Hey y’all. It’s been awhile! The semester is swiftly kicking my ass and I am officially brain dead. I need a break. But I was on a panel this past week and I wanted to share my opening remarks with you. I was proud of this and it served as a great reminder that I feel most in my element during these moments. Grateful for the opportunity and the growth and mentorship that helped me get to this point and will continue to push me further.
Let me know what you think of my comments! What are your experiences with sitting on or attending panels?
First, I wanna say two things. Thank you to the conference committee and staff for finding this topic important enough to discuss and Melanie for inviting me to this space as a panelist. Second, I want to take a moment to pause for those lives we have lost this year to COVID and equally so to all of those we have lost to the brutal hand of racism, including the Indigenous communities whose land we stand on. Thank you.
We’re here today to talk briefly about a very complex but simple system of power, racism. Beyond that, we’re here to discuss its impacts and what we can do to address it. To be clear, it’s not new and it was created long before any of us were born and will likely be here long after us.
One thing I was taught and have witnessed in these types of conversations is that one group typically brings their pain and the other brings their ignorance. And if they are not careful, they can waste a great opportunity to learn something new and to leave the experience changed, particularly those in the group who are bringing their ignorance. My hope is that we do not waste this opportunity and that we listen to one another, embracing the discomfort these conversations bring.
I come from a tradition of storytelling and so without getting into the technical terms, I’d like to invite you to hear a couple experiences that I think highlight the impact of systemic racism.
A few weeks ago, I was sitting down to eat dinner at home and I turned on the television. One of the first commercials that I saw was advertising a Debt-Relief program with three people offering their testimonials about how great working with this company had been and how much better their lives were as a result of being debt free. We’ve all seen these commercials, right? And then I noticed something. The three people offering their testimonials. One white woman, one white man and one Latina. Nothing struck me as odd about the representation. But their stories did. Both, the white woman and the white man, had narratives that sounded something like, “I ran out of options and had no choice but to run up my credit cards or I fell on hard times and did what I had to do.” The Latina’s narrative, on the other hand, illustrated that she had made bad decisions and the consequence was being in a great deal of debt.
Now on the surface, it probably doesn’t seem like a big deal and most of us probably wouldn’t notice anything strange about it all. But I did. Here’s why: I imagine that this company’s marketing team interviewed each of these folks for at least 30-60 minutes and they strategically chose the sound bites they wanted to use and thought would be the most enticing to their viewers. So why did they choose those sound bites? Why did they think those narratives were most believable and most enticing to a viewer?
Though it may seem subtle, there is a strong undercurrent running through these narratives. Our society finds it more reasonable that a white man and a white woman would fall on hard times and be forced to make less than ideal decisions because of it. Our society also finds it reasonable that the Latina made poor decisions and is now suffering the consequences of it. We tend to hold certain groups of people to a different standard of “accountability” than others. You don’t have to admit it to me but we do. When we respond to situations like the murder of George Floyd with “Well if he hadn’t had a counterfeit $20 bill” or Ahmaud Arbery, with “he shouldn’t have been running in that neighborhood or shouldn’t have stopped to look at the construction of that house” or with “Well Breonna Taylor shouldn’t have been dating a guy who was possibly selling drugs,” we are making the same statement as “well it’s believable that a Latina would make bad decisions and be suffering the consequence of debt because of it.”
Still not convinced? Think about the last time you read or heard of a woman who had been sexually assaulted. How did (you or) the folks around you respond? Were there questions about what she was wearing? What she was drinking, smoking, using? Were there questions about how long she had known the perpetrator? If so, it is the same root principle or issue at hand. A willingness to believe that certain individuals are more responsible for their plight, bad luck, misfortune than others.
The second experience I want to bring up happened just this past weekend. I was on the phone with one of my sorority sisters. She works for a circuit court judge in Virginia. She told me something that I want to share with you. She said that one of the judges she works with had an open and honest conversation with her and a couple others about why he was voting to re-elect Donald Trump. He said and I paraphrase, “that there was a general fear that if Democrats were to get hold of the oval office and Congress, they would implement laws and policies that would strip White people of their rights and the way things have always been. Things would flip and that what has been done to other communities, White people would now be subject to.” I thought that was so powerful and insightful. Though hard to hear, I think he was genuine with his thoughts.
And it highlights a couple things for me. 1.) He is clear of what has been done to Black and Brown folks, Asian folks, Indigenous people, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, people with disabilities, the poor, etc. 2.) He doesn’t want it done to him or his family. So in the words of Jane Elliott, why is he okay with it happening to others?
I’ll take a gander at why. We view human rights as pie. You’ve probably heard this before: if someone else has more of the pie, that automatically means we have less. But human rights isn’t pie. There is enough for everyone who is in need. And I believe it is easier for many to hold onto the pie narrative instead of acknowledging harm done to other people and to act in the benefit of more than just oneself. Or better, to act in their benefit despite oneself. To look at the pain of another human being and actively decide that for the rest of your life, you will work to undo anything in yourself that causes harm to others and you will actively create a world that allows everyone to survive, thrive, expand and chase their own dreams even if those dreams are different than your own, is the highest calling.
Systemic racism has allowed us to look the other way, to feign ignorance of the suffering of others, to create excuse after excuse about why their suffering is their fault, and to hold more tightly to the belief that our good choices have saved us from the same suffering. But to paraphrase Kerry Washington’s character in the popular show adaptation, Little Fires Everywhere, the truth is we didn’t make good choices. We had good or better choices to make. And that is entirely different from believing that our choices have saved us from the fate we see others face.
I’ll leave you with this quote by James Baldwin: “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
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