The Birth of a White Work Culture: Patriarchy, Policing, & Assimilation

hello and welcome this is your host enrico immanello here with another episode of intentionally act live with me today i've got a very special guest this is uh dr jacqueline batalora of saint xavier university in chicago where she is a professor of sociology in the course of her career she has not only penned birth of a white nation the invention of white people and its relevance today but for a time she was actually an active duty police officer more on that later also joining me today is the former chief of police in moultonborough new hampshire and our director of partnerships at all aces inc john monahan whose work includes understanding whiteness and healthy manhood in addition to racial equity so welcome to you both thanks thanks for having me yeah of course and uh so jackie uh you know before we really jump into our questions uh the first kind of uh thing we do to set the scene is to ask all of our guests what made you fall in love with what you do oh my god well it um learning about the truthful history which was radically different from what i learned formally in school was life-changing absolutely life-changing literally the world i inhabited was much different than i thought it was and there's truthfully not a part of me that has not been changed and changed for the better because of it thank you so uh john i know that uh we've had you host the show a number of times we've had you uh join us as a guest a number of times and so people have kind of learned a little bit about your background and how you got into racial equity but what is it that really kind of uh you know got you thinking about uh the culture that we're living in and especially that connection to healthy manhood yeah i think um you know i i got into police work because i was like if there are people being harmed or oppressed and someone needs to stand up for them that was really what i got into it for and as i found out similar to jackie that the there's a different truth for some folks you know a truth that we're not taught or shown i was i felt lied to and so and i was like well that's that's not gonna stand you know and so my work really became uh well what is the truth you know i mean and and we're supposed to be truth seekers we really are and so you know i felt as though it was my job my duty to find out what the real truth was and if um in finding it out that that certain people were being oppressed uh left out harmed in some way then it was my position as especially as a white man in this world to uh to use my voice and my privilege to to speak up and to show people things that they might not normally see yeah thank you both for your answers um you know in in thinking about that theme of truth uh one of the things that strikes me about white supremacy culture is it kind of sets us up for this idea of there are some people who are like really or truly american and there are those who are not uh so i i think it's pretty obvious that uh you can see that i am uh i'm of a different race and growing up in new hampshire uh where john currently lives uh i certainly felt that quite a lot right so i would be surrounded by classmates you know very innocently kind of saying like well my connection is uh so real to this country because my ancestors came over on the mayflower right and these kinds of things and so i learned to kind of dread uh those projects related to family trees and connected to uh well how american are you really you know that's kind of like the subtext in a lot of uh of school assignments uh that i certainly encountered and so we've kind of got this question right so uh this this aspect of our culture is in so deep that we often don't really understand that that's what we're doing right but uh so there are a lot of people out there that might unknowingly hold this view that to truly become american you have to give up parts of yourself you have to fit into something and so uh growing up in school that was often something like well i need to be eating certain foods that are american so like peanut butter and jelly instead of having rice and some meat and vegetables at lunch for example and so i guess what i'm really curious about is why is this underlying assumption a problem and you know if we're thinking about how we live right so americans work a lot uh and we actually live a lot of our lives at the workplace even if we have this kind of false separation of our real selves and our work selves but uh you know if we have this assumption uh affecting things in our real lives then it also affects us in the workplace as well absolutely i'm happy to jump in on that um it it's so rooted in um a history deeply planted literally the very first congress of this country um crap they had to of course craft all the laws of the new nation and they determined that in order to naturalize a u.s citizen um a person had to be white and and so whiteness and citizenship in this country um has been a a clear equation um established as a matter of founding law and that requirement of being white lasted more than 150 years so to to just unpack that a little more that meant that someone who was poor but if they were white they got access to citizenship if they were male or female but white you got access if you were jewish or muslim or atheist or christian or some other faith tradition but white you got access to it so i think for me that particular law again that lasted over 150 years and that was this clear statement on the part of our founders that more than your intellect more than your caring and adhering to and and holding up the principles upon which this nation was found more than all those things we care about you being white so this really flies in the face of that whole uh cultural strand of elevating and valuing merit right because people didn't do anything to merit their their white skin so what's that all about well it certainly it it flies in the face of merit when you know about it the but one of the trickeries of whiteness in this country is that our education system has withheld um so much information that if we knew it and knew about it as as john mentioned in our um introduction you know he was angry that he didn't know um and and i felt the same way when i started to learn some of the more truthful history um and and to when i started to learn um so much so many of the pieces that were left out um i too felt very angry and um i think because so many people are denied a truthful history of u.s history there is this incredible ignorance um that allows for uh some of the beliefs that are prominent of such as meritocracy yeah so john i'm really curious like have you observed similar things in your racial equity journey uh in working on yourself and with groups to kind of interrogate and dismantle some of the things uh that we thought we knew sure yeah you know i i come from southeastern massachusetts uh from a very irish catholic uh background you know and so there's there's all this like uh pride you know in my my family about their irish heritage uh and and having gone to ireland uh you know it's sort of it's stories that are told really there are that don't necessarily really reflect the culture of that nation you know uh but it's this heritage that we we hold so tightly to that that isn't necessarily true or real and so and i think that we find that uh in this country as well um you know that that people hold on to these ideas of what patriotism is and i think you know even very recently i would say when i when i grew up i i you know i remember going to the 1776 parades and you know we were all everybody was dressed up like minutemen and you know to playing drums and that was patriotism back then you know and then during this pandemic uh you know after 9 11 police officers and firefighters and emts they were they were considered patriots because of the the heroic acts of 9 11 uh you know dealing with that and this pandemic has really shown us that doctors and nurses and uh even front line workers the people bagging your groceries are are patriots in a different way and so it's it's a how we define it how it gets seen it really uh it depends on the flavor of the day but i think the overarching theme is who is the person deciding that and who's the person that is saying well this is what it means you know we see far too often uh written in the media narrative uh the people who get voice time to to try to define who gets access who gets to belong who we get to uh consider to be americans you know and and we the founding fathers of this country are not the founding fathers of this country you know our indigenous folks are are the founding people of this country and so you know we we we are being fed false uh false narratives oftentimes and and take it at face value if we don't question if we don't have the critical thinking and introspection to uh to think about the things that we've been told and find out if they're true or not yeah so i mean like life is hard enough to navigate already so we can kind of understand if people are finding out things about what they thought was a true history of this country all right well yeah what does this all mean for us as citizens but i think also we we bring a lot of assumptions into the workplace as well right and i think an undeniable fact is that well organizations are embedded in communities and so the cultures that we have at work they come from our our wider cultures and so you know we were just talking about meritocracy a little bit and certainly we in our in many of our work cultures we see that as kind of a fundamental thing but we also know that within our organizations there's pressure to conform there's uh you know there's actually not an openness to originality or ideas that deviate from this established standard which we're never explicitly told but we all kind of feel it we feel that we have to navigate around it and so you know i i think one of the the areas that i'm really curious about as we referenced in the intro jackie you are a professor of sociology although yes for a time you were also working for a chicago pd and john you've been an officer at various different posts and i'm really kind of curious from your perspectives how this kind of shows up i get that not everybody watching is a police officer but still i think that some of the dynamics we see are are common to many organizations yeah i know that i um i have witnessed that expression of um white as american equation um in in many arenas and um literally from taking my child to the playground interacting with other parents at school to my experiences in the chicago police department when you're paired up with a fellow officer partner and you're with a group of police officers and the police officer of of color who is asked you know where where are you from and they say you know i'm from the south side and they say no no no where are you from from where are you really from right it's something that most of us uh white people who speak english uh don't ever we're just assumed even if our family arrived in this country last week and we speak english the beginning assumption is that we belong here um and that's just not the case and and so it just makes me think about how many people how many fellow co-workers we have um principally those who are not white who who just get this grating message day in and day out that you don't really belong here yeah i mean this is uh this is something that i've encountered quite a lot in my life and uh actually i'll share that one time i was going for an a job interview and i showed up at the cafe where i was supposed to meet this person i was on the phone with them trying to find them and eventually i saw somebody so i tapped them on the shoulder and said oh i think you're looking for me she took one look at my face and said no that's not right voice also coming through the phone like uh yes hello and i'm your two o'clock i'm here to here to talk to you and what she said to me was oh i'm sorry i didn't think that your voice would go with your face which was like so do i get the job or not right yeah i would say that was one of the easier salary negotiations i ever had in my life but uh nonetheless i'm not sure it was totally worth it but uh yeah and i think you know something in what you said jackie that was really interesting is it doesn't matter if you got here last week if you have white skin and you speak english then you are assumed to belong here and earlier you had mentioned that whiteness at first had a very narrow and very specific definition right so many people are aware that many jewish people are considered to be white today although historically they were not and so what this leads us to kind of underscore is that whiteness has evolved right so at first irish for example were not included as white and john you were talking about how uh in your family you observed that there was a certain amount of pride in being irish so that's interesting that the uh the definition of whiteness can change but it still excludes people who are not visibly uh part of that group yeah it's absolutely true my father uh when i when i became a police officer he he he said well we've come a long way he did a lot of family lineage and he said we came from chicken thieves in uh in indiana so he uh he joked you know that that we had uh progressed up the the ladder i guess of success in this nation uh from being people who did time for stealing chickens to to me becoming a police officer and eventually a police chief you know but um you know yeah i just like to add to this that the um who counted as white it they were counted people could different groups could be counted as white and then not white at the same time for example after the treaty of guadalupe hidalgo when mexico was virtually chopped in half and the united united states then went from texas to california all of those mexican people who yesterday were mexican citizens living in mexico and then were mexican citizens living in the united states and they didn't move right and and those uh mexican people were treated as white by virtue of federal law so they got access to naturalization but at the local level they were not white and at the state level you would have state laws that made it illegal for a white person to marry a mexican person and actually they made a carve out for mexicans because anyway that's a longer story but but the point being that people could be not white and white at the same time for example the irish lucky for the irish catholics the irish protestants who came to this country before them had already established that that people from ireland count as white for access to um naturalization law but the irish catholics who began coming in large numbers starting in 1830 they were not treated as white at the local level and and so anyway you have all these incredible complications about white for certain purposes and not like for others white by federal law not white by local or state law and then some groups such as african americans who weren't by any version of the law but local practice or state law or or federal law um and so it's it and the other piece that i think is worth noting in any conversation about whiteness is that the definition of who is white has never been defined as a matter of federal law even though we have laws that turn on whether a person is considered white or not and so what that meant is that the determination of who is white gets um fought out in courts of law and so it's judges ultimately who are deciding who's white so when people talk about racism or race rather being a social construct that's not a frivolous line i i don't think that a lot of people really understand like just how deep this goes uh i mean maybe a parallel to draw here is um i've seen a number of people yelling at other perhaps americans who are speaking languages other than english right and there's this very uh you know very kind of pointed like oh we speak english in this country kind of deal but in fact the united states has no official language of any kind whatsoever english is not the official language right there is no official language we just assume that it is right and uh what's what's crazy is very few people take the time to actually correct that assumption right and half the time it's because it works for them you know so right there again we're flying once again into the the face of merit which you know we say to one another we hold really really dear i think too something that we don't think about is as other groups have become part of the white group you know they they're suddenly access to privilege access to naturalization and far from pushing back against that construct of whiteness a lot of groups just kind of quietly slide on into the inside right and then become perpetuators of it themselves and it is a fascinating thing to to perpetuate a culture because at some point that means that you identify as it right yep this is me this is what somebody like me does right it becomes part of the moral calculus and so i'm also aware that to become a police officer to join the military even you are indoctrinated into a culture you are taught how to be a member of that culture right and at some point you either have to accept that or reject it and uh you know that can kind of reconfigure your sense of self as well so i wonder if that's something either one of you or both could speak to well i was not in the military but uh my son is actually joining the marine corps my father was an army veteran and i did you know i went through the new hampshire police academy and worked for a municipal agency then a state agency and eventually became a chief of police where i could sort of run my own show and i think i did that as a result of not feeling as though i wanted to assimilate to certain cultural pressures you know that some of these larger institutions held and as a young officer you know it's very easy to sort of get the the more seasoned and gritty people to say well that's not the way we do things here we do things like this or and i can't tell you how many times i heard uh they'll teach you stuff in the academy and when you come back we'll teach you how to be a real cop and you know and that is that there's the there's all the mission statements and all the things that they write on the wall and then there's how the culture really exists within departments you know and and that's where you can either decide to keep your mouth shut you can decide to assimilate or you can decide to leave and it takes it takes a lot of pressure and a lot of courage to stand up to and change some of those especially the oppressive practices i'm not saying all the policing is bad there's some people doing some good work out in that world uh standing up for people that need to be stood up for uh but there's also a darker side you know that asks you to leave parts of yourself at the door um and if not then uh you know sort of suffer the conflict consequences of that and as a white man that that was lesser for me than it would be if i was a woman or if i was of a different color or you know and there are officers in this country of not were not born in the united states and you can speak better to that than i can uh jacqueline yeah well i'd love to piggyback on just that um in in my experience in the chicago police department um i mean really one of the tremendous forces that revealed to me that i needed to leave was just the weight of that culture that that you speak of right it's not about individual police officers being good or bad but rather it it was this culture that really reduced all of us to the lowest common denominator um and and you know that just i worked too hard to generate a few brain cells in this head you know i i was not gonna allow them to be lost um there and and how terrible right how terrible that this this institution that we empower with the legal ability to take one's life yeah right we is is in the has created a culture of um [Music] being ignorant um of of cultural um biases being really supported and and nurtured rather than challenged and um critiqued and yeah so i i found that to be um really difficult and and it made the decision to leave easy for me yeah um i i just knew that i had to get away from it and as i said you know before i felt myself changing i heard myself changing um and i just found it really frightening so what did that look like for you jackie i began to hear myself and it wasn't like saying some sort of uh racial um or ethnic epithet it wasn't like that but it was more physically how i held myself hmm and uh it just were i wish i could think of some of the words that i heard myself using but just words i would never ordinarily use and that just aren't respectful you know i i i want to be a respectful human being i can stand up for what you've got to do i can give you directions as a police officer um and expect you to comply and follow up if you don't but there's just no reason to be disrespectful it's not it's not a requirement of doing that job well in fact it's a deterrent i would argue so uh earlier john was talking a little bit about how he got into policing and jackie i don't know if you'd be interested in letting us know how you got into policing because if i'm not mistaken you are already fairly well along your career path you are already a professor of sociology at that point was that right well i had just received my phd at northwestern and i had a law degree and i had already practiced um law but well while i was finishing my phd at northwestern um an undergraduate student uh was shot and killed he was black unarmed you know very the story that is all too familiar with um people in the united states today um and his name was mark russ and i believe it was just about a week before um again unarmed uh african-american woman latonya haggerty had herself also been shot and killed by the police and i am i thought the city was going to be on fire yeah and um but it was managed in part because the officers who did the shootings were themselves african-american and i think that got used by the powers that be to uh kind of manage uh the response in the city but i couldn't shake it i i just i i absolutely couldn't shake it and and i had already taken the police exam um not because i wanted to become a police officer but because i was teaching in a criminal justice department at the university of illinois chicago just while i was finishing my my graduate work and i thought you know so many of my students are going to go take this and maybe it'll help me be a better instructor you know to know what it is they're being asked and so um the next thing that happened is i had some police officers showing up at my door a couple of whom i knew sort of personally um not very well but personally from activism in the lgbt community and so they showed up at my door you know trying to convince me that it would be a good thing for me and so i had i got into policing with chicago police department because first of all i wanted to learn about this institution on and i wan i had hoped that i would have been able to make a difference but it became very clear to me that that that was not going to happen interesting so uh before we get a response from john on that same kind of thread uh we've got a couple comments from our viewers so caitlyn is asking this to john but i'd like to bounce this out to both of you so caitlyn asks john did you feel as though you had to assimilate to a certain level before you could effectively advocate for chain so jackie you you just kind of answered that question a little bit but yeah thoughts on that i think as a young officer i did think that because i felt powerless you know i i will never forget when a a certain uh sergeant got promoted to lieutenant he was in charge of my my barracks up at troop f and i was a road trip i covered it nine towns and two head police departments it was a very rural community and so i was the police officer for these seven other towns and it was really hard work like a lot of work a lot of you know domestic violence and burglaries and sexual assaults and really difficult cases um and and i'll never forget thing and there were other patrol areas that were far less heavy of a lift and i remember thinking well this guy used to work my patrol area he'll understand that this workload should be distributed differently and so i went to him and i was like hey lt you know maybe now that you're in charge you can do something about this and he was like i remember that so well it was awful you know it's so much work and uh thanks for what you do you know and i was thinking like you can change that you know you you now have the rank like you can make a difference now and chose not to you know uh and so i think you know i'm not sure what i could have done as a younger officer in much of the impetus for me to go and run my own department was because i thought well if i can't uh make or affect change within the system that i'm in then i will go find a system that i can affect change in and so that that was the the reason that i i changed and went to my own department i kind of jokingly say it's like leaving corporate and going to run your own small business you know because it was just such a big organization and i went to such a tiny little department but i could really uh have an impact and not and i have such a fight to do so nice i mean there there is definitely serious pressure on young officers are regardless of one age one's age green officers i guess i should say um in large urban police departments the the pressure's huge and i too heard the same thing about okay yeah get through the academy and then you'll really learn the real stuff um out on the street we'll teach that to you on the street and and so much of what um occurred in the academy was described as you know cya cover your ass so it was very much dismissed in in that way yeah so you know on the business side of things we do a lot of work with organizations often very earnest very well-intentioned people that really want to step into their own power and have an impact on their organization as far as advancing racial equity but one of the things that we run into all the time is this a sense of people feeling powerless right these are smart well-educated people good people and they get to this this organization with others who are similarly intelligent similarly skilled and what happens a lot of it flies out the window and there's nothing we can do this machine just keeps marching on it we have no idea how we can you know infuse some of the things that we know to be right and to be true and to be good into this and it you can see it on their faces they're just broken down they're disheartened they're sad and it doesn't have to be this way because as as john's saying there is an lt there's always an lt there's always somebody that could be making a different decision and one uncomfortable truth i've had to embrace for myself is sometimes that person's me right you know and it's been a real challenge to try to you know uh get myself to a level where i can do that consistently and i i don't know uh what your experience has been like jackie but i wonder if you got insights into that because this is a dynamic that's been with us for a long time in this country and it doesn't come from nowhere right well i would like to say that i found in all the different areas that i've worked from police department to academia to lots of other areas of employment that one of the most influential things that i can do is to to be that person in terms of how i interact with with others right and not i don't mean others like non-whites i mean everyone right how i'm gonna interact with white people um ways in which i'm going to try to to help other white people to see whiteness and how we're swimming in it and um too often participating in uh reinstating it and and so there is no reason that that everyone who wants to make a difference in this regard that they can't do it because we can any interaction we have with other human beings is is an opportunity to to be that better self that inclusive self that more truthful self and it it involves of course doing our homework right because of you're only perpetuating the untruthful and the partial history unless you actually go and make some take some effort to fill in those pieces and correct that history um so i don't mean to present that as not being important it absolutely is but but every interaction every day we have the opportunity to to to be that person and in terms of of major structural kind of change um i believe that it it occurs most successfully when we build on that on those relationships that we've created um because when you when you start from the top and change policy i think that the work of carol anderson the historian carol anderson she wrote white rage and and her research reveals that when even when you have a supreme court decision like brown versus board of education uh because hearts were not changed right through across the country school boards communities responded to guarantee that the promises of boardview brownview board of education would never be realized and they haven't and she shows it with lots of different um policy and court decisions and so and which doesn't mean don't change policy it's a both and i just think it's really important that it's a both and and i think i would like to impress upon all of us the importance of of the heart part and that we are most effective in changing hearts not by presenting on a podcast but by our uh through our interpersonal um interactions with each other by our loving caring kind uh responses and interactions with each other yeah to your point i mean uh you know many municipalities uh have issued say mask mandates right and uh there are definitely people in my own life who uh i've seen kind of doing about face on this so when it was some faceless entity telling them that they had to do a certain thing they said no how dare you come into my life and tell me what i can do but when it was somebody who was close to them right like oh i'm really vulnerable i i could get really sick so could you please wear a mask around me right totally different of course i care about you wow how could you even question that right and the mask is on but we didn't come at it like that it was just very heavy-handed top-down kind of thing and we know this we know that this happens but we keep doing it um yeah we got a couple comments here meg says loves that jacqueline we have to change hearts as well as policy and we can do that in all of our relationships thank you so much meg we've got another comment here i'd like to touch on from cora who i know is also in new hampshire hello cora so she googled why isn't english the official language of the united states this is because the us has always been a multi-lingual nation yeah that is true and though this hasn't stopped many states from declaring english as their official language right so we're seeing those different layers kind of coming into some conflict with one another and by the time europeans um landed on the shores of north america indigenous people spoke more than 173 languages different languages yeah actually like a dizzying amount and that's actually one of the ways that we know how native peoples migrated which is actually uh like really important to understanding the history of native populations as they integrated or not integrated interacted sorry with different european populations and how they kind of played off of one another until we reached this this form that we're in right now so quora continues however title six of the civil rights act of 1964 is in place to protect the rights of individual taxpayers who don't speak fluent english so again that's uh that's a place where we've changed policy but not so much hearts right so uh we've got a couple projects that we're doing today uh with all aces and uh it was a big task to get things translated into a number of different languages because it's we're still not set up to do that even though this has been a feature of our history and our culture since its founding um yeah john um what's on your mind as we're kind of moving through this conversation i was thinking i'm going to leave you out man no no it's all right it's all right i i don't i don't have the the the huge view that that you all have i you know what would occur to me when you're talking about sort of speaking up and speaking truth to power there was this one time in my career i hate to tell stories but i'm going to uh and i love it there was a policy change there was a policy change that came through when i was a state trooper and i was upset about it because i saw it on tv and it was going to affect my life and the colonel of the state police and if you don't know rank that's the top dog like he's the he's the person in charge or she they happen to be a he and he said i have an open door policy well there and oftentimes rico will hear me refer to a book called reframing organizations and there's it's a book that looks at different um ways that you can look at an organization and so there's what we say and what we actually mean that is like a frame it's a symbolic frame right like i have an open door policy meaning i'm accessible to you uh however when i went to his office to express my displeasure with his decision through this open door policy i found out that wasn't actually the case that he did not have an open door policy and uh and though i tried as a young trooper to speak truth to power uh i found out the hard way that um that that was not the greatest idea and and in fact i turned out to be one of the people transferred as a result of that big big surprise right um and as you were speaking earlier uh professor i was thinking about some of my friends who came out you know i was a police officer from the late 90s into the uh to just a 2020. a lot of people came up as lb gtqia plus folks and they they um you know they were able to come out and that was not something that had happened prior to that was a really big deal and and and when we talk about relationships and the importance of it i remember reaching out to them and just saying hey i know i know somebody told me and i want you to know i support you and that if people give you a hard time i'm here for you and i want you to know that and and that was important um and my i guess my final thought is i remember when uh this woman lieutenant foreign got promoted to uh captain and that was a big deal a woman had never been promoted to a captain's position before and i remember congratulating her and as we talk about this you know and we think about you know finally there's somebody who's risen to this place you know they can make a difference i also think um you know were there parts of her that she had to assimilate to that culture in order to get there were there parts of herself that she had to leave behind in order to fit through certain um you know openings that you could only fit through if you may you know were shaped a certain way for a certain mold of person and so you know it gets very complicated and so but i do believe that there's power and relationships you know if i had had a better relationship with some other folks and maybe the colonel it would have made a really big difference in my conversation with him uh but i didn't you know and so i just i was very brash young and cocky at the time and so i went and spoke my mind uh you know to to much to my own peril however um you know relationships and what you can do with them how you can leverage them uh that would be the political frame in that book reframing organizations but um that that's where there's some power at and i encourage folks to use it yeah so uh you know one of the things that you highlighted john was um you know you tried to speak truth to power but power didn't want to hear the truth right um and so one of the things that we know is that police has a huge presence in american culture and certainly policing there are models of policing that do not replicate whiteness but there are certainly ones that do so i wonder if the two of you can kind of uh shed some insight for our viewers on how exactly that works i'm happy to jump in i'll just share a few things john john has so much more experience of policing than i uh but i'll i'll just uh share a few things that come to mind um plea policing um emerged in this country it's not in our founding constitution it's not even in the um city charters of our original cities in this country so policing came about later and it emerged in the south out of the um efforts to cap recapture enslaved people who had escaped right so there's that's the tradition of law enforcement that policing grew out of throughout the south and then um in the north it was the night watch um which you know birthed policing and and you know they were largely if the historical notes of which there aren't many but the ones that they have people were the men who filled these roles were frequently intoxicated and often joining in on the um the the trouble uh that they're supposed to be addressing so policing in the north emerged out of that and policing emerged in this country at a time when white supremacy was already deeply embedded and simply the norm throughout u.s culture and society right so it it came on the scene upon that foundation where the superiority of white people was simply presumed so unless people had sat down and intentionally designed it not to perpetuate white culture it really had no chance of doing anything but that is what i'm hearing you'd say that's exactly right because literally every institution from the founding of this country presumed the superiority of white people and so these institutions from lending to law enforcement to pop culture um and on and on they they all were built upon the presumption of the superiority of white people and so they were established to to both serve and to to assure the success of people who were racially white of course not all white people were um as successful or are as considered as other white people but nonetheless as a matter of race they all presumed that they existed for and to promote the success of white people so in a in a patrol car it doesn't look like uh you know uh one officer and their partner is saying like well let's prop up whiteness are you ready let's go but uh obviously it's through kind of these these day-to-day interactions and so john i wonder if you can kind of highlight some things uh for our viewers that that you're aware of yeah you know i would say rico that it's it's it's no different than any other person the the messages that we receive you know and i've taught about exactly what professor uh battler is talking about i've taught police officers about you know the fugitive slave act of 1850 and in slave patrols and uh all the sort of this history that no one ever teaches and it makes them incredibly uncomfortable incredibly uncomfortable and um and when we think about the messaging that just any white person in the united states has has received around what it means to just be the norm you know you're the dominant story of this culture at least that's the story that that has been perpetuated to you uh you know that then bleeds into the police and culture and and the policies and practices of which you know if we look at like redlining uh you know when when neighborhoods were segregated on purpose you know and and that kind of thing and then the troubles that uh poverty bring uh and then the policies and practices around like what those people are you know disproportionately having this effect and so we need to create a policy around that um without any real look at the root cause of many of the problems which which is this sort of uh it's a background noise of just like that being white is good you know and and growing up in these neighborhoods where where poverty you know is is rampant by design is bad and creates people who are then bad you know the the movie birth of a nation was was to message that that you know that african-americans were dangerous people you know and um and what i don't think that many people at this point in time at least in certain areas are really conscientious of it it's almost it's that implicit bias that we carry with us and and so we make decisions based off of imperfect information um and in in policing because of the the urgency of what those folks are dealing with and the deadliness of the calls that they go to it shows itself in these incredibly horrific ways um but it shows itself in all institutions in different ways in education and health care and you know food in in all the ways that our society works it's just uh in policing because it is just such a front line uh thing that profession that occurs that we just see it you know on the news constantly it's out on the street it's in your face it's on the camera um and and you know blatantly violent at times yeah thank you for that uh cora's got another uh comment here frames are such an important influence good and bad absolutely uh reminded of the i think this is actually sapperworf uh which is s-a-p-i-r hypothesis also the work of george lakoff i and the title of the book that john mentioned is um reframing organizations it's written by authors bowmen and deal right uh and uh it was a great it's a great book it looks at four frames uh human resources structural symbolic and political and and they're the four frames you can sort of look at organizations and society through great thank you john so i know we're we're kind of coming to the end of our time here but one of the things that i do want to highlight for our viewers is that uh in policing yes there is of course that well-established connection to white supremacy culture but it is and most of us know this already a heavily male-dominated profession and uh as are many of our workspaces and now john you mentioned earlier that uh part of the work that you got into based on your experience as an officer was healthy manhood or sometimes people talk about toxic masculinity so i'm wondering uh you know for the two of you what is the because we were talking about relationships what is the relationship between toxic masculinity and white supremacy culture and you know it's it's really seems to me like it kind of delivers a one-two punch in our in our organizations right well uh when you look at those who were positioned to be defenders of the nation right like when west point was established the only students who could be accepted there uh were white men um and those who uh because policing is considered this paramilitary organization right it has these connections with uh with the military and so that sort of mass hyper masculine um feature has certainly been part of law enforcement from its founding and i i saw it um i was kind of drawn to that i was a tomboy i loved the idea of being um which is totally an old-fashioned term my daughter would be appalled that i just used that um and i i loved the physicality of of the the job you know the thought of of being behind a desk for the rest of my life writing legal briefs like horrified me um and so i was very much drawn to that and and that and that that kind of physical work was itself masculinized um it was on steroids in the police department and and females who were fellow officers um had incredible pressures to conform to that to show that we were not physically weak and and i saw female police officers who got who who were more likely to put themselves in physically dangerous positions and to interact in a physical space with mostly folks who suffered from mental health issues um but but ended up getting physically hurt with some degree of regularity in part because of this pressure to show that you we females have every right to be here we can do this job um and that was a real negative um impulse on the part of of too many female officers that i saw wow yeah i you know it it it is a hyper masculine um environment you know and and i too i mean i i got into it in part because i was a martial artist and i wanted to see could i be in this conflict environment and stay calm and really true to myself and uh you know not not use my martial skills but really like use my martial brain to to be you know in a sense a peaceful warrior you know in a chaotic environment i think what we see is that over achieving that trying to assimilate to that and we see it with soldiers too you know that that you want to be this big tough person and you were exposed to trauma over and over again and that creates um a lot of you know i teach you know this rico but i teach mental health and well-being uh for for some super you know police supervisors and what we really do is look at what is that dominant story of toughness of of mine like there's nothing wrong with being strong and physical and athletic like that's all great that's all great stuff but when you harm yourself and when you're mentally or emotionally harmed you know uh whether it's post-traumatic stress disorder or you're just you know exposed to trauma or suffer trauma you know is it okay to speak up is it okay to ask for help and that's seen as weakness um and that's where where we really fall down and where we really end up perpetuating harm uh in our society in general especially with young young men uh and uh but also in policing in the military you know it's frowned upon to show any sort of uh what they would call weakness it's not weakness it's simply that you know you're not able to fit in that tough guy box that somebody else created for you and that box is this hyper masculine you know sort of white supremacist mold of how people are supposed to be um and quite frankly it cause it re relies on you must have great strength and great courage in order to speak up and it's quite the opposite of the story that you're told yeah i mean one of the most striking things about understanding white supremacy culture a little bit better that i've found is that you know when we are trying to assimilate when we're trying to become something else other than we are then we don't have a great relationship with understanding who we are in general and what our strengths really are and i think this is kind of the point that a lot of us who work in diversity equity and inclusion are trying to make is that to be truly adaptable to be truly resilient to be truly strong we need to employ a variety of perspectives tactics and to explore different ideas and different thoughts because you know if we're only strong in some ways that means that we're incredibly fragile in other ways right and you know as a person who has spent a lot of his life trying to assimilate into american culture even though i am born here and i am an american what i've come to realize is that really trying to assimilate it cut me off from or i ended up cutting myself off from understanding my own family and and their culture right and i see this with a lot of my white friends as well they'll say oh i'm i'm jewish i'm italian i'm these things but when you when i end up asking them more about that connection there's a certain sadness there because they never really got to understand what it is to be those things right they too were pressured into being white and half the time they didn't even know that that's that's pretty sad if you think about it right so we like to project this self-image we're very oriented toward the self in this country but what i'm learning more and more is we don't actually know who we are and so it's really easy to lead us down a lot of different roads in search of that thing when most of the time we could be looking inward yeah yeah i i think all workplaces um police departments as well as any other job site to be honest uh we we are dominant culture has really shaped those institutions in such a way that we are missing the resources that are right in front of us right the the array of of approaches for handling that conflict that that group of police officers um is called to right because there's more than one response there is the yeah you yell a directive they don't do it you pull your gun yeah that's one approach not necessarily the smartest one or the first one um and and there are a thousand other possibilities for addressing that situation that are far more likely to be effective and and produce a better society uh for everyone and and those array of other possibilities are as present in corporate america when confronting challenges or thinking about products even or how to pitch them um that are completely missed because whiteness is creating this single lane approach that is that is limiting all of us and harming many of us yeah and i'll just share uh here in oakland several weeks back there was a situation where there was uh a man and there's some kind of altercation and he ended up surrounded by police and it looked like the situation was going to escalate and they might have to use deadly force however uh some calls were made to some some local people and long story short uh instead of resorting to typical police tactics uh they called his mother and [Music] he's alive right it didn't escalate it it became something totally different but because they were approaching it with these set ways of thinking of knowing of understanding they could only see certain solutions right but calling his mother into the situation wow that's a big lever right and it turned out totally different so uh yeah i think that just reinforces the point um so we're about to go into our last question here so john you can answer this too i like to ask this of everybody but uh jackie what would you like to see uh what would you love to see come out of your work well i would love for the people of this country to realize how when where and why white people were invented and the meanings of whiteness that the very first laws that asserted this group called white people um work to construct that's what i would hope because i i know for me look i'm always shocked when i give a presentation and and there's always one or two right who hear what you're saying and feel assaulted yeah i always say to people look don't believe me right i am just the deliverer here's what i have found i i reference everything in the book you can go look it up yourself don't believe me there is not a single reference to any human being much less any group called a white called white people prior to 1681 simply doesn't exist right so why did they invent a group called white people and so we need to understand if we understand that history i know for me learning about it again has changed everything about me and i am such a better person because of it and i'm i've always been really rational you know we used to call it i don't know if it's even relevant anymore left brain right brain you know right it was always the sort of very rational approach and so learning that history was huge for me there are many paths to having that sort of awareness um for me it was law and history and so i've just tried to share that learning that research those discoveries uh with my readers great thank you jackie and john you know i guess i would i would jump off there and just say that you know to become aware of these systems um and to realize that you have been participating in and perpetuating them has also limited you as a white person that you in fact are participating in a system that doesn't recognize your full humanity as an individual instead you're the sort of the standard bearer for a system that doesn't necessarily recognize or serve your full humanity in addition to many other folks in their especially the marginalized groups and so to understand that to realize it to work uh towards a more liberated world you you yourself you know you're not benefiting at all by participating in a system that was designed for you because it it in fact is inhibiting you as well because it was fundamentally designed for the ruling elite right we've just played the role of protecting them and i don't think that's changed it's just metastasized yeah so to learn more about uh you know where jackie's mind has gone on this please do check out her book that is birth of a white nation we will be putting a link in the comments uh thank you so so much once again uh jackie that's uh dr jacqueline batalora to everybody uh from st xavier thank you so much john once again for joining me on this show and yes if you like this video please like share and subscribe and we will see you next time this is enrico imanalo with another episode of intentionally act live bye

Channel: All Aces, Inc.

Views: 1,372

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Id: BSLDWBdAj-I

Length: 63min 17sec (3797 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 21 2021