A history of integration how we address selfsegregation
Transcriber: Amanda Zhu
Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Phil Klein: Hello, and welcome to
TEDxSeattle Community Conversations.
I’m your host, Phil Klein,
and I’m here today with Byron Burkhalter,
a sociologist and co-founder
of “Out of Privilege,”
an organization that helps people
in individual and corporate settings
do the hard work to recognize
the privileges afforded them
by the racism and white supremacy
systemic in our everyday lives.
Byron, welcome and thank you
for joining us today.
Byron Burkhalter :
Oh, thanks for having me, Phil.
PK: Thank you so much.
Yes, great to see you.
So, where would you like to start
in terms of thinking about
either the history or the background
of white supremacy and privilege
as we experience in everyday lives,
in the US or more broadly?
BB: So I think the place I would start
is right after World War II
and the generation
of soldiers coming back,
also coming into a time of the red scare,
and the way that the United States
was attempting to integrate their society
and live up to their values.
And I just want to mention
sort of two different ways of integrating.
One of them is what I would call
a sociological model
because the impact was the individual
in the world that they lived in.
So I would say that the suburbanization
that brought in Jewish Americans
and in the ’60s, mid-’60s,
brought in Asian Americans
was evidence of sort of
this sociological model.
And then secondly,
I would bring in a psychological model,
which is based on “Brown
versus the Board of Education,”
which I think has been
the overwhelming model
for integrating Black and brown people,
you know, originally into schools,
but now I think
this is the basis of the DEI models
that you find in corporate America.
And what I want to say, I think,
mostly is I think that that model,
now some 70 years old,
was a misstep, was the wrong way to go
and has repercussions
that has hurt the ability
to actually integrate our work spaces.
PK: Can you unpack that
a little bit for us?
How do you see that model playing out?
BB: So I want to say first off,
that the model was a translation
of what the plaintiffs
of Brown actually wanted.
They wanted the sociological model,
the ability to choose which environments
their kids went to school in
without regard to skin color.
But the court translated that
into a psychological model
and said, “Separate’s not equal,
because you are impairing
the minds of these Black children.”
And so the model
that comes out of Brown is
taking individual Black kids -
you know, in the visual
that you get of it,
it’s always sort of
that black and white photo
with the crowds yelling,
and the one kid going in
surrounded by police officers -
and you take them into a space,
and once you get them to that space,
you’ve effectively integrated.
Now, the thing about that is
the space itself has not really changed.
Nobody has asked the white students
in the school to do anything different.
The administrators
aren’t doing anything different.
The curriculum is not changed.
It’s simply getting
one individual into the space
that counts as integration.
That I think is problematic.
And it’s problematic for us today
as you try to retain -
or recruit and retain,
African Americans and Latinx people
into your organizations
without actually going
through any change yourself.
So part of what our organization
“Out of Privilege” does
is it tries to bring
in that sociological model,
where the people that are already there
have to change,
have to do the work to understand
themselves in a larger context.
PK: So to understand that,
in Board of Education versus Brown,
you had Black people
brought into the white schools, right?
And that was considered
a complete remedy as implemented,
whereas what I think I hear you saying
is that true integration
entails creating a space
where each participant -
Black, brown, Latin American, etc. -
is a full participant
and is recognized as a full participant
rather than being assimilated
or integrated in a superficial sense
into a white space.
And it keeps attention
off of details like,
Oh, there was an entire
police force and federal agents
that were involved
in the way that was implemented
to address the impairment of Black kids
in their lack of access
to white resources.
BB: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right.
And more importantly,
for our understandings of whiteness,
that idea of the privilege
that you get from being part
of the political group of white people
is that we didn’t understand
that those with the privilege
were active participants
in maintaining the privilege
and that until their actions changed,
until they did things differently,
that privilege, that difference,
that segregation
was never going to go away.
We made it
where as long as we nominally had
enough Black and brown bodies around us,
we were doing the work.
PK: And there’s this kind
of whiteful blindness
around the not only “invisible man,”
you know, in Ralph Ellison’s terms
is the way a Black man was experienced,
there’s the invisible white power
that is surrounding things
that white people choose not to see,
because it’s pervasive for them.
BB: That’s exactly right.
Now, and notice as we talk about this
how different it was
in the armed services, right?
through an executive order,
from Eisenhower, I believe.
Within 10 years,
you had made incredible progress
by having people live with each other,
train with each other,
fight with each other,
trust in each other with their very lives.
But instead, in the way
that we’ve taken the psychological model,
instead of seeing this
as a social operation,
it’s been an individual model.
And even to this day,
you get people going
through anti-bias training
as though it were the individual’s mind
that had to be altered,
and that there were
these slight behavioral changes
that an individual could make
that would create a neutral atmosphere.
In the meantime, so many of us
have lived in segregated neighborhoods,
so many of us have gone
to segregated schools,
segregated colleges and universities,
so many of us go to meetings every day
that are segregated
that we haven’t had the time
of actually living together,
which was the armed services model,
and so we don’t know
how to connect with each other.
We simply haven’t had
the hours doing that;
in fact, we’ve had the hours
disconnecting from each other,
looking for safer schools,
safer neighborhoods,
and whatever other coded language we need
in order to justify having no experience
with Black and brown people in our lives.
Without that change,
your anti-bias training
doesn’t teach you how to live with anyone.
PK: So, just to kind of capture this
because it’s so vital.
You’re saying, I think -
keep me honest here -
that in our military,
really, the instrument
for our patriotism as a nation
focused on an evolution of development,
systematically,
of a multi-racial national force
in its very architecture
whereas in education,
the system in segregation,
and even in some aspects
of systematic desegregation,
was reinforcing of a psychological model
rather than embracing
the kind of sociological model.
BB: That’s right.
And the psychological model to me
is naturally more useful
to maintaining white supremacy,
just like you said -
and I think what you brought up
is brilliant, right?
This is how we protect our democracy.
If you go back
and read the executive order,
it says almost exactly that, Phil -
that this is to protect our democracy.
Now, when we looked
at Brown versus the Board of Education,
this was to stop the damage
to Black and brown minds.
It wasn’t for all of us
that we were integrating the schools;
it was for them.
This was our largesse, our altruism.
But with the armed forces,
this was our very country,
this experiment was on the line,
and so by order, you will live together,
and that had its effect, right?
But when we look at it
from the psychological model,
the idea is that we’re helping them
with no sense of that white people,
people within that political party,
needed that for themselves.
Even now as we come together
as organizations,
why is this organization diversifying?
Do they see it
as part of their bottom line?
Do they see it as part of who they are?
Or is this just their largesse?
BB: Can you speak a little more
to what you see as how companies
can and are or could or should
apply this thinking
in the way they start to look
at diversity and inclusion and equity?
So what I would say
is at the beginning of this,
each person would have
to understand themselves
in this racial context.
Each of us would have
to understand ourselves,
not in terms of our attitudes
or our feelings
or, you know, “I never think about race”
or “it’s not intended”
or any of these psychological terms,
but where do you live?
Do you know a Black couple
where both partners are Black?
How many hours have you spent
talking to Black people in the last year?
How much experience do you have
with Latinx people in a peer environment,
you know, at dinner
or in a meeting, right?
So it’s understanding yourself in context,
and then it’s starting to see
the small ways in which we cover
for the racism around us,
things like
“Well, I haven’t been presented
with a candidate to hire,”
where you get that sort of passive tense,
where there’s no notion
that you would have to be
active and proactive
and do the anti-racist action
of going to find.
Or we say, “Well yeah, I did hear that,
but I don’t think that was intentional,”
or “I think that that person’s
just not educated;
they’re just ignorant,”
as though it were just an issue
of not having these things available.
So looking for these little practices,
where within whiteness,
you maintain the privilege,
you maintain the veneer
that there’s nothing
untoward going on here.
Now, from that, you come into …
a place where you can understand
other people’s perspectives.
Let me say a little bit more about that.
Right now, the way
that DEI is done in organizations
doesn’t require those in power,
those with the jobs,
those already enculturated,
to understand the perspective
of other people,
but those one or two or four
Black and brown people
have to understand the perspectives
of the people around them.
They have to constantly be reading
those perspectives.
They have to recognize
that those people don’t have any practice,
don’t have the hours in,
and they have to modulate themselves
to keep the comfort
of the fragility of that environment,
that white environment.
So all of the work,
all of the weight of this,
is on those people
that you’re bringing in.
If you want to retain them,
if you want an integrated,
diverse, inclusive space,
you are going to have to be able
to take your white perspective,
that segregated perspective,
and move it over to the side
and get some time
understanding perspectives that
you have segregated yourself away from
all of these years
so that you can begin to carry the weight
of understanding other people.
Once you get to that point,
that’s how you begin
to establish trust, mutuality
so that then you can have
real conversations with each other,
so that you can really
come to understand each other.
This happened for most people
within whiteness in the suburbs.
This happened for Asian American families
coming in in the ’60s,
straight into the suburbs
with Jewish Americans and Irish Americans
and Italian Americans,
all coming to learn
how to live with each other.
And they all had to change,
and in fact, each of those generations
that came into the suburbs
is going to have more trouble connecting
with their parents and grandparents
that lived in ethnic communities
than they have with each other.
That culture, that coming together,
that’s what we’re trying to create
in a corporate environment,
and that means
that it’s not just a set of policies,
it’s not just a set of anti-bias training.
You need time.
You need practice.
It’s time to understand
someone other than yourself.
PK: That’s a powerful invitation and idea.
What I’m hearing
is that as an organization, perhaps,
that was predominantly white,
let’s say, six months ago
and has begun the process
of increasing the number of non-whites
who are in a variety of roles -
you know, I mean, for many companies,
this may have been going on
for five, ten years, longer -
there may subconsciously be
a sense of the company
as a “we’re a white company
who have some minority members.”
But as you point out,
acculturation is a dynamic
that is continually in operation;
and you’re suggesting
that in order to become conscious,
that acculturation process,
it needs to entail seeing oneself
in one’s racial context,
one’s self-segregating context,
or, you know, a combination
of self-selecting segregation
and situationally selective segregation,
and taking that structure
and putting it aside
to invite the culture of other groups.
So there’s this transition from otherness
to connectedness
and multiracial integration.
Is that a way to see
if going from “We think we’re not white,
but we really kind of are,
and we’re insisting
on white culture unknowingly”
to a negotiation of
“Hey, we’re no longer
needing to be that way.
That is not necessarily
in the best interest of our organization
in the same way
it wasn’t for the military”?
To really achieve,
we really need the full voices.
we need to really listen and really learn
and invite the potential and power
that is in each and every person
across their ethnic, racial,
cultural, gender, etc. backgrounds
in order to generate a better future
for our companies and organizations?
BB: Yeah, I actually think
I can tie it to the bottom line.
Let me start off by tightening
something up a little bit.
By “white,”
I’m talking about a political group.
That political group
has certain privileges.
I have some of those privileges.
So I’m not at all talking
about some biological category
because I don’t think
white was ever a biological category,
and I don’t think Italians, Irish,
Catholics, Jews, Asian Americans
are all in that biological category,
certainly,
but some of them
have this whiteness conditionally.
I think if you’re a Jewish American,
I think you’d recognize
that as the tenor of the politics goes,
so may go your sort of inclusion
within the group.
I think for Asian Americans,
you get almost a contradictory
whiteness sometimes,
where at any point -
and again, today’s politics
would take you there -
you can be seen as the enemy,
you can require more protection
because of what’s being said
by the political structure,
and at the same time, you know,
it’s not that you necessarily grew up
in an ethnic enclave
or anything like that.
You may be perfectly comfortable
at the largest companies in the country,
and you know, you’re going to see others
that look like you while you’re there.
So I do want to understand
that when whiteness
is a political coalition
and that not every member
has the same standing
within that coalition,
and then for the cultural part of it,
I think, you know, whiteness is sort of -
Well, one of the costs of that privilege
is to give up your actual culture,
to not be taught your actual history,
to not be taught of the connections
that you have to others
that are outside those groups,
and so I think that coming
out of privilege
is coming into your actual culture.
Talking about it from
an organizational perspective,
what I would say is this:
A lot of the work I do
is bringing up to speed
people of a certain age -
if I could use that term of art -
people who perhaps were comfortable
with their understanding of racism
five years ago, or 10 years ago, you know,
or during the LA rebellion
or during the ’80s or whenever,
where, you know, you could just understand
yourself as not racist
and say, “I don’t have these thoughts,”
and, you know,
“These things are terrible,”
and say those out loud as though
you were actually doing something.
There’s a generation or two down there -
and I struggle to see
exactly where they’re at,
I just know I’m not among them -
and they are not having your neutrality,
they are not having your claims about
a lack of intent or lack of education.
They are actively asking
why they’ve been given
whitewashed education,
why they haven’t been told
their actual history.
And what I would say to corporate America
is that’s the upcoming demographic
that’s going to be buying
some of your products,
and they are going to look
at your statements of neutrality
and your claims of being
behind “Black Lives Matters,”
and they’re going to check out
your board rooms,
they’re going to look
at your leadership teams,
and if all of your hiring
is down at the lower level,
they’re going to notice.
In case you haven’t been able to see,
they are taking this quite seriously,
and so I think that there are
good bottom line reasons
for some corporations
to start to think about
how they are going to adjust their vision
for a multi-racial United States
that may already be here
but is certainly on its way.