In a polarized world, it can be easy to demonize people with different views. We assume they will never evolve to align with us. Or we bombard them with facts and statistics in hopes of changing their minds.
But a new book by journalist Lewis Raven Wallace, Radical Unlearning: The Art and Science of Creating Change From Within, argues we can’t always think our way out of our biases. Rather, loving relationships and community more reliably provide the foundation for shifting our views and unlearning bias and oppressive thinking.
Wallace is an Abolition Journalism Fellow at the organization Interrupting Criminalization, author of The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity, and host of the podcast The View from Somewhere. I spoke with them about research related to unlearning, stories of change from the tiny to transformative, and strategies for all of us to open ourselves to other ways of thinking and being. Here is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Katherine Reynolds Lewis: Why don’t we start with the question of what do we as individuals, and as a society, need to unlearn?
Lewis Raven Wallace: I came into this project about unlearning thinking about transphobia and racism because those are two areas that immediately affect my life and my activism. I’ve dealt with a lot of learning and unlearning around transphobia within my family as a trans person who came out quite young. I also have been in a many decades-long process of my own unlearning around racism. I’ve always been really interested in family roots, and I come from a many generations white family in South Carolina, where there’s a lot of tension and unspoken challenges around racism, and that’s something that I was interested in surfacing through conversations with my mother and my grandmother.
I’m not interested in telling other people what they should unlearn. For me, it’s been a lot about the systems that underlie the harms we’re experiencing today. Even underlying systems like transphobia and racism, it’s capitalism and ideas about private property and individualism and all the structures and assumptions that make up so much of the day-to-day toxicity that circulates in U.S. society. I wanted to understand more about what is required of us when we want to unlearn, especially things that are ongoing, systems and structures that we’re still living with.
KRL: Can you talk about the role of love when it comes to unlearning?
LRW: One of my first interviews was with Adrienne Johnson Martin, a Black woman in her 50s. What created the conditions for her to unlearn around policing and anti-Blackness was her connection with her family, in particular her son, who has a disability. Through her love for her son, she had undergone all this transformation that she identified as a big part of what made her open to unlearning throughout all parts of her life.
As I read the psychological and neuroscience research for the book, a lot of that was about the neuroscience of connection, the hormonal reactions that happen and the neuroplasticity that we can access when we’re in loving, connected relationships, how that lays the foundation for unlearning. A lot of that research is actually about trauma, trauma healing, and unlearning trauma.
More and more over the last couple decades, researchers have been finding that it’s not enough to talk about your trauma, it’s not enough to just revisit your trauma, you have to actually experience different kinds of connections and relationships. That can be in a therapeutic relationship, or it can be in a loving relationship in your life. Trauma healing is actually love and unlearning in one.
That was so inspiring to me because trauma is probably the hardest thing to unlearn. It’s really, really deep; it creates these automated reactions in us. It’s uncomfortable to look at; it’s painful. The ways in which experiences of connection to other people can facilitate trauma healing, to me, that was a clue on this journey of trying to figure out the science of unlearning overall.
Every single person that I interviewed, in one way or another, talked about love, connection, community, and relationship. Not necessarily just romantic love, not just familial love, but experiences of connection as an aspect of their own learning.
KRL: Can you talk about attunement and co-regulation as motivating forces that facilitate unlearning?
LRW: There’s this really wonderful thing about human design, how we are made to survive together. Obviously you see it in parenting relationships, the phenomenon that the baby comes and you have to change as a person, you have to change all your lived patterns, you have to give up sleep and sacrifice a lot. So we’re actually neurologically designed to feel this sense of connection and interconnection in a way that makes us more open to change. At a neurological level, they call it rewiring the brain.
The more you use a certain circuit, the more likely you are to react in that same way in the future. We have these windows of opportunity where we are more open, more flexible to changing our reactions. Those windows can be created by oxytocin and the other hormones that are associated with love and connection and attunement. It opens us up at a biological level.
The way that humans tend to react to new information that contradicts us is one of two paths. Either we shut it down and shut it out, and that’s a very common and likely reaction, or we try to resolve the contradiction.The discomfort that’s required by trying to resolve the contradiction is very hard to go through on your own, especially if you’re going through a loss of identity or loss of sense of self. It’s hard, maybe even impossible to do that without a sense that other people are going to be there with you. It’s not just that being in relationship with other people can introduce you to new ideas, but it can actually make you a more flexible person.
So feelings of safety are a really important condition for long-term unlearning. You don’t have to feel safe the entire time, but you have to have some feeling of safety that you can go back to in order to kind of process the things that are hard.
KRL: Your grandmother had a lot of unlearning to do, and your mother to some extent. Can you talk about the tension that you describe in the book between love and fear around your gender identity, and how that came to play in their unlearning?
LRW: When I was coming out as queer and then trans in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, for my grandmother, who was born in the 1920’s, it was just confusing. And she’s a very loving person and she’s also, like a lot of people, kind of stuck in some of her ways. For my mother, it was more an experience of fear. She wasn’t particularly homophobic and there wasn’t really such a thing as transphobia in the way that there is now, because people just didn’t know what it was.
One of the few preconceived notions at the time was this would be a dangerous life, this would be a hard life, to be trans. Both of them had to do a lot of inner confrontation with discomfort and fear in order to relearn how to love me and stay in connection with me. That was not at all an overnight process.
KRL: Talk a bit about the role of generative somatics in unlearning.
LRW: Our bodies and minds are interconnected. We can’t just think our way out of things. In order to re-track our brains, we have to change our practices. Sometimes we even start doing the different thing before we’re totally mentally comfortable. That happens a lot around something as simple as pronouns. People might feel like, “I don’t really feel comfortable with it. I don’t really see it, but I’m just going to practice saying the right word.” And the more that you practice, the more it becomes second nature.
The field that I looked at, of politicized somatics, is taking this idea that change happens in the body and engaging with that as a political act. So asking, how can we strengthen our movements for justice? How can we strengthen our processes of unlearning? How can we become better listeners and unlearners ourselves through developing a kind of awareness of breath, of body, often very subtle things like, “Where do you feel tension as you talk about this? Or where does the energy in your body focus?”
I had experienced something traumatic with a group of people, and we went through a politicized somatic healing process collectively. We had this really incredible experience of somatically releasing an acute, traumatic event, which had been a physical assault by police. I actually felt in my body, I felt the experience of release.
It sounds complicated, and maybe a little woo, woo. But in some ways, it can actually be a shortcut compared to talking about something for years and years in therapy. To get into the physical embodiment of it, you then break the pattern in your body.
KRL: I’d love you to tell the story of Adrianne Black and how she evolved and unlearned the neo-Nazi beliefs of her community and her family of origin.
LRW: She had been raised by a family of activist white nationalists in Florida, and then she had gone to school at the New College of Florida, which is a public, alternative kind of college. She essentially was confronted, often in a very harsh way, by people who said, “Your beliefs and your family’s beliefs are not okay.” On the other hand, a small group of people embraced her and spent a lot of time with her, getting to know her and facilitating this unlearning and trying to talk her out of being a white nationalist.
The year after her graduation, she publicly renounced her family’s views. She alienated herself from her whole family of origin and apologized to a lot of people for the many years that she had spent holding these beliefs that she had come to see were really harmful. She changed through this combination of love, friendship, being loved by these people who spent time with her, and very uncomfortable confrontation, which she’s really come to terms with. She came out as trans a couple years later, so in some ways, her unlearning around racism and white nationalism had opened her up to a whole other world of who she would then become.
KRL: I’m curious about how you reconcile living in our flawed reality, while recognizing that there’s a lot of past inequity and harm that has not been resolved?
LRW: I grappled a lot with what I was going to say about settler colonialism in a book about unlearning. As somebody who’s living on stolen land, I own a home. I almost want to put it in quotes, “own.” I don’t believe that land should be parceled out and owned by people. How do I speak about unlearning something like that, when here I am sitting with all the privileges of it? Nonetheless, what I came to for myself is that there is no reconciliation. You actually remain in an acute awareness of the cognitive dissonance. Let that be motivating in trying to make change at every step. Sometimes those changes are really small and marginal, making a donation or paying a land tax, but over time, I think there’s something to be said for just not trying to resolve cognitive dissonance, letting it be really uncomfortable, and that is emotionally harsh.
Often, people who are in the settler position, or the colonizer position or the white position, we don’t have a lot of tools for looking at and actually feeling the pain of contradiction inside of ourselves, that I will never walk this earth in the kind of right relationship that I want to be in. That part of the story always brought me back to my grandmother and how, as she was essentially on her deathbed, she was still grappling with the impacts of her own internalized oppression, and it was painful to her. She wanted to feel this love and openness, she wanted to feel connected, she wanted to not be racist. But she couldn’t quite let go of all these things. There is a cost, even to the people who are privileged by it and who benefit.
KRL: What would you like readers to take from this book?
RLW: I want it to be a reminder that unlearning is really possible. It’s work that any of us can do. I want it to be a tool for people who want to have these unlearning conversations in their communities and with their families. It’s a very different kind of tool than the dominant narrative of: We should talk to each other across the aisle. I find that framework very limited because it doesn’t acknowledge the kind of trauma that may be playing out in some of those interactions. It doesn’t acknowledge the painful fact that we’re not talking about systems of oppression that have ended. We’re talking about ongoing, structural harm. A different set of tools says, hey, let’s start with ourselves. Let’s start with people right around us that we love and trust, and let’s build outward from there. It’s really possible for anybody to help cultivate these conditions.
Maybe you and your mom are long overdue for a conversation, or maybe you and your best friend haven’t been acknowledging something, or maybe in the work that you do, there’s room to cultivate just a little bit more space for unlearning. I want it to be empowering for people to think about the diversity of ways that we can create those conditions. I certainly have let go of the idea that unlearning is just a hard, crappy slog, and I want other people to feel that.