Happiness VS. Racism

This week’s video is all about the fact that there’s a gap between black people and white people with respect to happiness, the black-white gap. It’s bizarre, it sounds weird. Why would there be this gap? And yet, if you think about it, there’s a lot of bona fide reasons why we can all expect that things would be different between black people and white people, and this video is all about that with a little surprising twists in there too. So, stay tuned.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I, Paul Krismer, teach topics just like this one all around the world. So, stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Yes, oh, of course, black people are less happy than white people, and it makes sense to us, right? When you measure happiness as scientists do across all kinds of demographics, people of color, people of Asian descent, people with different income levels, people of different ages, all those kind of things, we can measure that stuff.

But why is it that even when we hold for equal incomes, equal wealth, and you look at some of these controls that we can measure the differences for and make the study group the same, you find that black people are still doing less well? Why is that? Wealth? Racism? If their experience of life, it’s that they go through life with a disparity of perceived and real changes in their life relative to other people. And of course, it shows up as poor wages and worse health, but it’s also police brutality, for crying out loud, and so call it stress writ large. That’s the everyday experience of systemic racism. It’s the perception that people have in their mind that they might be in danger by simply going to the corner store to buy a pop for crying out loud.

So, America, and it’s no better in lots of other places in the world, including my country, but America, we’re watching you. You were once this beacon of hope for the world, this shining hill on the city. Well, you are no more. You’ve had hundreds of years to address this issue, and this issue is still upon you, racial systemic injustice. And the measure will not be equal wealth, although God knows that would be a great goal and certainly something you have to strive to achieve, but the measure of success will be the happiness of black people. When people are as happy regardless of color, then we know we’ve gotten somewhere.

In the meantime, it’s that perception. If my perception is that I don’t have a fair shake, and my real experiences, I don’t have a fair shake, I can’t be happy. And even if the real experience changes but my perception hasn’t, my felt experience of happiness has not changed and gotten better, that I will not feel good about my experience. So, America, that’s your measure of success. And when black people are as happy as white people, then you know you’ve got it, and you will indeed have come back to being the shining hill on the city where the world can look on and say, “That’s what we aspire to be.”

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