Being fallible creatures most of us will sooner or later be charged with the social crime of being insensitive. I’m sure some of us have been charged multiple times; but the question is, insensitive to what? To the troubles of another? To the feelings of a spouse or friend? To the wants or needs of a specific group? The list could go on and would be a long one because our insensitivities and sensitivities are largely based on differences in our personal developments or how we were raised. Those differences are sometimes clear and sometimes not.

Religion, ethnicity, and social class, among many other things, are the soil our sensitivities and insensitivities grow in. The social development of a Hindu in India is clearly different from that of a Mormon in Utah or a Baptist in Alabama. Less visibly, a person raised in a home where education is encouraged likely develops quite differently from a similar person raised in a home where learning is not emphasized. Those differences in personal backgrounds give us our individual sensitivities and insensitivities, some of which are so deep within us that we are unaware we have them.

A similar unawareness exists in our physical lives. We have developed amid physical forces that influence us even though we are unaware of them. Take centrifugal force as an example. At this moment, the earth is spinning like a top and a person standing in southern Georgia is riding that spin at nearly 900 mph. Not only are we insensitive to that circular speed, but we are insensitive to the resulting centrifugal force that tries to throw us off the earth like water from a spinning tire. That throw-off effect gives a subtle lift to our bodies here in Georgia and makes us weigh less than we would on the north or south poles where there is no centrifugal effect. The force affecting us here in Georgia is so subtle we are unaware of it, yet it gives us a slightly different characteristic from the folks frolicking on the North Pole.

Similarly, we can be insensitive to elements of our social world whose elements can be as dramatic as the physical earth’s spin speed or as subtle as the lift we get from centrifugal force, and both can have their effects. For example, we may be charged with an insensitivity to racism, either in ourselves or others. It is, in fact, a major social force and those among us who grew up in the ancient atmosphere of unrepressed racism have to constantly be teaching ourselves out of it. Small remnants of it are especially hard to detect, so discovering within ourselves the insensitivities they produce seems a never-ending project.

The same is true for other social factors we might be either sensitive or insensitive to. A person may have been raised in an atmosphere that dismissed the importance of education or derided military service or disrespected people from other countries. That person will have insensitivities that require work to overcome. Some of us may have developed in an atmosphere that discounted the disabled, sneered at homosexuals, or diminished women. Those attitudes and others like them have planted seeds of disparagement that are hard to dig out even when the effort is made with good intentions.

Of course, not every claimed insensitivity is actually true; some claims are mere protests against uncomfortable realities. The first steps in knowing a true charge of insensitivity from a false one is to be aware of our innate biases and to be thoughtful about them. Some difficult truths we need to hear and their impact cannot be diminished by simply charging insensitivity.