Best Of Lewis Raven Wallace's "Radical Unlearning"
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Radical Unlearning: The Art and Science of Creating Change from Within by Lewis Raven Wallace
In exploring the conditions for unlearning, I've come to believe that loving and being loved are the headwaters, the source from which the rest of the possibilities of the mind flow. "Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within," writes James Baldwin in his classic essay "The Fire Next Time." (If you haven't read this seminal text for unlearning white supremacy, please abandon ship! Go read it and come back!) "I use the word 'love' here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace-not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth."
p. 23
Being loved-the purview of parents, children, friends, partners, community members-means being seen in light of what is possible within us. It means attuned, intimate interaction. It means a relaxation of the senses and, with all of that, an increased likelihood that we will be able to change. To cognitively connect with our creativity and our ability to unlearn, we cannot be in a constant state of terror, alarm, or even hypervigilance. We must feel safe enough to let down our guard. That safety may happen alone, but it is most likely to happen when we are receiving and giving love.
p. 24
Loving and being loved are key motivators that have the power to create ongoing conditions for unlearning.
p. 25
This is a huge factor in why facts alone don't change our minds: a fact that lands on a dysregulated system is a big nothing-burger, return to sender. Only through a sense of safety and connection can we properly "think" about anything at all, and nothing is more effective for calming us down than positive relationships with other people. "Being connected is the most efficient and effective way to get information up to the cortex, writes Dr. Perry. But he is conscious that modern neuroscience has only just "discovered" what cultures that value connection and collectivity have known all along: we need to be together, in loving and safe connections, in order to deeply learn or unlearn.
The importance of love and attunement is also a factor in how cults and autocratic leaders are effective in their recruitment and propaganda: they often focus on people who are traumatized and dysregulated, encouraging and amplifying fear and reactivity over mental flexibility. Mental flexibility is not a matter of education (many educated people are remarkably closed-minded, but an emotional skill, and these leaders understand very well how to manipulate the collective lack of that skill.
p. 28-29
As I drove out to meet Bonnie Dobson, I was struck by the individualism of the landscape: we are each in our cars on the highways. We stay in our cars through the drive-through. People here place their orders online for home delivery from Amazon and stick to their homes after work, behind wide lawns. People watch the news and it's all about shootings and public menaces; people are afraid of each other, afraid of race war and immigrant invasions. For whole swaths of this country, the landscape and the media are constantly teaching "every person for him-self," reinforcing isolation. These learnings are the wall we're up against in the collective unlearning required by movements for liberation. What does it look like to unlearn an entire matrix of fear and alienation? How can we cope with the disappointment and despair?
p. 110
Fear thrives in spaces of absence. It's not the only place it thrives, but the problem is when we have ample stories and are seen as an absence. So we have counterstories. We have stories that affirm our humanity in all kinds of ways. We actually need people to listen. We speak and they hear silence. It's not that we don't have the stories, we have them. It's people's willingness to hear them. Because once those fear stories find their way into their consciousness, they're very difficult to uproot. And, again, you can't control how a story shapes you, but a story will change you. That's the power of it, and that's why people are afraid of it.
Daniel Heath Justice, quoted on p. 93
Empathy has limited efficacy. Not that it's a bad thing. I think empathy can be a really good thing. But what it often means to people is it's kind of the goal rather than empathy motivating action. Like, "I feel bad for you. I've done my work." If empathy is unidirectional, there's something wrong with it as well, right? There's this idea that you have to be empathetic to me and my experience. But I can project all of my stereotypes and dislikes onto you. So it's just I need you to feel me rather than us, to see each other and think about the relationship that we are building from this point on. It's easy to see people as cardboard villains and not to see what motivates decisions beneath them.
Daniel Heath Justice, quoted on p. 92
I think part of it is not just presuming that there's a singular story. So bringing multiple voices into that conversation. And, you know, the great thing about Indigenous people is that we're very diverse and we have diverse experiences, and we have diverse cultural expressions even within one particular nation. We will have a lot of different approaches to issues. So there might be shared continuities. And we also talk about that.
But strategies of response are so varied. If you bring multiple voices in, you're more likely to disrupt in the attempt at certainty. And still grounded in people's experiences and realities. That doesn't mean that everything is just kind of thrown open and that there's no consensus reality. It means the consensus reality is bigger and more complicated than we imagined.
Propaganda is cynical. It's manipulative. And that's why it works. Because people want to have control over an ultimately uncontrollable universe. So it answers all the questions. Anything that answers all the questions is a lie. We're complicated creatures. We live in a complicated world. We need to be careful about being too, too aggressively certain about what is going on around us.
Daniel Heath Justice, quoted on p. 91
At its most extreme end, shaming works directly against unlearning Large-scale canceling, banishing, and punishing people can't create conditions for those people's unlearning because radical unlearning requires connection and relationship. People can't unlearn when they are isolated and shut down. These strategies might be helpful when the target is a corporation or a powerful individual, and the goal is to activate other people who are witnessing the interaction. Shaming powerful people to make a point about their behaviour is a tried-and-true political tactic, and I'm all for that. My concern here is practical, not moral: if you want a particular person or group to unlearn, then shame is not a sustainable condition.
p. 84
Those of us who grew up without an experience of belonging in a community will face the challenge of unlearning individualism; we have probably internalized the idea that we must go it alone. There is no solo pathway out of narrow thought, just as there is no solo way to change the world-even the sterile Western social scientists acknowledge that people need groups in order to activate change. What's more, the systems we are trying to unlearn are almost allays bolstered by individualism and broken down by collectivism. The simple act of doing things together to resist can shift the dynamics.
p. 64-65
When we feel certain about something, it can seem immovable even in the face of contradictory information. That's because certainty is not rational. Certainty is like sadness, anger, or love—it's a feeling. We believe that we are right not because we can prove it, but because we sense it.
These feelings can come off as innate and natural, but often they are also learned, in the realm of implicit memory—rituals like the nationalist military holidays Micha grew up with create associations that strengthen and deepen with repetition. Subtler rituals-learning language, for example, or learning how to fight or debate-also become forms of certainty as we repeat them. These certainties (this word means that; this symbol means this; these people are safe and these are not; and so on) begin to feel like facts no matter what their basis is in shared reality.
p. 42
Love, a core condition for unlearning, isn't about forgiveness, absolution, "going easy" on someone, or politeness. Love is about trust and a deep interest in and curiosity about the other person's reality. Other people can offer that to us, but we can also offer compassionate curiosity to ourselves. We might ask: Why do I think this way? What am I afraid of? Who taught me this? What are the stakes? What parts of me want to let go? What parts of me want to hold on? We can be our own guides in unlearning. But love, even self-love, isn't necessarily gentle: love is what makes discomfort tolerable, what makes us able to swim in contradiction.
p. 35
While not every instance of unlearning requires confronting patterns caused by trauma, the reactions we may encounter in a situation of intense defensiveness, ingrained bias, or cognitive dissonance-increased heart rate, sweaty palms, reduced rational thought, intense fear, the desire to fight or run away—are physiologically similar to activated trauma responses (albeit with wide variation in how intense the reactions are and how long they last). Whether being stuck in one's ways is a result of years of indoctrination, acute experiences of trauma, or simply habituation by the dominant culture, the path of confronting that stuckness can be rutted with reactivity.
p. 131
And it's my understanding that [for] folks who have been through a lot of trauma, it's hard to be in our bodies. It's hard to take responsibility for ourselves. So the easiest next thing is just to focus outwards. And just that makes relationships really fraught.
Tori Grace Nichols, quoted on p. 137
All of us are always bringing all of our traumas to move-ment. And so I think we're often just looking outward: We want to change the world, want to change this, want to change that, but what would it be like to start more internally and have these very small liberatory experiences? And try to create more wholeness within ourselves? Our movements are broken because we are broken. But if we were to create wholeness for ourselves, we could create more whole movements because we would be different in movement. All of our petty fights and conflict and scarcity mindset, we don't have to do that. It feels instinctual, but there's many other possibilities.
Tori Grace Nichols, quoted on p. 140
"Active Hope is a practice," they write. "Like tai chi or gardening, it is something we do rather than have. It is a process we can apply to any situation, and it involves three key steps. First, we take a clear view of reality; second, we identify what we hope for in terms of the direction we'd like things to move in or the values we'd like to see expressed; and third, we take steps to move ourselves or our situation in that direction."
Active hope, for me, has become an area of unlearning study in how I can change my insides by simply showing up. "Since Active Hope doesn't require optimism," they write, "we can apply it even in areas where we feel hopeless."
p.151-152
By design, humans are meant to change in relationship with one another, in order to cooperate and learn and survive together. In fact, surviving solo-while a colonial fascination—is close to impossible. Our ability to unlearn is intertwined inextricably with our ability to experience connection, tenderness, and their limbic cousins, play and improvisation. This is why love, community, questions, and artistic engagement are all so important to creating conditions for unlearning.
p. 214
Importantly, guilt and shame are also generally interpreted as meaningfully different emotional experiences from one another: guilt typically focuses on a specific action or event for which we feel we can take responsibility, while shame is a generalized sense of humiliation at who we are, or how we measure up to our own and others' expectations.
Guilt is about something we did wrong; shame is the feeling that "I am wrong." And guilt tends to focus on the private and personal need to change, while shame tends to assume an audience even if this audience is just an imagined person or group judging us.
p. 81
