one rated passer in college but he was drafted in the fifth round and there were a lot of stereotypes about you know he couldn't pass but he was the

number one passer in the nation. He was the highest runner up. It's changed dramatically. You know, guys that now are getting opportunities because guys like him, it blazed a trail for him. I was a safety in the NFL, and safeties when I was growing up was there were more white guys playing safety. And we were told things like, you know, the athletes go in the corner and the smart guys go in at safety.

I was told that. And so that was very subtle, but you had, you know, most of the coaches were white. And so not that they were racist at all, but when I was told that as a stereotype, you know, well, you're going to go over here because we have the smart guys that play this position. Now that's changed.

You've got, you know, a high degree of black players playing those positions, quarterback safety as well. But that was probably the biggest. And what my brother went through was the biggest glaring thing that was racist to me that I've experienced. So interesting. So I have a niece. She is half Hispanic, but she looks Hispanic. Well, if you saw her, she's experiencing what you just described, right? So she moved down here and the school she goes to has a lot of Hispanic kids. And she thought she was going to feel comfortable there. And they make fun of her. And they don't really bring her into their fold and they think she's a white girl and i'm like your name's castellanos i'm so confused she speaks spanish you know what i mean but they won't

accept her yeah and so it's just an interesting odd thing when you see this happen well we decide what is what is like me look like and what is like me sound like and what is like me do. Once we decide those barriers, then we exclude everyone else. And exclusion is really going to hell because hell, according to some theologians, is not a burning lake. It's separation from God and separation from your community because when you become separated from your community your life is at risk and so that exclusion is so painful as alizé right and the white kids don't want her in their group either well now they're accepting her because she's really smart but so they're they're bringing her in on based on her sort of iq and genetics and whatever um and yet and there's

a very funny other thing, and this probably goes along to what you said earlier. You may not mean it in a negative way, but it comes across that way. So my daughter went to a school where there were very few, very few African-American or black kids. And when they came in, they were such a novelty, everybody wanted to be their friend. And my daughter, it actually irritated her. She's like, why do you do this thing where you need a token black friend? I'm so confused. Like, what, like,

do you know that person? And it would bother her. And so her friends would call her racist. And she's like, no, I think they're racist. Like in her mind that felt racist to her. So what are your thoughts on that? You know, every person, I was walking to a school once into a inner city school to do an assembly and it was black and Hispanic, in the city of Philly, and a white youth pastor was walking with me, and he said, how do I act? And I said, number one, you can't act good enough to fool anybody. Right.

So don't try. Don't try. And number two, if you jest yourself, everything will be fine, even if you're goofy. And so in situations like that, every individual has to, in their heart, sincerely say, I really want to get to know you. Right. Or I really respect you.

And a lot of times we want to judge why someone's doing something, but sometimes people have a genuine interest in someone. And so it's okay. Sometimes people have a manipulative, undone mind intent. It's hard to determine that. So every individual case is so different. Yeah. So racism is common. It's painful. I grew up with it.

It's painful. And it was ugly. It is pervasive. What do you do about it? Stay with us. We're going to talk about the third option. Use the code podcast10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or on our supplements at brainmdhealth.com.

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