Black In Bend: Being An Extreme Minority In Suburbia | Anyssa Bohanan | TEDxBend

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[Music] [Applause] hi guys hi Oprah if you're watching this is my only time for a shout out but back to you guys so here in the audience I know there's some parents right out of those of you who have kids how many of you have had the talk with them right right it's weird right and it's awkward and I can guarantee you as someone who was once a child who received this talk it is just as awkward for us if not more so video so I got that talk when I was about eight or nine and it was weird guaranteed but when I was about nine or 10 that's me I had an entirely different talk with my parents and I'm not really sure how they decided that this was the day to have this talk but one Sunday afternoon my dad said I have something to show you and afterwards we're going to talk about it and then he cued up a History Channel documentary and he said I don't want to hurt your feelings I know that this might scare you but it's very important for you to hear so he cues up this History Channel documentary and the first images that I see are a very worked up group of KKK members and then shortly after that black men hanging from a tree now he didn't make me watch the whole thing because I was a very sensitive child but this talk that I had with my dad is one that many black children in America have to have at least once in their lives about the discrimination and racism that they are likely to face at some point because they are black and my dad said I don't mean to scare you but I just want you to know that someday someone might want to hurt you or even kill you because of who you are and I remember going to my bedroom afterwards and laying on the bed and staring at the ceiling and saying why do they hate us imagine that little girl wondering why people didn't like her already because of who she was now despite the severity of the talk when I went back to school on Monday I was pretty resilient as most children are and I mentioned it to my friends and I realized that they were uncomfortable and I didn't realize until later that it was because some of my friends had not had to have this particular kind of talk with their parents about somehow confronting someone who would one day think that they were beneath them or want to hurt them because of who they were and after several other incidences that were similar I just realized that there were some groups with whom I would not be able to discuss race and so in groups where even the differences between us were glaringly obvious I would avoid the topic because I didn't want to make other people uncomfortable now fast forward a few years from elementary school after I graduated from college I decided to use my journalism degree and teach English in South Korea it it was an amazing experience in part due to the fantastic people that I met from all corners of the world but moving across the world let me tell you can come with just a few challenges as I'm sure you're aware how many of you guys have ever been the only one in a room the only one of your race your gender your sexuality how does it feel some people like it it's fine I felt all right for some people it makes you feel incredibly vulnerable now imagine that feeling of discomfort combined with your dad's far echoing words of someone maybe not liking you simply because of who you are and take that feeling times a thousand because you're the only one that looks like you pretty much in the whole country oh goodness it was it was a fun time though honestly but I did feel like I was under a microscope at all times I mean I had some of the most interesting experiences like I was going up the escalator one day and amarte and a man leaned so far over the railing to get a closer look at me I thought we were gonna make out I thought that was it I had a new husband you know and some of my students would call me things like Africa teacher or to make a future which was easy enough to correct they just simply didn't know one time I got into the taxicab and the taxi driver was just as shocked to see me as pretty much anyone and after a frantic conversation didn't rapid-fire Korean he was asking to take my hand I thought in marriage what's going on here but it turned out but he just wanted to try to rub the brown off of it yeah yeah that happened it was real now that incident was more amusing than anything and these experiences that I had were more you know misunderstandings it wasn't like they were purposefully trying to hurt me at all which was fine but there were other incidences where the whole purpose was to hurt me so I go down to Ulsan one weekend to visit a couple of my friends hold on is this beautiful city on the southern coast of South Korea and there are far more used to seeing foreigners and tourists so I was really looking forward to a weekend where fewer people stared at me at least and my friends and I we go out and we have a great time and we end the day in one of our favorite bars and all of a sudden mid-conversation my friend to the left of me freezes like she has seen a ghost like someone has walked over her grave and she turns to the three Korean men sitting next to her and starts yelling at them what what is going on so of course my friend and I are concerned maybe they've said some inappropriate to her I'm kinda ready to throw down a little bit I mean I'm small but mighty like I'm ready to go and instead she she turns to me and she says with tears in her eyes they just called you a dumb nigger yikes my other friend's reaction turns visceral now she's yelling at them now the bartender's are involved but guys are frantically trying to explain but it's just because they've been caught my friend who originally heard it has run to the bathroom crying because she's so angry but you know what in all of the chaos once I realized that that was the issue I got very calm because this is exactly what I had been fearing since I was 10 years old watching a documentary about the fact that someone might say exactly what this man had just said to me and I survived I always thought that such a blatant racist event would feel like a knife through my chest and instead it felt more like a paper cut quick sting little scar a reminder that this was not the worst that I would ever hear but that I would survive now not every part of my life in South Korea was this dramatic I'm just telling you guys the craziest parts honestly it was the greatest experience ever it really made me a stronger more confident and resilient person and that newfound confidence is probably why three months after I moved back home and I got offered the job here in Bend I left at the opportunity it sounded like my dream job to be a storyteller and not just a news reporter and when I talked to my now boss on the phone he informed me that Bend was not very diverse and by not very diverse he meant that there were a lot of white people which was fine I said well you know I moved to an entirely different country what was moving to an entirely different state the difference they and gentlemen is that by moving to South Korea I had other people around me who recognized that feeling of outside earnest of feeling like a foreigner and here in Benz I didn't really have that relatability and I was experiencing all of this in the public eye you see journalists are not really allowed to have a public opinion we are unbiased figures of the community something that I've struggled with on certain topics but for the most part I understand because this is all that I've ever wanted to do and it's part of the job but being the only one who looks like me on TV can pose unique challenges and I find myself putting myself into two categories quite often Anisa the journalists and it's of the black jack now these two categories clashed for the first time last summer the same week that falando castile and Alton Stirling two black men were shot and killed in two separate states the same week that five police officers were shot and killed in Dallas in response to those shootings it was a tough week to be an American and it was certainly a tough week to be in news but the morning that I woke up two days after Elton sterling had been shot to see the fairly graphic video of falando Castile dying in his car I felt more exhausted than anything and I watched a few minutes of the video and got ready for work hopped in the car got ready to drive out and I got about ten feet down the road if that before I burst into tears and it's still very hard for me to talk about without getting emotional because these men are people that I could have known could have been friends family co-workers that I'd had in the past and when I got to work and no one was talking about it I've never felt so alone I felt like it didn't matter what had happened to these men I felt like I didn't matter and no we even notice so after our morning meeting I asked our producer why we weren't covering the shootings and he said that we needed to find a way to localize it fair enough so we suggested that we do man on the street interviews and I wasn't that excited about it but I figured all right here we go so my videographer and I go downtown and not many people were willing to talk about it you know unpleasantness just doesn't belong on a sunny summer day in Bend but we did get a couple who gave us a very modest opinion and I was feeling pretty good about myself because I didn't think we were gonna get anything so we were just talking about packing it in and getting ready to go when a man rolled up on his bike white man mid-40s or so very bendy and he asked what we were doing so we told him we were getting opinions on the shootings that had happened and he said I have opinions but I don't want to save them on camera and we repeatedly asked him are you sure are you sure because you know he wasn't going anywhere he definitely wanted to share his opinion and before we could get him convinced that maybe he should just tell us while the camera was rolling he launches into this long opinion about everyone from Muslims to immigrants and then he tops it off by saying I hate to say this because you're a black let's just stop right there for a little mini lesson no good sentence ever starts with I hate to be racist but so he says I hate to say this because you're a black but you guys are just built stronger and faster and sometimes police have no choice but to shoot because they're afraid and black people are more violent statistically you can look it up I go completely numb I cannot believe you just set this to me and he said this to me on a sunny day in the middle of downtown Bend as placidly as if he was telling me the sky was blue that was a knife so now that you guys heard that a few weeks ago we aired a story about me telling this exact same story and the backlash and comments were startling a lot of people were upset over the fact that I had made everyone in Bend look racist and said they would never watch our show again others suggested that if I wanted diversity as it was move and then of course there is the infamous five black people in bend comments if there is anything I could take back it would be that if this viciously said that there were five of us in Benz and people countered with I know at least 12 black people here in Benz 13 even and to them I say I think you missed the point and also kind of made mine because it doesn't matter that you know 12 black people or 13 or 25 black people in bends the fact that you can count us at all in a city of literally thousands should give you pause I wasn't looking to give a Census Bureau count or call everyone in the area racist my point remains that we've got to find a way to comfortably talk about race as soon as I mentioned it it was a tack mode it's offensive see so often people want to shy away from the fact that I'm black my least favorite phrase is I don't see color and I get that you mean that you see us as equals but why can't you see me as your equal and black I would never say I don't see you as white [Applause] so you should acknowledge that I'm black because I'm okay with it I want you to know that I am a professional woman and I am black and I also want you to know that even though there may be more than five of us sometimes I feel like the only one in a sea of literally thousands and that can be a real challenge and exhausting on days when I'm already not having the greatest time I want you to know that living here in Bend can be just as amazing as it was living in South Korea but it's also scary when I'm walking down the street and I wonder who is walking past me that's thinking the exact same thing that that man once said to me I don't want to leave you with oversimplified generalizations like all black people feel victimized or all white people are racist but in a community like Bend where the majority is white I want to know how can we learn together how can we hope to create a better community if we never see each other's differences but only our sameness if we take on each other's differences and see each other more fully think about how much better we could make not just Bend but the world thank you [Applause] [Music]

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Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 59,922

Rating: 4.7647057 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Social Science, Behavior, Change, Community, Discrimination

Id: GC5EMHDpZlE

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2017

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