Integration: The Illusion of Inclusion

things and starting to over associate all things good with whiteness that they now had access to and so we've been talking about that goal and what happened with that goal did it really happen um are we now integrated are things now fair um and then if that's the case then how do you go about creating unity and true integration which is i mean we're all connected right so it makes sense that we want to be we're one human family we're not multiple species so we should be able to live together harmoniously so why aren't we well it starts with the big lie okay it really does start with the big lie um and i think you know i actually i actually prepared for today's class i have look at you i'm recommending these books because you know actually i read a couple of them years ago um you have send by downtowns uh you have the color of law uh no equal justice and two nations black and white separate hostile and unequal along with post-traumatic and you know i was trying to figure out how we have this conversation because i think we have this illusion of inclusion which is kind of where or where i am that we have the illusion of inclusion so i want to actually read from post-traumatic and read read about what was it called watch watch watchmen right where they actually uh the show that came what are you doing nobody was bothering me you know the show that came on uh that uh really looked at tulsa and what happened in tulsa oklahoma there was a series that was on you didn't watch it okay okay maybe i watched a whole bunch of those types of things you made me okay i didn't really it was recent oh then maybe not i think it was called the watchman oh no no no i didn't see that okay and i'm glad i'm not talking to myself okay um and and i think a lot of people uh you know as i was reading through back through the material that i read years ago there's just a real mythology around the whole idea that we have this uh you know integrated community and we don't have an interview right for example i don't care where you are if you're watching this is there a black community do you know where the black people are do you know where the mexican people are do you know is there a hood is there a chinatown right all of those things yes and and again uh this this illusion that has been i'm gonna just have to read stuff about it i mean i've been i've been reading and it's just made me mad all over again right um but uh i wanted to start maybe with uh james lowen who wrote lies my teacher told me you know that that book um and he he wrote this book sundown towns and a lot of people had a problem with it they're going you know why are you dredging this up he says because we still have them exactly sun downtown this is not new we still have segregated communities we all we have white communities all of those things still exist in them in america and we've you know everybody's kind of acting like why can't everybody get along well you know every single time we try to there was a problem like burning your town to the ground so let's start with um a discussion about the more recently one that people have been talking about is greenwood so i'm going to read from the book uh and it's just a couple of uh paragraphs so that we can kind of start this conversation okay in 1921 african americans had managed to build greenwood a booming industrious town within tulsa oklahoma that came to be called the negro wall street by local residents segregated towns like greenwood formed because it was often unlawful for blacks to own businesses in white cities the tensions in tulsa were part of a national pattern during the teens and twenties when city after city exploded in the worst racial conflicts that the country would ever see fear of black independence and self-determination took a freudian form of rape area in one town after another racial violence was sparked by rumors that a negro had harmed a white woman here we go this happened in washington omaha kansas city knoxville tennessee longview texas rosewood and florida why were tensions exploiting exploding at this time in part because in the face of more than 300 years of bondage segregation and oppression african americans were organizing and were building healthy and economically self-sustaining communities against overwhelming odds they were becoming successful for a multitude of reasons white society could not sit casually by and watch us flourish so in one of the most successful black communities seen in america up until that time it seemed like something had to give one morning during rush hour people claimed they heard sarah page a white elevator operator scream and then saw dick rowland a black shoe shiner running from the elevator as a result roland was arrested in jail for assaulting a white woman the next day an article an editorial in the local newspaper called for roland to be lynched that night a white mob went to the courthouse to get rolling and a group of black men marched in from greenwood to protect him a confrontation between the groups ensued shots were fired and the riot began as a black man retreated to their black men retreated to their community white police officials deputized many of the mob and gave them instructions uh to in effect go out and kill you some damn [ __ ] perhaps as many as ten thousand whites stormed greenwood when it was all over greenwood had been raised to the ground hundreds were dead ironically sarah page refused to press charges against the accused and dick rowland was acquitted once again the familiar theme of a white woman being raped spawned a reign of terror by thousands of whites that left hundreds of people dead the majority black and the prosperous segregated town blacktown of greenwood burned to the ground um i think that again after slavery was over everybody has this idea that you know everything was fine everything wasn't fine everything began began to become separate separated more poorer than right more were on top of it because you're supposed to be free is it that's even a more uh psychologically damaging because when you're in bondage you know the deal you know what i'm saying as sick and twisted as it is you know the rules right exactly and one of the things that uh kind of struck struck me and i really loved reading this book uh two nations someone asked if you could go back over the the list of books you had in the beginning yeah you kind of randomly the one is called two nations uh black and white separate hostile and unequal by andrew hacker it was written back in the 90s he did a really good job um and it's really interesting because he deals with students and classrooms around this and it's amazing how they behave around it the other book is called no equal justice by david cole uh and this really looks at the criminal justice system um it's really straightforward we you can you can't read this book and not know how the institution uh the criminal justice system was never designed to be equal and just and fair to black people the other one is called the color of law this is a more recent book by richard rossing um excellent book where he really talks about the fact and i will read a few quotes from here as well um that you know that these were laws that were enacted federal state local laws that were enacted to maintain segregation um from from the time of slavery whether you you know once we had the de facto segregation and then that was ruled you know you know we can't have segregation anymore we'll have you know we want to make certain that everyone has equity and justice and fairness and that just simply never happened um and he talks about that he talks about how these were this was legislated this wasn't um some accident that happened it was deliberate and intentional and it was written into law the other book is called sundown towns um by james lowen uh and he basically documents all the sun downtowns in america and the fact that they're always they've always been there and they still are there and they're still on the books i mean they haven't just because they haven't been enforced it doesn't mean they can't right they're still there you know so so you know the idea that and it's so sad in so many ways because like i said it's when you when you it's like when you you're playing a game outside you see children's play playing outside you see a little a little smaller child can i play and like sure you can play but you have to do all these different things and they change the rules on them and you you know you realize like that's what always happens right they go you can play the game so long as you can um you know all these rules and then they change the rules so and every time we try to adjust i mean i know people who are very very um uh jaded on the the judicial process just even in voting and i've been telling them you know you have to exercise your vote because you have to exercise your locus of control you can't control every dynamic you can only control the action that you have and right now you know looking at you know you know you and i we recognize you know as baha'is we definitely believe in the oneness of mankind oneness of humanity but we're very clear about the status of where we are right now that you can't get to that point with injustice you know and and and this has been the thing that's so amazing about this conversation now and this all you know was kind of sparked i know our family started talking about it when a group of african americans uh bought up a bunch of land 97 acres 97 acres of land in georgia and you know there's been a buzz all over the place about why they did it uh i know there were real estate agents involved and one woman said she's she she's fears for her her son's life every waking day and so there i think the even though it's not real clear everything that's going on with that part of the thinking is let's build it let's let's create village let's create a community that's safe for us that loves us that embraces us then you have a whole lot of people that are like well you're self-segregating we're already segregated well and not only that but i'm like when have we been successful and not letting them burn all of our crap down that's my issue it's like yeah okay you do all that you get it together and unless you really have i mean because this is my point i believe in doing that kind of a thing uh in the sense that we have to deal with the reality of what's happening we know that race is a social construct it's not real it's all created because we're one species of human being the idea of division of races is really bizarre but the fact is there are real ramifications for racism and these these systems that are continuing to hold us back that's the reality right so let me let me read from uh two nations from andrew hacker and this of course is back in the 90s he says black americans are americans yet they still subsist as aliens and the only land they know other groups may remain outside the mainstream some religious sex for example but they do so voluntarily in contrast blacks must endure a segregation that is far from freely chosen so america may be seen as two separate nations of course there are spaces and places where the races mingle yet in most in the most significant respects the separation is pervasive penetrating and as a social and human division it surpasses others even gender in intensity and subordination america is inherently a white country in character in structure in culture needless to say black americans create lives of their own yet as people they face boundaries and constrictions set by the white majority america's version of apartheid it goes on to say that we must not be too quick and this is something that's amazing you know we talk about america being a multicultural nation right it says nor should we be too quick in proclaiming that america will become multicultural as well true one can point to exotic neighborhoods and parades and festivals foreign language newspapers television channels along with calls for new kinds of courses in college and schools it would be more accurate to say that the united states will continue to have a single dominant culture it doesn't really matter whether it's called white or western or anglo or eurocentric or any other title it would be better simply to describe it as a structure of opportunities and institutions that are willing to use and exploit the energies and talents of people of various origins so what we're saying is yeah we're multicultural to the extent that uh we can utilize whatever skills abilities you bring but don't get it twisted this song's not about you and over and over again in all the books you know and i'm going all the way back to the 80s coming all the way forward looking at even um isabel wilkins wilkerson's book books about this whole the migration of black people again there is just this kind of blindsided feeling that people have well no if people just work hard you but you know this is the thing that i think about all the time when you look at oppressed peoples okay and then you look at us and there are we talked about this before with the delete now there's there are oppressed people all over this planet that have experienced all kinds of things we're not suggesting that our plight is it's been you know necessarily more or less than those people's but we will say what's fascinating about this this situation with us is the illusion part because in other cultural frameworks even the oppression is clearly spelled out this is what the rule is even if you're in a horrible case cast situation that's what it is everybody's clear what it is it may be terrible and horrible but there's not a suggestion that it maybe isn't that way okay the problem with this being here is the idea that you especially these beautiful these values oh we are inclusive we want to be right but the the natural culture of what you actually want and believe is built on something that's nefarious like it's it's like i think about remember the lady remember i told you like normally i can see a microaggression coming i normally can see it and this is an analogy that literally walked into my house okay here's the deal i built a house i was very excited about doing that and all of the people who came in to do you know the first few days they go and they check everything in your house to make sure it's good the first month or whatever and the electrician was a woman the plumber was a woman i was like wow this is great look at all these women now they're all white women but hey they're women this is advancement we're in a little area that it was pretty you know rural and non-diverse and my whole block is diverse right i'm like we're coming along here you know this is what i start to feel right look at us we're moving up the mexican family the indian family i'm like we're good we're good we all both our houses look at us so the electrician lady is telling me because i'm so hyped about her being a woman is telling me all these pieces about my house more than i ever would want to know in life about my stove and about you know this is a filter did you know you can undo this like i'm like i didn't know but i have anything to do so i'm just you know i'm no problem to pump you up today so i took all of that in till we get to my ovens my double ovens so again i normally can see a microaggression coming a mile away someone's about to call me articulate or something i can tell it's gonna happen but in my house i wasn't prepared my garden was down we moved on up and built a house so i feel feeling pretty good and i'm complimenting this chick okay so what happens is the woman says to me these are your oven sets let me tell you about your oven your double oven i'm like okay so she says so this is the master and this is the slave about my others so i go so okay so i i stopped myself for a second i'm a little stuck because i'm like am i tripping we're talking about evans is it me or was that what just happened here right so i'm like while i'm stuck in my normally i can come with him you know i come i'm pretty quick but in my house when i didn't see it coming i'm kind of stuck so i'm sitting there i'm kind of stuck i'm not saying anything anymore because i'm trying to figure out what's going on and she goes so the master it cooks efficiently it cooks really quickly it takes all of the energy from this from the slave oven and basically the slave oven cannot it cannot cook efficiently it's slow don't put your turkey in that one because it won't get done listen to me i'm like if this is not an analogy for white supremacy what else what sucks all the energy from the bottom oven now again i'm stuck but what i've real i start realizing that and she's going just what i realize is two things are going on here one the originators the frigidaire originators of this oven which is what it's called i looked it up it is called the master's leg but you've been fragrancing you've been doing this work you told me for 30 years you have been fragrancing every one of the segregated homes you've been in because you've been doing this for white people for a long time in this area this is your spiel this is your little thing that you do right so you probably get a little chuckle from them and that little because it wasn't like you know and the slave it was made the whole thing was done in a way that i'm sure you get a response you were expecting a certain kind of response didn't even consider that you shouldn't say that to me so we start walking out and i'm like okay my children were there i would have been probably a little more swift but i was really trying to make sure i wasn't tripping you know i can be real black sometimes and i was like maybe i'm just am i being too black in this moment about the ovens no so we're walking and i said so first let me say honestly i really appreciated all the information you provided with to me about my uh appliances uh maybe consider losing your master slave analogy even if just for black home owners maybe so now this is her opportunity to access her full humanity this is her opportunity to to pause and recognize the error of her ways and to say because of course we all espouse these inclusive practices we all spouse that we it's all it doesn't matter whose house i'm in right well that's what it's called i mean you have samsung refrigerator but that's that's a frigidaire that's american made that's what it's called it's not i mean i get it but that's what it's called so you shirked your opportunity you decided to avoid your opportunity to access your full humanity right in that moment because again you could have called it the main and the secondary you could have called it primary secondary you could have called it the the um the uh the the um you know just anything else you know the top and bottom anything else that's what i was thinking about bottom uh you know primary uh secondary any of those things would not have elicited that kind of a feeling in me but your natural way of being has been normalized that you could in it just in your work you've been fragrancing with racism all these homes you've been going in for 30 years so of course now i got to call my home building association i got to call them to call the contractor to call the local people to get her ass okay now i gotta do all that but what i realized about that is that that analogy was so perfect for me because even in moving and building my house and doing all the stuff that i thought would give me some measure of of of of calm and safety because now we've all we've all done this in this neighborhood we all built our house no matter who you were and i still had to you see what i'm saying this is what i'm what i mean is that i was caught off guard because i had done all these things right that i thought would check create more safety for me in this space in my own damn house okay but that's what i started to realize this [ __ ] is deep it's it's very deep and it goes beyond it i'm like when you got me stuck in my kitchen thinking about whipping your tail over an oven it is a problem you know i'm saying so i think when we start the danger in in doing well the danger in doing in in moving up or in getting the access is not always good for you or your community and i think that's the part that's been a hard pill to swallow even though we believe in in integration yet there's a there's a piece of me you know and i know that there are a lot of people you know that are going gosh you know we can't you can't segregate and and the thing that i struggle with is the fact that people live with segregation happily every single day if you were to ask them you know any city where the black folks well if you go down yeah they go they're gonna know where they are and they're gonna oh well we you do you just think we just all i've got i've never been there before you know oh no i had somebody tell me oh i don't go over there you know i had a person say something to me about my house come into my house and say oh i don't usually go over there i go okay oh look at the time really you don't go over there um but so so while we lived with we live with this segregation we have a pretense that these lines aren't already drawn and so when when these people decided to buy up all this land there was something exciting about it to me there was something about it uh that was appealing and and the part that was appealing was you know i live in a neighborhood right now that's black my neighborhood is black everybody you know and there is a i don't even know what to call it there is a comfort there's a feeling where everyone speaks to everybody there's no drama i mean it's amazing to me the idea that what we do in our effort to try to move up as you would say is to move out in a way who says we have to do that i've been working with people all over the united states i work with people in section eight section eight uh people that are renting people who are constantly being evicted you know all kind of stuff so i've been saying to people and and these are families these are families of working class people that are struggling but they're saying you know i want my kids to be safe i want to not have to worry about i said have you ever thought about the idea of getting together with some of your friends and saying we we have to rent we can't afford to buy right now but let's all rent together right let's go let's find a space so that i know that if i'm not i don't get home in time then my son can go to your house and i know he's going to be okay i started working with families in communities around the united states and saying to them there's no reason why you can't still build community and still build their village even if you can't own it now the optimal thing is to own it so nobody can tell you you gotta go you gotta move and so i think it's really uh it's something appealing i think everybody that's why this article had got such a response because black people were kind of going i want to go can i come you said our girls is this no option even when but even when it's and it's weird because it's like going to a black college right only people who go to a black college really understand it like my friend sandy always says shout out to sandy wade my friend sandy always says i refuse to have conversation with people about black colleges and they they they cannot really wait i'm not gonna waste my time people try to go well what do you think she's like i refuse to engage in discovery you don't understand i'm not gonna and and the idea of being in a space for four years where people expect you to do well um to tell you that they have high expectations for you um that you meet other people who are wishing you well and who believe in your success and believe in your abilities i mean it was the weirdest thing when i met uh what if i wanted to say his name but i was the nerdiest teacher in my life i was like is he real like he was like a a movie character that i've never seen before in my life this the super super smart professor who had kind of a cross-eyed thing happening and was just super like corny and i was like are you real but it was so amazing to be able to be in a classroom with someone that brilliant that he wasn't even in touch with it that's how brilliant he was and i was like i it was like a made-up character it didn't seem real and having those experiences this close to you i was telling my daughter i probably know 100 doctors medical phds dental right i probably know 100 doctors and and i went to a tiny little black college fisk but the thing about it is having that access to those services is what people had in segregation they knew who the black doctors were they knew where the black dentist was they knew right because they had that access and as soon as they said oh there you can actually go to the white dentist it's like well he got to be better you got to be better than this one oh wait and there are people who deal with that now while the doctors i know still have that experience with people who are like oh wait not you right because it's we bought that idea that they're better but when you're in a four-year institution for four years it does something for you because people like why would you want to do that when that's not reality oh no no no you need some that's that was my reality for for that time that i was there and there's nothing like it just like running a black organization let me just say i again i have had you you wish for autonomy in your life but when you go into a space where you do not have to package yourself in any way to make yourself more palatable digestible for other people i don't have and i didn't even realize i was doing that i felt like i was being authentically myself finally at my last job until i got this job and i was like dang i was still kind of faking it a little bit i was still a little i'm just a little faking because i'm not i don't at all we got one guy there one white guy there and i have to remind him regularly you know we're not going to do that white [ __ ] though we're not doing any passive regrets we you got to come on to what we do here right and as much as you didn't mean it you got to stop doing that right jennifer you know i get to say that in a way and he is a kind-hearted person that has been indoctrinated in all this mess the way everybody else has right so how do we how do we capture that without promoting segregation like we have to capture the fact that there's something about that there is that community and the village the connections that are not against anyone else but yeah anyone has to explain the fact that they like being around their people i don't think there's anything necessary about having to explain why culture is important or you know um i like i said you know when i moved here i moved i'm back in the south and i'm and it's an amazing feeling of first of all being here first of all you have critical mass i see black people every day all day right and uh it's a wonderful feeling when you've been starved right you're in situations where everybody's behaving strangely because nobody's comfortable with with what's going on and then there are circles where you know again our family which is extraordinarily diverse and our our our world is very broad so we you know you've grown up with with diversity your whole life um you've not grown up with white is better you know um and i think that looking at just going back to isabel wilkinson's uh book the uh warmth of other suns and looking at people wanting to escape the jim crow south so what we what we have to appreciate that's happened and this is this is the part i wanted to share actually i wanted to share it on the slide but i'm gonna do that so here's what i would say that after slavery officially ended what you had was you know where did slavery go right so where slavery went was into peonage unlawful selling of people back into slavery okay so we know that you saw 12 years a slave wasn't just him so then you had after that you had uh black coats and sundown sundown towns and sundown laws right so you better not the sun better not meet you here i want to read this statement uh from a place called and you probably have heard of this um uh is it true that anna stands for ain't no [ __ ] allowed i asked at the convenience store in anna illinois where i stopped to buy my coffee yes the clerk replied that's sad isn't it she added distancing herself from the policy and she went on to assure me uh that all happened a long time ago i understand racial exclusion is still going on i asked yes she replied that is really sad now this was in 2001. right that this that particular thing was written but what people have this idea of is that you think everybody just went on and decided to be where they are they decided to be in places where there were food deserts where there was no industry where there was no there were no schools where there's no work yeah everybody just voluntarily moved over there or were they places where white people abandoned where there was redlining where banks decided they weren't going to give loans where you see that's the part of it that people don't understand that produced ghettos that is exactly what in fact um richard rostein says in his book but i want to read this piece he says today's residential segregation in the north south midwest and west is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but of unhidden unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the united states the policy was so systematic and forceful that its effects endured to the present time without our government's purposeful imposition of racial segregation the other causes private prejudice white flight real estate steering black bank redlining income differences and self segregation still would have existed but with far less opportunity for expression segregation by inner intentional government action is not de facto rather it is what courts call de jour segregation by law and public policy so some people don't get that they don't understand you know wait a minute doesn't everybody have a free and equal opportunity before the law no no i mean it's it's for me it's so hard for me to deal with the fact that there are people in 2020 that are sitting here going they just they just don't want to work hard they just well they chose to do that what is wrong with people no and but even black people when you know but also black people this is the part where the illusion is even more dangerous to me when we talk about randall robinson talking about people robbing people of the memory of themselves the idea i've been fighting with this lately because the idea is that we somehow never had it like this thing that we're always attaining we're attaining black excellence and we're attaining we're trying we want to move towards it ending the achievement gap we're trying to get stability in our housing so i had a black person having this conversation right we were glad i'm a black person and was having this conversation and um the wondering was posed i think it was jayada who actually posed it initially i think she said jada shout out to java um jefferson fenway fiat she said if every one of those people you're talking about the conversations are black on black crime with another black person and the whole idea was if everybody who is struggling right now with gang violence and and drug addiction and domestic violence and all things that are happening if they were enabled their parents were enabled to have a home that they owned a car and a job right if we just just those things you don't have to be the best neighborhood it has to be the best house but if just those things if they were able to all have those things the level of stability that would happen in the community the the reduction of drug abuse the reduction in crime that's it the whole idea of the 40 acres in the mule was the idea of being able to have some independence within the structure right of but so the question becomes how could you have you know all these cities that were burnt to the ground rosewood green wherever you know all of these places where black people were prospering mm-hmm white people weren't they weren't involved with that but what white people figured out was we need your money so we're going to we're going to offer you this illusion that oh yeah come on you can be here with us because we need the fact that you're consumers we need your money why why do we we don't want you spending money with you we want you spending money with us and again there's that belief that the white man's ice is colder but there's also a fair number of black folks that were like no no i don't i don't i don't want to do that and so what ends up happening then you start looking at the color of law yeah you start looking at folks that are saying we're going to make it impossible for you to do that we're going to use laws to do that people don't realize that the federal government made a statement you got to read the book but that is immoral immoral to consider that white people have to live in proximity of black people the federal government said that immoral so when we see you know when i see these black people you know buying all this acreage there's a part of me that goes i get it because we well i need to know my my children are safe i need to know uh that nobody can come in true story my son god bless him shout out to nadine um you know he's married with with a family he had just enrolled his children in school and he got an eviction notice it's called no fault or no no cause evictions remember when those first came out no cause i don't have to tell you i can say blacky blacky blacky i don't like you and there's nothing you could do it's called a no-cause eviction so he calls me up he's hot speaks it's hot my son is and he's like i can't believe it i just got my kids in school you know we pay everything on time and nope and then what did they do they started dumping out all of these complexes and and uh all of these uh townhouses and just replacing them with white people i mean essentially that's what they did they were able to do a racist thing by something called no fault no cause eviction yeah you just gotta go it used to be that you go you know i think i was you know this was you know i was discriminated against they go so and in the south they really don't care right yeah so i said to my son i said okay here's the thing they can't tell you to leave if you own it right so i said that over and over again i said now you know i'll help you do whatever i say but they can't tell you the leadership on it i can honestly say based based on what we know uh the other the other thing i would recommend that people look at is a social determinants social determinants of health economics what are the social determinants and so the social determinants of health for example look at stability they could actually look at whether you owned your house how long you owned your house and whether you are going to be sick as an adult the level of your health as an adult based on how many years your family owned their home which and i have how many years your family felt safe and stable that's the key absolutely that's the key and so i'm watching i'm even looking at my own grandchildren and the difference in them i'm looking at just that level of stability and we all know that in america that homeownership is the you know the step to wealth we all we all know that so some people go why are they buying homes well do we get the loan do we get even the salary equity to get to be able to qualify for the loan you see there's so many layers to this but everybody wants to look at one little piece over here and go but what about that i said well we got to figure out how that showed up and so after segregation after the black codes sundown laws all the lynching all of that they said okay we're going to integrate we're going to integrate you and but we're not going to allow you to live in white neighborhoods hence the big thick book here okay big big thick book a lot of sun downtown and matter of fact he identifies that a lot of people think the sundown towns were in the south yes they were that's not where the sundown tiles were illinois has something like 475 areas that are that are literally white only and so when you and even though there's nothing that says it's white only they make it absolutely impossible for you to be there and so i think that the education that we need to have all of us right because because i think again people they just have no idea even black people don't know why when i was in portland i said did everybody just sign up to live in albany what's that right do we all just have a meeting and say we're gonna move to help no that was the only place you could live right and then they said but you know that's really good area it's close and guess what they did took it back so here's what happened so then we had we after after we had segregation and we had redlining then we had oh wait a minute we have good words that go with it urban renewal oh gosh we're going to urban we're going to mow down the whole black community and build a college or whatever else we want hospital hospital whatever it is domain domain so we have urban renewal then there's clear clearing and curing uh blight urban blight we're just trying to fix the urban black another word for you know segmentation then then they said okay we got rid of all those words we got a new one now you all know the new word right simplification so you give it all different names gentrification i what's what i struggle with is you know i'm here you know i i know we get there we get to the point where a person called me the other day a really good friend of mine actually she is from where is she from originally i won't even say because i might am i kind of outer but she called me up she was hot because this one white woman ally friend just started saying she said she started hearing the woman started saying all kind of crazy things about black people so they were they were actually in the car driving to a conference and she goes you know we got a long way to drive and i'm going to need you to stop talking to me she said i'm going to need you to stop talking to me if we're going to make it to where we're going because she has a whole new idea about black people and she started unloading on her and she was saying enjoy she said i was so upset my blood pressure i said now here's the problem i said nobody should ever get your blood pressure up i said i don't give a nickels worth of time right now nickels worth of time to people who are going to get my blood pressure up i said what are you doing i said there's something called a scientific zero that you have to cut scientific zero done zero weird it's the mantra it's so want to drive you crazy if you take away the keys they take away the keys and she said to me she stopped and she goes oh my god what have i been doing she said i said you've been trying to get this way well you're trying to convince this white woman something oh haven't you you've been working yourself up trainer you could say to her here's my everybody knows this is my line weren't those flowers nice those flowers nice last spring and that's it that's all you're getting we're done and i i and again i'm feeling some kind of way because we go through so much we harm ourselves trying to get people but we can that's the thing that i've been working with our families around is like what is your locus of control because the end of the day you can tell your child that you own your house you can do all the things to make them feel safe in the space they don't have to know if you if you were to create a way to say can nobody come in here and tell us if you do all that the same way that you do when you have a house that you own you can create that same sense of stability when you are stressed and anxious the children are stressed and anxious right so you have to figure out how to regulate yourself i know this one all my children i'll just be concentrating like mom you mad are you mad i'm like why would i i'm mad he looks so intense like i'm not mad you know so it's one of those things where i feel like we have some control but what i'm thinking about we have 15 minutes left so i don't know i want to read some other stuff too okay so why don't you read this the next uh next step i want to read this piece from and i'm trying to read from each of the books and again the span of time that we're talking about how could you not know how could how could these books be coming out and you know the few more i could pull off the shelf of it's not like this is exhaustive but these are pretty solid how can we not know how is it people and this is where like like i know our kids come up against this in schools and everywhere else well my i just you know america is a country where you and i'm going do you understand what this country is based on anyway let me let me let me read this piece here so the history that has been hidden even though sundown towns were everywhere almost no literature exists on the topic no book has ever been written about the making of all white towns in america indeed this story is so unknown as to deserve the term hidden most americans have no idea such towns or counties exist or they think such things happen mainly in the deep south ironically the traditional south has almost no sundown towns mississippi for instance has no more than six mostly mere hamlets while illinois has no fewer than 456 even book length studies of individual sundown towns rarely mention their exclusionary policies local historians omit the fact intentionally knowing that it would reflect badly on their community communities that publicized uh abroad you know uh broadly so what we what we're looking at here is we're ignorant and we want to remain that way because it's so unpleasant human beings avoid difficult conversations they avoid anything difficult and europeans even more so so let's just let's just not talk about it we're not going to correct for it we're just not going to talk about it and then you have children growing up and this is why we have to have these conversations because our children grow up and they grow up in an environment that's sending them signals and giving them pictures of what reality is and it's not reality it's you know in other words we get snippets of of of anything positive and it's amazing it's almost like when anything wonderful is happening with black people it's like everybody's surprised good for you oh this just you know that's how how much we've normalized this craziness about who who we are how how you you begin to live inauthentically like you were saying didn't even know it right the the thing that happens is the older you get people give you they just give you room they go you know she's old i don't care what they call me well i first of all i don't want to say that i was living inauthentically okay that's not even in my i don't have the ability to just be inauthentic i'm just way blacker in my new role what you mean by way blacker but yeah what i mean by that is whatever black that i show up in is how i get to be it's not a it's not a you know i get to do black how i do black but i get to do it completely and so this way like are there any white people that go gosh am i being too white yes i think so i think there's some people who do who are aware that white is actually has its own cultural set of you know behaviors and values i think when i was explaining to some of my um white colleagues about how i was saying we can't do the white stuff in my office they're like what do you mean by that let me just give you an example i said if somebody says something to you let's say mom that you are supposed to meet me um on friday today is wednesday and i say to you hey just uh um i would really appreciate it if you're on time on friday now you've never been not on time to come to meetings and it's wednesday so you might say what what are you talking about now that person may have just thought i would really appreciate it but when you say i'd appreciate it so now i'm getting stuck like i didn't appreciate him saying i would appreciate it this is the kind of stuff that i get because that's that white stuff why are you doing that why are you doing that you could easily just say look forward to meet you on friday if you want to remind them or thursday say gentle reminder i have a meeting at such and such a time so both of us let's try to be there there's so many ways to do it but the condescending way and it doesn't seem like it's condescending is an aspect of whiteness that people who are aware go am i being too white they'll do that so wait a minute am i asking am i yes you are or am i doing really wide and doing this yes you are that's not anything or wrong with you also but with us assumption that things like which is interesting because i talk about in the book about on time uh being efficient being professional see these are also buzz words right and there's a fundamental assumption that everything that is the opposite of that would be black right um and it's and and again you have people who are running whole countries well i don't believe in robert's rules of order or parliamentary procedure there are tons of ways to arrive at consensus right than to have to say i nay abstain oh my god poke my eye out right i have to do that and we can still arrive at it at a decision we can still share ideas and there's other things that we have to begin to question right you know it's like it's like anything else it's like um you know our idea of if i would ask everybody right now what do you wear to an interview but what should one wear me what i don't wear anymore i don't wear suits when you're a short woman and you wear a tailored suit i'm telling all the shirt women out there don't do it because pete you'll start to see this like isn't she cute in her little suit see and you know what i pay you a cute salary and i'm not the one okay proper chinese a little is that everything we define intelligence professionalism all of those things it's amazing to me and we just accept what people say like people have said to me you know in my in my clinical practice and i loved being in clinical practice i loved my my my clients i loved working with people uh it was just something that kind of flowed with me and i have to tell you if i'd have done the things that i was told to do in my community and the people that i was trying to help i would have never gotten through the door they would never come through the door right now so again it's like i think about all the things even i've been trained to do and we just make an assumption this must be the right way to do it right who's friends who says that's the right right way to do it you think they do it like that in china they've been around for a long time okay they'll do it like that in china they don't do that in nairobi they don't do it like that so when you start creating these notions of rightness correctness all of these things they're colored by the delusion in this country the the absolute delusion of white supremacy it just really does and i think the difficulty that i'm struggling with right now is what are our children seeing what do young people believe about themselves what do they believe when i see the media i always do you know i always do the little the little uh thing with my audience is where i have them close their eyes and give them a scene and then they they figure out who the people are because of what we've consistently seen in the media you know there are more black people that are actually doing okay right but you don't we don't see that all the time you don't see even when you imagine uh graduations and you're mad people don't see black people but it's happening every day black people you know running companies and organizations and advancing their education and studying and working and loving every day that's been my experience the majority of my experience in my 62 years but that's not what i see that's not what we're showing we're showing the children and so i think when when this whole thing came up and i kept thinking we got to talk about this whole idea of how do you stay safe how do you build village how do you be inclusive when you're in danger well with one there's a but there are things that you can do that we do that we can stop so one of the things that we don't do is and i will say this i have a few friends of mine they know who they are who are excellent at connecting me with other people who are black who are doing things excellent they focus on oh you there's there's a black person who owns this business they might want to connect you might want to connect with and then you know what i do i connect with them right because that's the other thing is that we don't promote the folks that we know who are doing those things i always try to put someone on our own sense of wait i should be the only one am i going to be threatened by somebody else's position also stops us from being able to create village we know what they're going to be doing to us out here if we can strengthen what we're doing in here right that's the first thing is that one thing that happened before desegregation right before that happened was that people had resources they connected with one another they felt value in that they didn't like feeling collectively they were being oppressed but they did have that and what i've noticed is that there's this this kind of white rugged individualism people are starting to try to adopt um in order for them to be successful you know and that's not what ever kept us safer together a whole or growing so for me i'm like what can we do the first thing we teach our daughters and our sons is to try to be connected with your fellow person the cattiness the the the insta you know instagram and snapchat and all these things have allowed people and tick tock to back bite about other people publicly to promote something that you know somebody might have gotten a fight in the past you'd be like yeah they got a fight got a butt kick but now they have to relive it forever because it's on world star or something right so one of the things that we can start to do and i've told my brother this the other day um you can't watch or support things that are um exploitive of people right you see someone who's poor or you see someone who's a little kid and they're they're they're making a little kid you know do things or say things that are you know we can't continue to laugh at that and share those things it's basically like the woman in my living room it's like my kitchen perfuming the space with that we're perfuming the space i heard my daughter's friends talking about who that they think was gonna have a baby first i didn't hear who do they think was gonna get married first that wasn't the conversation it wasn't who did they think was going to have the strong relationship in the family or have the degree right those were the things that i was hearing the conversation and i i pointed that out to them you guys find it abnormal in any way that you aren't talking about having a solid relationship before you were talking about bringing another person into the world that's fascinating right like and they were like huh because again it's all about how we decide to tell folks what's the best for them what we look at them what we want to see i want to see you get a degree i want to see you i take own your own business or you know what that's really focus on we don't want you to work for anybody else how can we create a way that none of you guys have to work for anyone else like these are things that we can start to do um that i think that that is within our control we have to love one another i was telling um i don't know who i was telling this but i tell all the time because i'm always tap dancing for money it's just a little shuffling i gotta do but i told people i said listen i really want to make people remember who they are what we can't do is by the illusion that we are less than absolutely that we are not equipped that we are not beautiful that we are not um you know we don't have uh a promise and spirituality and intelligence and creativity like these are all a lot that's not that that's who we why everybody wants to be like us because we have a little thing so we can't decide that you know we go we look and say oh kim kardashian we're a but better than we do okay this is the way that she worked better than us you know this is my my ear my issue so when everybody there was this whole thing around adele she had some bantu knots and she was in uh wore some bantu knots out in um she was in jamaica or no she was she jim and she was in jamaica or anyway she's wearing jamaican colors and the jamaicans were kind of like hey she's just repping us you know rubbing jamaica yay right and everybody's like well you know she may have been culturally appropriating but not with ill intent and i was like you know i'm giving damn about intent i only care about impact i don't care about your intentions but the reality for me was if the impact and i'm not saying she was trying to do something or whatever but the impact is little black girls who wear bantu nets saying wow adele looks pretty in them i don't look pretty in my bantu knots but she looks pretty in them this is when we start that's the problem with that because everybody's decided that that if the white people do it it's okay and even if they do what we do it's okay now when it's them it's beautiful when it's them it's new when it's them and that's the part that i'm like we can't control that right so like for instance my daughter never saw a disney princess until the princess and the frog right never now she got a lot of disney presents but i cut all the heads off cut all the faces off all the disney dress-up clothes so even when we got to disney world or disneyland there was no like oh it's the princesses well i told her that all her little outfits they were all fairy outfits because fairies have powers and they don't wait around to get rescued so um we never had princess parties but we did have fairy parties so i told them i was a fairy that's right you were very so then we had all people we had oh careful we had a fairy party and all the the people who came had to have a fairy like power right i remember i think sedai came with a she had a uh army jacket and some fairy wings and i said who are you and she said like revolution fairy i'm not mad at it i'm not mad at it so anyway all of the disney uh princess outfits i cut off the faces and then i told her that these were different fairies who had powers so the snow white outfit she said that fairy could run really really fast so when we got to disneyland and she saw snow white she goes mom never the fairy who could run really fast they could run really fast so again we can control even though you know again there's so many things coming at us without like telling the child they can't watch any tv you can be careful about what you expose them to how you empower them how you make them feel like no you're the you we're the bomb you know they're okay but we're the bomb everyone nightmare got the uh the first white doll she ever got somebody gave her a cheerleading doll and she goes like mother what do you think about this doll i was like she's cool why she was like what do you think about her skin i said her skin is cool she's not prettier than your other dolls but she's cool she's got a talent she cheerleads she's got something going on you know what i'm saying i'm not mad at her but that wasn't the primary doll that wasn't the this is the pretty doll right i think there's ways for us to control things in our space that don't allow our children to buy into that and the more we do that you know there's a piece and i'm gonna end here um it's actually a statement from martin luther king and i remember uh when i read it it uh i felt some kind of way about it uh he's talking about his a conversation he had with his mother and i just listened to it he says every parent at some time faces the problem of explaining the facts of life to his child just as inevitably for the negro parent the moment comes when he must explain to his offspring the facts of segregation my mother took me on her lap and began to tell me about slavery and how it had ended with the civil war she tried to explain the divided system of the south the segregated schools restaurants theaters housing the white and colored signs on drinking fountains waiting rooms lavatories as a social condition rather than a natural order then she said the words that almost every negro hears before he can yet understand the injustice that makes them necessary you are as good as anyone the injustice that makes it necessary and the whole time you were talking i was thinking about the injustices that make it necessary for us to have to do that for us to deliberately create a way for our children to love themselves do you know what i'm saying there is um and then there's again we live this life we know what this is but the injustice that makes it necessary the injustice that even makes wellness wednesdays necessary and then you have to sit in a room with people that go i don't know i don't know i don't know see this is why it's not that bad this is what this is where things could lead to violence okay because you just get no no this is where this is where my therapeutic stuff comes in because you know the thing that you gifted me with thank you mom is a quick brain so people say it's up to me you know my goal i want you clutching your pillow tonight in shame for what you said or did so i'm gonna be very nice and and very very meticulously let you remind you that you are not accessing your full humanity in this moment that's the one thing i get to hold on to as i have my full humanity right i'm never going to do something that i won't try to correct if it is harmful in any way nothing gets taken away from me to change my behavior and shift him and do better so when you decide not when she decided not in my in my kitchen to say oh my gosh i've been saying that for years when she decided not to acknowledge that she had made done something wrong she did not she decided not to access her full humanity in that moment she decided not to be a human being in her fullness and that's that's on her that's not my fault and i'm not about to freak out about i am going to get her you know because there is justice but but that's the thing at the end of the day we have our humanity we always have and the only time that it starts to go away is when we forget who we are and how noble we are yes right i'm so tired i was talking about being resilient that's not going to talk about what happened after the fact i always feel like we stabbed victims and we're like we're so good at getting stabbed we just keep you just don't die you know i'm just i i'ma stop we gotta stop the stabbers you gotta stop the stabbers and we have to you know there was something i was in a class it was a book book one i'm in a book one class yeah a long story anyway um so i'm doing this book one and there was a question that was asked um asked about when you do things wrong right what what do you what do we feel mentally emotionally spiritually what happens i mean what happens when we choose when when you choose to do the wrong thing when when the woman was continued realizing that maybe i shouldn't be calling this a slave and hard-working and this one's lazy the other oven was lazy the slow oven inefficiently cooking and you know there's a point at which each each one of us make decisions in our lives and i remember reading a piece around wrongdoing and when people do things that are wrong um and that what happens in that moment you use the term you you're not accessing your full humanity but what we do when we decide to do something that's wrong whatever that thing is is we rob the world of goodness in that moment and we add to the pollution and and i remember reading that i must have been 20 years ago i'm reading about that that it's not that we say evil or sin or any of those things it's about having the opportunity to deliberately place goodness in the world and not robbing yourself or the world in that moment of that goodness and then being someone who adds to the pollution i mean it just really changed me it it did something to me to think about it that way so i don't you know i know that we do what we do we love what we do we love people um you know we're not clearly not perfect people but we want to help people you know that that is what you know someone asked me about my children um and what i admire most about my children is that they're kind and that they're loving and that they share and that they help and that they give and that they that they uh produce you know i think about that the fact that i know every single one of my children are kind and loving and giving and it's as though those qualities are ignored you know it's not and i and i'm glad that in addition to that they went to school they have good jobs and getting degrees and that's that's fine but more important to me is the kind of character the kind of person that you are and i thought about you know martin luther king sitting on his mother's lap and her having to have that hard conversation with her son who had such promise who was so amazing and yet she had to very gingerly explain to him a system that has no explanation there is no way to make it right so i think that whatever we decide to do you know i you know i might still call those folk that georgia i'm gonna give me a little plot of land can i summer vacationing but i'm not mad at them i understand it i appreciate it uh not only that you know just in terms of it as a business move i mean you know there's a whole lot of uh stuff that's going into that and you know and i don't know but i think all of us for a moment thought gosh is there a space we can be safe and be loved is there a space where we we can prosper and grow and not be molested is it is there a space right um and again you're right you know my husband says says to me the other day says you know you're not in syria we're not dealing with bombs falling on our heads at least not yet not yet i would say have the ability to create that though what you're saying mom we have the ability to create those safe spaces and that's the thing that i want people to remember you can control if you talk about your neighbor you can control if you uh if you uh you know demean someone for the job that they have you can control that right you can beam light into children you can beam light into men and women who you walk down the street and see you have that capacity to make them feel safe with you in that moment and the more that you build those moments that is also putting something out into the universe i was just telling my brothers on that today when you put out positivity it just creates its own energy around you it just does and i think that we can do that so while we're working towards feeling safe literally in our space we have to create safety in our hearts and with other people who look like us too that's not segregation that's integration all right true integration with uh with one another and that's what we do on wellness wednesday my mom and i are very integrated so we want to integrate with y'all now shout out to organic oneness absolutely be it down here okay i wanted a shout out to to tracy uh tracy my niece who was on uh that is running for the school board in and here's the thing monrovia california monrovia california and um what i'm saying is you know it's not just promoting her i walked through her school i walked where i walked through the school with she and and niecy and carmen and she knew the name of every single child every single child because she loved those children and she loves her staff and i watched her do that for 30 years that's what you need on your school board you need tracy tracy golar she beams light means light right so now and these are all those plugs organic oneness like i was saying our good friend cider taylor and chicago who is working for justice and and she really is trying to create that true integration and the work that she's doing so if you're in chicagoland area look up organic oneness support some of the things that they're doing um she pushes for justice and that's how we know we're gonna get to unity and last thing to shout out please visit the black parent initiative website we are having our annual fundraiser to serve black families in portland and you know they need it so please visit www.thebpi.org yes i'm the executive director of the black panther initiative and joint you can join i think for free you can join our um our live luncheon for free we're going to have dr joy giving us a word and some beautiful talented children um singing and talking about what our organization means to them so please tune in anyway we're happy you're joining us we're happy we're together we're creating these safe spaces and please do the same where you are thank you so much i'm going back to bed i'm tired i'm sleepy too today look i'm in the dark it's rough we had part of the storm coming in oh okay yeah it rained all day well you know we have the forest fire so we have the dark haze so i got you know i've been you know my air purifiers run in my got my sage in the water boiling out and just trying to clean my air so i don't i know i don't sound as if they don't have a lot of those uh fires contained exactly but it's crazy right now so we um yeah they're all it's it's terrible the air quality is that hazardous here so we are um i just ordered more air filters so yeah pray for us in the northwest oh actually the whole west coast is burning so yeah uh but anyway see you all pray for humanity yes yes all of us we all need right now all right be safe be happy be well

Channel: Dr. Joy DeGruy

Views: 113,149

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Id: hxk5Sfx8s_I

Length: 71min 45sec (4305 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020