Charting a course beyond racism
Transcriber: Raquel Vasconcelos
Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
When I was younger, I had the pleasure
of working at a wonderful summer camp
on beautiful Lake Thompson
in West Portland, Maine.
For many days, my friends and I
would look out across the lake,
over the green, beautiful meadow
on a hillside in the near distance,
and we really wanted to go there.
So on one of our days off,
we set out to do just that.
We figured it couldn’t involve more
than driving down the camp road,
taking a right, following
the road along the lakeside
and arriving at
our beautiful green meadow.
Well …
over an hour into
our precious 24 hours off,
we were frustrated, lost
and desperate enough to ask for help.
So we did.
We stopped at a typical Maine
small grocer, coffee, pizza sub,
soft serve ice cream, deli,
bait and tackle, guns and ammo,
foreign auto repair,
real estate broker,
laundromat and gas station …
and asked for directions.
(Laughter)
After we explained our situation
to the kind, suspendered,
plain-speaking proprietor, he said …
“Heya, that’s Johnson Hill.
You can’t get there from here.”
(Laughter)
Now, while that sounded like more
of an indictment than a helpful pointer,
it was meant to make us aware
that the route we had in our minds
didn’t match the terrain
we needed to navigate.
The directions our Maine guide gave us
didn’t remotely match
the maps we had in our heads.
But the maps we had in our heads
didn’t remotely match reality.
Once we reoriented
to the correct view of things
and followed the right directions,
we were in fact able to arrive at
our beautiful Green Meadow on Johnson Hill
and have a beautiful day.
Like our helpful Maine guide,
I want today to provide us with
an reoriented way to think about race.
I want to help correct the bad road maps
we have in our head about race.
I want to provide directions that can
lead us finally and truly beyond racism.
The map you likely
have in your head about race
tells you that to get beyond racism,
we have to somehow arrive
at racial equality.
But racial equality is an oxymoron,
an idea that contradicts itself,
kind of like jumbo shrimp.
Race is by definition about inequality.
Race was invented to separate people,
based on the false notion
of unequal capacity and unequal worth.
What I’ve learned, standing
at the intersection of my identities,
as an immigrant, as a child of poverty,
as an adult who’s in the middle class,
as a father, as a teacher,
as a social worker and a psychotherapist,
and as an adversely racialized person,
is that we haven’t moved beyond racism
because we’re using a map
designed to separate us,
because we’re using a map
designed by the racists.
Audre Lorde famously said
“The master’s tools will never destroy
the master’s house.”
In the spirit of Lord’s wisdom,
we need to realize
that the master’s map will never
lead us past the master’s boundaries,
boundaries constructed
to keep us on one side or the other
of social advantage
or social disadvantage.
The master’s map is a product
of something called racialization,
the process by which
we literally create races,
which in turn, serve as the basis
and justification for racism.
We haven’t successfully overcome racism
because, and some people might say,
in fact, that it’s worse than ever,
because we continue to use a map
that separates us on the basis of race.
I’m going to provide some directions,
some corrective road signs,
and take us on a journey
beyond our misunderstanding about race,
so that we can finally get beyond racism.
But before we take that journey,
let’s conduct a small vision test
to make sure we’re ready for the drive.
What do you see?
Which two substances
in these jars are most alike?
Jars one and two?
Jars two and three?
Or jars one and three?
And on what evidence
are you starting to draw your maps
of difference and similarity?
Well, it turns out
that jar one contains white sugar,
jar two contains brown sugar
and jar three contains, wait for it …
salt.
Now that you know
what’s actually in the jars,
which two are most alike?
What’s the difference
between white sugar and brown sugar?
It’s just one thing …
molasses.
Now, if you’re like most people
who do this activity,
you’re feeling
a couple of things right now.
One is cognitive dissonance,
that unsettled feeling
when the world tells you
that something you thought was
pretty right, is actually pretty wrong.
And perhaps you’re also feeling that
“I can’t believe how foolish -
how easily I was just fooled” feeling.
But that’s OK.
It’s alright to make mistakes, right?
As long as we learn from them.
So what’s the lesson here?
Well, one way of putting it
might be “It’s stupid to draw conclusions
based on superficial
and meager evidence; don’t be stupid.”
But that’s a little harsh.
It’s true, but it’s a little harsh.
(Laughter)
And we can go deeper into our lesson
to actually understand
why it is that our brain
makes this mistake.
You made the mistake about the jars
because your brain was doing
what brains do:
thinking fast, making assumptions
and then acting on them.
Your brain was going through five steps
that are pretty simple,
but incredibly consequential.
They are selecting, sorting, attributing,
essentializing and then acting.
When I asked you to figure out what’s
different and the same about the jars,
the first thing your brain had to do
was select something to differentiate.
That’s step number one.
And then you sorted based on the criteria.
And for most of us,
the criteria was color.
So white things over here,
brown things over there.
At the third step,
things start to get really interesting.
Your brain goes beyond what it can see
to develop ideas about what it can’t see.
It starts to attribute qualities to things
it only knows about
on the surface level.
Your brain says, “I bet if I could feel
and taste those white things
that look so much alike,
they would feel and taste the same.
And I bet if I could feel
and taste that brown thing,
it wouldn’t feel and taste
anything like the white things.”
At step number four,
we lock in our confusion.
Your brain starts to essentialize
differences about things
it only knows about on a surface level.
These white things are naturally and
immutably white, and can never be brown.
This brown thing is naturally and
immutably brown, and will never be white.
When I do this exercise with kids,
I like to ask them “How many of you
would accept brown sugar as a substitute
for white sugar in your cereal
in the morning?”
Almost always 100 percent, because most
kids know that they’re both sweeteners.
When I ask them
“How many of you would accept salt
as a substitute for your sugar?”
zero percent “yes,” 100 percent “yuck.”
And that takes us
to the fifth step, which is acting.
Once you have performed
your flawed process of selecting,
sorting, essentializing, attributing,
you’re ready to act, right?
You’re ready to act
on the false logic you created,
on the dots you connected incorrectly,
and you end up
putting salt in your cereal.
Now, once your flawed
mapping was corrected,
you were able to understand the substances
in a way that actually matched reality.
And it wasn’t hard for you
to make that correction.
Cognitive corrections aren’t hard
when we’re talking about things
that we’re not very attached to.
But as the stakes and as the meaning
of our conditioning
and our convictions
get stronger and deeper,
it’s harder and harder to let go
of our bad maps.
What do you see?
What’s different about these two people?
What’s alike about these two people?
What’s the relationship
between these two people?
And here’s a hint …
Try to remember the lesson
we just learned with the jars.
(Laughter)
Selecting, sorting, attributing,
essentializing, acting.
The person on the left is yours truly,
the person on the right
is Evan Carlos Hoyt,
Evan Carlos Hoyt is my son.
I made him.
To be more accurate,
I played a small part in making him
with his mom, my wife, Leslie.
Thank you, Leslie.
If you allow yourself,
if you allow your brain
to push past the master’s
false cartography of difference,
you’ll see that Evan and I actually share
a lot of similarities in our appearance.
Even at this young age
when this was taken,
he’s starting to grow
his dad’s bushy eyebrows,
I’m sorry about that, sweetie.
You can see that our eyes
are the same shape.
So is our mouth, our ears
are the same shape and size.
We even share freckles in common.
What stops you from seeing how similar
my son and I are in appearance?
What’s the difference
between dark skin and light skin?
It’s just one thing …
melanin.
When we apply the process
of selecting, sorting,
attributing, essentializing and acting
to how we understand
and should treat human beings,
we are performing
the process of racialization.
We are literally creating
the social construct of race
within which we stay trapped and harmed.
Here’s what your brain does
on racialization.
I’m going to read you a quote
of somebody’s process of racialization.
“Anyone who thinks
that white and Black people
look as different as we do on the outside,
but are somehow magically the same
on the inside, is delusional.
How could our faces, skin,
hair and body structure all be different,
but our brains be exactly the same?”
And I’m guessing that sort of matches
the way a lot of us think about race.
In this case,
this articulation of racialization
belongs to Dylann Roof,
who massacred
nine Black racialized people
in a church in Charleston, South Carolina,
on June 17th, in 2015.
Roof’s process of racialization
led to some terrible action.
Now, I said here’s what
your brain does on racialization,
and then I read you a quote
from an evil racist murderer.
Please know, I mean no offense by seeming
to put you in the same category
of an evil racist.
I don’t think any of you are evil racists.
In fact, I’m pretty sure all of you
are very kind racists, right?
(Laughter)
I’m sure all of you
are like doctors, you know,
who are very kind people and dedicate
their lives to healing and doing no harm.
But it turns out that at least
half of all medical trainees and interns
believe that Black racialized
people’s blood coagulates more quickly
than white racialized people’s blood.
That Black racialized people’s skin
is thicker than
white racialized people’s skin.
And that Black racialized people
have nerve endings that are less sensitive
than white racialized people.
And you can imagine the results of that
in terms of care and treatment.
And let’s be clear, this is not just true
of white racialized doctors.
Doctors, biologist, lawyers,
politician, police and you.
Almost all of us harbor these kind of
racist beliefs on which we too often act.
How could this be?
I say, how could this not be?
We are trained and conditioned
and expected from an early age
to racialize others and ourselves.
For some of us, this false logic
justifies discrimination and violence.
For some of us, it leads us
to try the best we can
to bring about some sort of state
of separate but equal racial equality.
But we can’t.
Race is predicated on separation -
separations that aren’t equal.
Separate and unequal
is the essential logic of race.
Evil racists like Dylann Roof
use it to perform terrible atrocities.
Systems and institutions
are rooted in the same false logic.
And good and kind racists like you
apply the same false logic.
You apply it when you see
families like mine.
You apply it when you think about
what neighborhoods to live in,
who you’ll date,
who you’ll marry and have children with,
where those children will go to school …
You apply it when you think about
who you’ll vote for …
who you’ll march for …
who you’ll fight for …
who you’ll die for.
All these decisions about how to act,
stemming from
the process of racialization,
no matter your best intentions
to be anti-racist
and bring about a world
in which there’s racial equality,
only end up reifying, recapitulating
and reinforcing
the very essence of racism.
If you truly want to be anti-racist,
you’re going to have to learn
to be anti-racialization.
If we truly want to get past racism,
we’re going to have to stop seeing
and navigating the world
according to the master’s false
and devious cartography
of human differences.
Using that bad map
has only kept us stuck
in a kind of terrible rotary
trying to drive away from racialization
while holding onto the basis of racism.
We intend to drive away from something
and end up where we started,
and we’ve been going around and around
like that since race was a thing.
Driving while racialized,
trying to get beyond racism
while reproducing the very thing
that makes racism inevitable.
Before we knew better,
this mistake was understandable,
even though it was tragic.
But we’ve known better for a long time
that race is not just absurd,
it’s lethally absurd.
And yet we keep behaving
as if race is every bit as real
as it was when we thought it was real.
We broke the shackle of the body,
but we allow the shackle
of the mind to stay intact.
Is it too late to adjust
to a more accurate map
of human differences
and similarities and solidarity?
No, it’s not.
And I can give you proof
that it’s not too late.
I offer myself as an example.
I am not a racist.
And I know I say that at a time
when it’s popular and almost expected
for everyone to confess
that they are a racist.
But I’m not a racist.
And I don’t say that meaning
that I believe in colorblindness,
ignoring how people look;
we can’t do that
in the state that we’re in.
And I don’t say that meaning
that I think we are in a post-race zone.
We’re not there either.
As a matter of fact, we’re literally
up to our necks in race and racism.
We’re still very much stuck
in the race rotary.
I’m not a racist because I know better
than to believe a false construction
of human difference
that only results in separating people
into superior and subjugated.
I’m not a racist, because I understand
how racialization works,
and I dedicate my life to fighting
against the peril of racism,
which is the product of racialization.
And I can introduce you to others
who have also found the exit ramp
from the race rotary.
If you’d like to join us,
here are four simple directions
you can use to get started.
One: Be aware of your racialization habit.
Right?
Admitting you have a problem
is the beginning of solving it.
Stop referring to people
as members of categories that don’t exist.
Start recognizing people
not as races, but as racialized.
And understand that racialization
is the source of race and racism,
and resist it mightily.
Now, being a therapist, I know and honor
that people get where they get
when they get there.
As a therapist,
I know that a critical step
to helping people move forward and heal
is helping them abandon
some of the false constructions
they have of their world
that keep them harmed,
and hurt and stuck.
But it can take a while to do this.
Directions aren’t dictums.
We could’ve ignored
the sage advice of our Maine guide.
It took a while for us to stop thinking
that the world was flat.
It took a while for us to stop thinking
that the world is the center
of what we know is the solar system.
It’s taking us a while to let go
of the misguided belief
and attachment to race.
We get where we get
when we get there.
That’s a tautology, an undeniable truth.
Here’s another one
regarding moving past racism
while continuing to racialize people.
We won’t get where
we want to get by doing that.
We won’t get there
by using the master’s maps,
but we can get there
if we reorient to a better map.
Ready to use a better map?
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)