Gestalt, cultural blinders, and transient realities
Rodney D. Coates *

We all speak different languages, even while we use the same language set.  That is to say, gender, race, culture, religion, age, ability levels, education, nationality, sexuality, marriage status (or its lack), levels of sanity, political persuasion, and of course ethnic persuasion - all impact upon how we view the world, how we are viewed by the world, and how we interact with the various symbol sets and identity matrices we encounter.  There is no way that these symbol sets and identity matrices can be ignored, and there are no ways that anyone does not act, react, interpret, and miss-interpret various situations except through these states of consciousness.  The problem comes when we delude ourselves to think that we somehow function, interact, and act in such ways that these symbol sets or identity matrices are not present.  So color blind, gender neutral, sexual non-descript, and ethnically un-entangled just does not exist.  Let's take color-blindness just for an exampl
 e.
        When color-blindness is typically encountered in the physical world, and someone says that they are color blind it means that they have a disability which causes them difficulty in distinguishing different primary colors.  That is they absolutely do not have the capacity to distinguish between say blue and green, or red and blue.  Now when we speak of such with reference to racial groups, that so and so is color blind, or that there are color blind practices in place -this in all honesty is an impossibility.   There is no way that you can, given the racial orientation of much of the modern world, not see race writ large wherever we go.  Put simply -we have been trained, from birth, to see, differentiate, and make decisions based upon racial differentials.  Alternatively, there are various individuals who have played upon racial ambiguity and have passed.  Thus passing, racial masquerading, is something which highlights the racial divide.  Typically, passing takes plac
 e when the racial stakes are high, and discrimination against particular groups are equally high.
        There are some interesting articles regarding how the Jews and Irish became white in the U.S.  Essentially, as Roediger (and others explain) becoming white meant that many previously discriminated and marginalized European ethnic immigrant groups, chose to align themselves with the White majority -English protestants - in the U.s. to avoid the racial stigma associated with blacks, native Americans, Asians, and others.  In the process race -whiteness, blackness, and otherness -in America became a gestalt -a unified, cohesive cultural embodiment of the American experiences.

        The issue is that what was produced were multiple gestalts -that often collide, interact, mutually and separately coexists, or as system elements create and manipulate what can only be termed transient realities.  Such transient realities, which have the appearance of solidity, actually vary across socio-political, historical, and other contexts.  One could say that we are multi-polar as a society.


Excerpted from forthcoming article "Matrices of Opportunity" by Rodney D. Coates



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