There Are No Stupid Questions

You know the adage, “There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.” I’ve found myself wondering about that lately. I have a lot of questions, and I’m worried to ask some of them because it makes me vulnerable. Vulnerable to exposing my ignorance, to being met with criticism or disdain, or being told that my question is hurting someone else. In effect, feeling humiliated, or even worse, being mean. In that context, it feels hard to believe there are no stupid questions.

Then I listened to this powerful conversation with Lama Rod Owens on Dan Harris’ Ten Percent Happier podcast. It is long but well worth the listen. One of the points he gently offers is that a big challenge of difficult conversations is when one or more participants ignore the relevant feelings that are present within the conversational space, and instead remain in the intellectual realm. In the context of race, this might look like a white person asking questions to try to understand the Black experience at a cognitive level while remaining separate from the emotional level, which may be where the experience largely exists for that Black person. When the people conversing are in different realms, they fail to connect in a meaningful way. A safe space is not provided for actual talking, listening, learning, growing, and building a relationship.

So, maybe it does turn out that there are stupid questions? Just kidding! I don’t think it’s the question that is stupid, nor do I think “stupid” is a helpful label. So I’ll try to stop using that word, just like I ask my kids on a regular basis. Like Lama Rod points out, the feelings matter. How we ask a question has a lot to do with our emotional intent, and how we hear a question or receive an answer also has a lot to do with the emotional state we’re occupying.

This all makes me think of shame and defensiveness. Feeling shame can help us, while being shamed is likely to do the opposite. I listened to Brene Brown’s podcast with Ibram X. Kendi on anti-racism. It’s amazing, and has this valuable metaphor in it: Racism is raining down on us, and powerful people are raining it. But these same people are telling us we’re dry, when in fact we’re wet. Along comes someone who offers us an umbrella. To feel shame is to suddenly realize we are wet. But we can still accept the umbrella and thank the person offering it to us.

In this metaphor, we (or I, as a white person) are not even asking a question, and by not asking, we have been complicit in a system of racism that we may not have even known existed. However, once we are offered the umbrella, we can either feel the shame of not having ever asked the question (Am I wet?), or we can be defensive (I’m dry) and continue to perpetuate a racist system, but now a little less blindly. At that point, the questions, no matter how “stupid” they might seem, need to be asked so that one is at least in the conversational space. And once we step into the arena, as Brene Brown would say, we begin to break the cycle of being both the victim and perpetrator of racist propaganda.

Similarly to not asking uncomfortable questions, silence can send a message of shame, regardless of whether or not that was our intent. For me, I have experienced this in the world of fertility. You might have family or friends who hide their sexuality in this way. Sometimes it feels like it’s up to the person assumed to be experiencing the shame to take control of sharing or explaining, like we might put people on the spot or be insensitive by bringing up uncomfortable subjects. But for me, I welcome the questions because it gives the opportunity to celebrate something beautiful and wonderful that brings me pride. But getting there definitely took some emotional work. I imagine it might be similar in racial conversations. Questions may actually be welcomed and answers received openly once some emotional work has been done to trust the conversational space.

So where does that leave us? Getting back to Lama Rod, I think it leaves us creating safe spaces for questions and conversations and building relationships. And in building those relationships, uncomfortable topics will not only become more comfortable, they will also become more pressing and personal, and impossible to ignore. I already wrote about updating media to be more representative and inclusive, which I think is a huge step towards educating ourselves about history and the typical experiences of other people, from their perspectives. And that helps a lot with the emotional work of asking questions from a place of empathy and receiving answers without defensiveness. But then I think we need to make it a bit more personal in order to find a place of action. And while personal is necessarily individual, here are a couple of my own thoughts:

• My kids were walking with their friends in the neighborhood and came across a house with 3 dogs, 2 white and 1 black, playing outside. My oldest son commented on how hard it is to imagine treating the black dog differently than the white dogs. His friend agreed, “I mean, they’re all dogs. How could you treat them differently?” Obviously I don’t want to equate humans and dogs with this example, but I do want to point out that this experience brought this topic to the personal level for them in a way that they could talk about it, empathize with the arbitrariness of racism, and have some thoughts about unfairness that might percolate for them and perhaps lead to some action.
• Books and other media can bring up uncomfortable topics and can model language for having difficult conversations. I’m a huge fan of podcasts, as you might have noticed. In this Parent Trapped conversation with Allison Briscoe-Smith, she brings up the parallel discomfort you might feel in a conversation with your kids about sex and in a conversation about racism. Even though it’s uncomfortable, we can agree that it would be irresponsible to not have a conversation with your child about sex, and the same applies to racism. And she notes that starting with your children’s questions and being alert and sensitive to their reactions and discomfort is also important. For me, listening to podcasts about talking to kids and having conversations about racism and social injustice is helpful in thinking through and imagining such conversations, preparing me for some of the emotional work of being in such conversations, and framing the importance of having the conversations amidst the discomfort. And she concludes by noting the importance of emphasizing resilience and how far we’ve come and how far there still is to go, which in itself is a call to action.