Donita Ellison - Art Educator and Aesthetic Realism Associate

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Aesthetic Realism Foundation

This talk was presented at Harvard University, March 17, 2001
by invitation of COOL (Campus Outreach Opportunity League)
for its National Conference

Aesthetic Realism Can End
Racism and Prejudice

By Dr. Jaime R. Torres

Federal statistics continue to show an increase in hate crimes motivated by race and ethnicity in our country. That means that thousands of men and women--as real as you and me—still undergo racial profiling, beatings, and worse. As a Puerto Rican I also have been the object of racism.

And the question is: why after years of so many people fighting courageously for civil rights—many of them losing their lives for equality; after passionate pleas from churches and universities--why is it that racism and prejudice still persist in our country?

Dr. Jaime Torres

The answer is explained by Aesthetic Realism, and without this knowledge, people won't be able to see that something we cherish in ourselves—the drive for contempt--is the thing that can most hurt our lives, and also be hurtful to others. Eli Siegel explained that contempt—“the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it”—is the fundamental cause of prejudice and racism. And it is my firm belief that the study of this education can end prejudice.

Prejudice is Present Among All

People have been confused and pained by the fact that persons who have suffered the injustice of discrimination--like African-Americans and Latinos—-have also been unjust and prejudiced themselves. Puerto Ricans have discriminated against Dominicans and visa versa; an African American from Harlem has looked down on a black person from Jamaica and vice versa. And this contempt is also what has a person from Cincinnati feel superior to someone in Cleveland, or has a student living in dorm “A” feel he is big stuff compared to those living in dorm “B”.

Growing up in Puerto Rico, where most of us are a mixture of African, Taino Indian and Spanish blood, I got the message early that some people—-because of their skin tone, the texture of their hair or how little or much money they had—-were beneath me and my family. While I never considered myself a “racist,” when my grandmother would point to her own cheek and tell me in Spanish, “Don’t bring any girls to my house darker than this,” “no traigas muchachas aquí más oscuras que yo,” I did not object.

I didn’t know then what I would later learn from Aesthetic Realism, that I used the praise I got from my family to feel I was special and superior, and that other people were less real, unimportant and beneath me.

When I came to New York to study at Fordham University in the 1970’s, I was outraged by the racial violence I saw African Americans endure, and the daily awful discrimination Puerto Ricans suffered here on the mainland. But I made no connection between my feeling against this injustice to the way I refused to join clubs and study groups in college that had Blacks and New York-born Puerto Ricans. Shamefully I felt I was better than they were, and that intellectually they would bring me down.

But I also was the brunt of racist comments like "he got into school through a quota," and "you won't make it academically here." Also, at times when someone didn’t understand my accent he would say, “You are in America now—learn English!” And on a few occasions while looking for an apartment, suddenly I would hear “It was rented,” when in fact it was not. Once, I overheard a broker tell a landlord on the phone about me, “Don’t worry, he is light skin and a professional.” In every instance I felt angry and humiliated.

But I didn’t use this injustice to be kinder and to have more feeling for what others have endured, but to feel this world is an insincere mess and I have the right to see anyone or anything as I please, while seemingly acting as if I were above it all. My sense of outrage was not enough to change my own prejudice and how I saw other people.

In Aesthetic Realism consultations I began to learn—-and this is what changed me—-that even with all the injustice, what I wanted most was to like how I saw the world different from myself. In an early consultation, as I spoke about not being able to "connect" with others, I was asked:

Consultants: Do you like people?

Jaime Torres: People say that I'm nice.

Consultants: If those people were able to see what’s in your mind, do you
think they would like it?

Jaime Torres: Oh no!

Consultants: Do you know the difference between acting nice and being kind?

Jaime Torres: Wow, I don't think I do!

Consultants: Do you think you have fooled everyone...

I had and my consultants explained this was contempt. They asked:

Consultants: Do you know how much that has hurt you?

I didn’t. I had thought it was clever to be able to look affable, while inwardly looking to exploit the shortcomings in others--real or imagined. I came to see that what I saw as an achievement was really the cause of my inability to have true feelings for others.

The Profit System Encourages Prejudice

What I was learning in consultations helped see my whole life newly. As a Hispanic doctor I was hoping to be useful to others and felt proud of caring for many people, including some in the poorest areas in New York. But I also wanted to make lots of money, own several homes and have an office on Park Avenue. What I saw as my comfort went against justice to other people, and increasingly I felt agitated. This is what many doctors feel and it’s perilous because one way to ease the nervousness is by becoming cold, and the results can be deadly.

I was able to understand the battle I was in that made me so cold and distant from my patients. In another consultation I learned about a central cause of prejudice—seeing other people as only different from myself. My consultants asked:

Consultants: Do you think you are more alike or different from your patients?

Jaime Torres: Oh, different.

Consultants:   That's very dangerous because as soon as you see yourself as
                     different the ego wants to feel superior; and from that many of
                     the horrors of the world have occurred.

As I wrote assignments my consultants suggested—including to write 10 ways I was the same and different from my patients—I felt new care for them and what they have to endured.

Biology and Genetics are Against Racism and Prejudice

One of the important things biology shows is that if you look at the inside of any person, you would not know if his or her heart belonged to a person from Africa, China or Scandinavia.

Throughout history, however, people impelled by a desire for contempt have tried to prove the superiority of one race over another. A great deal of pseudo science has come from this, including the Eugenics movement in the 1920’s, and more recently the book The Bell Curve.

In the United States between 1911 and 1930, the idea that some people were of superior stock--and therefore had to be kept “pure”-- was used to pass laws limiting racially mixed marriages and immigration from many countries.

In 1923, Eli Siegel wrote the historic essay: "The Equality of Man," in which he scientifically disproved the Eugenics theory by giving step by step evidence that if all people were given similar conditions—enough food, a place to live, education, enough money, they would be equal.

I respect and admire him so much because throughout his life, he explained and fought injustice wherever he saw it. And he also showed the beautiful, ethical alternative. His love for truth, for the best in humanity, made him courageous. This essay—written in Baltimore, at a time when Eugenics was so popular and backed by powerful people in government—reads in part:

Mind needs nourishment, care, and training all by itself... And the fact is plain enough that millions and millions of people from the beginning of the world…have not got this mind's nourishment, care and training. Their lives were forced to be led so, to get food enough for their stomachs, was all that they could do...I say it is wrong, to say that any one's mind is inferior, until it has been completely seen that it has been given all the nourishment, care and training that it needs or could get.

And in the year 2000 we got the genetic evidence for what was presented in "The Equality of Man." I was thrilled when I read that one of the important findings of the Human Genome Project was the showing that "the racial categories recognized by society are not reflected on the genetic level." In fact, all human beings share 99.99% of the same genetic material! And whatever differences exist are literally skin deep only. Wrote Dr. Eric Lander in the New York Times [8-22-00]:

There's no scientific evidence to support substantial differences between groups. The tremendous burden of proof goes to anyone who wants to assert those differences.

As you can see there is no scientific basis for racism; the only reason for racism and prejudice is the human desire to have contempt for what is different from ourselves, “el deseo de tener desprecio por lo que es diferente a nosotros.” That is why it's so emergent that people learn how to like the way they see other people. Tolerance by itself will never do, because it doesn’t satisfy what every person wants most: to feel that through whatever and whomever we meet, we can like the world and ourselves more.

Aesthetic Realism is the education that can teach that way of seeing that has a person sure that being fair to another is the same as self-expression, pleasure and pride.

Dr. Jaime Torres is the Associate Director of Consultative Services at Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital in New York City. He is on the advisory board of the National Hispanic Medical Association and is a partner of the National Diabetes Education Program. He has spoken at conferences and written articles about the need for ethics in healthcare.