Hi, good evening, everyone. It's wonderful to see you here. My name is Rick Locke. I'm a professor here
in political science and international
public affairs. And also I'm currently
serving as the provost and it's really a great
pleasure to welcome you here this evening. And I'm the especially
honored to be collaborating with Professor
Tricia Rose on this important event which
launches a series built around her scholarship
that I believe holds significant value,
not only for our campus, but for the broader
community, for our country, and for the world. Racism, or the belief
that a particular race is inferior or superior to another,
and that certain traits are pre-determined by
a person's race, has existed throughout history. And certainly since the
United States was founded. Racism in this country
has been at the root of our darkest periods. Despite the efforts of many
across the generations, civil rights activists,
students, soldiers, and scholars, we
know that racism is pervasive today and
remains at the core of our darkest days. In some cases, the
manifestations are obvious. We see disparities by race in
our schools, in our prisons, and in a housing and
economic opportunity. In other, less obvious but
equally prodigious ways, we see the effects of racism in
daily life, through the media, and through regular
reports of microaggressions on our own campus,
in our community, and across the nation. At Brown, we have been
deeply engaged in efforts to confront and address
legacies of structural racism and discrimination in our
society and on our own campus. Many of you in this room have
been leaders in this work, and I thank you and welcome you. Creating a just an
inclusive campus community is key to Brown's
ambitions as a university. We cannot be a truly excellent
institution if we are marginalizing,
devaluing, or excluding-- even inadvertently--
excluding entire segments of our community. And advancing and
sharing knowledge to contribute to a better world
is essential to our mission. We are fortunate
here at Brown to have significant scholarly resources
to draw upon in the work that we're trying to do. From the Center for the
Study of Slavery and Justice, and the departments of
Africana Studies, History , American And Ethnic Studies
to the Center for the Study of Race and
Ethnicity in America, Brown has leading scholars
committed to investigating history and shaping contemporary
thought, policy, and practice. Tonight, we are privileged
to have Professor Tricia Rose, the Director of the
Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, to
share with us her own research on the issue of structural
racism, what it is, and how it operates. Through this and the
future components in the series-- which are
planned and I hope to see you there for the spring and also
the fall semesters of 2016-- we will deepen our own
knowledge, awareness, and understanding about the
origins and effects of racism, providing opportunities to
inform our conversations and to promote change. When I came to
Brown in 2013, I was fortunate to meet Tricia
Rose very early on. Over a series of discussions,
she shared with me nuggets of her
emerging research and I found it compelling and
also very interested-- then, actually I'm still, for I
guess 29 more days, director of The Watson Institute--
to explore opportunities to collaborate. After all the
mission of Watson is to promote a just
and peaceful world. And structural racism
is a powerful force that inhibits our
progress towards justice, towards peace, as well
as towards prosperity. In recent weeks as a result
of a lot of the conversations that we've been having on
campus, I was able to convince Tricia that, while she considers
the work the she'll present today still very much
work in progress, convince her that
Brown, as a community, can greatly benefit by
sharing her research now. And I'm grateful that she
has agreed to do this, and also to identify future
opportunities for both students and faculty to engage
this work, to engage in this research and a variety
of things associated with It. Now I imagine that many
of you know of, and about, Tricia Rose. She is certainly
well-known on this campus, but also throughout the
country through her research and her teaching. She is an internationally
respected scholar of post-civil rights era black
US culture, popular music, social issues,
gender, and sexuality. She is most well-known
for her groundbreaking book on the emergence
of hip hop culture which is called "Black Noise:
Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America." She was born and
raised in New York City and spent her childhood in
Harlem and in the Bronx. She graduated from Yale
University with a B.A. in sociology and received
her PH.D. Here at Brown in American Studies. Prior to returning to
Brown as a faculty member, she was a professor at NYU and
at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In 2013, professor
Rose was appointed to lead the Center for the
Study of Race and Ethnicity in America and has work
to position the center as a hub for interdisciplinary,
campus-wide, student and faculty research
and public events to address the pressing
issues of race and ethnicity in America today and
throughout history. She is also committed
to making her work and the work of the center
accessible to scholars and to the general public. And she is a frequent
contributor to CNN and NPR and MSNBC, et cetera. She is a true treasure
for Brown University, a source of incredible research,
an inspirational teacher, a wonderful colleague,
and I'm very grateful that she is sharing her
research with us this evening. Please join me in welcoming
Professor Tricia Rose. [APPLAUSE] I really am thrilled to be
able to share this project. I intended to do
it at some point, but we made more progress than
I'd like to admit so I thought, I think I can put 40 minutes
of conversation on the table. And so I'm very happy that
this has been a subject that were all engaged with much
more intensely than some of us may have not been recently. I'm really happy that
there's this opportunity. It is a work in progress
though, and that's not to make excuses
for arguments that you may disagree
with, it's more to say I want to invite
you to come to reach out with ideas, suggestions and
for opportunities for research collaboration. There will be potentially
several research positions-- not full time but
part time-- student positions graduate
and undergraduate, in the spring and
the fall that you can visit CSREA website to
get more information about. I want you to
imagine that this is sort of starting
that conversation, because it's going to need
all hands on deck this is not a topic that we can solve really
by ourselves or individually. But I also really want to
thank Rick Locke because a year and a half ago when I
started thinking about this-- and Sam Rosen,
who's sitting here, decided to not take
some really fancy job come work for like three hours
a week to talk about this with me-- I didn't
really share with anybody in particular, just general
public conversations. And I just happened
to mention in passing. And Rick said let
me see the proposal, and just vetted it
over and over and read, gave great comments and
advice and suggestions. So this really grows out
of that commitment as much as it grows out of the
needs that we have now. OK, so how many
of you in the room have actually
recognize I don't even ask you for those of you who
have known me in the classroom, you know that these objects
are very foreign to me. It is taking me a few
weeks to get clear. This thing right here looks
like something from James Bond but I'm going to try to use it. The reason I chose to has to
do with the speed with which I want to present
certain types of ideas and move as quickly
as possible and not lose people, or
myself, so forgive me if I'm a little awkward. Because my motto
is, power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. So here I am, a victim. Like structural racism, you
know the underdog has a lot more power than it looks like. So what is the How Structural
Racism Works project? What is the project,
what's the point? Is it just about explaining what
structural racism is to people? In part, that's a
really ongoing job. That's a the job that
apparently is sort of like explaining things that
never can be explained somehow. It's always really surprising
that it's going on. So it is about describing it. But really it's
about a intending to produce, at some point in
the future which has not yet been designed, a very visually
engaging, video-based web project explaining, describing
it and working to recruit people to feel a level
of emotional attachment to the urgency around ending it. So the problem that I
want to get at today isn't just knowing
about structural racism. For goodness sake, I took
structural racism courses-- they weren't called
that, but that's what they were-- at
Yale in the 1980s. This is not new
information, in a sense. There's new formations,
but it's not new. The question is, what
are the impediments that make us, a society as a
whole, unable to really turn the corner and confront it
and gather around changing it. So it's a visual and cultural
and emotional project that's designed to
expand public knowledge, but also to build an anti-racist
community in the broadest sense armed to work against it. But structural racism is a very
difficult topic to talk about. A lot of research on social
problems are difficult. This isn't the only one. They're daunting. I was watching some video on
climate change and thought, God, I thought racism was bad. I was like, we're in trouble! Note to self. If we get this one solved,
we got like six more weeks before the polar
ice cap is gone. Like, we fixed it just in time. [LAUGHTER] But structural racism is
particularly difficult to talk about. We've all contributed
to global warming, but it doesn't quite
feel is identity-based. There aren't too
many of us saying, yeah I'm really proud of
contributing to global warming. That's not common in
our personal identities. But when it comes to questions
of race, questions of history, questions of power,
questions of privilege and the notion of
belonging, race and racism really stand at the heart of
many of our understandings. And that makes it
much more complicated when ideas that challenge,
either conscious or unconscious, values
come into play. So it makes it harder to build
investment and collaboration to work against structural
racism and its emotionally challenging for everyone. It's different and challenging
for different reasons. And we often would make
an easy assumption, perhaps that some
racial groups have one kind of emotional challenge
and others have others. But I've had fascinating
conversations, particularly with young people over the years
who, sometimes will tell me, I don't want to hear about
the structural racism. Students of color will say, I
don't want to hear about it, I don't want to know
about it, it's just going to get in my way. You would expect this
is going to empower you, you'll know what
the impediments are, that was how I approached it. For me it was like lightning. I was like, why didn't
somebody tell me this in the fifth grade? That was my response. But that's not
everyone's response, so it's a very emotionally
challenging topic. And that's part of the purpose
of the format of the video. But it's also going
to require that we all do our best to kind of
stay in our best lane as we grapple with it. There's a certain
kind of emotional work we have to do as we
listen and as we engage. So there's an extensive
body of research that makes quite clear
that there's extraordinary racial disparity today
and it's everywhere. In fact, when I had the
three-hour, unedited, completely confused version
of this talk operating not that long ago--
I won't use my watch to show how long that
was-- it was just staggering to think
about all of the axes that one could present. I had to had 15
slides, all of which are cut now-- which we
could talk about later- that were just sort of breaking it
down in every possible sphere. As if the data was going
to somehow prove the point. If you need evidence, you call
me but for now suffice to say, every aspect of life,
jobs, employment, wealth, discrimination, education,
criminal justice, media, housing, health, mental health,
insurance agencies, loans, banking, every aspect of
life that we can think about has elements of structural
racism-- or shall we say evidence of racial
disparity that's operating. There's virtually no place
and where it's not operating. So this makes it
overwhelming, makes it large, makes it significant. Now, what we make
of these numbers we'll talk about in a minute. But this topic is also
difficult for reasons that do not come into the main
view, too much these days. Which is that there's been a
pretty explicit ideological war over the past 40 years between
the story of structural racism and the emergent,
and now dominant, story of color blindness. And the war between
these two stories is at the heart of
the project that I want us to talk about
tonight, but also the project I'm hoping to work on. So these two stories, the
story of structural racism, and the story of
color blindness, have been the primary
explanations and frameworks that determine our public, and
frankly a lot of our scholarly, analysis since the soft end of
what we call the civil rights movement. So let's start with just
some basic definitions. There's lots of them in the
world but this is a composite. -Structural racism in the
US is the normalization and legitimization of a range of
dynamics historical, cultural, institutional, and interpersonal
that routinely advantage whites while producing cumulative
and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color. That's general
operative definition of structural racism. Color blindness, or I'm
calling a colorblind ideology, Makes the argument that only the
absence of accounting for race will bring racial equality. And that we must reject
all racial categorizations, record keeping, make no
distinctions based on race in order to reach a
color blind context for a fair, equal society. It fundamentally
relies on the idea that race is not operating
now, and then we must keep it that way by being colorblind. I could spend a whole
45 minutes on how we got this color
blindness exactly, what the easy mechanisms
were, the kind of manipulation of King's very famous
phrase, content of character, not color of skin. He didn't say anything
about being blind. I know he's rolling over in
his grave about that phrase. Like, I should've changed
it, who could know? [LAUGHTER] But colorblindness is extremely
resistant to illuminating any categories of race and
therefore any measurements. Which makes, of course,
the whole structural racism argument completely antithetical
to colorblind ideology. But it also assumes, in addition
to race doesn't matter now, it also means that we have to
assume racial hierarchies are not already operating. That society is
fundamentally fair if it's left alone
to its own devices. That's the fundamental
logic of color blindness. That by simply
ending the ability to see color which has
always fascinated me as a strangely depressing
sort of self-punishing idea. I'm like, I like it. But it means that the fact that
if we leave society on its own, it will say correct and
produce a just circumstance. But since systemic forms of
discrimination are widespread, colorblind ideology
actually hides them. It has to work all the
time to get rid of them, to marginalize them, to
make them look minimal or off the beaten path, or
not central and not systemic in any major way. It also rejects policies
that are designed-- and this is very important
because colorblind ideology has been at the heart of ending of
any kinds of programs designed to redress a legacy of
structural discrimination. So you can't solve the
problem by saying, anything that looks like affirmative
action in any sphere becomes extremely
problematic in the context of color blind ideology. And the Supreme Court's
been a very significant and ending, transforming,
forcing, dramatic curtailments of a variety of efforts
to try to remedy even past discrimination. I'm not even talking about
newfangled, present day versions of it just the past. So what happens with
colorblind ideology, is phrases like
affirmative action, instead of them being, as
President Johnson attended, this idea of sort of
acting affirmatively in the spirit of the
creation of an equal society, they become special privileges. And the whole language
of shifts entirely. There's privileges
that advantage black and brown
people not an effort to level the playing field. And of course there are a
small number-- well maybe not that small,
but not that big, so in the middle--
group of whites who actually would claim they
have significant disadvantages now. And the studies
that show that, I need to read in much greater
depth because this one just is dumbfounding. It takes the whole
thing to levels that make you need a
happy hour, basically. I put it in this
way and this is how everyday people
can back themselves into the logic of
color blindness. And I just want to
really know them before I read this and talk
about it, of course there are vicious ideologues
who we could say are sort of hatred-filled,
trying to destroy society, making sure that people
of color are pressed down and never make it. They exist unfortunately, and
there are more than I'd like. But the vast majority of people
who subscribe to colorblindness are not those people. It it's a combination
of a set of moves that produce an easy association. So this is sort of how I see it
working out for the most part. People would say
to themselves, well since most people believe
in racial equality, which includes myself, and
since the laws have been changed to outlaw discrimination,
and since I don't see color-- well we'll give you that
one-- so I can't be a racist, and since no special
benefits or accrued to me based on whiteness,
question mark, racism isn't causing
these inequalities. So you end up with a kind
of if, then, if, then is. If all these things
are true, then I don't know what your problems
are about, because I've passed my own litmus test. So what remains left here at the
end of this kind of self-check? What remains left is
actually the heart of color blind ideology in
the way it gets deployed and that's the behavior. Because colorblind
ideology Imagines that there are no
structures impeding us so we have a kind of
individual capacity and this must be about the
behavior of those who are being discriminated against. They must either bring it upon
themselves or be uninterested, and they have imputed
cultural limitations that get understood as
motivating their experiences with structural racism. So let's take a look at
this in a concrete sense. Let's just very quickly
take a super fast look at the 2010 unemployment rates. This is a simple data, we don't
need to do a lot of analysis. For all intents and purposes
here you see 1 and 1/2 times or 2 and 1/2 times unemployment
for blacks and Hispanics in 2010. I will just quickly
for those of you who don't study this
sort of thing general, tell you that when the
recession hit and the mainstream cross racial combined
figure for unemployment reached something like 11%,
people went completely bananas. It's a crisis. Society's going to fall apart. People need to work. 11% unemployed, we
can't survive it. Black people seem to be doing
all right with 16% pretty much all the time. And It's never
understood as a crisis, it's actually just normal. It's not only
these numbers here, but it's the context of
what's considered a crisis. Anyway, here we have
8.7%, 12.5%, 16%. Let's see these two
stories in action. What happens when we think
about the motivations for this jobless rate,
how do we explain it? Why would there be
a racial disparity? Because all disparity
does is tell us that there's a difference. It doesn't tell us why. So what we have
to do, is animate a story about what
motivates this difference. Structural racism
argument would point to a myriad body of
stories that talks very intensively about the way
hiring discrimination works. There's a lot of different
studies about this. There's the Devah Pager
study, "Race at Work," where the young people's
resumes are sent in, everything's identical about
them except for an indication that they're somehow of color. And all the same
school education, and the callback numbers
are dramatically distinct. Then there is channeling
in sequencing. People get hired, but they're
hired below their actual talent level and they're not promoted. There is access
to social networks and other kinds of
limited opportunities. Everyone knows that the
vast majority of jobs don't even make it to any kind
of public reckoning, opening position an advertisement. In fact it's, who do you know? And once you have
a highly segregated and a hierarchical
set of perceptions, who do you know is my
buddy, fill in the blank and if some groups
of people have the vast majority of access
to those available positions and their friendship networks
are like the TV show, "Friends," then that's
who gets the job. There's lots of studies here
I'll tell you just one more because again these are
all the 40 slides that are now in a little slide bin. But there was a
study by sociologist at Notre Dame in which
Abigail-- can't remember, It will come to me-- she
did this amazing study that showed that US
companies in general, assumed that black people
were drug users and did not actually even consider
them for positions based on this perception. She found this out
through interviews, but she also found
out that the best way to control for this was a
drug test applicants for jobs across race and ethnicity,
gender everything else. And by doing so, they found
that blacks were actually more likely to be hired because
this stigma was replaced by something like a fact. [LAUGHTER] But then I thought
to myself, goodness, how could a whole company decide
that black people as a whole are drug users? Oh, OK, we'll get to that later. But anyway, it's a
fascinating thing. I'm sure you think you
fill out the application and it doesn't occur to
you that, they don't even know who I am and they've made
this massive set of assumptions that would produce a
significant discrimination. But what happens with
colorblind racism? Colorblind racism focuses
on individuals and imagines that none of that
is really going on, but it's about culture,
behavior, and discipline. And other studies have
shown tremendous data about the most widely-endorsed
account among whites in particular and point to a
supposed lack of motivation or willpower on
the part of blacks as a key factor in
racial inequality. I will say it's a little
bit depressing but true, that this story
over here is mostly winning in American society. Whether it's winning
in absolute terms or just in that
subtle day-to-day. Well you did great, Tricia,
you must you must work hard. OK, are we going down
the rabbit path here? Are we going? Is like, no we're not. This idea that you
must be an exception, you've done something that some
other people just never do. It can be that kind of subtle
or it can be all the way up to, basically all of
Fox News and republican party platforms, which pretty
much rely on this ideology one way or another as a dog
whistle, racial or otherwise. And it doesn't matter,
there may be other policies that they get right. But when it comes to this,
it's entirely about behavior. Let me give you just a
clear simple example. There are so many
to choose from. In 2014, Paul Ryan came
up with 250 page report called "The War on
Poverty 50 Years Later," because he's an expert on that. And so he writes this
report, none of which actually makes this
argument but when he promotes be the statement
and the document itself, he goes on Bill
Bennett's radio show and says the following- this is
an explanation for why we have poverty issues of
inequality-- "We've got this tailspin of
culture in our inner cities, in particular of men not working
and just generations of men not even thinking about
working, or learning the value in culture work. And so there's this real
culture problem here that has to be dealt with." So again, if we were to
unpack all of the ways that joblessness
takes place, it would be staggering in the formation
of actions by other people and yet this whole
issue is really about just generation
of people just not even thinking about working. Like, I didn't even think
about working, my whole life! Anybody ever met a
person like that? I mean I would like that for
myself, but no one says this, this is a ridiculous thing. Now I really want to point out
that these views are not just the hardcore. This ideological work
that needs to be done has to do really
with the mainstream because there's been a
tremendous saturation of this argument. It's been everywhere
in the mass media. So it shouldn't be
surprising then, given both the argument that's
made by color blindness, but also the argument that
relies on culture that there's a huge racial disparity
in what people think about when racial
equality will be achieved. So this one is Lawrence
Bobo, a sociologist, who was that at
Harvard, does a study that shows that 61% of whites
think we've already achieved equality, racially
speaking, and it's on the horizon for another 20. So 80% of white people
think we're pretty much scot-free we're almost home. I don't know what they're doing. They live in
multiracial communities. [LAUGHTER] Sorry. See, we're videotaping
this, I got to keep it real. I got to stay on the page. 17% of black people think
we've achieved equality. 36% think it's on the horizon. And the other half are
not so sure about what is going to happen. But this is a very
big gap this is a significant gap in, if
nothing else, perception. We don't know what education's
about, but if the 61% of whites think we have already
achieved and another 20% think it's around the
corner, how in God's name do we convince those
80% of respondents that racism is an impediment? So this perception
drives a rejection of the consciousness you need
to fight structural racism. Now some people say this out
of Pollyanna hopefulness, it's just right
around the corner and oh, it's going to
be fine, but there is a willful kind of resistance. So the focus on behavior,
the belief in equality has already or will
soon take place, work together to facilitate
the rejection of policies that many think
what in fact work to counter structural racism. And then we get the
no special favors. This is Bobo's analysis of
the General Social Survey data in which he says between
'94 and 2008 roughly 3/4 of white respondents felt
the blacks should overcome prejudice without
special favors, just like other minority
groups is claimed. Minority groups like the
Irish, the Italian, and Jews. This is a very
interesting problem because it illuminates the
complexity around folding in ethnic groups
that are marginalized versus the very significant
category that race plays. Ian Haney Lopez's
book, "White By Law," is a fascinating study
about the shifting line of where whiteness
begins and ends and how important
that line is for what your opportunities will be. So if you take these
two charts-- and there's many, many others. Again, this is just
a thumbnail today-- these numbers suggest that
structural changes, mandated by policies are not
going to find too much support among most whites. And frankly, if you look
at no special favors, that's 50% of black people if
you look at the line below it. They are really
not so interested in of these so-called
special favors either. And so when you
think about something like Obama's obsession with the
lift-all-boats approach-- which I was particularly
aggravated by, I thought, what would be the
point of a black president if we're going to
go this route again. It's a little essentialist
of an argument, but I was kind of just hoping--
but it's extremely important because they'll be no will. It'll be total
impossible backlash and this is why the
ideology's so important. But I just want to
spend two seconds on why 50% of what people might
say this and why I think it's important. First of all, there's
a long history among the various positions
that could be all considered under the rubric of
black nationalism, where self-determination is a
critical, anti-colonial project and thus, any special
favors is a problem because it has to do with
submitting to a politically subordinated position inside
of a society that doesn't find you to be acceptable. So there's certainly some
of that, I'm sure, going on. And then there's frankly
though, the saturating influence of the ideology of
color blindness. I have these arguments with
students of all backgrounds, and the invisibility
of structural racism. Until you really look at
the depths of what goes on, it doesn't look
so bad, socially, compared to other
historical moments. And then there's the worry
that help is an association with inferiority. And there's so much
effort to produce a mentality of inferiority
to match the conditions that are being created,
that anything that looks like it might produce
more mental barriers is often rejected. So the story of structural
racism has been on the ropes, but it's not knocked out,
is my argument for sure. I think we have a
lot of potential here to make
significant advances in making it more legible. And that even if we
change the name of it the principles behind it
seemed to me to be significant. And of course, there's
a wide range of research I'm only doing some here there's
Bonilla-Silva, Lopez, Shapiro, Oliver, Lipsitz, Bobo,
Crenshaw, Katznelson, there's many amazing people. But most of that research
happens in the academy. And they happen in
journals and in books that the vast majority
of people are not either-- if they're
reading them, they're not doing anything
with them, that's for sure. Nobody walks up to me on
the street saying, hey, did you check out Crenshaw's
latest collection? I mean on Brown's campus
yes, but other places, there aren't even any
bookstores, first of all. And these are on
academic presses, you have to go to Amazon and
have to already know about it. But there have been some
important journalistic trajectories recently,
in particular what's happened with police
brutality and state murder, has brought more attention
to what the conditions might be around it. So there's a couple
things in particular. One, the articles about
Ferguson in the New York Times and Mother Jones and also on NPR
and elsewhere-- in the wake of, not just right after the murder
of Mike Brown, but little bit later-- to talk
about all of the ways these structural
impediments we're working to criminalize
and penalize everyone in Ferguson county. And then eventually a couple
of other intrepid journalists said, oh and by the way, the
other three counties over are actually worse,
and two to the left are actually worse than that. So it was the beginning
of this sense of, oh wait, is not just a band of psychos in
Ferguson, this must be bigger, then the ball gets dropped. But there have been these
moments of highly visible public spaces. And Ta-Nehisi Coates' article,
"The Case for Reparations," is another example where a
highly visible, accessible, journalistic piece-- that
basically borrowed a lot, which I respect, from many scholars
to make that argument, that's research that's been done--
put it in a public venue where the possibility
of reaching many people was much higher. But there's a mainstream
public narrative that is driven by colorblindness
but that approaches is this kind of information with
three particular strategies. And there are others,
but these are three. One is that these are
structural anomalies. This is just a weird
one-off, something happened and when went wrong. That the criminal
justice system works, just sometimes it doesn't
work, just there's the few times over here,
and oh well that one was just a procedural
thing, and this one the guy had mental problems
and he lunged at him, and this other guy he's six
four and this so this sort of a perpetuation of anomalies. And the other one is
the one bad apple. There's a rogue cop. There's just one rogue cop. Who, 17 times, nobody
pays any attention to, and he's just so rogue
nobody notices but he's just one bad apple. It doesn't spoil the
whole tree of course, because the system works. One is a structural
anomoly, the other one's a sort of personalized one. And then the third one
is just the demonization of either the victim
or the a community. So just recently I was going
through some-- I don't even know what kind-- website
but Freddie Grey's family and others have asked
the media to stop referring to him as the son of
an uneducated heroin addict. Well wait, exactly what is the
value of that information here? Well if he was an educated
non-heroin addict, then the police would not have
done to him what they did? Is that what we're
really saying? There's this
constant demonization and marginalization
and reduction of the humanity of victims
as a means by which to normalize status
quo, and render the visibility of structural
racism foggy at best. We have these conditions. Even if we buy structural
racism which I'm going take for granted for the
sake of argument that you do. If we do that, we still have
these three impediments. We have the narrative,
which is another problem but the real challenges
on the ground are, that the discrimination
itself continues in new forms and practices. So actually, it's
a constant project. It's not the same thing
it was even 10 years ago. Someone wrote a really
interesting piece about the end of redlining,
with sub-prime lending being the exact inverse of redlining. Redlining is-- which
we're going to talk about in a minute-- we are not
going to give you any loans. Sub-prime lending
is, we are going to give you a whole lot
of really bad loans. It never ends, It's like
what's the newfangled way we can create bad outcomes
and take a lot of money. Banks are very
creative with this. So there are new
forms and practices. n You can't tackle something
very easily when it's always shifting. You have to figure out what
are the core things that seem to be continuous. The second thing,
is the way in which colorblind ideology in the
stories hide what's going on and blames personal behavior. And the third is the
special favors narrative. Because anything that
smacks of special favors, people resist and they just
have a knee-jerk of rejection, doesn't matter what the data is. So my argument is
that research alone is not going to interrupt
this interconnected set of perceptions. If it were, it probably
would have done it by now, because the research
is staggering. So, the How Structural Racism
Works project is an attempt to figure out, how do we
tell this story in a way they builds the kind
of emotional momentum that colorblind ideology builds. How do we actually
make people feel connected to it in some way? So the first part was to
sort of decide, how do we tackle where it's
happening, and how do we condense it in such
a way that might make it sort of graspable. Because again, it
really is everywhere. So I just made
what I guess you'd call a kind of educated slash
executive, personal choice decision, that these five areas
are incredibly significant, not only consequential but
dynamic and interactive. And so these are
the five-- wealth and jobs is a little complicated
because it can be wealth or it can be jobs but I
kind of want to do both, so I don't know
we'll just come back to that-- I think they
both have to be involved. But these areas, I'm
calling them five even though it's kind
of like 5 and 1/2, are extremely
important and they're going to be at the core of
examining these processes of structural racism. As they're listed
here, you see them and as they are in
this image, they are operating in
their own spheres. There's a real sense that the
media and criminal justice and housing, wealth,
and education have their own
circumstances and they're operating independently. This is often how
we talk about this. We talk about them
as single-sphere. We look for housing
discrimination and we look for a
legacy of it, but we don't think about
how it connects to all these other factors. So part of the
vision of the project is to put these gears in
relationship to one another. Now the gear metaphor
is also in progress. I give you five critiques
of at any time in the Q&A. I'm not sure it's going to work. But the main purpose of it
for as a placeholder right now is to 1, explain that
the system is designed to reproduce these disparities. So it's not a one-off,
it's not a bad apple, it's a history of intentional
constant reproduction through different mechanisms. And that they're interactive
and interconnected along multiple pegs. You could start this
in any number of places and connect them
in different ways. And that they
reinforce each other. So it's not a single
sphere set of problems. If we end mass
incarceration tomorrow we'll still have
a tremendous level of problems in
many other spheres that are interactive
with mass incarceration, but entirely independent
of it in many ways and connected to other things. So it's interdependent,
interactive, and compounding. So thinking of it this
way and figuring out how to tell the
story this way seems to be one of the goals so far. Let's say we take
the housing gear. Now this gear could have like
10 more pegs with policies, but just imagine this
gear here to describe some of the main policies
that have happened over time to create really black
communities slash constrained, ghetto-ized black
communities, often. The policies have done that
along with many other things. These are just a handful,
there are many others. But when you take them
together, they have pretty much gutted the ongoing stability
of predominately black, or all, or mainly African American
and Latino communities. So they've devalued these
communities and the property owners in them,
and their property, created incredibly high
hurdles for ownership of homes and businesses
and in an indirect way, transferred risks
than would otherwise be disparate across society. By creating pockets of
privileges and resources and buffer zones,
troubles and problems are dis-accumulated
from one area and hyper-accumulated
in communities of color. So these transferred
social risks not only reproduce themselves
and compound themselves, but they preserve racialized
benefits for whites. And then finally, just a
couple of other things, that stigmatizes the
very idea of community. And you'll see in a
minute how that happens. So that just the idea
of black community is itself stigmatized. Patricia Williams has
a terrific little book on this where she talks about
how it's a long story, so I won't tell because I
don't have enough time, but basically she
talks a bit about how her own identity as a
black community member is something she herself
should be afraid of. Because it creates
its own sense of risk, and your own association
with yourself is actually a dangerous activity
for your own financial well being. Let's look at
redlining for a moment, because it's such a big one. Redlining, In the
Homeowner's Loan Corporation and the FHA operated
from '33 to 1977 until it was outlawed to redline
American city neighborhoods will use a color coded
system for determining which neighborhoods
were suitable and which residents
were suitable for loans. You can find these
maps all over Google. They're still in existence,
you can see the old maps. And if it was green and
you were to put in green, you've got a rating of an A,
and the basis for the rating was entirely racial. It was about it being an
all-white neighborhood and lacking a single
foreigner or negro. If you've got a
red marking, there where they were
grades in between, so the more you
became of color, it would say dangerous
mixed-race communities with Latinos, Asian
Americans, and blacks. But that was, I
forgot the exact color was between red and green, but
there was a gradation system. But the worst
possible rating where for which there was
no lending, we're neighborhoods where
any black people lived and where they were therefore
given the lowest rating and ruled completely ineligible
for home and business loans. It didn't matter
how many, and it didn't matter what their social
class was, not that it should but it's just a
point to be made. And these were partnerships
between government private businesses designed
to stabilize and expand home ownership for
some communities but not these others and this
had nothing to do with credit, had nothing to do with
jobs, and had everything to do, fundamentally. With a state and government
and private enterprise transfer of value and privilege
to the category of whiteness. Lipsitz, George Lipsitz calls
this a possessive investment in whiteness, that
the nation makes an investment in whiteness. And then of course
people are going to want to hold onto
it because it has value and they're going to
want to protect it because it is being rewarded. Operating in the same landscape,
another significant bill was the GI Bill. This was actually
a colorblind bill, it was meant to be for all GIs
returning home from World War II, and GIs in general. And the plan was to expand
middle class possibilities for families of course this
was a highly patriarchal lot because they weren't
too many women in the military at the time. So this was kind of
a patriarchal idea of starting families
and giving them a starter home as at the
head of the household. But eight out of 10
men born in the 1920s, 16 million veterans were
eligible and participated in this program. The government spent $95
billion on giving support for home ownership to veterans. But FDR was unable to
get the bill passed unless he gave specific
control mechanisms for who would get the money to Southern
states and local district managers. And once you made that
move, which is also what happening to the social
security for the exclusion of domestic worker
benefits for example, you create a context
in which you basically don't have to give any money
to black veterans, which is pretty much what happened. Some were given
benefits but they were profoundly under-represented. But it was through a
color blind legislation. Fair Housing Act of
1968 is happy news, except in the version I'm
going to tell you right now. Which is that it was fought
for and it was lobbied for and it was an amazing
piece of legislation, along with many
other civil rights acts of anti-discrimination law. And this banned discrimination
in all the places. These are just a few,
intimidation and coercion, because there was constant
threats to black people if they moved into
white neighborhoods, there was racial
steering, like, oh we don't have any homes over
here but we have over here, blockbusting, in which
neighborhoods were intentionally broken up so
that profits could be gleaned and so white flight
could be accelerated, and slum lords
could exact higher prices for worse-maintained
properties, and redlining. So it was passed by Johnson
with an aim of creating, in some sense, an
anti-discrimination law that's trying to level the
housing playing field. But the person who
had to deal with it was Richard Nixon
because it happened at the end of Johnson's term. And Nixon was not all
so excited about this. He called it forced integration
and consistently interrogated his staff, fired people
who tried to implement it-- and one of them was
actually George Romney but that's another story-- but
ultimately, basically wanted to know how narrowly can
he understand this law and still abide by it. But he wasn't naive
about its effects. In a private memo to his
closest advisers he wrote, "I realize that this
position will lead us to a situation in which
blacks will continue to live, for the most part,
in black neighborhoods, and where there will be
predominantly black schools and predominantly
white schools." So this was not like,
hey I don't know what the outcome will look like. So between 1974 and 1983
is not a single dollar was withheld from
any city or town that may have been practicing
housing discrimination. Again, we don't
have time here today to go into the depths
of how it works, but I guarantee
you somebody did. And not one single dollar--
here's a law, what happens? Nothing. This is again why colorblind
ideology is so dangerous because it relies
on the use of a law and not the actual application
and implementation of it. Of course, Ronald Reagan
choked off the enforcement even further and all of
the new laws people tried to pass to
get around them. So what we're
talking about here, is a set of practices
and policies and behaviors on the
ground that have created, structurally speaking,
incredibly fragile and economically-deprived and
highly burdened neighborhoods. Neighborhoods that are carrying
the risks and accumulated disadvantages that are
produced in other parts of society in very
compacted spaces. In fact, the entire
logic of the notion of a ghetto-- which was not
a black phenomenon originally but when you say the
word today pretty much that's what people think--
is actually a construction. it is an intentional
construction. But the power and legacy
of housing discrimination is much more powerful when you
think about it in relationship to these spheres
that are around it. So very briefly,
what I want to just to help you think about how
these gears might interact. So the most obvious
one for those of you already studied this
material, is the primary way we fund education and public
schools in the United States is through what? Taxes. What determines property taxes? The value of your house. So now if you've had 100
years of no home ownership because you have been
denied loans, or high risk loans that mean you have
high levels of foreclosures-- that you actually
qualified not to have but we're given anyway--
and economic discrimination in other spheres,
you're not going to have a tax base to
generate the kind of resources for schools in
your neighborhood. So Here you have an
educational outcome where the institution
of education is understood as the
great leveler, right? This is going to be
a great equalizer. Everyone works hard in school,
it's meritocracy system, they get out the other end
and everything works out. So what you see here is a
very clear and easy kind of educational
intersection and there have been really vivid
stories about neighborhoods working very hard to hold
on to these resources now. I don't know if you remember the
Kelly Williams-Bolar story that took place in Akron,
Ohio and the township, I forgot the full name of it
it'll come to me, just west of Akron, Ohio in which
she sent her two daughters to this all-white township. It's literally a quarter mile
away, it's 85% black Akron, 96% percent all-white
something-something township this is not good, and they
basically followed her around and had a private
eye investigate to prove that she did
not live in the township, that she lived in Akron. Even though her father
lived in the township, that wasn't an adequate
explanation enough. And because she wouldn't
agree to a fine, and to pay for the taxes for the
school in the other township, they were going to
throw her in jail. Mind you, this is an
open enrollment state. Actually all areas are
supposed to participate in educational system equally. You're not even thought
to have boundaries. Basically, open enrollment
means anyone can apply to any school in the state. But what? Rich neighborhoods opt out. They opt out of open
enrollment and then just pay the state back. Because they have so much
money in property taxes, they literally write a check
to the state of Ohio and say, we don't need to participate,
we do enclosed enrollment. take your dough. But they were going to charge
again Kelly Williams-Bolar. So these become really
significant kinds of intersections. Now there are many
others I'm not going to have time
to go through here, but you can imagine
pretty easily, if you think for
example, even if we take the notion of ghettoization. And think about it
as we've been talking about these neighborhoods
here you obviously have a tremendous capacity
for racialized policing. If you segregate people, and put
them under full surveillance, you have a capacity to
create two tiers of a system without really
anybody else noticing. So you noticed before all
of the last three years a focus on police
brutality, there was a tremendous
amount of skepticism. Oh police wouldn't do that, I've
never seen a policeman do that. Well if you live
over here you saw a policeman do this all the
time, it's not a question. So you have a deep interaction
here where, for example, you could have a war on drugs
in this neighborhood, assuming this here is
a black neighborhood. You can have a war on
drugs in this neighborhood even though black
people do not use drugs at any rate higher than whites. In fact, they use
many of them less. But nobody else ever gets
their pockets turned inside out on a constant basis. Stop and frisk only works
in a segregated context. You can't just go around
stopping and frisking Wall Street bankers, it doesn't
really work out so well. Housing generates a
tremendous amount of wealth. It's the most significant wealth
transfer for most citizens. If you have any family
issues with health or with educational needs,
it's second mortgages, it's home property. The transfers of all this wealth
away from minority communities and into wealthy,
white communities has been tremendously
significant inter-generational. It's not just a
one-time transfer. It's the money
that keeps giving. We talked a bit about
education, but then I want to talk a little
bit about what's happened in the same
last 40 years, which is the kind of fixation
and culturalization of black ghetto life. The idea that the ghetto
is a black cultural space, and that it's not a
structural formation and that it's not the
product of street culture. And gangs and drugs
and guns and sex trade and fill in
the blank whatever the alternative
economies, largely in very fragile and
disrupted communities, get understood as a black
thing, a cultural thing. And if you really pay attention
to what happens in the same 40 year period, it is an
ever-narrowing description of black life so that
it's only really black when it functions as a mirror
of the stereotype of the ghetto. So the ghetto becomes not a
form of structural racism, not a form of deprivation of
circumstances and oppression, but a kind of cultural choice. You know, like, I chose the
ghetto, I open up the paper, I want to live somewhere,
they say ghetto apartment, I circle it, I go visit. Because I'm interested. I think I can just do
my thing in the ghetto. So then you have
a Ghettopoly, only if you remember that brief
game, Monopoly for the ghetto, thank God they pulled that one. There are these many principles. And commercial hip
hop, as those of you who know my other
work is about, it's most profitable
in the marketplace when it takes that framework
as its primary understanding for commercial
mainstream artists. So there are many other examples
we could talk about here and there's a monumental set
of forces that are happening so of course this is daunting. But at the same time, there have
been amazing points of entry. And part of the value of this
structure as opposed to others, at least as I see
it now, is that it provides lots of
points of entry that can be accumulative in value. So one quick example--
and I'll give more is if need be but
I want to stop now to make sure we have
time to talk-- the Ban the Box movement. I don't know, how many of you
know about the Ban the Box? A few hands? That's pretty
good, that's great. So the general
principle at first was to outlaw the use
of the requirement that anyone who was a
felon or went to jail would have to check
the box to say so. Which is just adding
stigma on top of stigma. It's a permanent life sentence. You're always on
your way to jail, you can't just have done it. So if you check
the box they found of course a Lo and behold,
ex-cons didn't get tired. What a shock and what
a surprise And then be a black ex-con,
oh good, terrific, that's going to
be really helpful. So they were trying to
ban the box for jobs, but what the
movement has moved to is ban the box for
housing applications. Because if you find housing
applications now, they say, have you been a felon
or been a prisoner? And now there's been a
movement to even not allow people who live
in public housing to have relatives who are
returning from prison to live in public housing. So you have a sense
then is now we don't destabilizing your whole
family and community that you never end. So the band there has been
a really terrific movement that is moved across. There been tremendous fair
lending organizations. There's been a
county in Maryland I guess it was Montgomery County
that a wealthy county that actually required developers
to put affordable housing in their programs otherwise
they wouldn't approve the plans and they've been successful
for many, many years although there's a lot of
pressure to stop it to create at least a multi-class,
multi-racial county under tremendous pressure. Organizations like ColorofChange
are also really exciting to me because of the way they've
intervened in the narrative and in the political
activism, sort of galvanizing using mainly
social media to have leverage. But they've been really
significant around banning some of the cultural work
recently, like the show Cops on Fox Television,
which has been 25 years of just
free-for-all of racial insult on these questions around
criminalization of the poor. So the goal here
is to figure out how to pay attention
to these intersections and to use existing
research, but to make sure that we're really
invested in building public community about
ideas that may not yet have mainstream support. There's no way
we're going to know all there is to know about
structural racism so of course, we want to keep learning
and keep growing. And we want to share
this information because the people
who know it best the people who are applying
for loans and by having these experiences,
applying for insurance and getting triple the rate
because of their zip code. But even in this
media-rich environment, the power to marginalize
important information remains strong. This to me as a mandate
seems to me for education, for college and graduate
and professorial work. We can't just imagine
that these ideas can just be put in a journal
put in a newspaper or commented somewhere
and that they're just going to have the
proper level of reach. And I think at this point,
it's actually a little bit irresponsible to have
this kind of information, to have this kind of
crisis and to not be interested in figuring out
how to connect with people, and to put this
in the public eye. So this project
at its heart aims to encourage everyone,
some people who know something's wrong,
some people who may not yet know something wrong with me
a little bit of encouragement about what's wrong. But the ones who do know, they
may not be sure what it is, that but they want a
pathway to make it right. And so I'm hoping
that we can use the visual and the emotional
engagement to bring these ideas to the public. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] For the graduate students
and the undergraduates, if you have research time
and you want to participate, just go to our website. And they'll be a form to
fill out and one of us will get in touch with you
to see about including you. And I just want
to thank also Mina and Sam and Amanda who've been
just really great researchers. Especially Sam, who
from the beginning, has been a partner in crime
for all the hard work. And also Christina Downs
who did those amazing gears. So thank you all,
have a great night.
Likes and comments should not need to be disabled on a video like this.
The argument essentially boils down to the idea that there's a relationship of logical implication between nepotism and racism. (Which is not logically provable.)
It goes as follows-
If a set of people are racially and/or culturally homogeneous, and if they are a historically disproportionately wealthy group, and if these people frequently engage in nepotism (giving information or job opportunities to people by virtue of them being a relative or friend) and have implicit bias towards there own group (all people do), then that eventually manifests as a statistical disadvantage for individuals who aren't part of that racially/culturally homogeneous set. You could demonstrate this with formal logic or a mathematical model.
Here's what that logic will also tell you - not one single person in that group could ever have had a racist thought let alone acted on a racist thought and you can still end up with that statistical disadvantage because of nepotism/implicit bias and advantageous historical circumstance.
An act of nepotism is not racist, yet it has consequences that might lead to a racially-biased society provided some other conditions are satisfied.
In reality there's waaayyy more at work in this topic- not least are self-destructive cultural patterns, the stress of poverty and the damage of single parent family environments. Nepotism is one of the smaller problems, plus it's not good for capitalism so corporations already actively try to mitigate it when hiring employees, plus you can gain nepotistic advantage by just making friends with people in the advantaged group.
[deleted]
Thanks for sharing. Whenever something like this gets posted, even on this sub, a swarm of angry white Americans descend on it, thus proving the need for more lectures like this.