I just watched the podcast on “Misuse of the Model” with Anita Miller. I agree that racism does exist. I also agree there are systemic issues and biases that may not be apparent. Brooke was willing to rethink her thinking when she saw the George Floyd incident as a human experience and consider that racism might have played a role.

In Anita Miller‘s model her thought was disappointment in the “disregard and disrespect of a black life. “ Her interpretation of the incident was that the man was killed because he was black and that if the victim had been white, this would not have happened.

I’m not questioning whether that is true, because I can’t know for sure what someone’s intent or thought was. In most of my work with coaches and Brooke’s worksheets on the model, we have intentional and unintentional models.

Shouldn’t both of them have evaluated their unintentional model, not just Brooke? Instead, it seemed that Anita’s thought that the man was killed because he was black was accepted as correct, and this would not have happened if Mr, Floyd was white. That may be true, but should she not have considered a model where he was actually killed because he was poor or on drugs, just as Brooke considered the alternative that he was killed because he was black? If seems to me that we need work on BOTH sides and the model would definitely work in both cases. Please help correct my thinking where my statements are incorrect.

Second, Anita discusses racist incidents that happened to her at work: being passed up for a job, and not being able to send a list of action items to a man. Her thought was that this occurred because she was black. I have had very similar incidents as a white woman, which my male boss later confided were because I was female. We all have biases based on our experiences. I’m not denying that racism exists. We see not only racism, but similar discrimination and cruelty of women, and people who are Muslim, Jewish, overweight, handicapped, or any number of other differences.

How can we use the model to view people and situations differently, regardless of which side we are on – the target of these biases or the ones with these biases and would it be any different than looking at the race bias? Thank you!