Racism & Cognitive Load Theory: The Thousand Cuts of Microaggressions
By Drego Little
Cognitive Load is a concept and theory developed by scholars and researchers to describe the limits imposed by certain situations on our cognitive architecture and how to accommodate or compensate for these limits. Essentially, when the brain is overloaded, attention, learning and engagement suffer.
What would it be like if limitations and distractions were imposed, under toxically stressful conditions, continuously, for hundreds of years?
1. I walk into a cafe, I am wearing khaki pants and a pale blue button down shirt. The white man in front of me is dressed in essentially the same outfit. I hear the white man addressed with the courtesy and respect that should be accorded polite strangers, he is smiled at and called “sir”. When it is my turn to order, the barista grins slyly, jerks his head upward and says “sup”? This is all that is said to me during the entire transaction.
2. I am sitting in a “fancy” restaurant with my partner, when the server approaches the table he says “hey kids” (we are middle aged) and immediately reaches to remove the wine glasses from the table before only offering us the appetizer menu. He does not behave this way with the obviously younger white couple sitting across from us.
3. I am a Black American man and a teacher. At one of the places where I teach, two colleagues who are Black ask about hiring more faculty of color. They are told that “we don’t want to lower standards” by a program director.
4. I am talking to a white woman who runs a teacher training program in the city where I live. Whenever we bump into each other and chat, she always talks about my “opinions” about education even though we both studied at the same graduate school.
5. One of my students was called “nigger” by someone at his high school. A white woman who worked with me and knew the student said “I don’t want us to make a big deal out of this”.
6. Whenever I am on the university campus where I teach, I make sure I have my faculty I.D. after an odd series of questions from a campus police officer.
This short list could apply to a five-hour period on a single day. This list could apply to a two-hour period on a single day.
The one thing we can be sure of is that this-and worse-happens to Black Americans, every, single, day if they are in interracial settings, whether they talk about it or not.
People will very well doubt the previous sentence: Are Black Americans credible witnesses to their own experience absent video evidence?
Given the cognitive load of racism, should Black Americans be required to teach, comfort, or consult (for free) with people about a system they had no hand in building?
