- Welcome to everyone tonight.
Thank you very much for joining us
for our 2016 annual anti-racism lecture.
My name is Marianne Yoshioka
and I'm the dean of this school for social work.
I am so pleased tonight to introduce
and present the lecture that will
be delivered by Dr. John L. Jackson, Jr.
Dr. Jackson is the dean of this school
for social policy and practice
and the Richard Perry University Professor
at the University of Pennsylvania.
His talk tonight is entitled Love, Race,
and the Invisibility of Us in a World of Us and Them.
And he's going to discuss the role of love,
empathy, and mutual recognition across racial lines
in the context of social work and social justice activism.
The faculty and I had invited Dean Jackson
to deliver this year's lecture
after we read a very thought-provoking chapter
that he had written in a book that came out in 2014.
The book is Impolite Conversations,
and the chapter is Obama Makes Whites Whiter.
In the world of academia, I have to tell you,
Dean Jackson is kind of a rockstar.
Not only is he an endowed University Professor
and the Dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice,
but he is also a professor of anthropology
in Penn's Department of Anthropology.
He's also a professor of communications
in the Annenberg School of Communications
and he is also a professor of Africana studies
and their Department of Africana Studies.
He's the author of five books
and he has another one under contract.
Titles include things such as Racial Paranoia:
The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness,
Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity,
Thin Description: Ethnography and the African
Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem,
Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class
in Contemporary Black America,
and the one book I just mentioned, Impolite Conversations.
He's the author of numerous reviewed publications
and book reviews and chapters addressing
the cultural production and experience of race and class
and topics such as the place of Israel in
the African context, the positive role that urban religions
may play in improving outcomes for under-served communities,
and urban ethnographic methods.
And if all that were not enough,
Dean Jackson is also a filmmaker.
He has produced a feature length film,
fiction film, documentaries, film shorts,
that have been screened at festivals internationally.
His most recent film, that was
co-directed by Deborah A. Thomas,
is entitled Bad Friday: Rastafari After Coral Gardens,
which examines the history of violence in Jamaica
through the eyes of it's iconic Rastafarian community.
Please help me in welcoming Dean John Jackson.
(audience clapping)
- Thank you, that was exciting.
I want to thank your dean so much
for that beautiful introduction
and for inviting me to come at all.
I want to tell you that if it gets really bad,
I can project.
- [Voiceover] Oh no, we're good.
Okay, okay. We should be alright.
The social psychology experiment is now officially over.
(audience laughing)
So good evening.
I wanted to tell you a couple of things
really quickly to start.
The first is that it's been an incredibly long day,
I'm sure, for everyone, so I'm impressed you're even here.
It shows you're committed, so I want to thank you
for taking the time to come out.
I also want to let you know that ultimately,
the reason why I got into the academy,
the reason why I'm here at all,
was because I have always been completely obsessed
with thinking about how and why
we hold categories like race the way we do in society.
So for me, this is the sweet spot
of what I've been praying to kind of do.
And so what I wanted to spend the next
35 minutes, we'll see how it goes,
talking through with you all
is exactly how I'm imagining the links between
a discussion of race and what I'm trying to develop
hopefully for the next book, which is an attempt
to institutionalize a commitment
to teaching people how to love better.
And there's a punchline.
The punchline, I'll give it away early.
But there's a punchline that I think social work at its best
is about training folks to see
folks who are otherwise made invisible.
To see them fully, to see them totally,
and to see them through a lens, through a
framework of love and commitment.
And I think that's a relatively rare thing these days.
So that's ultimately where we're going.
But it starts, as far as I'm concerned,
with the discussion about how and why
I think race is such an interesting topic
to think with and about.
I think it is fascinating, I still find it engaging.
And I warn you that one of the things
I'll probably be doing tonight is...
Microphone 2, is it too disturbing?
Should we try something else?
I'll take the other mic.
This mic a little better?
- [Audience] Yeah!
(audience clapping)
- Now I feel like a stand-up comedian.
(audience laughing)
I'm not going to go on with this story
but the one story I have about
when I was a high school student,
I think my parents would tell you
I was a relatively easy kid and I listened to them,
but for some reason, when I was maybe in the 10th grade,
I got into my head that for the rest of my life
I wanted to be a professional stand-up comedian.
(audience laughing)
And I don't know where this came from.
Maybe watching too many Saturday Night Live episodes
on the weekend, but what it meant was
I would sneak out of the house at night, and we lived,
so I don't know how many folks know New York City,
but we lived in Brooklyn.
- [Voiceover] Whoo!
Whoo, Brooklyn's in the house, Brooklyn's everywhere.
You can't go anywhere on the planet
and people don't claim they're from Brooklyn.
But we lived in sort of deep into Brooklyn.
We lived so far from civilization
that we got a free transfer to the train
if we made it to the train.
We just got on the train for free.
Every week I would sneak out of the house late at night,
I'm making this too long, I'll make it quick.
(audience laughing)
But you know, you have me look like a stand-up.
This is taking me back to high school.
(audience laughing)
So I would sneak out of the house,
and my parents were sleeping, get on the bus,
another bus, come to the train, come to Manhattan,
and do these comedy clubs, and I would record it.
I mean I'll tell you, one thing I will you
is I'm incredibly hard-headed and stubborn.
I think in good ways.
And the reason why I know that moment was so important
for me is cause anyone who knows me now will
be able to tell you, I am not funny at all.
I've never been funny, like not a shred of humor.
But I wanted to do this, and I will tell you though.
So ultimately, you know, I got found out and got in trouble.
But it did eventuated me because I was very good
about recording my bit, study and practice,
sent I off to a radio station in New York, FM station,
and I got my own radio talk show in the 11th grade.
Alright, so that was the final two years.
But part of what I want to tell you today is
I think there's something about how we understand
our commitment to race that really is about
thinking through all of those kinds of
micro-decisions we make.
I tell people, a lot of the reasons why
I might seem successful, I often don't feel successful,
but I think I look successful at least on paper to people
is because early in my life, when I
was still in high school and thinking ridiculous thoughts
about being a stand-up comedian,
it turned out that I just got a break.
You know, some crazy producer at a radio station
decided to give me a talk show.
For two years, I was a real rockstar in high school.
You know what I mean?
I interviewed Spike Lee and Tina Marie.
I always tell people it was downhill from there.
(audience laughing)
Like that was really the best two years of my life
and my final two years of high school.
But I realized what it reinforced in me was this idea of
I can dream it, it can happen,
And a lot of folks don't have that feeling.
And there's something about the way we structure society
often to dampen out that spirit of possibility.
And race I think, I would argue, is one of those
categories we use to snuff out possibility,
to make it harder, not easier,
for people to dream their worlds into existence.
Now, when I was trained, so my mom was a case worker
in New York and so I grew up in that space,
but I'm trained as an anthropologist.
I think for me, and I started when your dean started,
so that's two years ago, and when we started in July,
did you start in July?
We didn't know we we're going to have Michael Brown.
We didn't know we we're going to have Eric Garner.
Black Lives Matter wasn't a hashtag yet that we all knew.
And so one of the things I know from my first year
as Dean of Penn's Social Justice School,
is our students were an inspiration through it all.
Across campus, they were clearly the organizing leaders.
And where I think some of my fellow deans,
the 12 of us altogether, were a little anxious
about what some of this campus agitation would mean
for what would develop in their schools,
I was always incredibly encouraged
by how much our students, our social work students,
were committed to trying to use this space
to create something constructive for the campus
and for the larger Philadelphia community.
And the first thing I realized
was that what they didn't want from the administration
was faculty and deans and presidents
prepackaging things for them and giving it to them.
What they wanted was to be in conversation
with us about what's possible.
To have the dialogue start from the ground up.
And that was something that was key
cause it meant our job was to work through all of that
together over the course of that year.
We did a lot of work.
There's tons more to do, but we did a lot.
And one of the central components is trying to get our
students to think more critically about what race even is.
What I love about the discipline of anthropology,
I feel like first of all, there are a lot of interesting,
even uncanny connections
between social work and anthropology.
The investment in the field, right, field placement.
We operation our fields differently,
but we're doing our work in the field.
There's also this wonderful combination, I think,
in both fields of both humility and hubris, right.
And some of the humilities predicate on the same investment,
so one thing I tell people is what I'm trained to do
as an anthropologist actually serves me well as a dean, too,
is to really listen to people, to recognize that
any human being is a more than adequate ambassador
for his or her or their cultural universe
if you listen carefully enough.
Doesn't matter what station or statue in life,
they can tell you where they come from, how they've
come to be if you give them a chance to articulate.
And there's something about just being willing to listen,
my grandmother would have called it suffering fools,
you realize a fool can tell you all you need to know
about the world they existence in, that quote-on-quote fool.
So there's something I think very humble about saying,
I'm just going to sit and learn from you, period,
because I know I can.
If my antenna are up high enough,
if I'm really focused enough, but at the very same time,
the methodological approach is also I think
predicated on this really, I would argue,
bold idea that it's not enough to simply imagine
we can intellectualize ourselves out of our problems.
There's a way in which at its best,
I think both anthropology and social work,
think so wildly holistically about what they're project is.
I often tell students the way you know that's real
is when you realize for the first time in the field,
whether that's in the field while you're still a student
or once you've graduated and have
gone on with your professional career,
that one of the first things to leave you
in the moment, in the heat of the moment,
when you're trying to negotiate a complicated,
difficult, maybe even cathected experience,
is whatever the theoretical framework or scaffolding words
you learned from textbook somewhere.
In an instant, who and what you are,
what you really think and feel about the world, comes out.
Maybe after the fact, when you maybe beat yourself up
for not doing what you imagined
the higher virtue of angels of yourselves
would have been able to pull off,
you'll pull that theory back out.
But ultimately what you're trying to figure out is
how do I find ways to take these ideas that I know
are important, that seem powerful and compelling,
and be able to draw on them in a moment's notice.
To have them so completely internalized that
I can use them almost unthinkingly cause I trust them,
cause I've found a way to embrace them that's fundamental,
that's careful, that's purposeful, and that recognizes that
it can trust the stuff that we're doing and training
ourselves to do in places like Smith College.
When I was studying race as a graduate student,
I feel like I was given two, diametrically opposed,
maybe even impossible to reconcile,
understandings of what that meant.
So one version of what we were getting
is I think a term that isn't even just academic anymore.
Now it's gone public and popular.
It's the idea that race isn't biologically real.
It's a social construction.
It's a cultural concoction.
We created racial categories, imbued them with false
biological specificity, and then fooled ourselves into
believing the bad biology was real.
That race is in genes, in blood, in bones,
as opposed to just a social contract.
So part of the point was to teach us to be able to disabuse
people of their misperceptions about what race actually is.
The point being what?
The point simply being if you can convince people
that race isn't real the way they thought it was real,
you might be able to inoculate them
from some of its most pernicious machinations.
That was the idea.
That you buy it, that you think it's biology,
it's natural, maybe even supernatural,
these categories are prepackaged, they can't move.
You show people that it's moved over time.
You show people it's different
in different parts of the world.
You recognize the simple tests you can do to people
to get them to understand how porous the categories are,
how little they can withstand serious interrogation.
The idea is people start to divest their emotions,
their commitments, their politics in these categories.
So one point would say show them it's not biology,
it's culture, it's social contract.
But at the very same time,
we were being told a different thing.
That different thing was that in a nutshell,
there's something about culture
and the productive force of culture,
the power of the cultural, that's sewage in ears,
that doesn't have to be reducible in any way to biology,
to have impact on people's lives.
That culture does what culture does because it's culture,
not because it's passing itself off as biology,
but because culture itself has
an organizing principle that's very powerful.
One of the things, I won't spend time doing it now,
but one of the things I would want you to think about
if you haven't thought about this before
is not what do we mean by culture but what is culture,
which I would argue is almost kind of the easy question.
The way to really flip it is to ask you what isn't culture.
The way to really frame that to tell you
cause it gives you what all the implications are
with it, embedded in the question,
is what is not merely culture.
Right, we used to have these big debates,
we're still having them,
they don't use the terminology anymore,
but we used to have these big debates in the academy
about nature versus nurture.
What was the idea?
The idea was if you could prove something was natural,
then that's the end of the discussion.
Nothing else to do.
Unless you want to be unnatural, right, that's it.
So the holy grail was trying to find some way to determine
that an act, a trait, a characteristic
was somehow hardwired, so the nature side of that divide
was really supposed to be the trump card.
If it was nurture, the argument went,
well then we can nurture ourselves into something different.
That must be easy, that must be fungible.
So there was always this discussion about
is it nature, is it nurture.
Nurture was always merely nurture.
I would argue that one of the things
that defines the 21st century,
although I won't spend a lot of time on this,
we can talk about this if you want in the Q and A,
is that actually, we've reversed, in some fundamental ways,
understanding of what that bifurcation means.
That there's a capacity we imagine we have,
even if we think it's just hubris,
to be able to engineer the biological, the natural,
we can grow what we want in fauna,
we can do what we want with animals,
we can create them from scratch if we want to.
There's a command and power we imagine ourselves having
over the natural, the predictabilities
of what we create in the natural world
that still is very different from what we still think of
as fundamentally unpredictable about cultural change.
It's something about the way we imagine
we've mastered the tools of the natural sciences
that we still haven't quite found a way
to imagine we can be as confident
in mastering other cultural and nurture sciences.
But that was the debate.
The debate was if we can say it's nature,
then we say it can't be changed.
Nurture, then maybe we can have
a conversation about how we do it differently.
But I would argue, you can't quite think about this idea
of race not being biological as the only way to understand
its power, its purchase on us today in the 21st century.
And I'll maybe give you five major themes that I would argue
should be handlebars to hold onto
if you want to think critically about
how we engage race in the contemporary moment.
The first one is this myth, this fallacy,
that race as social construction is enough.
That if we get people to give up
on the idea that race is biology,
then they won't engage in the kind of racist activity.
Biology is always under-graded in the past.
The character, the figure who I think
is a wonderful example of this,
I don't know if any folks have heard of him here,
and there's tons of versions of these kinds of people,
this is the one that I constantly go back to
because I happened to be in Boston, Massachusetts
in 1999 when this made headlines,
there was this guy named Leo Felton.
Anybody heard of Leo Felton?
And so Leo Felton was famous in 1999
because he's got busted in a Dunkin Donuts
for passing off fake bills.
They did a little more investigating,
they found out this was part of this very elaborate
money laundering scheme that was actually intended
to finance a Neo-Nazi Skinhead group's attempt to blow up
Jewish monuments all around Boston, Massachusetts.
I heard about it then, but that's actually not even
why it became a huge story.
It was a huge story because the journalist began
to do a little bit more investigating,
and they realized Leo Felton was actually
a part of this Neo-Nazi Skinhead group
who was passing for white.
He was a quote-on-quote love child to the 1960s,
ended up becoming a part of this community,
had to pretend he was from Southern Italy
to explain the sort of relative darkness of his hue.
And when the journalist found out about this,
he said, is this guy writing some kind of expose on him.
He's trying to, you know, explain to us
how and why the logic, no.
He was there as a part of this Neo-Nazi organization
because he was committed to the supremacy of whiteness.
Not only that, what was most fascinating,
is he had clearly understood all of the arguments about
race not being biologically real.
And one of the ways he framed it,
he framed his need to pass for Southern Italian,
was he said his compatriots in the Neo-Nazi organization
were still racial materialists, he said.
They still thought race was in your blood
and bone, it's something about it.
He says, they don't realize that race
isn't a biological reality, it's something else.
He talked in terms of spirit, he can throw out anthropology,
philosophy, quote folks at length,
but part of what I find so powerful about Leo Felton
as an example, and this is someone who got the memo
about race not being biologically real,
who could wax on about its lack of biological moorings
and could still use it to organize some incredibly dangerous
and ugly things under racist auspices.
So there's something about, I would argue,
the logic of what he's able to do there
that should remind us of the limitations
of simply thinking it's enough
to disprove race is biological scaffolding.
So we have to think about what's beyond
just that argument, what's left, what else can we do.
I think the other mistake often we make with race
is we want to imagine that there's a way
of talking about race, we always want to have
national conversations, national dialogues on race.
But one of the things actually no one wants to do
in these dialogues is actually listen to anyone else.
We're good at performing discussion,
which is really just a debate cloaked as a discussion.
So I'll wait either long enough for you to tire yourself out
or I'll wait until I find some small area argument
I can pounce on, but I'm not really listening.
What I know is real is that often
when we look at our social networks,
when we look at our social capital,
even without trying we can reproduce
some really pernicious forms of segregation
just among our friends and family without even trying.
They used to always say, you know,
the sort of religious hour in America
was the most segregated hour in the week.
That the people who you go to church with or synagogue with,
not as diverse as you would want.
I would argue there's something really fundamental
about pretending you can have a
serious conversation with strangers.
That's a set up, I would argue. That's a set up.
In some ways, that's the reason why
we can be so adamant about rooting for our sports teams.
Cause part of what it does, it allows us to have
angst and anger and excitement about something trivial,
but something we're committed to,
but it's something relatively innocuous.
You can do that with somebody you don't know at all.
But it becomes really difficult to have a tough conversation
about prickly issues with someone you don't care about,
someone you don't know at all,
which is why we don't do it.
Which is why sometimes we spend years
being coworkers with folk.
We've never had them home for dinner,
we've never had a serious conversation
about this stuff we care about,
and in some ways, I would argue rightfully so
because we know that especially if we don't have a serious,
substantive, strong tie with that individual,
the moment you say something they don't like,
what can they do?
They write you off, right. That's easy to do.
And so one of the things I think we have to think about
is the conversations we want to have about
these hot button issues, and I'm talking about race,
but we can talk about any of the seemingly
controversial issues we have around
cultural politics in the contemporary moment.
It's impossible to do it if you're thinking deep
conversation is the end and not the means to some other end.
So you have to think about what's the real end.
If it's just conversation for conversation's sake, okay.
But ultimately, usually, we're communicating
to get something done in the world.
And so what are we trying to get done with the discussion?
If what we're trying to get done
is to try to build a multiracial poly,
trying to find a way to create a community
that is as inclusive as possible.
If it's about trying to connect up with someone else
so I know them, so they know me,
so we're forging an actual relationship,
that's a very different kind of project.
It's not a one off conversation at all.
It's a series of discussions, sometimes freighted ones.
One are the ways one of our social work students framed it
which I think is so powerful is to say
you have to feel like you can create spaces with someone
and more than one someone that are safe enough for you
to be profoundly uncomfortable, difficult.
We want to imagine we can have these
gentile conversations about race,
kinda almost of a tea and crumpets kind of stuff.
You know, I mean that's what we want
because we're terrified of affect, of emotion.
Especially in the academy, but all over.
But if you're going to talk seriously
about any of this stuff that you care about,
and I always tell people, culture, art,
that's the stuff that people die over and they kill for.
It's the stuff of culture, period.
And just because it's culture doesn't mean
that we are soft or innocuous.
It's what we're committed to.
And so one of the things I would argue
is if you're going to be serious,
there's going to be gnashing of teeth.
It's going to be hard.
It's going to mean after awhile,
you're probably going to need to stop and calm down
so you have to trust that the person
who you're having this discussion with, this conversation,
is committed to the relationship,
committed to the community.
If they're not, there's so many places
where it's going to break down.
Where actually, you can take a situation
that's already fraught and just make it worse.
Have people go off into their camps and corners.
That's the key.
What are you talking about race to do?
What kind of community are you trying to build?
And if you have to be honest with yourself about it.
What is your end game?
I think one of the things that we're very good at doing
is we're very good at using race
to separate us's from thems.
We do other things along the same line
to divide up the we from the they,
but race becomes one of the trump cards in this discussion.
Why?
Because supposedly, it's immutable,
it's unchangeable, it's genetic, you can't tamper with it,
and so it allows us to imagine the categorical difference
between us and them, again, isn't merely culture,
it's something else, it's something more formative,
it's something impossible to change.
It's in their essence, it's in the others' spirit.
It's that hard and fast and absolutist tar
that grounds our investments in
racial reasoning and racial discourse.
And so we use it to say it's not us and them
and some sort of porous, easy-to-circumvent way,
it's us versus them for all time,
and our commitment to being against them
actually, I would argue, can be very generously
simply a function of our love for us,
the version of what we think us is.
That's how we justify it.
All the horrible things we do to the them and the they
because we love the us so much.
W. E. B. Dubois over a hundred years ago now
was famous for saying, asking a simple question
rhetorically but still powerful.
His question simply put was
how does it feel to be a problem?
How does it feel to be a problem?
And in the academy, we spend a lot of time,
especially in the social sciences,
thinking about the latter half of that question.
What do we mean by problem?
How do we operationalize it?
How do we measure it?
What are the metrics?
Right, that's what we think about: the problem side.
And Dubois did a lot on that.
But I think just as powerfully, just as evocatively,
is the first part.
How does it feel to be a problem?
How does that feel both for the person
imagining themselves to see a problem in the other
and for the individual, individuals
so stigmatized as the problem themselves.
How does that actually feel?
There's so much about, I think,
what's incredibly inadequate
about the academy's response to these issues
that is simply, I think, a function to the fact
that we drank the Kool-Aid,
a certain version of the Kool-Aid
about what defines our species being.
And it's this idea that we think therefore we are, right.
The very reason right, that's what separates us
from all the other species on this planet.
Of course, that's not an anthropological position.
That's not what separates us, we would argue,
we have other things we would use.
But we have this fantasy that part of what we,
the engine that makes us so distinctive
and that we can explain all of our activities
as a function is this fact that we can cogitate,
that we think so deeply.
Where as one of the things race teaches you,
again coming on a discussion of culture,
is that all of the stuff that we do in practice
is almost exclusively done at a certain level unthinkingly.
By robot.
Part of why I argue culture's so incredibly fascinating
to study and race is just sort of one subject of that
is because we can do culture without even trying to do it.
We used to call it second nature in the academy.
I felt like the air you breathe,
and suddenly it's the very frame,
it's the lens, it's the eyeballs
you use to see the world.
So part of your problem then as someone trying
to do a study of something like race
is trying to figure out how do you understand
the beast when you're inside the belly of the beast.
What kind of study is that?
How do you get critical distance in that context?
Is it possible?
One of the things I've always
thought was incredibly powerful.
So when I started two years ago as dean,
the first thing I did was just to go out
to a lot of our field placement sites
to speak to our field placement supervisors.
And you know, we're all over Philadelphia.
And I remember there was this one principal
who was actually a graduate of Penn
at a high school in North Philadelphia
who framed his approach to teaching these young people
in a way that I felt like I wished I could hear more
because it was so incredibly moving.
And so what he did basically when I went to visit him,
was he sat me down in his office,
we were there for maybe 30 minutes, that's all.
And he explained to me how it was
that he came to realize that before he taught a single one,
and these are poor black and brown young people
in North Philadelphia, he said
before I can get them to learn math,
to read a sentence or a paragraph of anything,
I have to convince these young people,
I have to really convince them that I love them.
He said if I don't that, I don't have a fighting,
I can't do anything else.
We might as well just close this place down.
He said not only that but I won't hire a single person
in this building, not to mop the floors,
not to serve the food, yet alone teach any of the subjects
unless they prove to me they love these kids.
Period, unequivocally.
Now, I had never really heard a principal,
and it was clear he was serious, by the way.
He was serious.
So I thought, wow this is incredible.
I mean even when I think about it now
and place myself back in that space,
the hairs on the back of my neck stand up
because it was so definitive for him what his job was.
And I have to tell you, just the year before,
so I teach a lot of film classes,
and somethings sometimes very experimental classes.
And one of the classes that I had taught the year before
was a class that had Penn students, both undergrad and grad,
collaborating with a different Westfield,
Westfield different different high school
on a documentary film about criminal justice and police.
We did another one on public education in Philadelphia,
both incredibly controversial topics
and difficult to pull off.
But I remember when we did that class,
the year before I met this principal,
after our first session at the high school,
when we got back to Penn the next week,
it was almost like we had to have an intervention
with the Penn undergraduate and graduate students
because they were traumatized by what they heard,
by what they felt and saw in the
West Philadelphia high school classroom.
And at the time, I wouldn't have used love
as the analytic to frame, but what they saw, I would argue,
was young people who had accurately diagnosed
that the folks who should care about them,
in and across the city,
didn't care about them and didn't love them.
And there was so many reasons why it meant
they didn't trust a group of Penn folks
parachuting in for a day,
telling them they're going to spend
the semester working with them on issues
of criminal justice and police.
Cause there are so many reasons why
they had good, ample evidence of affect
that most people didn't care about,
didn't actually love them.
And so to hear this principal just the year after
talking in incredibly eloquent ways about
how he tries to institutionalize
his investment in the love of these young people
was really powerful for me but even less powerful
than what happened after that,
which is he said, you're going.
I want you to go on a tour of the school
with the young people themselves.
And they spent, I don't know how long it was,
maybe an hour, hour and a half,
taking me around their school, and it was the most
moving hour and a half I've had so far as dean.
Why?
Because it was clear those young people,
poor young folks in Philadelphia,
at least in the context of that classroom,
felt those folks loved and cared about them.
And it did make all the difference.
Now, often I feel like you say terms
like love and rightfully so,
it feels like something very trivial and superficial.
What is this love thing?
And one of the reasons why it feels that way I think
is because we set up this false dichotomy between
structural analyses or structure on one end
and agents of possibility on the other.
So either we are talking, we think about structures that
produce and reproduce all kinds
of exploitations and marginalizations,
including racial as one of those.
Or we're talking about individuals
who are responsible for their own
well-being, their own marginalization.
So we think that part of what we're trying to figure out is
are we on the agency side of things
where folks are responsible for what they do
or in the structure side of things, how we set up,
where in some ways, society quote-on-quote is responsible.
So that's a false dichotomy, I would argue.
Part of what we're trying to think about
is exactly how do we understand,
and in the certain sliver of the social sciences,
folks would call this practice theory,
but they would be using practice
in a very different kind of way.
But part of what we're trying to figure out is
how do you put these two pieces together humanely?
How do you think about the structural,
Macral structural forces, that do predetermine
certain possibilities for all of us?
No one's outside the structuration of society.
So how do you understand its workings, its history?
What do you understand about the history allows you
to make decisions about policy, to potentially change it,
open it up, make it more inclusive.
But that doesn't mean you're imagining
individuals aren't making choices at forks in the road.
They're making choices every single day.
And part of what you want to imagine is
there are ways you can structure society such that
they're making choices that are actual, bonafide choices.
Patricia Williams, one of these critical
race study scholars out of law,
is very good about getting people
to think through all the ways in which
we want to pretend we have choices
for people that aren't actually choices.
It's the difference between a rock
and a hard place scenario.
We want to call, we want to use the trope,
the framework of choice.
Often it's not choice.
Maybe it's the lesser of three or four or five evils.
Maybe it's choosing trapdoor number one
or trapdoor number two, but the idea is
to think about all the ways in which we structure society
such that agents have a harder or easier time navigating.
Cause we do that.
We do that with policy, we do that
with our economic structure,
we do them all the ways in which we build a body politic.
And so thinking about that relationship in a way
that doesn't simply say either you imagine
people have agency and take responsibility
or imagine there's some responsibility that society
structurally has in producing or reproducing difference.
The young people in that high school
and in the discussion about love
and the institutionalization of love, I learned,
is about trying to see those two things together
in a way that says I'm not scapegoating the other,
I'm not trying to allow myself to sleep better at night
by using an analytic that lets me off the hook.
I can imagine I'm not part of the problem,
that pretends away versions of solutions that can work.
And so ultimately, I want to imagine
that one of the ways we do that,
just one, they're many, but one of the ways we do that
is to reconnect a serious investment in intellectuality.
In thinking deeply about stuff.
Being willing to take the aspects of our cultural world
that we take for granted and interrogate them.
Peel them apart a little bit.
Think more deeply about our investments in them.
That's a really big deal I would argue.
Goes a long way to be self-reflexive.
Be respective our own investments
and our own preoccupations,
our own ideological commitments.
But then at the very same time,
as we're doing that, we have to I would argue
recognize that the only way we're going
to navigate these spaces, if we deal with one another's
affective, emotional investments in this stuff.
So race is a social construction
doesn't actually help to explain fully
what race does for us.
Why do we need it so badly?
What work does it do for, and we can
delineate all the work it does.
It does a lot of work.
I just gave you one earlier, the us/them.
There are tons of ways we can frame that.
For what does race do for you?
What does it allow you to do?
What does it do for a community, for a collective?
That can then label other folks as undeserving,
or underclass, or pathological?
What is the work it does and how and why
do we need it to do that work for us?
Almost existentially speak.
Why do we need that?
I feel like also trying to reconnect
the intellectual side of things
with our experiential and affect later ones
actually means it's not enough simply to say I feel it.
You have to try to figure out where the feelings come from.
That's hard.
I always tell people, you know,
it's difficult enough for us as human beings
to communicate to one another.
I don't know if you all are science fiction fans,
I'm a big science fiction person,
the tons of ways the science fiction genre
tries to operationalize the centrality
of our ability to communicate badly.
Because communicating badly ultimately, I mean,
comes at a high cost and there's tons of confusion,
but it's actually part of what makes us human
is that we can hide things from one another.
We're not transparent to one another.
We're actually not even self-transparent
which is why psychoanalysts and psychologists,
we can make a living because we don't
often know what we think.
We don't know what we're saying to ourselves
let alone saying to someone else, right.
And so there's this model, so in least the starship version,
is the Borg, I don't know if you know the Borg.
And so the thing about the Borg of course
is they don't have to communicate.
In a sense, they share the same mind.
And there's something about that kind of pure,
unadulterated, unmediated communication
that we kind of think we wish we had.
There's something about that, it would mean
a lot less confusion, right.
I don't have to explain myself again,
there's no chance of miscommunication,
or the inadequacies of the signs we use to communicate,
that just fades away.
What I think and feel, you know it boom immediately.
We go on about our business.
But one of the wonderful things about
how the Borg is used in Star Trek
is it tries to competize the fact that having
that kind of power to communicate without any difficulty
actually doesn't make us human anymore.
I don't know what we are, but we're not us.
And there's something about being able
to hold onto secrets, as much as that terrifies us,
as much as it means we can do some horrible things,
but also I think is some way central to our very humanity.
And so because we don't know what
one another thinks all the time,
we use categories like gender, ethnicity,
race, sexuality as short hands.
We think before you get in the room,
if we have those categories, we'll know a ton
of what we need to know about you.
Maybe not 100%, but 85% right, then we'll fill in the rest.
We think we know you before you open your mouth
if we have those categories.
And so ultimately, we think it's our attempt
to try to find a way to negotiate the fact that
we can't just open your brain up and look inside you.
That we're not that transparent.
So race is an attempt to create
this kind of full transparency.
All these categories are. And often, they feel very helpful.
Often they feel that they work,
that they work, that they're effective.
But of course, they come at a price.
Part of the price is they convince us
of their ontological reality when in fact they're not.
They're heuristics that are imperfect,
that actually often do more harm than good,
and that even though, so I read a lot about
racial sincerity which for me is an attempt to say
that it's not enough in the academy
to only think that categories like race
are like prison houses.
Often one of the ways in which we try
to challenge and critique deployments of race
is say that race is always a straight jacket.
It's always about authenticity tests,
and either you can pass the authenticity test or you can't.
It's a clear test, there are right and wrong answers.
If you don't know the right answer, you fail the test.
You're not an authentic member of this community.
And we have this litmus tests for all these categories,
we know this, right?
And so one of the things I try to remind people is
on the ground everyday, vernacularly,
academics don't any way, shape, or form
go in the pocket on this.
And the second book Real Black, it's about how it happens.
Every day, people are confounding these authenticity tests,
disproving they're a liability,
showing they don't buy the hype around
what they imagine authenticity tests prove
who and what we are.
They're doing it every single day
on every street corner in America and beyond.
We don't talk about it enough.
We don't see it and recognize it and appreciate it enough.
But the authenticity tests themselves
don't always carry today.
And so what I try to say in that book
is this is cognate ideal.
We should really called it cognate ideal or sincerity,
which is another way we try to get at what we need by
what we mean by real, what it means to be real and genuine.
So for me, part of what it allows us to recognize
the sincerity version, is that no matter how many
authentic test you ask somebody to take,
it's almost like the more test you ask them to take,
the more you realize the tests aren't giving you
the results you think you need.
The more suspicions you have that someway they're cheating
the test, that they can beat the test.
That it's not actually giving you any kind of
purchase to who and what they are.
So what it remind me of is what other different models
and methods they can use to see one another
when we're go good as a society of not seeing.
Or at seeing one another in very impoverished ways.
In ways that dehumanize, that trivialize,
that don't think of us as full people.
I like the idea that one of the things that,
and I'll start to close up, that affect allows us to do
again when thought about and felt in a more substansive
in a more substantive way allows us to do things
we're not typically able to do.
Ralph Ellison wrote, and I'll end
on this note, Invisible Man.
And I always feel like it's one of these
and I may be give you, I'm not an actor by any stretch,
but one of the things I want to try to embody
and perform and demonstrate for you is this investment
in hearing and seeing differently, effectively.
And it's one of the techs in the US that really
tries to articulates what it feels like to be invisible.
To not be seen.
And what he says is he says, "I am an invisible man.
"No I'm not a spook, like those that haunted Edgar Allan
"Poe nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms.
"I am a man of substance.
"Of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids.
"And I might even be said to possess a mind.
"I'm invisible simply because people refuse to see me.
"Oh they approach me, they do, but they see this
"surroundings or themselves or worse,
"figments of their own imagination.
"They see everything,
"anything except me.
" Now I'm not complaining."
He writes, "Nor am I protesting.
"Sometimes it's advantageous to be unseen.
"But other times it gets quite taxing on the nerves.
"You go around getting bumped against
"by people with poor vision and
"you begin to doubt whether you exist in the real world.
"Whether you're a part of all the sound
"and the anguish and you lash out with your fist
"and you curse and you swear to make people recognize you.
"But alas, you're seldom successful.
"That my friends is the real soul sickness.
"The tear in your side, the drag by the neck
"through the mob angry crowd.
"The grand inquisition, the embrace of the maid,
"and the rip in your belly with your guts just spilling out.
"The trip to the chamber with the gas
"or hygienically clean but it's worse because you can't die.
"You have to go on living
"stupidly,
"but live you must.
"And you can either make passionate love to that sickness
"or burn it out and go on to the next conflicting phase.
"But what is that next conflicting phase?
"How often I've gone about to search it out.
"Just like everyone else, I started out with my own share
of optimism, I believe in progress and I believe in action.
"But after being for your society and then against it,
"I assign myself no rank, or any limit.
"My world is one of infinite possibilities."
What a phrase, infinite possibilities.
It's a good phrase and a good view of life.
A good person shouldn't have any other.
You step outside the narrow confines
of what others call reality
and you can step into chaos or imagination.
That too I have learned in my sealot.
And I didn't learn that by deadening
my own senses of perception.
I am invisible, I'm invisible.
But I'm not blind.
Social work I would argue at it's best
is about seeing folks who otherwise cannot be seen.
It's about visualizing, making clear and real folks
who have been so marginalized as to be transparent
and at the very same time, I would claim that
fundamentally one of the things we can do a very good
job at, is trying to explain to other folks how they can
and should, why it's in their interest to see better.
To see people who they otherwise dismiss
as not being relevant or around.
If there is a way, I always think we
bring in also the people who already
have this propensity to see people generously.
They're already primed for it, that's why they're here.
So one of the things is, can we take folks
who are already geared to think about how to love
effectively and make them love even better.
In a way that draws a much wider circle of us
that includes many more.
That recognized the lie to begin
with of any battle of any kind.
I think social work does that, does it well,
tries to figure out a way to exploit that.
Does it by actually teaching students,
not just from a textbook but in the world.
And that's something that shouldn't be trivialized.
That we have to do a much better job of broadcasting.
That ultimately if you do it well, there's a fighting
chance of dealing with the history or legacy of racism
and other things in society.
So thank you very much.
(audience clapping)
Now once a couple of people stand up
now everyone's gonna stand up.
(audience clapping)
So thank, I appreciate it.
(audience clapping)
How long are we here for ma'am?
We have some time for Q & A?
Thanks you all, I appreciate that.
You all are very generous.
I know it's late and you just wanted to stand up
and stretch your legs a little bit.
(audience laughing)
I still appreciate it 100%, trust me.
I was a little longer than I thought,
but we have a little bit of time for questions,
comments, push back, whatever you want.
So I'll open it up, I'll even
walk around with the microphone.
So we can have the full Oprah effect.
(audience laughing)
Unless there's another mic, what?
Okay.
But these have to be actual questions, not soliloquies.
I only get away with that.
- [Lady In Red] Hi, I'm a first year and I guess
my question has to do with sort of what
you're talking about with affect and blake.
I think maybe the ways that we mistakenly perceive race
is this like only the social construction
because I think that that sometimes gets frustrating
for me when I have conversations with people who understand
race is a social construction but don't understand
that racism has very tangible material effects.
I'm wondering how can I possibly integrate
the possibility of racism with the intangibility of race.
- I should also, that was a wonderful question.
And it's wonderful because I can't even answer it.
I couldn't even begin to address,
so what I would say is even just the fact
that you're trying to get people to think about those things
both being real at the same time is a start.
So one of the things I try to model in my classroom,
I think it kind of has worked for me.
Though it's not always easy to pull off
and sometimes it can be difficult but I think
it makes for really comfortable and safe
discussion across ideological difference too.
One of the things of course, often it's easy
to talk to the choir right, that's simple.
It's when you're speaking of folks that come from
a very different ideological position,
who don't want to hear it, right.
Who don't, no matter what you say they have a
ready response for it to dismiss it and poo-poo it.
And so one of the things I try to do,
we have a class, a mandatory class for all
environmental studies students on American racism.
I've had it for a long time.
And in teaching it, one of the things that I try to do,
I try to make sure I can be as compelling
and as effective on both sides of any argument.
Why?
One, I want to show that I'm listening.
I think they presuppose often what they think
I must really think, but I want to be better
than the best arguer they can bring in that room
to actually the other side's opinion.
Why?
Cause then part of what it allows you to do,
is it allows you to demonstrate that you actually
aren't setting up a caricature or the other.
You're listening carefully to why they got there,
hoe they got there, what's motivating their position.
Like we often want to believe that there's
the right side of the argument and then their
folks that are just disingenuous, they're just ignorant.
Part of what we have to recognize, there are people who
bring what they imagine to be, strong, hard
evidence to bear on their side of any debate.
So what I want to be able to demonstrate,
is I can do both sides.
Now I have a position, it doesn't
mean I don't have a position.
But it means I can demonstrate that it's not enough
to simply caricaturize the other one.
I do my job well if I can say the position I know is
impopular in the room in a way that gets students going
okay that's true.
It doesn't mean they're going to change
but it means it's your job to recognize
that to get this right means it can't just
imagine a way you're into lies.
You can't just think well they can't
be as sophisticated as I am.
They're just coming form a very different place,
motivated by very different incentives.
Invested maybe in a different sense of what the endgame is.
But often they can't even articulate that.
We can't articulate that,
unless we're forced to do it.
One of the things I would say,
and this is a long winded way to say
one of your jobs is to get the other person
you're talking to, to cross any kind of idealogical
political divide to be their own deconstructor.
If you give people enough time to talk,
ask the right question, and some ways
I always tell people there's something about
the ethnigraphic approach that can
be profoundly manipulative.
All you do is ask them a couple of questions.
Then you follow it up with another question.
And what you realize is of course, all of culture.
What's amazing is you recognize all this stuff you believe,
once you really get people, force people to unpack it,
there's very little logic behind most of it.
We do it cause we've always done it that way.
We did it because our parents did it that way.
We do it cause it feels right.
The more we can actually begin to put some analytics
behind that, means one we can feel like
those decisions we want to continue to invest in we can.
And the ones we want to imagine differently we also can.
But it means you have to give people
time to do it themselves.
And not to try to force it on them.
Again, I think you can force it on them and then they
won't talk to you for 25 years and then finally 25
years later they get it and they go back.
That could work, but then you don't have
that relationship for 25 years.
So it kind of depends on what you want to do with it.
Ultimately I do think what has been effective for me,
is being able to let folks know I hear their position
to be able to give it to them even better than
they gave it to me to let them know I'm listening.
But then to ask the follow up question,
to get them to think about where the edges
of the analysis are frayed.
Then they'll just keep thinking about it.
You know I mean we torment ourselves
about stuff like that and we always will.
And then Gunnar Myrdal Wrote that famous
book about the American Dilemma.
How can we be so committed to racism on the ground.
Have all these ideals.
There's no way we can reconcile these two things.
We're going to have to find a way to resolve it.
There's something about that, that's overly romantic.
There's also something about it that's fundamentally true.
We don't like to sit with contradiction,
so either we pretend it away or bracket it out,
we find a way to resolve it even
if it's not real and effective but we can
sleep at night cause it works.
I think the more you can trouble some of the easy ways
we pretend resolution in effect, the more you get people
to do the work themselves.
To really begin to think about their
own connections and investigations.
Now some of it, the chapter of Why It Makes White Whiter,
is really about saying we live in a world now
where whiteness is no longer an unmarked category.
We used to get trained that part of the way whiteness
functions in the US was whiteness wasn't marked.
Whiteness was just normative, that was just universal.
And if you're not white, then you have particularities
and you're a marked category.
One of the things we're recognizing with
the browning of the electorate, the election of Obama.
All this stuff is that now there's a whiteness
that is increasingly having it's own particularity
It isn't reducible to the KKK.
Isn't redicible to white supremacy.
There can be whiteness without white supremacy.
Now maybe we want to get to a place where
we're post racial, this fantasy of post raciality.
It depends on what you mean by that, whether it's possible.
But ultimately where we have to start, is a whiteness
that is white in the same way we construct
blackness to be black and brownness to be brown.
It doesn't have any pride or place or privilege
in an edgeamnic since over the others.
And I think that's a start.
Now it's going to come with a lot of you know,
a lot of anxiety because that's a big shift
in the way America holds it's racial categories.
But I think ultimately we can get through it,
we'll be the better for the fact that we found a way.
In some ways I would argue, to almost domesticate
our historical investments in life.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, got a lot of play last year
by trying to frame his discussion
In Between The World And Me
as thinking about how and why white people
come to think about themselves as white.
That phrasing he has right.
I think there's a way in which part of what Obama
allows us to do, is allows us to think about
our racial categories such that whiteness now is a category.
Not the lack of categorization.
That's an incredible powerful step.
And I think it's the beginning of hopefully
a different kind of conversation across racial lines.
- [Lady In White Shirt] So what would you say isn't culture,
cause I found that very interesting.
- Okay so I would answer the anthropologic answer is,
very little.
So if culture is anything that you didn't have to learn,
if you had to learn it, it's culture.
So what is it that you do that you didn't have
to in some way learn how to do.
Often still to say things like breathing.
Which is important, but we don't thing about
it all the time, but it is important.
It would say going to the bathroom, right.
It's important, I would think.
Sometimes we would say being bipedal
by being able to walk on two legs.
There are things that we imagine are more hardwired.
They seem to me to be very base and fundamental.
They don't explain our decisions
in the political and social world.
Our decisions in that world are reducible to
do we breathe or not.
So I think that's the difference.
If someone had to teach it to you, if you had to learn it
in school or in society, that's the stuff of culture.
Someone taught you to do that.
And most of the stuff we do, even down
to brushing your teeth, even innocuous.
Some stuff is innocuous.
You learn it, it doesn't seem to
have serious political ramifications.
But you learn to do it, you learn it so well
you do it without even thinking about it.
So I tell people strong culture is the stuff
that you don't even interrogate.
I mean that's like the air you breathe.
You just do it.
You don't think about it, you can think about other things.
That's strong culture.
It is so internalized, it is the ground you walk on
so you can actually do other things to walk someplace.
Ultimately the weaker forms of culture,
weaker, are the ones that actually have a second
of luxury to try to think about.
You have the time and space to interrogate.
And so I think most of the stuff that we care about,
that we really are battling over, all of it,
is the stuff of culture.
Now, we make distinctions in high culture and low culture,
anthropologists don't maybe.
Again high culture and low culture
all examples of culturally universes.
Even the distinction itself is a cultural distinction.
No reason why opera would be any
more high culture than hip-hop, no reason.
Except we decided that's the case.
We could decide something else right.
It's a version that almost feels like,
and it's not quite arbitrary.
So there's a way in which we use the language
of arbitrariness that it is and is not arbitrary.
It's about the kind of sedimented history
of investments and commitments and certain
kinds of understanding of the world that
accrue into these solid forms of distinction
between and among cultural and social options.
That's different from simply saying well we
flipped a coin and that's what we decided.
We actually flipped a billion coins in all
kind of ways and after the 12 billionth coin flipped,
we end up at a place and we're here.
We like how did we get here.
The way that I also think about culture,
especially race is it's almost
like the story of Frankenstein,
where Frankenstein is this terrible beast
that has a creator, that has a master.
And actually Frankenstein has the master's name.
That's Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein.
But part of what's so powerful about Frankenstein is
it's created and it seems so incredibly big and strong
and terrifying that it torments it maker.
There's a way in which the logic of race
is similar to that logic.
We almost forget we create it cause it seems so
much bigger than us, that's also culture.
So we think we have no control over it,
like how can I change it, this predates me.
And it can be so massive and intense,
we don't recognize we are the agents that produced it.
And so we begin to imagine we have no power to change it.
And there's a Frankenstinian logic to
some of the ways in which culture functions.
But anything that someone had to tell you to do
that you share with other people, that you're gonna pass on,
to the folks behind you, it's culture.
Some of it's concrete, like the buildings
that will be here after we're long gone.
That's cultural stuff.
The ideas in the books, all that stuff,
the stuff I'm telling you, all this is about
how people are thinking in a particular cultural moment.
And it's always in flux, it's changing.
Sometimes the changes are fast, but other moments
it's like wow there doesn't seem to be any change at all.
Even if there really is.
- [Lady In White Shirt] I have a question,
regarding the topic of conversation.
The race and love and thinking about the dualism
that's created and the paradox or like,
um sorry the dualism created right
and in the discussions on race and racism.
I guess I'm thinking about it through the process
in which race is marked on bodies and how
subjectives are formed through the idea of race.
And I guess how, I guess it's a difficult question
to think about the way that you proceed
with this ethic that is love or kindness
with people that you don't know and have these conversations
that are seemingly difficult but also seem
very laborious in a lot of way.
Pat Barker has this poem, For The White Person
Who Wants To Be My Friend, at the end she concludes,
this whole poem is paradoxical in a lot of ways.
But at the end, she concludes if you want to be my friend
kind of don't make a labor about it.
I guess it's difficult in thinking about day
to day mundane interactions that create microaggressions
and how is it then as a person with marginal identities
in these interactions that are microaggressional,
how do you continue with that idea in an ethic
that is kindness and is love?
I think it's a very difficult humane question,
especially when you read Invisible Man,
that's the whole idea of what racism is,
a dehumanizing project for those marked by non-whiteness.
So then how is it, do you continue with this,
whether you're a teacher right, your pedigree is to kindness
and accountability.
How do we create spaces that is accountable but don't feel
like this weirdness that is call and call out?
I feel like there's a lot of weird problematics
that's call and call out.
I think there are moments when accountability must be held
and discussions are gone, weary, and actually
create violence too.
Yeah, cause then it leads to pessimism too,
thinking about, yeah, I believe in this love is
liberator practice but how do you then continue
especially as a person marked by marginal
identities that is outside of the white normative paradigm?
- Thank you for that.
I always feel insufficient to say I don't know.
Ultimately that is the truth.
If I knew, I'd be leader of the world, right.
I mean I don't know.
I can tell you two things that I always come back to
when I think in some ways around the orbit of the
really deep and intense question you just asked.
The first one is, for me it's always important
and this is going to maybe feel like a cop out even
a political or pre-political focus but I feel like
it's very important for me, any space I'm occupying
to try to be the most generous person in that room.
To be generous, and part of what that means
is recognizing that people don't earn generosity.
They're generous because you're generous
and that you're modeling a way of interacting
that hopefully can be contagious too, you know what I mean?
And so part of what that means for me is recognizing
that actually I want to be disciplined enough to do
is to say, I'm not gonna cut my generosity
short because someone isn't where I think they should be
given the way we think about the kind of society we want.
I actually want to demonstrate to them that generosity works
above and against their lack of
commitment to community across differences.
That's one version of it, and I do feel like
even out of other parts of the academy,
I have a colleague at Penn at Wharton
coming from a business model,
who has this very big book called Give And Take.
There's a version of the argument that says even if
you're instrumentalist about it, even if ultimate
all you want to do is get stuff to come back to you,
you just want more and more stuff.
He says actually the way you do that, is by being generous.
It's by giving, giving, giving.
That ironically enough that's how you get.
So even if your ultimate end game is a very selfish one,
he says the most effective way
to be selfish is to be generous.
That to me is a profound way to think about things.
Even if you're a selfish person, around this stuff.
You're thinking how do I get to this person
who's intransigent, who won't change,
the way you do that I would argue, is by your generosity
trumps whatever kind of commitment they have
being selfish and uncaring.
I would argue it's one way to do it.
The other thing might seem maybe
paradoxical or counter-intuitive is for me,
at least for me, this doesn't hold for anyone else
in the room and I always tell my students
you don't have to agree with me and maybe
I won't agree with me in 15 minutes.
But ultimately for me, what racism means,
what recognizing racism and race is to me
is to ultimately recognize that when I encounter,
whether it's micro or macroaggressions, it's actually not
about me at all.
This is about folks who don't see me.
I don't exist as an individual and what does that do?
It allows me to recognize at a certain level,
even if the issues are profound they're real
repercussions for people's lives.
It doesn't mean I take them personally as some
sort of individualized, because my definition
they don't see me as an individual.
They don't see me at all.
And all that allows me to do is not internalize
it in a way that's gonna feel debilitating.
And it's gonna make me carry this burden of feeling
not just that someone is aggressive towards me,
but somehow it's got inside of me because I think
they're talking about me when they're actually not.
They don't even see you.
Again I think there's some power in not being seen
if you know how to use that invisibility well.
So for me, it's about this combination of generosity
that says it's almost like I love the version
of what they did with the Hulk in superhero movies.
What they did with the Hulk in the movie version,
is the more you beat up on the Hulk,
the more the Hulk got punished,
the bigger and stronger he got.
You can't beat that Hulk.
If the more you pummel the Hulk, the stronger he gets,
it's like you don't want to beat up the Hulk
because you don't want the Hulk.
I think there's something about that logic
that also for me is something I just want to aspire to
around this generosity.
Like the more I'm seeing a lack of generosity,
the more I got to raise my game to counterbalance it.
At the very same time, I also have to be honest,
sometimes it's hard to remind yourself
that it's not about you.
This is someone who actually doesn't see you at all.
And that that doesn't let them off the hook,
it doesn't mean there's something about what
they're doing that isn't horrible,
it means it's not horrible in the way
that sometimes we try to personalize
the horror as being about us.
It means they don't see you, so how do you get them?
So your job then is how do you get them to see you?
Not the phantom they create, not the projection
they've offered up, but you as an individual human
being that is represented of a community
or various communities, but not the community
they imagine they need you to be represented of
to have the kind of assumptions they have about
how the world should be organized.
I know it's not a great answer.
- [Voiceover] Last one you got.
- Thank you for that question and thank you for your answer.
I have a question about, I'm curious about
this idea of generosity.
I'm also like how are you defining this
and what would that look like on a daily basis
in authentic relationships, number one.
Number two, have you always been generous with yourself
or is your generosity, is your generosity
sort of a product of your escalating privilege
and the intersections of your very privileged identities.
And number three,
(audience laughing)
I'm concerned about this conversation about
like the Hulk and beat up, quoting
Ta-Nehisi Coates Between The World And Me,
he uses the body as the sight of analysis
which was all rooted in black feminism,
so I'm really curious about this whole thing,
about getting beat up more.
And third, so much of what you said resonated with me,
and I would like for you to share.
It sounds so familiar like the strength to let
Martin Luther King, Bell Hooks, you know
teaching transgress, All About Love,
and for me Pedagogy Of The Opressed,
and I want to know what literature did you use
to come to where you are right now
and create a book list for folks in the room
that need to go do they're own work.
(audience laughing)
(audience clapping)
- I appreciate all of that.
So I can definitely tell you if you email me,
some people always say email them
and I do get a ton of emails.
If you email me I can definitely send you a list,
so be careful what you ask for.
I mean a lot of it is stuff that you offered up too.
I do feel like ultimately,
I'm not sure, it was after the fact that I think I
thought about myself as some how being invested
in the idea of generosity.
I'm not sure when I realized that or when I actually
recognized it as something that actually was powerful
and protected me in some kind of way.
Ultimately I do feel like,
I like this idea of saying we all have to think
about the metaphors that we deploy.
So whether they're militaristic or there's all
these ways that we can use language in these
imperfect ways and not recognize what it leaves out,
what it marginalizes, how it harms.
That's again, cause we're not Borgs,
we can't control all of that.
Ultimately I would say maybe two things.
One is I do believe that ultimately
there's something about my own investments
in generosity that simply are a function of how
I grew up and the kind of household I grew up in.
I mean i grew up with parents, a biological dad
from the south, step father from the Caribbean,
mother from the Caribbean, very Caribbean part of Brooklyn
and New York, but one of these places, usually
people understand the relationship between
Caribbean-Americans and West Indies
and African-Americans is very contentious.
And all this discourse around the abject African-American
and I didn't hear any of that,
maybe because I was African-American.
I was African-American, I was born in, that's it.
That's all I felt.
My wife always tells me I try to pretend I'm not
Caribbean in any kind of way.
Ultimately what I think it means is for better or worse,
I'm someone who always felt for a whole bunch of reasons.
I understood the value of what my
mother was doing as a case worker.
So she worked with elderly New Yorkers,
usually when they're stuff was already
out on the street or about to be on the street.
Either trying to keep them housed,
get them back in a home, find another home for them
if they're already kicked out and I remember
just being terrified every day she went to work.
Cause I knew where she was going.
I knew how dangerous it was.
If you seen my mom, she seems very quiet.
Ultimately I think part of what you're asking
is a question about to what extent we're able
to own and recognize our privilege
in all the ways they manifest themselves.
And to figure out how to use those points of privilege
as a way to open up the door to bring other people in,
as a way to reproduce their exclusions.
I feel like one of the ways I think about generosity,
the example I would use.
Again I feel like our students inspire me every single day,
but there was one moment this year
that had me my most frustrated.
And I think it's an example of kind of what I mean.
Not all of it but it,
and I've never talked about this publicly
and I won't say too much.
But it was students who got wind of another
group of our students in the same school,
who were trying to organize an event around
the vulnerability of trans killed, trans black
people in Philadelphia.
And they had spent the whole semester working on this
and talking to the families of relatives who
survived, are surviving the dead young people,
often very young people, but not all the time.
They tried to do a reading list, where they
thought about all the things they needed
to learn and understand to place this in
this larger social context, I mean all this work
all this semester.
They were going to do a public event
where they had a conversation about it.
Again almost throw away the conversation
at the end of the year.
And one of the things that really brought me
to my lowest point all year, and I'm still
trying to think about how to process it
and make sure we learn from it.
Is when another group of students,
got wind of what they were doing, and before
again what they got was some invite to this session.
We were going to talk this stuff through.
And before they did research to figure
out where this come from, before they spoke
to any of the students, they went on social media
and just went berserk.
They just went berserk about who is included,
who is not included, in a register,
in a language that to me seemed it was clearly
genuinely trying to think in a very progressive
and inclusive way about the trans community.
But in a language it registered such hostility and anger.
And I didn't understand how you could do that.
I was like it's one thing to say it's something about
our affect that presupposes our politics.
There isn't.
So it's not about if I'm heated, if I'm angry,
if I'm really vocal and unwilling to budge,
is it something about what I must be saying
that by definition must be reactionary and harmful.
I think the politics behind what they were doing,
probably was really good.
What I didn't appreciate was the fact
that they were so committed to almost a kind
of language of betrayal and accusation,
that they weren't willing to do the next step,
which was to have a discussion about how and why
we can talk together about what might be lacking.
Now we can make sure we can feel it in.
And that to me is a text book
example of what generosity isn't.
It says in some ways, I'm not willing to
actually go the extra step and really
understand before I attack.
And I understand why they want to attack because
they think we often feel like we're very vulnerable.
And often we're under attack so I get it.
You're often defending yourself, defending your,
and defending your dear life.
And I understand that, but I still feel like there
are ways in which we can so, with a hairs trigger
kind of philosophy.
We get to this place where we're not actually
thinking about our connection to other people.
We're redefining fetishizing a certain kind of
again often very caricature dose of ideological
commitment at the expense of what should
be the end game of actually creating
a beloved community of some kind with real people in it.
Well you brought him up, that's why I ended
with Martin Luther King.
So I do feel like to me that was one example
of actually students, I would argue is the right
politic, as hard as it was to think more
critically about what you're doing and how you're doing it.
But in a mode I thought that was exactly disastrous.
And I would argue not a social working mode at all.
and I was really surprised by that.
I do feel like part of what, we're in this.
I wrote this book, Impolite Conversation,
before we knew we'd have the presidential election
we would have, we were going to have.
And so it was almost like be careful what you ask for.
I get that too, so it's not like it's something
about impoliteness that's some smoking gun,
you know what I mean.
There aren't smoking guns, I mean that's part of what
the problem is, we want easy simple answers.
Tell us what the magic bullet is.
We'll do it and then we'll be done with it.
And what we don't realize or I think
appreciate to the extent that we have to,
to have a chance of doing this right.
Is that it isn't about any sort of magic formula
that we've invoked that totally changes our world.
It's about ongoing constant struggle, struggle in quotes.
Struggle that can be affect laden but in ways
that are positive and constructive.
But to try to pretend to ourselves that anytime
someone comes at you with a simple answer,
no that it's a lie.
It's a lie, by definition a lie.
Cause it were that simple, we're a pretty smart
species, we would have figured that out a long time ago.
It's incredibly difficult.
And nothing is one off, right?
So it's like what is the commitment you make
long term, the thinking through the process of change.
And knowing that for every small success,
you can have a ton of setbacks.
That's okay too, you can learn the right way
to learn from those mistakes.
So ultimately again, I'll just end on one simple note.
I do believe that part of what we have in the academy
right now is this space where students are really
trying to figure out what makes spaces like this one,
much more inclusive.
We try, we often have rhetoric of inclusion
and diversity, but it's hard to institutionalize that.
And let me tell you, if it's hard in the academy,
which is a prime space for it,
think about other institutions.
How hard is it in other places?
And so out job is to, I would think
always try to find a way.
We don't have to agree with one another,
we don't have to agree with every argument.
You don't have to agree with any of my arguments,
but know that you're responsibility is to think
about why and how you hold the position you hold
and to constantly push yourself.
Push yourself to think more deeply about it
and to feel more deeply about it.
To do them together.
And then to come back to what you take for granted.
To the stuff you believe.
I mean even this idea of thinking,
I mean this was one of the critiques of the culture as well.
Who invisibilized even in seemingly very positive
and impactful kind of articulations and problems areas.
It's not like you're going to find someway to magic
and make sure everyone's at the table.
But you have to be open to the fact that someone
didn't get invited, you understand how and why
you fell into that trap.
And you try to quickly find enough space for them
to be there and to occupy that space as well
as effectively, as humanely, and as fully as you do.
I think we can do that.
And we do that by saying, it's not about,
we want to think, see I can talk and talk.
So the last thing I'll say is we want to imagine
that some people, they where black hats
and they're bad all the time.
They're just bad people.
And some people where white hats.
Well you can switch them around if you're so integrated.
The bad guys can wear the white hats, the good guys.
But the point is, we imagine that the differences
are hard and fast and eternal.
That's how we reframe our debates.
They're bad people here who are always bad people
for all time, good people on this side right,
with halos over their heads.
And ultimately we have to recognize is,
and we know this but how do we negotiate it every day?
That's a myth, that's a fantasy we tell ourselves.
That part of what we understand,
we're living in a world where people operate
on both sides of those lines every day.
Some of the kindest people you'd have met in the old South,
were the most virulent, segregationist in the world.
Even in the contemporary moment.
I would argue a moment where race doesn't even,
like we want to imagine we can use all the categories
and conceptual framework from the pre-civil rights era
to talk about the emerging moment.
We can not.
we can not.
They can't even begin to capture what's new about how we
handle and negotiate race in the present moment.
Tons of examples of that.
If you look, I mean I can give you a couple
but I'm a stop because I'm going over.
The one that I use in my book Racial Paranoia,
Dave Chappell and how and why Dave Chappell
walked away from 50 million dollars.
To me that's an example of a version of dealing with race
that is not like anything we've seen in the media
industry before that day.
Nothing about it is similar to what we've seen before then.
Then all of these discussions about how college
students differently use black-face
when they party and all that stuff.
I do know part of what we're good at doing,
is we're good at taking the versions of what we did before
and imagining that when we see them in the present,
all of the meanings, all of the values they
had with them before are immediately operating
in the exact same way now.
What we have to recognize is that isn't always the case.
So we have to think a little bit differently.
We have to turn the screw one more rotation.
It doesn't mean we get rid of history,
it doesn't mean history doesn't matter.
It's history by itself won't get us to the finished line.
We're going to have to create new categories
that are up to the task of doing justice
to the present moment.
And we never had to create them before
and it's a tall order but I would argue as a species
we've been doing that again and again for a long, long time.
So I want to feel like we're up to the task
of doing it again.
So thanks you all.
Sorry to keep you so late.
(audience clapping)
- Thank you very much.
This was wonderful.
On behalf of all of us, thank you very much for coming.
Good night everyone.
(audience clapping)