Talking About… Antiracism
In this series of conversations, Maggie and Sarita talk about our ongoing journeys shifting from “not racist” to “anti-racist.”
This conversation is from early June 2020.
Maggie: I’m excited to be talking with you again, Sarita. I’m in my front yard, where I’ve been sitting most every day lately. I’ve been out here to engage with my neighbors and neighborhood, which seems especially important in the days since George Floyd was murdered and the local and national uprising began.
Where are you today?
Sarita: I’m just closing my computer right now and I will soon be out on the sidewalk in front of my house, too. It’s a warm, breezy, and sunny day in Minnesota. We don’t get a lot of these, so when we do, we’re culturally programmed to get outside.
Okay, today, we wanted to talk about one of the most painful topics of our time: racism, and more constructively, anti-racism. Our goal in the next few conversations is to go deeper into this topic than we’d normally go in the workplace.
One thing that I’ve learned since the murder of George Floyd is how to start thinking about racism differently. Specifically, shifting from “not being racist” to actively being “anti-racist.”
Maggie: Almost every white person I know, myself included, would gladly raise their hand and say, “Oh, well, I don’t agree with racism. I don’t think racism is a good idea. People who believe in racism, that’s sort of an extremist thing.” A classical idea of what racism means. But what I’ve learned in the past couple of weeks, is it’s a wholly different thing to be actively anti-racist.
Being anti-racist has a lot more agency, has a lot more action, requires a lot more self reflection and a lot more willingness to really look at the big systemic picture and be willing to interrogate things that we maybe take as normal and understand how they actually support a societal system that is deeply unfair to black, to indigenous, to people of color, in a decades- and centuries-long way, including in the present moment.
I’m just starting to read Ibram X. Kendi’s book, How to Be an Anti-Racist. What does anti-racism mean to you?
Sarita: I think you described it well. What strikes me is how deeply rooted and hidden racism can be. We don’t recognize our unconscious bias because, well, it’s unconscious! It’s human nature, it’s how the brain works.
We are all aware of race — we can see skin color — and I would go so far as to say that I believe everybody has racial bias. We all have gender bias, age bias, size bias. When we see someone for the first time, we have all kinds of patterns and associations and unconscious recognition. We don’t know what we don’t know about the unconscious judgements we make. You can examine the brain’s implicit bias for yourself (and support research about it) here.
Here’s a real-life way to think about it: Imagine if you’re about to see a speaker on stage. Say someone is on the stage, white, mid-40s, six feet tall, male. And say someone else comes on the stage, say a petite black woman in her late 50s. There’s a good chance you’re going to have different expectations, conscious and unconscious, of those two speakers.
And what I’m seeing, and what I’m experiencing personally, is that with anti-black racism, so many people have found themselves surprised and heartbroken, asking “How can I have been blind to this?” Then, reflecting, and still continuing to say things like, I don’t believe I’m a racist or I don’t see color.
It’s hard to reconcile this long-standing identity of “not being a racist” with understanding unconscious bias. It’s destabilizing to recognize that racism is entrenched in our culture and it’s deeply entrenched in us.
Maggie: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I fully agree that we all have racial bias. We can’t not, because in addition to how the human brain works, we live in and have been socialized by a highly racist system and culture. This is still true even if we don’t want to face it or are telling ourselves a different story.
I have not yet read the book White Fragility by Dr. Robin D’Angelo, but I’ve seen her speak on YouTube. She talks about the very thing that you just said. Statements like “I don’t see color” are stories or slogans that so many of us tell ourselves, but they actually uphold the structural racism we live within in our country. I’ve certainly said and believed stuff like that myself over many, many years.
To face up to it feels really threatening to a lot of white folks’ perception of themselves as good people. Statements and stories like that are designed to help us feel like morally comfortable and absolve us of being at fault and they do nothing to change the problem, increase empathy, or help us feel responsibility to take action.
Sarita: Racism is so deeply ingrained in society that somehow it just seemed normal. Even though we were surrounded by it, especially here in Minneapolis, it’s astounding to me that we didn’t see it. It reminds me of the metaphor of a fish swimming in water — the water around a fish just is — the fish doesn’t notice the water even though it’s surrounded by it.
I think, for all of us, having a first-person view to George Floyd’s death and a first-person view to Amy Cooper’s 911 bigotry has forced us to take the blinders off. Now, we can’t not see it.
Maggie : When we see it and believe it, we can start interrogating for ourselves. “Where are these thought patterns coming from? How does this show up and work within my life? And within my community?”
Then we can ask questions like, “What might I do to interrupt racism within myself and within the things and the people in the places that I influence?” I think there is this emotional journey for people, like when they first recognize it. I think there’s a sense of guilt or a sense of shame, or maybe even a sense of denial. All of those things that come before recognizing, “This is real.” I’ve certainly felt these things, and I’ve come to realize this is long-term work for me and many others.
Sarita: The Amy Cooper video from New York, where she threatens Christian Cooper with 911 for asking her to leash her dog, is a strong example of how racism can be so deeply ingrained in our society. I felt like Amy Cooper could be one of dozens of people I know. People who, on paper, are progressive and truly believe they are not racist… But do not understand how deeply racist beliefs and tropes manifest. People who reject the idea that they have deep racism that they don’t understand.
I almost feel like it’s liberating to accept what reality is — sort of this Buddhist idea of accepting what is real and true, right now, instead of battling it. Not “acceptance” in the sense that “It’s okay.” And, side note, this is a real risk — there’s a lot of research showing that, on average, when people learn that something is common, it normalizes it and they stop working on it — a risk that people will soften and think “I’m off the hook, because everybody’s racist.”
Instead, accepting that it is true that we live in a racist system, which frees me to put constructive energy into changing it in myself and my community. To stop claiming it as false and start working on it constructively. It’s so important to frame it as everyone has racial bias, and we all have work to become more anti-racist. These two ideas go hand in hand.
Maggie: It is true that I am and want to be anti-racist. And at the same time I have perpetuated racism and I’ve perpetuated harm, and I benefit from my privilege. It is true that we live in a deeply structurally racist society. And also that it’s something we can continue to work on. It’s true that I didn’t learn a lot of the true history of how racism works, of the way white systems and white people have profited off of Black and Indigenous and people of color for decades and centuries. It’s true that I didn’t learn that. And it’s also true that I can now start and continue to learn this history.
And it’s also true that there’s not an end point where I will have learned it all and become perfected and better. It’s a practice like any other thing that you practice like a sport, to build skill.
Sarita: Next conversation, we’ll reflect on our reactions to the attack on Christian Cooper in Central Park and George Floyd’s murder, and our journey from those initial reactions to an anti-racist mindset.
