Tricia Rose | Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives—and How We Break Free

scholar Trisha Rose studies African-American life culture and the impact of inequality in the post Civil Rights era she is Chancellor's professor of Africana studies and director of the center for the study of race and ethnicity in America at Brown University her work is especially interested in the important role African-American expressive culture plays in creating spaces of recognition resilience and resistance her books include Longing To Tell The Hip Hop Wars and black noise which is considered a foundational text for the academic study of hip hop in her new book she reveals how an array of policies and practices connect and interact to produce a devastating meta racism far worse than the sum of its parts she'll be joined in conversation this evening with awardwinning journalist and longtime Library friend Tracy matac please welcome our guests to the Free Library [Applause] well good evening everyone and thank you so much for sharing your Wednesday evening with us on this beautiful warm uh spring evening we're delighted to have you with us and we are especially delighted to have Professor Trisha rose with us to discuss her new book meta racism um I will tell you do not be fooled by the size of the book because there is a lot of well researched information and here we will get through as many questions as we can can and as we always do we have budgeted some time for your questions as well so uh if you have a question for Professor Rose just raise your hand when we get to that point in the program and uh we will get a microphone to you and we'll get through as many questions as we have time to get through so that said Professor Rose welcome to the Philadelphia Free Library thank you so much Tracy it's really great to be here I've heard so much about this story building but I've never been in it the building is extraordinary as I pulled I'm like is this the building that's been going on for like three blocks I'm like I said anytime you put a library in a building that big you're saying something so I'm I'm all for it we are proud of it aren't we you should be you should be so let's start by defining our terms um what is meta racism how do you define it okay I'm going to do a little Preamble and then I'm going to give you a very clear definition so um when we say things like which we very frequently do the system is broken right we're frustrated something Terrible's happened we say the system is broken frequently but in fact the system is not broken if if you study systems and you learn what systems mean you will realize from looking at the way racism actually works that it is working in the way that it intends and I'm not talking about a nefarious conspiracy theory I'm saying that the way things are organized and arranged produce this outcome over and over right it's not a one-off one little broken wing on the system on the left now the reason I've gone ahead and made uh that statement is because we are very um generally not very aware of what makes a system a system and this term comes from system thinking so in a system all the parts are interconnected in various ways so there are Parts you can identify it's quality one quality two is there are those parts are interconnected and number three those parts are interconnected in such a way that they create effects that are bigger than than any individual part meta Uber if you want to you know be German um and any number of other uh uh words are used to describe that that third piece of the puzzle which is when they're interconnected they're not just hanging next to each other like you know schools and housing you go to school in the same district as you live that's a system but it's not that meta effect of what happens when you drill down and pay attention to what that means because of how we handle property taxes and funding schools and things like that so meta racism is meant to describe what happens when a system that is designed to produce racial inequality accumulates over time and the and what the nature of those effects are right and so I want people to really have to sort of one of those titles that says like what do you mean is it everywhere is meta is it can't be escaped is this Facebook again you know like why why are we here you know I thought of that before meta became a Facebook word um but I wanted everyone to really understand that this is bigger than just a little bit goes on in housing a little bit goes on in education oh there's some bad cops but otherwise things are generally fine and yeah there's a 10 to one wealth Gap but you know it'll dissipate over time right those kinds of explanations make the seeing of the meta quality the interconnected compounding nature of systems frames invisible and I want to bring those to life it seems like around the time that George Floyd was murdered we started hearing terms like systemic racism structural racism they became part of our lexicon you make a distinction though between those two what is that distinction I do and I'm happy to say that I was as confused as the next person for a long time I used them interchangeably so I don't want anyone to think I was born knowing this distinction I was all of a sudden I realized oh there's a massive distinction no one or few people are concern concerned with so structure to say something is structural is to say that it is built in to the condition and circumstances you're in so you can have something built in to a to an institution it could be built into to um a a local organization as opposed to say an entire set of outfits for an institution and it's built in how it's built in is not clear necessarily you don't necessarily know where why and how and nor is there any requirement that the way that it's built in is interconnected so you can have a structure that has racial negative racial effects but it doesn't have to overlap with something else when you call something a system You Are by definition describing something that has identifiable parts that are um interconnected to one another and that Dynamic interconnection produces effects that are greater than the sum of any of those parts so it's Dynamic and compounding and it is maintained over time systems do not pop up today and close out tomorrow they take some time and then they also evolve and there's all kinds of other interesting things about them but that's a huge difference it has profound consequences for how we respond to the problem of racism structural racism you could disband an organization say there's just a company that is doing terrible things on its own right you could it's buil bu into their culture it's built into their you know HR practices whatever you say okay well let's just take their license away or let's clear out all of the management you can't do that with a A system that will change very little yeah so the difference is not just a semantic or some annoying academic one which it may be feeling like right now but it is in fact extremely consequential for understanding what any group of people who are subjected to a systemic form of discrimination are facing and it dramatically changes the way we might be thinking about productive Solutions you mentioned three factors that are involved in meta racism um containment extraction and Punishment of black people and a little bit later on I want to talk about some specific examples of how that plays out but just to begin with could you give a sort of a higher level view of what each of those things is yeah so um I I read into and examined about 80 to 100 policies across five areas in society the fifth which is health is not in the book but we can talk about that later so going through all of them you know I would look and I'd say okay well this doesn't on its face have anything discriminatory to in its language because all post Civil Rights era policies which is what I focused on they don't have that Jim Crow moment right of none of this none of that you have to stay here here's the law blah blah blah it's more like no everybody's equal on paper and then the whole process is going to continue with no actual acknowledgement so um as I was looking I started thinking these policies are so different from one another and they intersect in such interesting ways and I thought after I mean it had been close to two years I thought you know they seem to have the same very similar qualities of outcomes so they might say it's for one thing but then it also it say it's a punishment say it's uh you've gone to jail for something but then they have rules about when you get out that not only just continue the pun punishment but they work to contain you or extract resources and so then I'm like well wait a minute and I once I came up with those three and I had paid attention to some of them individually in the literature many people write about them but not all three of them together so interlocking for so long and that's when I realized oh the policy is a means to an end we always want to contain black people there's not a moment in US history that containment has not been a driving force how we contain has shifted right gentrification is containment away from opportunity it's not containment in the same neighborhood as red lining produced um you know extraction is about money it's about confidence it's about uh you know intelligence I mean you look at the school system and the quality and the access and the resources that is so disperate you can't possibly be expecting that person to come out with with their natural sense of self intact right um and so it's not just extraction means money containment doesn't only mean physical right and Punishment does not only mean prison but when you look at those three things together I mean it's actually that was the most difficult part of the book for me to come to terms with that and then Mike Brown's story was just was a little was a lot the real story yeah um and and you see it as you read some of the examples that you cite then you can start identifying those three factors in so many of these stories you also write about how all too often and Society tends to think of racism as individual acts of racism interpersonal acts not unlike what you experienced when you were in nth grade and you write about this in the book and you went to visit a friend who a classmate who lived on the Upper East Side in Manhattan um and and we'll get to why it's so much bigger than individual acts but I still think that your story yeah is worth telling if you would share with us what happened in that experience so I'm from New York City and uh I grew up first in Harlem in the 1960s and then we moved out to Co-op City in the Bronx which I only learned recently was like a communist Cooperative I'm like wow I was way cool before I knew I was cool you know what I mean I was like I was in a communist Cooperative don't mess with me anyway so you know I didn't know that but my parents you know were dead set on me going to schools that would match what they felt was my capacity so I finally got into dalon a very elite East Side private high school I commuted an hour and a half each way three hours a day for six years alone on the train from 12 to 17 I mean you know like that's a long time to be on the train alone at 12 um anyway so um one time I went after school to visit you know somebody in my class and you Upper East Side real estate is is a no joke it wasn't just middle class it's like stratospheric and so I go to the to say I'm going here to visit Carrie and he said well to go around the back and use the service elevator and it I didn't even really understand what he was saying to me so I went around the back and I'm in the elevator like why am I in the service I said I was her friend at Dalton and then it took a minute and at first I thought in most of my life I thought you know this is just a person who needs education you know and I was like we have to educate you know and I was all pey and and hopeful about that notion of Education because I just thought it was so ridiculous that as soon as you knew it you'd be fine be like oh I'm so sorry Trisha Rose you know I just didn't know really appreciate that information but then you realize later in life it's much more productive than it is an absence of information it's like what work does it do like for example here we are I'm obviously much older and I know the story why why do I know the story because he was he was understanding me in a way that was implicitly you know class-based which I don't even have a problem with if it was an appreciation for me because of that but it was a devaluing of me and an assumption about me that I did not belong there as a friend right and you know this is like the mid 1970s this is not like 1936 you know you know somewhere else so and there I have a hundred stories like that but the main issue was the the particular way that that you I'm being positioned is hey you're here but you don't belong here right and that could be you know and that was a for a that's not a form of containment because it wasn't a systemic practice it was an individual practice that fuels the ideas that keep systemic racism functional but it is not itself systemic racism do you understand what I mean by that because we don't want to collapse everything into you call someone a bad word and it's systemic racism it's like no it's actually not right and and and speaking of individual acts um around the time again of George Floyd there was this proliferation of books as you mentioned about you know how not to be a racist and how to be an ally and and those books were very um popular people were very interested in them um but they did not talk about the larger systemic structure that you're writing about here do those books though still have their place well you know I'm never going to argue there should be no certain books that don't exist because you know I'm a I'm a thinker so you know you just even if you want to kick it across the room which has happened um you know you just still think book should exist and I also would want to remind people that the level of banning and censorship that's going on we want to be very careful not to get in that bandwagon when we think it benefits us what we need is critical thinkers who know what to do with material because it's always going to come at us those books have a place for sure right I mean you know Ibrahim kendi and and you know Robin D'Angelo and others are trying to address the consciousness of whiteness at least in her case and in his case the kind of built-in language of race that has historically shaped the society and then there's this notion of like I'm going to tell you how to be an anti-racist that's where I got a little I was like well that's really not going to happen in this book bro I'm pretty sure and it also panders to a comfort zone you know one of the things that keeps us doing the same thing over and over and over again in this country is because people who we need to be allies with do not want to be uncomfortable right and every time you push it Forward past their comfort zone which is you know I don't know about like this far you know voice to mic you end up with silence uh Retreat reframing accusations and then eventually you know just disengagement so for me it's about how do we tell it in a way tell the truth in a way that makes it we're accountable but we're not accused and we're responsible for what we know now um and and we can see how it can go on even if we have fantastic liberal or left values because you know one of the things that keeps people from thinking that there's no system is they're like I'm not a racist I fought in the Civil Rights Movement my kids are not a racist they're part of black lives matter or you know maybe a little bit earlier and my neighborhood is liberal and the country F fixed the laws so so not what are you talking about Trisha right and so my book is an answer to that I'm like this is what I'm talking about so you can have all the values in the world that doesn't mean the country is functioning in your name but it is providing you with the Investments and the advantages that you would have had even before all of those changes that's what people don't want to believe they want to think they're here only because of hard work right and it's just not how it works I mean I I you know it's like I don't I don't as I mean I don't like to make people uncomfortable but I think we have to be honest that it's going to make us uncomfortable how are we going to fix this problem and be all happy go lucky all the way through yeah well speaking of discomfort and book bands um you as a professor of Africana studies know more than anyone about the recent backlash about African-American AP studies um so now you know there's not just a resistance to fighting racism but even to talking about it thinking about it learning about it now um because it has created a sense of discomfort um you know words like woke and CRT have become kind of dirty words um in certain places and so um because of the discomfort that they've created and I wonder if you would speak to that particularly as a professor of Africana studies that's true you would think we'd be talking about that all day you know go figure um I guess we don't think it's hysterical enough you know academics are complicated because we have so much responsibility in One Direction that it's hard to just pivot out and this is a huge pivot out some of us are very big in activism some of us aren't um so I wish we were doing a little bit more that was a long winded way of saying that but let me let me speak to the this discomfort and and also to this notion of the the as you said becoming sort of dirty words I think it's a great description um there's never been a moment there's never been a moment G stay back here there's never been a moment in in africanamerican and American history where the language of black resistance or the language of black uh challenge to domination uh was not reappropriated for the purposes of delegitimation and devaluation never it's always been a multi-prong strategy outright violence legal changes ideological Warfare of different types and then the language of Freedom or the language of of Justice the language of equality gets changed so color blindness instead of being a strategy to address already existing racial categories to say we want to shoot for a colorblind future but we're not going to be there until we account for color appropriately and its reality gets used to say oh no we're ready now why are we ready now the laws say you can't discriminate it's not our fault they're not being practiced properly or that you know from Reagan on uh we just gutted all the all the enforcement staff and enforcement units so what's happening is it's not just that people are afraid of these words but they are being they are being manipulated into being afraid and they're also being embarrassed it's it's almost like remember when hip hop started and if you were whiten into hip-hop they had like really bad names for you which I'll leave alone here I'll let the the podcast people you know Google when they're home um but you know they had names for them that was meant to embarrass them for being associated with Blackness for being associated with with the struggle so there's a way of shaming whites who were involved in Black lives matter and who have been part of this struggle for decades and generations across different groups so what what's happening is it's not so there's this Sil ing because once you talk openly and honestly about this it's really no way out you you can't you just can't be open and honest about what's happened and then say all everything is good so they have to burn it to the ground right so their whole thing is you say anything that makes my kid feel bad and their own kids are saying I don't feel bad they're like I don't feel bad they they want to know right and so of course they're freaked out by this we're taking over The Academy please come to Brown anytime and just see how much we're taking over the entire University um I mean it's so absurd but they have to create this fear that it's African-Americans and the category of race in particular that is destroying a meritocracy that is destroying equal access now let me remind you we've had athletic reasons for taking people for hundreds of years we've had Legacy reasons I didn't see them Banning gender as a category in Dei admissions so if you have a stem program that has not enough women which I still think is really important to do so I'm not I'm against it but I'm saying why didn't it come up the Civil Rights Act had that in gender and sexuality was in the same act you see my point so there's this stigma and this reversal that these are unworthy people who have no reason to be attended to because there's no racial context of discrimination happening so they're they're changing that language and attempting to make it so that you know white kids who might have been interested brown kids imigrants of different backgrounds who might have been interested in learning these things will now think twice because they don't want to look embarrassed they don't want to be you know teased by other kids I mean literally that's where we're at now and and they also then will never know the things that we have moved forward knowledge wise right they just won't know yeah that's a really important problem very because what they're doing is cultivating a racist form of whiteness whiteness like any other racial category that we've invented because none of this exist EX ists in biology or nature is a category we can revise right Blackness has changed dramatically from 1865 to the present yeah not as much in some ways as we'd like materially but in terms of who black people are and how they think of themselves speaking here from the US perspective massive change why can't that be true for everybody else but they don't want some people in the society don't want that because they know workingclass whites will stop fighting fighting black and brown people immigrants Muslims Mexican amans or Mexicans before they become mexican-americans and they'll start fighting the people who've taken their jobs which is not these poor people right the people who've destroyed their towns the people who've created very limited opportunities for local business right so it is a very intentional strategy that is familiar let me just say one more thing because I think strategy is so interesting I don't know if you remember the southern strategy that um um uh God I knew his name was gonna don't say it all right say it say it say it not strong Thurman Lee Atwater yeah Lee Atwater he was you know that that audio tape of him saying this wasn't released until the gentleman who took the audio tape passed away because they didn't want to have a controversy but he explicitly says on tape that what they did after the Civil Rights Movement was move away from explicit language where you could literally say nword nword n word nword which he did he said and then you have to start moving into more indirect language like states rights and freedom and some other term I don't recall right now he said and then eventually it's so abstract you don't realize you're talking about race at all he said but you notice you will notice that it always has a disproportionate effect on black people I was like man that brother was describing meta racism I like I guess it's more organized than I thought you know what I mean so it was really true because that's exactly what we have yeah so it was a it took 50 years but here we are yeah well in talking about education one of the stories that really stood out to me as I read your book and and you know you certainly you cover Trayvon Martin Michael Brown the worst examples of racism leading to the deaths of these young men and so many others but you also write about Kelly Williams bolar um who was convicted of stealing education for her daughters in 2011 I think it was can you remind us because her story while it made headlines um I don't know that everybody remembers her story the way that we remember Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin and George Floyd um can you remind us of her story and kind of what got missed in the outcry around her story yeah her story is a a little different partly for the reasons you said people it didn't make the news for the length of time because it wasn't she didn't die right and that's important she wasn't there was no sort of uh you know video or testimony of people watching watching a body laying in the street you know for four hours in the hot sun I mean these things are very traumatic so they take a different space and maybe they should for that reason but what I thought was amazing about her story and this was like it's a little bit like investigative sleuthing like a little bit of you know digging in the archives SL investigative journalism you know and it's really fun to me to find out like well wait that's really interesting well how does that relate to this and then this whole picture emerges and in her case the surface was the prosecution said you are stealing education you are falsifying forms to say that you live in um uh the county right outside of West akan which was an all-white County and this County um my memory I have to look at the book but it's um it'll come to me it I can see it anyway but it was like the Copley yeah cople Township thank you darling CLE I just think Boston CLE okay um so she her father however lived in cople Township owned a home did not rent owned a home kobble Township was in the 90th percentile white East West acran was 84 to 86% black and then 10 12% other non people of color maybe 32% white and those schools were much lower in quality than the ones in cople Township it was a classic story and they and she said she was afraid for her neighborhood after school there had been a burglar who broke into the homes in her building and I think even her apartment when her daughters were not home and it freaked her out so much that she moved she had them enroll in the in the grandfather's District where they knew he'd be home after school because he had a health condition so he wasn't moving around a lot he could be there when they got in they'd be safer okay so all that seems like a kind of reasonable intergenerational family decision right I mean wouldn't you if your if your father or mother owned a home in a town that had schools that were one you know highly ranked in the top 10% wouldn't you put your kids over there I mean who would wouldn't do that and we're talking like two miles less than two miles right so she was within two miles of that school and further away was the school that she was supposed to send her kids to now here's what's amazing about this and this why I enjoyed this Lu thing most specifically the stealing of the education right was a part of a CRI an attempt to criminalize the educational system in the way so many other institutions had been criminalized by actually criminalizing the parents or people of colle in the process so when I did some homework I realized that the Ohio um Supreme Court had already outlawed District specific education and said it's unconstitutional because of the inequities so everyone in the state was said you can send your kids to any District you want that's a cool thing right if you want to drive five hours a day to drop your kids off sleep in the car wait for them to come out at three drive them home and get like world class education that you're right but guess what happened the wealthiest District it's the most homogeneously white and Powerful said oh no no no no no no we want an opt out program and they're pressure they have so much leverage and they said we don't want any of the state allocation because States get towns get a foundation amount and then their taxes make up the difference roughly it's a super truncated conversation so cople Township was an opt out District so from their vantage point it was just preserved preserving our resources we have a right to teach our kids what we want you know with our money was very privatized concept of public education so she's in a state not where this is really against the law she's doing what the Supreme Court mandated but this power and leverage that certain people were able to execute meant that the opt out was not was now given the opportunity to to stigmatize her ability to bring her daughters to the school right just two miles away now there's been a ton of research about this practice where a very badly performing school with low resources and poor people of color and immigrants is right up against a district which has all the opposite characteristics and they basically said this is an arbitrary moment right here you know I mean it's like there's no reason this this line is drawn for the purposes of creating this hoarding access to education so I thought that was very interesting because by the time we get to a case like Michael Brown Normandy High School it's it's already been in this network of jostling and management of power um that creates this inequity the other thing was the fact that she was a mom and the way they executed the devaluing of black women as part of the shaming of the process that she was a criminal not a good mom right she was she tried to defraud the state you know that was her purpose and you know what was wonderful was that a lot of people of different backgrounds were like wait hold on hold on my kids go to another District you know and they would wait till their kids were out of course um you know and I went there and people like you know famous black people say well I went my mom did that and what else could we do so there was a lot of support but there was also that vicious vicious attacks on her you know as a way of demonizing so I thought it was a helpful way to show how space and and containment again in neighborhoods and also this was process by which the rule says one thing but here's the work around the work around is race neutral but who can afford to work around What towns can pay for their Foundation they're writing a check they have so many resources they're writing a check to say no we don't want any state money for school well we're good and she did she was sent to jail she was sent to jail and then you know the governor pardoned her but what they wanted this is the other sickness about a lot about I think the criminal justice system that they wanted her to be humiliated and to be to show a level of Shame shame and embarrassment and she was too cocky she was too like look I want my kids to have a good education and they saying well were you why did you have to do crime to do that she's like well look at the school and then it would be this back and forth you're either trying to help your kids for educational reasons or you're afraid of crime and I'm saying oh no those things are connected a systems analysis will show you they generate each other's relationship you see so this whole non systems approach can make you think it's a single access problem a great School in a very dangerous stressed out chronically uh you know um vulnerable Community is not going to stay a very good school for long if it's if it's populated by people in the neighborhood because the the families are trauma based really you see so that's the kind of thing when we put it together and we imagine hey we're talking about our kids then all of a sudden it's crystal clear crystal clear so that's why I thought Kelly was an important case for the gender reasons the way women and moms black women and moms were demonized the way the ations behind the scenes that brought that to that moment you see when we tell the story about she's a she's a criminal right that's the same as you know he's a racist right Darren Wilson is a racist the cop in in uh um f Ferguson but when we're looking at someone to say well she's a criminal that's the same single access thinking and I'm like well wait a minute yes okay she did defraud the rules were built that way that's true so did Martin Luther King during the Civil Rights Movement right so it's about get people to see that is this whole structure and system around it that tells us quite a bit that if we don't attend to it we have nothing but the other way of thinking which is Kelly is a fraud you know a Fed she's she's a fraudster she's trying to defraud the government she doesn't care about her daughter's education yeah um Trisha I'd like you to take an example of there there are several people that you write about in the book but to kind of show us how these systems interconnect and and we've seen pieces of it throughout the conversation but maybe there's one example I don't know if it's Michael Brown or who it might be where you can sort of weave for us how one system or one policy affects another and you sort of get this overriding yeah meta racism that's it's really yeah and I will say I just let me just say two CLE two things before that first of all these are really amazing questions can I take you home with me and like bring you with me to the next city I'm not sure what it is but I'll pay your whole way and back it's on podcast it's going to be recorded live here so anyway I know you're busy whatever but if you if you're into it let me know um um so um I had to decide you know when I figured out how systems work which took its own toll on me as a non-science person it's really a stem phenomenon you have to you know if you really dig into it it's out it's outside of my technical realm but it has a framework that you can understand then I had to figure out how to describe the practices and then I had to figure out how do I tell the story this is very hard to figure out because it flies in the face of all the things you would normally do for a public B book for the public or even an academic book because you couldn't just list all the policies and say you know here they are you have to show them in action in relationship but then you have to figure out well what stories do people already know because if I had to tell the story and they had never heard it before then it wouldn't compel them to believe that the version I'm telling is different than the one they already think they know right so then I had to decide I had to really cross my fingers and say is it better to tell a story that's a little bit older because that's what more people know what they think they know it's kind of embedded or should I go with a you know an immediate one and George Floyd happened near the writing process or during it and I decided that you know it takes a lot of research to get that much information about all the schools that say Trayvon went to in his district the one in Sanford and the class you know how the how the Foreclosure crisis in 2008 impacted George Zimmerman and so on and so so this takes it's not like it's just hey let me just tell you about one school right so I decided to pick these three for a variety of reasons but especially that they were very visceral to the National imagination especially the two Trayvon and and Mike Brown Mike Brown many people say was the real Catalyst for black lives matter and the whole thing the beginning of this outrage was Trayvon as a point of accumulation really so um that I just wanted to explain that because people will say why did you pick those and I'm sure if I if I write another Edition yeah I'll probably do the homework on George Floyd that will not I've already done enough to say okay well there's a chapter check it's not you know maybe I'll have people write it with me because I think it'd be really interesting to take these tools to a community of people and say how does this work for you maybe just go to Minneapolis so I'm thinking of creative ways to deploy the process but let's take Mike Brown does everyone feel like like they know what happened in Ferguson pretty much like yeah they're like please don't make me raise my hand um um so um so in in the case of Mike Brown there were um when the no you notice well you don't notice because you haven't necessarily read the book but I do not talk about the riots or the Insurrection because what I'm really interested in is what is the context that leads up to this incident that itself is being understood as the moment moment of of racism and I want to unpack the the the width and the depth and the interconnected in just ensnarement that is present long before he runs into Darren Wilson or Wilson runs into him and that it's that setup that's really important the same thing's true for Trayvon um maybe I'll tell Trayvon let me go to Trayvon because the title is much more memorable and this is an oral environment so if you remember the chapter's called no chance in encounter and um the reason I took that title for the Trayvon chapter was because there was a huge People magazine cover a few weeks after he was murdered that said a chance encounter right goes from you know life and going to get Skittles to you know being so I started thinking like you know that's such a classic misunderstanding of what happened it's as if you're saying that the only reason Trayvon was murdered that night was because he just happened to run into one crazy guy so then I said okay well let's prove it let's see what happened so I said okay well let me really look into what happened at at school why was he suspended so then I of course did you know a whole ton of homework on suspensions in general but but I looked specifically to begin with at what happened to Trayvon so um he went to a public school that was you know in a segregated black neighborhood in Florida because that's what things are and and um you know everyone said he's a bad kid remember everyone was pissed at him for being you having alcohol and all kind of stuff in his in his social media profile so and people say well he's a bad kid he got suspended so the handbook in the handbook at at um Michael crop high school has a set of rules for what you get punished for and what level of punishment so what they did was the the end of this piece is that the practices that the school deployed was the same process of overcriminalization that you see in the Juvenile Justice System where you create contexts of extreme punishment some cases punishment when none should apply other cases where you have an option between say one to 10 at a level of infraction and then what happens is you get 10 and then you get another 10 and then you're out so it's like this escalation and a hyper criminalization so what happened to Trayvon the first time he was in touch with the you know the the arm of the long arm of the law was he was tardy and under the crop punishment guidelines it's not listed it has no punishment what did they do anybody want to guess they suspended him so there you have your first moment is like way over the top it's literally not in the handbook second infraction writing WTF on a locker once level two was the uh the uh punishment and it was supposed to be a suspension only only if serious or habitual I don't know that doesn't seem either one of those we know it's not habitual he did it once we have evidence for that but it doesn't seem like it's worth a suspension especially now it's on top of a completely fake suspension third one is the offense was possessing a plastic bag with marijuana residue it had no marijuana in it but I guess they tested it and had residue so he does no weed in the school he's just trying to be you know an ecologically Sound Recycling person right he's bringing his plastic bags that are empty you know Lord knows where level three suspension between 1 and 10 days how many days did they give him 10 that's the infraction that brought him to his father's house now there are a couple things that are really important about this number one he was over policed over suspended in a school that um you know uses this framework to imagine that bad kids are bad good kids are good we keep the good ones in we throw the bad ones away which makes no sense because then they're outside pissed and alienated they grow up and then we have a crime problem and you want to know why right there's that but then I looked into it and said okay what happens to kids who get suspended a lot and the research shows that kids who are invested in school who actually like to be in school generally speaking are the ones that are the most negatively impacted by suspension so you're not teaching the thugs a lesson which is the me the metaphor right you're teaching the kids who are really interested in school or somewhat interested in school that they're unwanted so you push them actually out when they were kind of in they weren't just out out kids now what they did in this case in particular was um um take a kid who was interested and then add a level of trauma that is so significant the suspension process is so painful for kids even though they Bluster that the American Pediatric Association has a national guideline that all doctors who are pediatricians are required to ask the parents or Guardians who bring them in did your child get suspended anytime ever because there's so many triggers for alienation lack of belonging lack of being appreciated and that is so significant across every possible group so here we are meeting out excessive punishment over what feels like a crck of nothing I mean I went to high school in the 70s I would definitely not be sitting here they would have suspended me once a week I mean we were doing dumb stuff you know maybe I shouldn't have said that on record but do you know what I mean like you realize this is just like very um con it's just suffocating right there's no interaction there's no discussion okay so that's the school thing now back in his home District very quickly um the logic was that Zimmerman was was was racially profiling him because Zimmerman was an individual who had racist problems he did seem to have them his little his little notes to the to the um the town the town's uh you know self- Protection Agency you you know he'd say crazy things in there looks like a black man enough that the black men who lived in the compound like yeah I'm staying home I'm it's going to come out in the day because I don't really need to be you know shot by a man I know who doesn't recognize me at night um so I I said okay there's all of this fear in Zimmerman but what's the stop and frisk culture in the context of of trayvon's life in his H town where his mom lived this the stop and frisk practice was so extreme that the police themselves called it stop and frisk on steroids they arrested some people 250 times there was a corner in the in the poor part of the town where it was a package shop and the Immigrant family that owned it originally got cameras to stop crime by the by the people who were buying or not buying the alcohol the police were so abusive they turned the cameras and put them outside where the police were behaving to document their discrimination and that's how some inves ative journalists broke the story about what was going on in his town so now here I'm saying you have a situation where if he had stayed home and never gone to Sanford true his encounter would be very different maybe he would have lived a long time would he have evaded systemic racism would his school have treated him better would he be frisked and stopped and harassed and maybe you know assaulted um you see what I'm getting at so this one chance encounter gives us this whole fiction that you know if Zimmerman just happened to feel sick that day and just went inside all would be good and what I'm saying rather soberingly but you know not not without hope that that is not true and that is not where the main problem is as obvious and horrible as these incidences were it's the living thousands of trayon that I want to change their Destiny and speaking of that you know as we listen to you know the stories that shared with us and the research that you've done it can feel so daunting because of the way that these policies and procedures and systems are interconnected that for any one person it would feel like well how do you address it but you do offer some thoughts around ways that people who find this deeply concerning can take some action right right I mean you know it's it's a bit of you I can't wait to hear what you all think about this problem this issue in general but you know this is a hard problem problem to solve right but I don't believe and this is kind of a two two- school you know debate you know I'm of the school that says look if I'm experiencing something I'd really like to know what it is like I don't want to be coughing all the time and then somebody when I die says you know she was living in a highly polluted area but we knew but we didn't tell her we thought it would depress her it would make her not feel like she could really make it in the I'm like well I'm definitely not going to make it if I don't know what's actually going on right in front of me so how do we tell that story in a way that's empowering how do we give young people and their parents and families and communities and allies a sense that this is empowerment not depression and you know and and and sort of crushing information so for me systems are the way are are the problem and they're the solution thank goodness for that um so if you have a system so you I'm saying systemic racism housing discrimination reduces uh Equity significantly reduces equity in value that coupled with segregation and funding schools with property taxes which very few countries in the world do um means that you're compounding right that's that intersection boom and you're making it bigger and stronger so now over time that thing gets bigger and bigger right so what if we did something in the reverse what if we looked at all of these super muscular leverage points right that are these inner connections and we said let's take one of these and imagine that the goal is Justice how would you what would you do and then how would you replicate it consistently for long enough that it would have the a Justice effect a fairness effect right now there's a million problems with doing this simply this would be very complex so I'm not being naive but rather than saying things like we're going to fund the schools or we're going to make them all take tests and give the more money to the schools that test well I mean it's such a denial of what's happening it makes things worse and every year they get worse and then every year we say it's black people they don't like school they don't have good families and then we just step over this massive you know cavernous hole that people get sucked into so for me what systems does is it allows me to think practically in a grounded way to really look at policy and behavior and attitudes which is where you write you know where we started and to start thinking locally as well as nationally because what every chapter case study does is it says here's the situation for Trayvon here's the situation in Sanford here's the situation in Miami uh Gardens here's the situation around the country that's my way of saying this is not just Florida this is not just George Zimmerman but it is Trayvon it is George zman and it is Florida and it's also nationally so by doing that you get this sense of oh okay we can tackle this locally but we'll do a much better job if we know the national landscape so my hope for the the role of systems thinking is that we'll be able to identify leverage points that are now being used for negative impact and we can focus on those to turn it around and there are many possibilities there because even one intersection has multiple Min ones so the ones that produce economic inequity there's a million of them right so you could you know depends on where you are what your concerns are you can tailor it the other thing that I love about this is that it's also asking people to develop a new way of thinking and that is you know shifting from a one at a time racist is racist finding a racist is what do I call like whacka it's like wacka racist you know they pop up in a thing like bam you know it's like we won and then you find another it's like you know it might be entertaining but it's not going to win but so rather than a whack-a-mole paradigm which is we find these individuals who were destroying our successful racial Equity life you say to yourself okay in the course of history this is not that long for us to get very far we've been resisting it a long time how do we really acknowledge that build camaraderie but tell the story in a way that tells the truth but doesn't get into some massively accusatory waste of energy which is the way I see that and then you say okay how do I tell the story and then you invite people to have this Paradigm Shift which is basically taking all the information you have and choosing a story that goes with that information changing your parad Paradigm is looking at all the same information and choosing a different story so people see all this information and they say it's Black Culture Darren Wilson went on a tear I started out at the bottom I just like you know he did and and so the the journalist is like well is that really true yeah I and then I work my way up and I'm like oh there's 175 articles that show that you and my brown would not have the same experience going in for the same job with the same level of knowledge it's not going to happen so you're telling me a fiction so that getting the Paradigm that we are I'm asking you to think about and asking everyone to consider is to account for those documented differences so that we can be honest about them and not get caught up in you know just um imagining that fixing it one at a time and not addressing these issues is going to make it so for me that's very inspiring but you know I'm a little weird so I I wouldn't I wouldn't be surprised if you said well it wasn't inspiring for me but I I do think it's it's it's important last point is that we you know we love a Hollywood ending and we have really I think um what's the word when you um weaken a muscle we've you know we've atrophy perfect word thank you sir atrophied this muscle of managing discomfort dealing with really difficult conflict um keeping sense of people's humanity and disagreeing I mean you can go on the web and watch James Baldwin arguing with um William um that dude and you know you can have that conversation and it' be amazing and really interesting and totally opposite you could have that conversation today so that muscle has atrophied to such a degree that we're unable to solve the problems we're creating and we want to run away and saying I want a happy ending is running away yeah now you can be hopeful and engaged and connected and know it's going to be a long time you know nobody in who was enslaved said well you know if we don't get this done tomorrow you know you know what I mean you have to try what is the alternative so that to me is what inspires me gives us tools and I think there are tools let's try to use them yeah well on that note let's take your questions for Professor Rose she's given us a lot to think about I know I'm so sorry I get so excited I'm like okay I'm only going to meet you once here is the whole deal thank you for that um it I'm going to get the book so um but I wanted to to uh ask your thoughts on uh I don't know if you know Charles blow and from New York Times and he wrote a book just recently about um reverse uh migration migration and um that can solve some of the problems in in the South and just because you know most populous area of black people and we should really not abandon it and and try to rectify that um structure the structure is there um what are your thoughts of that well I love the in the in the innovativeness of it right I love the idea of like oh okay I love this feeling like hey we really don't have to live here I would take it a little further as in leave the country you know I would I would consider that I'm not even half joking I'm like where can I go and like have decent Healthcare when I'm you know five years from now um but um I'd like his creativity I'd like the sense that look we left things behind we didn't just take all of these assets we left things behind things had been taken from us that were forcibly left behind and we also left things behind we left a way of life behind for those right that that um who are from the south um I but there's an assumption that a majority of black people will be in power because they're a majority and that's a post civil rights fiction to my mind you have lots in fact in the Mike Brown case the use of Municipal fines and fees which I didn't get into here because I chose Trayvon but if you get the book you'll see what I mean these use of Municipal fines and fees are targeted for black communities partially because of pre-existing inequities and they're black people running those towns not all of them but most so if a system is set up to do what it's set up to do you can put anybody in the front of it Obama the mayor of Atlanta and and I'm not blaming them I'm saying you can't black and brown faces and high places as Cornell West would say is not going to get us where we need to go there could be amazing individuals but even an individual activist or critical thinker isn't going to get us there so I challenge that concept I do think it's many ways more culturally comfortable I mean the truth of the matter is if you're going to be horrifically treated you feel like there's a better chance that your Humanity might be seen although the cops do make this unlikely um in a black context right you go to the black place and ask for to be file a complaint I don't know I guess you assume they're going to be nicer so there's a kind of identity politics driving a political organizational framework and I haven't seen that really work terribly well yet that said the south is a special and an important place that black people should claim and own it does not exist without African enslaved people the only last point about that and then I think we have just said time for one more is that black community in America is much more diverse than the African-American South at this point and we're a little behind in thinking through the consequences and complexity of that about 15% of black people are not from the US at all that's 15 now it's only going to get bigger and if you look at the enrollment in colleges and the absence of what I'd call domestic black people and the ways in which systemic racism affects them the most because it's the longest and it comes without that immigrant sort of construct you know that could get worse and worse in which case they will just be erased or we will just be erased so I'm not sure right that the south is going to save us from that which is a different problem than you know gentrification in the north right now um so I just wanted to lay that out because it's important to figure that out and I I don't have an answer but thank you that's a really really good question I appreciate it hi uh do you think that the darkening of America as far as uh immigrants and uh you know the birth rates and whatever do you think that that could put a dent in the into racism or white supremacy or patriarchy or whatever it is that's keeping the system in place yeah do you see America darkening to the point that it becomes a more of an issue more yeah more it becomes a more egalitarian thing because there just aren't enough there's just just the majority is of color and comfortable with that Arrangement is that right basically no well I'm not talking about a a majority right now but like what I'm saying is like uh as you have the immigration you know America just seems to be darkening and I see it uh tenses uh tenseness and I see an electorate like you have whole states like let's say Nevada Florida which happens to be Republican now but it's a lot of Latinos down there right A lot of them are brown they're not they're not like European white right like Cubans say for example right and and and so you might have a lessening of that white European type population right and lower birth rate and and and you know possibly cutting down on an income inequality you know you got $20 per hour in California and I can maybe see a time where uh people on one side can say Hey you know you know this system is not working for the majority of us now you know because America could easily be past that 50% if it's not the ready that's right I see of black and brown people yeah that that's a really good question it's super nuanced I'm glad I got it wrong the first time so I could understand it better the second time um thank you for your patience um so I'm I'm what I'm I'm gonna say what I'm trying to do and then I'm GNA say why why that what you're saying is is equally important but slightly different so it'll maybe illuminate the problem from why it's not a straightforward answer for me so I'm trying trying to show how this category of race that is used arbitrarily for people with brown skin dark brown skin um to create conditions and circumstances that keep an inequality alive that keep the working class as in general more quiet um and produces um an investment in the illusion of this meritocracy right so that those are the sort of basic goals of a lot of what I'm saying and I'm saying how do we fix that but what you're Illuminating here is like how do we take this notion of what a white supremacist framework would be and separate it from white people right and say when other people take it up what happens do they do they become equally invested in this idea that it's a it's a land of opportunity how will uh they respond to that in other words where will we seek the evidence for how Society has changed as it has browni or darkened itself is that is that a fairer closer thing okay so now here's here's where I get stuck whereas the first thing I get stuck on is okay since racism and racial hierarchy is a is an ideology it's a way of thinking it's a paradigm what makes brown and black immigrants feel invested in it because they do you have many many many immigrants of color who frequently complain about African-Americans being lazy you might as well be in all white town sometimes and they feel like as an immigrant they have the right as a poor immigrant I came from nothing right and I my parents saved me and worked things up and I'm not saying it didn't happen but that's a different trajectory that's this tiny little bubble of people who are popping out of massive poverty right you know someone who comes from Brazil and makes it I'm like okay well do should we talk about Brazil a little bit you know that's like a whole different moment so I think part of the the problem for me is that we think white supremacy is white people but white supremacy is an ideology there are people of color there are white people there are all kinds a whole rainbow of people who have an investment in it that's why I said this whole Banning of of a certain kind of books and ways of thinking is about creating a kind of white person right and it's also about making sure we do not create the other kinds of white people who might be more radical and engaged it's not white people that's the problem it's whiteness that's the problem how we how it's been evaluated and valued and controlled and used to manipulate so now we have to ask questions about why immigrants would want to invest some of them not all number one because that's the American ideology you know if I'm going to a country I know just what their main story is if I want to try to live there I gotta I gotta play by play ball I can't come in being a radical but Brown and really darkskinned immigrants people from the continent of Africa um dark skinned Dominicans and Haitians who are not Porter Ricans right who are not Cubans they have a different experience over here because at some point there's black black it doesn't matter where black is from it's where you at now once that happens now you have new racializations forming new groups of people who see themselves as black because society's going to keep constructing them that way and new people who are sort of maybe creating what I call a kind of you know like a colored population in the context of say South Africa and that is something I can imagine where colorism would Advance as a category all this talk about mixed race people are you know taking over the world I mean I'm like please it gives me a headache um but this idea that we're breaking down barriers by creating another class of another race of people right so that's where I would go with that question I don't have an answer but I think the work has got to be ending this kind of racial hierarchy and eventually really ending the category of race I agree with that but not now we because we haven't done the homework and the emotional psychological political work to make that anything that would be helpful does that help a little bit answer your question I was trying to give different angles to get at it because it's so it's so interesting thank you very much for that I appreciate it the book is called meta racism how systemic racism devastates black lives and how we break free ladies and Gentlemen please join me in appreciating Professor terisha Rose for a great convers ation um thank you and as I said you've given us so much to think about read the book um it's beautifully researched um there is so so much information in here and also a plan of action um for people who are concerned about these things and uh steps that that all of us can take so hope you enjoyed the conversation thank you all for being with us please be safe getting home tonight great thank you so much for coming and and thanks for giving up a 75 degree evening in in April thanks [Applause] again

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Length: 63min 41sec (3821 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2024