A Small Experiment in Drawing, Racism, and Changing My Perception
Can we change the way we think? This question has been at the forefront of my thoughts since the Black Lives Matter movement propelled (again) the issue of race into the collective conscious. BLM inspired me, like many people I know, to donate money, watch important documentaries, and examine my own thoughts and behavior. This is important – we should all be consciously working to educate ourselves and change racist ways of thinking. But the truth about cognition is that more often than not, it’s the subconscious part of the brain that is actually in the driver’s seat.
How do I consciously change the way I subconsciously think? Is that even possible? I decided to do a personal pandemic-friendly art-oriented small experiment to find out.
I Might Not Be Racist, but My Brain Might Be
Before I get to the details of my experiment, let me set the stage. It’s a fact of cognition that much of what goes on in our brain – from the initial processing of information to making decisions – happens without us ever noticing. In his excellent book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains how our fast and automatic system of thinking is partly hard-wired and partly based on the cognitive structures that we have built to represent things in our world.
The heavy cognitive lifting done by the subconscious frees up the conscious brain to do the things that require more effort and attention, like writing this blog post. But the drawback of subconscious cognition is that it cannot be turned off and it can sometimes lead us astray. We generally cannot stop seeing a visual illusion, although we can use our conscious brain to convince ourselves that it is not reality. Likewise, we may not be able to prevent ingrained prejudices from bubbling up, although we can work to tamp them down or to recognize them and stop them from affecting our decisions and behavior.
Anyone who has ever attempted to draw a person understands firsthand the influence and potential biases of automatic thinking. Last year, I wrote a blog post on how our brains can derail our figure drawing – you can read it here if you want the longer story – but in a nutshell, our brains try their best to make us draw what they know to be true based on how they’ve experienced the world. This is why most beginners draw the eyes high on the face rather than in the center – our brains have learned that the most important features for recognizing people are the eyes, at the top, down to the mouth, at the bottom.
Although drawing may seem to have nothing to do with racism, our drawing mistakes demonstrate how our brains make subconscious assumptions and decisions based on what they have been fed. If you grew up, like I did, seeing mostly White faces, your brain’s image of “normal mainstream face” is most likely built around White features. If you grew up, like I did, in a culture that uses race as a way to categorize people and where Black men on TV and in the news were disproportionately portrayed as criminals, your brain readily used that experience to build its understanding of “Black man.” These cognitive conceptions reflect reality as far as our subconscious brains are concerned and so it happily uses them as a basis for assumptions and behaviors.
Our brains have spent so much energy building their conceptions of the world that they are loath to change them. We tend to hold fast to our existing way of thinking and even go so far as to fail to notice, or even outright deny, evidence that contradicts what our brains believe to be true. But can we change the way we think? Can we infiltrate and restructure the cognitive models upon which subconscious thought depends?
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
My Small Experiment
To bring the big question of cognitive change down to a manageable small art-related experiment, I asked: Can I consciously broaden my subconscious conception of “mainstream human face” to embrace Black faces and features?
The experiment was a simple one. I would try to draw a portrait a day for two weeks using reference images of Black women and see what happened.
Why drawing? Drawing can be a powerful way to help one see and understand what is actually there rather than what the brain assumes is there. When I am in the zone in a life drawing class, my brain, like the brains of most artists, tends to stop naming things. I stop seeing “ear” and start noticing the details of shadow and light that describe this particular ear. In this way, I am able to feed my brain new information about what an ear looks like under the radar of my own misconceptions.
In the same way, I was hoping that once I got into the flow of drawing Black women, my mind would let go of its biases, emotions, and prejudices and simply immerse itself in the details. In the process, I hoped to feed my brain new information that could infiltrate and shift its conception of “mainstream face.”
Why women? I draw women more often than men and I didn’t want to muddy the waters by changing more than one thing at a time. I also decided not to draw anyone I know or recognize. I wanted to access my brain’s mental model of “average woman’s face” rather than, for example, its mental model of Michelle Obama.
Why two weeks? I know everyone is jumping on the 100-day project band wagon lately, but I wanted something more manageable. There was no scientific reasoning behind the two weeks, and I’m sure longer would be better, but this seemed like a time frame I could commit to and I figured I could always extend it if nothing was happening.
What Happened? Baby Steps Toward Change
While doing my first four or five drawings, I noticed myself thinking, “Oh, this nose is much wider than average,” and “These lips are much more full than normal.” I made lots of mistakes in proportion as my brain kept trying to “correct” the drawing to be more in line with its conception of “typical (White) face.” Rendering the lips proved to be the most difficult. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that my problems were not just in getting the proportions correct (hint: fuller lips do not mean a longer face overall) but also in getting the relative values correct. A full upper lip tends to catch the light while a narrow compact lip typically lies in shadow. This difference is subtle but makes a big difference in whether you end up portraying a lovely full lip or a lip that just appears oddly wide.
As the days and drawings progressed, my proportions became more accurate and I realized that I was no longer mentally comparing the models’ facial features to a White-based “average.” The features and faces themselves were now looking perfectly usual, perfectly mainstream, to me. It seemed as though I was indeed teaching my brain a thing or two.
In my earliest drawings, I was making some pretty cringe-worthy mistakes with proportions. The feature shapes were not what I was used to, my unconscious brain was trying to tell me what to do, and the feature placement ended up being pretty off.
The proportions in my fourth drawing are better overall, but I can see that my brain was still working to shift her features in the direction of what it was expecting to see. I drew her nose too narrow and the shading of her lips is still off.
The biggest surprise, though, happened about a week and a half into this little experiment. I woke up one morning, shuffled into the bathroom and was shocked by what I saw in the mirror. My face looked strange. My lips were barely perceptible – a mere pencil line between my chin and nose. Why had they shriveled overnight? My husband didn’t notice anything different but I couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that my lips, which are admittedly on the thin side even for a White woman, had all but disappeared. I suppose the good news was that this was a further sign of some success in shifting my mental image of “average,” at least when it comes to facial features. The bad news is that I have been left feeling like I have unflatteringly thin lips because my own brain has pushed my lips from mainstream to outliers.
Since my small drawing experiment, I have continued to seek out Black models for life drawing and am finding it easier to accurately capture a wider range of features and faces. This is probably because it is easier for the brain to detect even small differences in faces that it defines as mainstream. My subconscious facial feature vocabulary is expanding – perhaps not by much, but by enough to notice.
By my seventh drawing, I was finally starting to see what was actually there.
Small Experiments, Big Ideas
There is a wide breadth of systemic issues that we must address in the fight against racism and I am far from qualified to discuss those. But I do know that part of the solution lies in changing how people think subconsciously as well as consciously. How differently would I view the world if my own subconscious models of “mainstream” had been fed by a richer diet of experiences: Where “Black artist” was not a separate category to be trotted out only during Black History month and where Target’s “Diverse Book Club” choices were simply “Book Club” choices.
My small experiment with drawing is too small to even qualify as a drop in the bucket of addressing racism. But it does show me that change is possible and that I can consciously work to change some of my subconscious biases. Small experiments aren’t designed to solve big problems. Their power lies in their ability to illuminate – to shine a small light down a passage of possibilities in order to see what’s worthy of further exploration.
Why not try your own small experiment and see what happens? I’d love to hear about it!
