Racial Literacy and the Potential for the Tech World
An interview with Dr. Howard Stevenson
This interview expands on ideas from Jessie Daniels’s new paper Advancing Racial Literacy in Tech, co-authored with 2018–19 Fellow Mutale Nkonde and 2017–18 Fellow Darakhshan Mir. It has been condensed and edited for this post.
“Recall a racially stressful event. What is the feeling you experience when you recall it? Where is that feeling in your body?” — Dr. Howard Stevenson
These are some of the provocations and questions that Dr. Howard Stevenson uses in his work on racial literacy. I became intrigued with this concept, and how it might be applicable to the tech world, back in the fall of 2018. In developing Advancing Racial Literacy in Tech, I drew inspiration from Dr. Stevenson’s work, so it made sense to me to reach out to him for an interview on the eve of launching the report.
Dr. Daniels: You’ve been doing work on racial literacy for more than two decades, and I wonder if you could start just by saying a little bit about the origin of this work for you. Where did this begin?
Dr. Stevenson: Well, it really started growing up in a household that talked a fair amount about race, and also going to a psychology program that didn’t really address these issues. So, in becoming a psychologist, I felt like there was always a need for translating the kind of strengths from my cultural background that were often racial, but that were not included in the way I trained as a clinical psychologist.
Also, in my experience as a black man dealing with people misperceiving me in public places, but also in educational spaces, and how nervous people get in navigating racial moments. It wasn’t simply that the scholarship was lacking around racial problem solving, but that people were physically and viscerally afraid to touch these issues.
It’s sort of a loop where you have folks who are not knowledgeable, but are in places of knowledge, and they themselves are so scared about [race] that they literally block off access and are okay to not know about these things.
Dr. Daniels: Much of your work has been focused on schools, and I wonder if you could speak a little bit about why you see schools as an important place for this work?
Dr. Stevenson: Schools just happen to be the place where children spend most of their time. Students and their families are forced to navigate politics in places in ways that we often think only adults do. Family is a better way to understand how children negotiate, or not negotiate, or learn to avoid negotiating racial politics. Most of the race relation stuff is about adults or politics, or legal engagements that are in institutions, but emotional trauma issues start earlier around these racial politics. Schools happen to be the first place that these racial politics play out. But they’re very similar to how they play out in other institutions, so it’s really about the families and the beginning of how racial politics need to be navigated, more so than schools as an institution.
“The issue of racial politics is not simply a didactic issue.”
Dr. Daniels: That’s very interesting. So, as you know, I and some colleagues at Data & Society have been doing some work to extend and apply your insights to the tech world. In doing that, we talked with some people working in technology and one of the push backs that we heard was that people should have gotten this in school, so they think they shouldn’t have to talk about racial literacy in their jobs as adults. I wonder what you say to that kind of pushback?
Dr. Stevenson: Well, the issue of racial politics is not simply a didactic issue. And, schools don’t actually teach about racial politics. If you do learn about race in schools, it’s more of a history lesson. But, we know that history books in schools don’t include a very useful understanding of [basics of systemic racism], not even slavery. So not only are schools deficient in this knowledge, when it is presented it’s didactic and wouldn’t help you navigate the day-to-day relational and emotional challenges that young people face. In fact, these interpersonal conflicts that go on shift over time from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, so that even if you thought about learning about dealing with childhood and adolescent racial challenges or interpersonal challenges, you would still need to learn how to deal with workplace challenges that are racialized. It’s not like once you get it once, you’ll always get it. You have to go through the stress management at each level because they’re different problems.
Dr. Daniels: One of the other push backs that we got in talking with people developing this report was from those who were sympathetic or inclined to embrace the idea of racial literacy but said, “If we try to take this back to our company people would say, ‘Well, we don’t have any racially stressful encounters here.’” I wonder what your response would be to people who are just kind of in denial about the whole thing?
“Do you have a strategy for measuring racial, stressful encounters or diversity?”
Dr. Stevenson: I would ask them how do they know they don’t have them. What tools are they using to measure that? In the same way that you’d want to know what tools you are measuring to see if somebody’s competent on the job as a technology person. How do you evaluate that somebody’s not doing well on the job? I would say if you apply that same approach to whether people have racial stressful encounters, it wouldn’t be so easy to answer that question. It would be harder.
Do you have a strategy for measuring racial, stressful encounters or diversity, stressful encounters of any type? And then, what did you learn from it if you do have a strategy. And if people were to apply the same approaches that they do for evaluating worker performance to racial or diversity conflicts or management of those conflicts, then people would have a much more sophisticated way of answering that question.
And denial would be okay. People are still going to be in denial, but how do you know? What’s your evidence for that response?
Dr. Daniels: Right, right. So, do I have this correct that you’ve done some of this work on racial literacy in medical schools?
Dr. Stevenson: Well, I’ve spoken to different audiences and yes. We’re actually using some of the med school technology to set up vignettes so that doctors and medical students can begin to deal with their own stress in working with families or patients of color. Because there’s a lot of research on how, if you have the same illness and the same symptoms, you might get different treatment as a function of your race. This is related to how well physicians and their regime of treatment can be, even severe enough to the point of denial or the point of withholding treatment. And assuming that patients of color can manage pain more so than other groups and don’t need other kinds of medication.
We are in the process of developing modules to help med students see these implicit biases and then what to do about them.
Dr. Daniels: That’s great.
Dr. Stevenson: But that was also true when working with police as well as teachers and therapists, who also have implicit biases.
Dr. Daniels: And can you talk about the impact of the work on racial literacy. How does it move us beyond just knowing, “Oh, okay. I have implicit bias.” Can you talk about the impact for these different groups that you talked to?
Dr. Stevenson: Yeah, for the most part I think most people see race and racism and racial politics as ideological or legal, or they think about right and wrong or character. We would try to challenge those issues, because even if you had a very strong positive outlook on humanity and a good character, it doesn’t mean you really know how to navigate a racial conflict.
“Literacy…will help people understand where they’re weak and strong about engaging racial moments.”
And when we talk about a racial conflict we think of face-to-face, in the moment sorts of situations. We’re looking at, what do you emotionally go through? How do you manage face-to-face racial conflicts? And where most of the stressful encounters, most of the more difficult outcomes come from. Certainly, systemic racism is a problem, but many of those system issues are invisible. But the face-to-face encounters, I would argue, very few people are skilled at those. What racial literacy can do is begin to help people be alert to how they are under-reacting or overreacting both physiologically, cognitively, and emotionally to these situations and are unprepared to deal with it.
By being unprepared, they might say something or do something, or they actually might not do something that’s ethically important based on their role. And you know, character isn’t really a great way to judge skill building. For example, you want to be an algebra teacher, but if you’re not good at math, nobody’s going to hire you simply because you’re a good person. The same would apply to supervisors and managers, they have to have skills in those roles and navigating racial conflicts. Literacy, I think, will help people understand where they’re weak and strong about engaging racial moments to improve climates, whether it’s schools, whether it’s workplaces, to head off problems before they get to be too large.
In some places lawsuits or the fear of lawsuits can drive people to learn how to prevent, or avoid racial moments before they escalate into something else. But these are still interpersonal. Literacy is there to help you navigate the interpersonal conflicts that end up, if unaddressed, leading to more litigious situations.
Dr. Daniels: Well, last question. Based on your experience in the field, what do you think the benefits might be for the tech world as we try to cultivate racial literacy there?
Dr. Stevenson: I think I need to learn more about the tech world but as you and others have tried to school me on it, [it’s] that we don’t know what we are creating if we’re not aware of our biases. I think there’s a fear about that stuff you don’t know, and how that’s integrated into the tech world. I want to know more about how it works, but those biases play a role in how you create anything.
Author’s Note: As someone who has worked in the tech industry and is trained as a sociologist, I tend to live in my head a lot. Part of what I find so refreshing about Dr. Stevenson’s work is that it encourages me to think about the way that racially stressful situations linger in the body. More than that, I appreciate the fact that Dr. Stevenson’s approach is one that expands our capacity for addressing the harm of racism in our everyday lives.
There are many ways racial literacy could apply to the tech industry, but I think an important place to start is with helping people be alert to how they are reacting physiologically, cognitively, and emotionally to racially stressful situations. From there, I think it’s possible to learn to do less harm with the technology we create.
Jessie Daniels, PhD is a 2018–19 Faculty Fellow at Data & Society and Professor at Hunter College (Sociology) and The Graduate Center, CUNY (Africana Studies, Critical Social Psychology, and Sociology).
Howard Stevenson, PhD is the Constance Clayton Professor of Urban Education, Professor of Africana Studies, in the Human Development & Quantitative Methods Division of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Stevenson is Executive Director of the Racial Empowerment Collaborative (REC), a research, program development, and training center that brings together community leaders, researchers, authority figures, families, and youth to study and promote racial literacy and health in schools and neighborhoods.
