A Stoic Approach to Racism

Frank Thermitus says prepare for the worst to achieve the best.

- Frank Thermitus

Rather than imagining an ideal world, Stoics try to manage their emotions in order to deal with the world as it is. With this in mind, Stoicism would suggest that people of color should begin each day by reminding themselves, “I will face racism, I will be stereotyped, I will be racially profiled, I will face racial discrimination, and people will be culturally or racially insensitive.”

Although this idea of negative visualization – visualization of the inevitability of suffering – seems an odd approach in contrast with presently popular positive thinking psychology, it is rooted in a time-tested philosophy that started in Greece in the third century BCE. The original Stoic principles are based on the idea that we may not have control over the things that happen to us, but we do have control over how we respond to them. The Stoics also believed that one should cope with the real world while pursuing self-improvement through wisdom, temperance, justice, and courage. The best-known Stoic philosopher was the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE), who in his book Meditations wrote, “Begin each day by telling yourself: ‘I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness’ – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good and evil.”