 Ruha Benjamin is a professor in the Department of African-American Studies at Princeton University. She writes, teaches, and speaks about the relationship between innovation and equity, health, and justice, science, and citizenship. She is the author of People's Science, Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier, and Race After Technology. This morning, her topic will be the beautiful struggle, understanding racism, and transforming words into deeds. Good morning, co-workers. That's one of my favorite words in the Baha'i lexicon, because it implies one kind of radical mutuality, and also that we're ready to get to work. Are you ready to get to work? Okay, the beautiful struggle. You know, I was thinking about how to frame the conversation this morning, and thinking about the way we're trying to bring together an anticipatory vision of the kind of world that we're trying to create. And at the same time, keep our feet grounded in reality, the reality that many people are struggling with. Too often, people want to skip over the struggle and just get to the beauty. Am I right? And so, as Baha'i, we know that these two things go hand in hand. There is no beauty without struggle. Likewise, we need to bring together all of the fantastic insights and wisdom that we have through the writings of our faith in conversation with the social scientific insights that help us diagnose this reality, right? When you just have faith without the knowledge, it produces a kind of naivety, right? We think sort of magic fairy dust is going to fall from the sky and make everything okay. That our good intention is enough. And at the same time, when you only have knowledge about reality, right, and you don't have the spiritual insights, it can produce a kind of paralysis, right? A kind of cynicism. The burden of knowing how bad things are without the vision for how we begin to heal and create the world we want. So we need these things that often are pitted against one another, right? Faith and reason, knowledge and courage. When we act without knowledge, right, we may be misdiagnosing the world that we're trying to create. And so I'm going to spend some time this morning talking about common misdiagnoses when it comes to racism. The reason which we're trying to acknowledge that it exists, but we're not quite getting it right in terms of how deeply rooted it is, how it takes shape and reproduces. And so together I want us to think about how our beliefs are like theories, right? And that to actually work, to actually create the world we want, our theories, our beliefs have to be empirically tested, right? So this we use the language of science, we use the language of academe to think about how just believing in something is never enough, right? So that the struggle, the empirically testing our beliefs is how we make the wonders of humanity a fact, right? How we make it a fact. And so in a nutshell, just let's say some of you doze off, you get distracted. I want to give you a trailer for the comments today. So if you don't pay attention to anything else, the next two minutes you can walk away and say, I know exactly what you said, right? We'll circle back down to it, but, you know, I have a habit of leaving the action items to the end. Everyone's tired. So I thought, let me foreground the action items, how we can move forward, and we'll circle back around to it, but I don't want to rush it at the end assuming I run out of time. So in two minutes, the trailer is this. We're told by our National Assembly, in a beautiful letter dated September 8th, 2014, that the American struggle is our struggle. That is the starting point. There is no us in them. There are no races out there and loving human beings in here. We are one. We do not have it figured out and they just have to get it. That is not the reality. The American struggle is our struggle. For those who feel like race is a hot button issue in the news, something that is, you know, new and interesting for now, they haven't been paying attention. This is something that people have been struggling with since the founding of this country. The fact that some of us may be awakening to that reality is another thing. But this is an ongoing struggle that many people have not had the luxury to ignore. Secondly, we have everything we need in the forceful example of Abdul Baha. Everything that I tell you after this is just fleshing out the incredible example that he's created. We often like to retell the stories of Abdul Baha as a kind of loving father figure, where loving often takes the shape of a kind of saccharine sweetness, right? When in fact Abdul Baha's life assaulted the racial and class norms of the societies in which he lived, assaulted the racial and class norms of the society in which he lived. We have here a program from the NLDP in which we see Abdul Baha listed as one of the speakers, right? One of the ways in which he showed us how to move forward in the world is through collaboration, that our faith is not an insular congregation, but it is a way of engaging with the world, finding like-minded individuals and organizations to work alongside with and to learn from, because we don't have it all figured out. The second part of the example is that in community life, Abdul Baha did not prioritize the comfort of the privileged over standing for justice. We have so many examples, whether it's the dinner table where he brought Louis Gregory to sit by his side when the host wanted to keep him in the kitchen, whether it's his friend that he befriended in Paris visiting at the hotel and the hotel manager didn't want this black man to come into the hotel and Abdul Baha said, go get my friend. He said, I didn't come to Paris to adapt to the norms of Paris. I came to uphold the standard of Baha'u'llah. He did not care if it made them uncomfortable. And so we too cannot prioritize the comfort of the privilege for whom this society seems to be working and not speak out and act in defense of the oppressed. Lastly, and this one may be a bit of a stretch, but I like it anyway. One thing we don't often talk about and consider is that when Abdul Baha was traveling through Europe and the United States, he was rocking his robe and his turban and his beard at a time when it was customary for those people coming from his part of the world to adapt a more European look, the tailored suits, the waxed mustache. I was like, no, I'm not waxing my mustache. I'm rocking my beard. Y'all gonna deal with it. Again, he was not assimilating to the norms of the societies in which he lived. We don't think about that, right? He could have thought, you know, let me make these people feel comfortable. Let me make them feel like I'm part of them. But that is not the model of unity that he was trying to show us. He prioritized difference over assimilation, standing out, not trying to fit in. And so there is our example. So let's figure out how we begin to adapt these things in our own life, in our own communities, in our own workplace. We're told that with the coming of Bahá'u'lláh, the whole creation was revolutionized. Through that word, the realities of all created things were shaken, divided, separated, scattered, combined and reunited. Disclosing entities of a new creation. Now again, we might want to jump over to the reunited. Skip the shaken, skip the divided, skip the separated and the scattered. We might want to just go to the part that feels good. But that is not the process that was unleashed. Thus we have to embrace all of the nitty-gritty, the shaken, the scattered, the ways in which things are being torn apart as part of the process. And so let's think about what that means in our own lives, right? How we look for opportunities to struggle. We don't run from them. Because without them, we are not going to become the new creation that we were destined to become. We are going to be imitations of the status quo, right? We have to embrace this vision, which means embracing the struggle of becoming this new creation. My favorite, my favorite writing. The best beloved of all things in my sight is what? The best beloved of all things in my sight is justice. By its aid thou shall see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others. Shall know of thine own knowledge and not the knowledge of thy neighbor. Verily justice is my gift to thee. Set it then before thine eyes. Now I want to reflect a moment on this idea of seeing and vision and begin now to weave in some of the social scientific insights that are in conversation with this beautiful scripture. A colleague of mine, Osagi Basagi, wrote a book called Blinded by Sight in which he interviewed people who were blind from birth about what they thought, what they knew about race. To see, in fact, if race is simply a visual technology, a way of seeing so that if you can't see, perhaps you also do not recognize race and are not participating in the racism that surrounds us. And what he found was the contrary, that in fact people who are blind from birth see, perceive, engage, make decisions based on race without ever having seen the races that we think are natural. So that racism is a way of perceiving the world that does not simply rest on the visual. He tells us, and we'll circle back around to this, that color blindness, therefore, cannot be a solution to racism. It runs much deeper. Pretending that we don't see difference is not based in reality. We have a study that came out of Yale recently in which they were looking at preschool teachers using very sophisticated eye tracking technology and let them see these scenarios of children playing. When they were primed to expect misbehavior, they spent so much time looking at the little black boys. And so we see that in fact, not simply at the level of policing, adults, but at the level of observing children, these biases and associations of blackness, criminality and misbehavior infect our sight, infect our thinking and then our behavior so that we shouldn't be surprised that the rate of suspension and expulsion of black children, especially black boys, is through the roof. Now we should take this personally as Baha'is. We create all of these beautiful activities, children's classes where kids can interact and love each other as my sons here do with their friends. And we have to realize that this is not enough because as soon as these children step out into the world, in fact, maybe as soon as they step into the children's classes, they may be treated differently. So our obligation is actually to create a world that reflects back at them their oneness and their nobility. We can't just take it for granted that we teach the belief without empirically testing it in practice because as we know, as it was profiled more recently in the news with the Trayvon's murder and a host of other murders after that, when they move into the world, simply changing their garments will create completely different reactions for them, right? And so we have an obligation to begin to change this environment if we truly believe in their oneness. We cannot afford not to talk to them. Now, if preschool children are being treated differently based on race, that means we need to start talking to them at preschool about race and racism, right? We cannot afford to pretend like it's too sophisticated or too, you know, too much for them to handle. Again, color blindness is not a solution. Our good intentions are not enough. Our National Spiritual Assembly in 1991 told us that racism is endemic to the U.S. society. And I would say in many societies around the world now, it's like a cancer corroding the vitals of the nation, right? We don't do it with any physical ailment. We don't go to the doctor and say, you know what, I've been really feeling very terrible, but I really don't want you to tell me what's wrong. You know, just tell me I'm doing all right. The doctor diagnoses you. And for us, maybe we accept the diagnosis. Maybe we accept that it's endemic. But then it's as if we take the diagnosis, say we take the x-ray, and we put it in a frame and hang it on our house and say, you know, that is a very good diagnosis. Look at that. Endemic racism, we don't do that with physical illness. We act on it, right? And so we can't do that with spiritual diagnoses, right? We can't just put it in a frame and put it on the wall. We have to act on it with the seriousness in which it deserves. Recently it was found that Miami PD were using these faces as target practice. So you think about this is what you're practicing on. What are you going to see as threats when you get on the street? In response though, and again we have to highlight the parallel history that always goes along with racial domination. And that is people fighting back, trying to resist and work against it. In this case, the clergy in this area started a hashtag in which they put their own faces and said, use me instead. This is the example, friends. We cannot let this continue without speaking and acting on it. And in many ways we need to follow and collaborate with other faith communities who are doing that. Now think about that, target practice, and juxtapose it with what our writings say about blackness and black people. Not threats, but thou art light unto the pupil of the eye. That's dark in color, but a fount of light and the revealer of the contingent world. We need to be so crystal clear on how our faith speaks back to this reality and says not target practice, not criminality, and it's not about ignoring blackness. It's not about color blindness. It's acknowledging it and saying this is the contribution. Our guardian says that what is required is a revolutionary change in the concept and attitude of the average white American toward his Negro fellow citizen. It didn't say reform your concept and attitude, not tweak your concept and attitude. A revolutionary change. What is that? What does that look like? What level of self-reflection, community deliberation, outward action does it take to bring this to life? Just being appalled by the headlines is not enough. Recognizing the problem is not enough. We have to begin to transform what we see if not target practice. One of the foremost social theorists, Chris Rock, said, the thing is we treat racism in this country like it's a style that America went through, like flared legs and lava lamps. Oh, that crazy thing we did. We were hanging black people. We treat it like a fad instead of a disease that eradicates millions of people. This is not a hot button issue, friends. This is not something that popped off when Fox and MSNBC got to it. This is long-standing. Rock says you've got to get it at a lab. You've got to study it. You've got to see its origin, see what it's immune to, and what breaks it down. The seriousness in which we have to take this work. And this metaphor of the lab is not coincidental. People are hungry for healing and justice, and we have the prescription on a frame on the wall. The all-knowing physician has his finger on the pulse of mankind. He perceives the disease and prescribes in his unerring wisdom the remedy. Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age he live in. And center your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements. Incline your ears to the sweet melody of this prisoner. If I had a part two of this talk, we would just talk about this last word, prisoner. It's not a coincidence that the manifestation of God for this day refers to himself as a prisoner who was held captive for most of his life at a time when the most incredible human rights violations affecting people of African descent in this country is the carceral system. This prisoner has a lot to say about that, but we don't have time. In the September 8, 2014 letter to us co-workers, our beloved National Assembly says, surely we of all people cannot afford to stay silent and aloof. We who have access to the healing message of Bahá'u'lláh cannot fail to apply the remedy. We can neither surrender ourselves to anger or despair, nor merely mouth by Bahá'u'lláh. Rather, we must recognize the greatness of the challenges still before us, the vastness of the learning and growth we must still acquire. We must also never doubt the transformative power latent in the community life. We are laboring to create. I want to pause on that phrase, merely mouth platitudes. The stickers, the t-shirts, the posters, the banners, no room in my heart for prejudice. But if we live in a world filled not only with prejudice, but with virulent, cancerous racism, do we think we are immune? Shoghi Effendi says that we are organic with the world. What's on the outside gets inside of us, but also what's inside of us can shape our environment. I think we have to hold fast to this idea that our faith as individuals and communities is deeply bound up with the state of the world. We do not live in a cocoon. If we're navigating institutions and workplaces of our kids or in schools that are deeply stratified in which the curriculum continues to idealize whiteness, there is room in their heart for prejudice. We are not immune. Let's spend a minute on this idea of the black-white binary. Sometimes in discourse around racism, a hand is raised, a frustration is voiced, why do we always talk about this? Well, our writings say there is a reason why we talk about this. In fact, the social science supports what our writings say, that we need to deal and wrestle with this polarity between black and white. It is the paradigm in which racist ideology was created. Such that black people have been fabricated through law and through custom as not simply outsiders to the body politic, but as a threat, a virus to the body politic, through laws and through custom. This means that you cannot naturalize a threat, right? You don't assimilate a threat. You dispose of it, such that the disposability of black life is foundational to this nation. My mother's resident alien card here begins to get us thinking about how other groups fit into this polarity systematically as other groups have been incorporated in this country. They have quickly figured out that it is to their benefit to distance themselves from black people and blackness in order to gain the privileges and rights of whiteness. The Italians, the Jews, the Irish, the Persians, we have to wrestle with this equation in which gaining access to the American dream has meant stepping on the necks of black people. Don't take my word for it. There's hundreds of books, the myth of ethnic success, right? The idea that these groups have climbed the ladder through gumption, through hard work, through education, with no mention of the ways in which they have worked tirelessly to distance themselves and denigrate black people in their climb upward. Thus, we have to reckon with the idea of false equivalences. Well, this group did it. Why can't you? Without reckoning with the histories and institutions that have worked to ensure that differences are different, right, that not all biases are created equal, that there's a difference between individual bias and institutionalized racism and discrimination. The example I give my students is this. We all have the ability to spit in someone else's water. We had water bottles with cups. We could all harm each other in that way. We don't all have the ability to poison the pipes of an entire city, as has happened in Flint, Michigan, and that has disproportionately harmed poor people and black and brown people. Those are differences of scale, different units of analysis, and too often we're conflating them and saying, well, you can do it to me. I can do it to you. Sure, that's one level of analysis. But let's zoom the lens out and look at the ways in which institutional power has been monopolized and that harm has been done on much greater scale and that it requires more than changing hearts to grapple with. Another example I often point to is this analogy with the orchard. We often think of racism and prejudice as bad apples. You know, the media plays into this. Someone has a racial slur, and for a week we have to hear about it nonstop, and we put them on trial and we pluck the bad apple, fire the teacher, fire the cop, and then we wonder, it happened again. It happened again. We keep plucking the bad apples and not dealing with the orchard. It's very easy to cast blame on individuals, and sure, individuals need to be held accountable for their actions. That's not what we're saying. But we should not be surprised at the routinization of racism if we fail to deal with the orchard, addressing the root causes of the ills of flicking society. We can tell every news story through the lens of apples and orchards. How many of you recognize this teenager? Ahmed Mohammed, at the time he was 14 years old in Texas, he created a clock out of his pencil box, took it to school, they assumed it was a bomb. By the time he got to fifth period, they'd called the cops, five officers interrogated him. He was expelled. Eventually his family went back to Kuwait. They just recently came back I think last summer. There's a way to tell this story through the lens of bad apples, bad teacher, bad cop, bad principal. Sure, they should be held accountable. He wouldn't have been treated that way if his name was Adam and he looked differently. But there's something bigger going on here that's not captured by the bad apple scenario. Likewise with this teenager in Charleston who was using her cell phone in class and the officer slammed her out of her desk. She was dealing with family issues, trying to communicate with family. And this is the response. Again, we could tell it through the lens of bad apples, overreacting cop, teacher shouldn't have left it to the cop to make this call, et cetera, et cetera. Again, we're missing something. We're not dealing with the larger orchard, which includes the fact that one in two Americans believe that Arab Americans should carry special ID cards. That's not about a few individuals in one school. Likewise, the fact that black students are suspended and expelled at three times the rate of white students. And this goes much higher in my town of Princeton that the community has come together to demand accountability around this and it's eight times the rate as white students. This is part of the orchard, right? That will ensure that we have more Ahmeds and more Charleston's next week, next month, next year until we begin to grapple with it at this community-wide level. And so now I'm going to breeze through five ways in which we all routinely misdiagnose racism. I'm going to breeze through the first four and spend a little bit more time on the fifth. The first is the legalistic fallacy. This is the idea that with the change of laws we've changed society, that we've progressed, right? For example, equal opportunity laws that require people not to discriminate in workplace and employment. So we say the law has changed so it must not be happening and we know that in fact, our study shows that it persists maybe in slightly different forms but for example, these two University of Chicago business researchers did an audit study sending out resumes in Chicago and Boston to thousands and thousands of employers and tweaked the names on the applications on the resumes from names that are stereotypically black like Keisha and Jamal to names like Emily and Greg. They wanted to see what the employers' responses with the same qualifications and not surprisingly they found that the callback rate for the white sounding names was 50% more than the black sounding names with identical credentials and they calculated that this higher callback rate was equivalent to the employers assuming that those white applicants had eight additional years of job experience that they in fact did not have and what they found actually was that those employers who have that equal opportunity clause we do not discriminate against race, gender, class, actuality that you see at those ads they discriminated at the same rate as everyone else. So when you see those clauses don't think that that is actually matching reality but what is quite telling now is that the way in which we try to move from humans making these subjected biases to deferring to technology is actually quite alarming and this is what my next book is grappling with and that is that we think technology is more neutral perhaps even more ethical than humans but we program the technology and so what we find is Princeton researchers note that algorithms are making the same associations as humans linking white sounding names with more pleasant associations than other names so we have to keep track of how our values and assumptions are being embedded in the technologies that will increasingly be making decisions about everything from healthcare to education to crime and punishment the second fallacy we often assume that racism is about individual intentions whether good or bad that it boils down to what's in our hearts certainly that's a huge part of it we have to care about what we as individuals do and think and mean but it's not reduced to that and so for example we have this idea that by just disclaiming your racism it covers up anything that comes after it anything that you do or say that pause I'm not racist no what's coming after that is probably very very racist I'll give you some examples Twitter, I love Twitter as Ada I'm not racist, black people were a lot nicer before the civil rights movement I promise I'm not racist though it might sound it but Obama needs to get out the White House it's called the White House for a reason one of the reasons I really love Twitter as data is because young people are not our salvation I love young people, I have two sons, 13 and 16 but they are living in the same fishbowl as all of us they are learning the values and assumptions and biases of all of us so when you go to Twitter you say we are not aging out of this problem friends when I started I used to tell my students let's just wait a while for all the seniors to make their way now I know that that's not a solution we are passing on these ideas and these ideologies to younger and younger generations the third fallacy, the third way we often misdiagnosed racism is assuming that the way racism operates today is the same as it did a generation two ago if it doesn't look like a sign on the wall that says whites only if it doesn't look like lynching we say well it's a lot better without accounting for the way that it mutates diagnosing it as it changes as opposed to holding a fixed idea for what and how it is and then measuring today's racism with the past so an example again going back to criminal justice is the way that our carceral system is reproducing ideas relinking blackness with criminality so that people feel justified many cases are legally allowed to discriminate against those with felony records when those with felony records are disproportionately black here we had a study by Deva Pager, Harvard sociologist in which this time she didn't send out the resumes she sent out actual people two testers black and white to potential employers same qualifications but in the case of two of the testers they showed as if they had a felony record in the case of the other two that they didn't and what she found unsurprisingly was though the black and white tester with the felony record got a lot less interest from employers what she wasn't expecting to find and which made this study a splash is that the white individual with a felony record received much more favorable attention from employers than the black individual without a felony record ideas of meritocracy out the door the notion that you get what you deserve so something about blackness is priming these people to really think that they are undeserving and relinking a host of negative connotations to them the fourth fallacy, the way in which we misdiagnosed racism is the tokenistic fallacy the idea that a few examples of progress or success overshadow much larger patterns of inequality and Oprah means that everyone has an equal chance in entertainment and media and Obama means that our political system is magically fixed a few black professors at Princeton means that there's not an issue with hiring black and brown faculty in universities and so we have to be wary of using these celebrity cases or these individual tokens as a reflection of broader patterns we need to really diagnose the larger phenomena and now I want to spend a few minutes on this last fallacy and you'll see why as it comes to solutions and ways to really address some of these issues so here the ahistorical fallacy is the way that we look at present reality and we fail to fully grapple with the complex histories that have produced the present that in fact the past is not past and so we look at neighborhoods thinking of the neighborhoods in which you live, you work you do core activities when we look and diagnose this we have to keep in mind the histories, the policies the customs that have produced various realities pulled up this map of LA showing the racial ethnic composition of different parts of the city you know we'd like to think of our metropolitan areas as so diverse we use words like diverse when in fact we would be more accurate to say look how segregated, in fact most of our cities are more segregated today than they were at the end of the Civil War and so when we look at a map like this we're attempting to ignore the histories that have produced it not simply separation but inequality that walking in the green zone is very different from walking in the yellow zone or the blue zone that the kinds of establishments and schools and activities and green spaces are radically different across this landscape it's not simply people that are different it's inequality that's reproduced and naturalized so in many ways when we outlaw discrimination through Jim Crow laws what we did was re-naturalize and reproduce the geography of the nation and allow many of the same activities to persist and so we would have to grapple with the practice of redlining again with Los Angeles in which the government sanctioned banks to discriminate against prospective homeowners and look at how the redlining map overlaps with the map of racial ethnic segregation today green zone, the red zone in which case is my... can you see the red zone? yeah, my mom's neighborhood my grandma's neighborhood thinking about what it means that people are living with the legacy of redlining state mandated and sanctioned discrimination which was in fact the divestment from an entire population and the investment and the accumulated wealth of white people and those who have moved closer to whiteness through assimilation we had forums like this in which banks would really rank and categorize a neighborhood in this case trying to figure out the concentration of undesirables low class whites and negro the infiltration of the negro the rate of people on welfare and through the systematic analysis would decide no in fact we are not giving out loans in this high risk area with these undesirables a similar practice that complimented redlining was racially restrictive covenants in which individual home buyers home buyers associations would make it difficult if not impossible for you to sell your own home to a black individual or family they use language like none of the residential lots nor any part thereof shall be leased let or sold or transferred to or occupied by anyone who is or whose spouse is or the members of whose immediate family are of other than the white or Caucasian race and this exclusion shall include persons perceptible strains of the Asiatic, Mexican, Mexican Indian American Indian Negro, Filipino or Hindu races it being understood however that this provision shall not be interpreted to prevent the occupancy as such by domestic servants employed by an owner or tenant there's so much going on here isn't there for one quite humorously account for the fact that say an interracial couple might send the white half of a couple in to buy the home and then the other person kind of jumps out and surprise less humorously it reminds us that these politics and restrictions were never ever simply meant to keep people apart but to enforce hierarchy and status you can live with me as long as you're there to serve me racism is never simply about difference but about power the fatal coupling of power and difference so as I was preparing for this conference today I was spending some time with my mom who lives in the Lamert Park area the blue area on the first map and I found some interesting documents about restrictive covenants in her neighborhood this ad by some developers trying to entice white home buyers to come live there and calling these beneficial restrictions that would ensure your investment you buy this house don't worry we're ensuring that this area will stay white you won't lose your money through depreciation through the influx of Negroes similarly an example of the homeowners association in this area they call themselves neighborly endeavor ink racism is so innovative in using euphemisms isn't it neighborly endeavor ink and what they did was there was a white homeowner who was trying to sell his house to a black couple the Wilson's and the homeowners association was working to sue him to prevent him from doing it right and it's so interesting the lead plaintiff in this suit he said he disclaimed any racial feeling I just cannot get on board with the influx of Negroes in the neighborhood he's saying I'm not racist but it's so interesting how that disclaimer has been operating since the 20s if not earlier people don't want to own it but they want to act on it but this is not the end of the story whether Lamert Park or elsewhere because again any time there's been racial domination people have been working to pose it quietly and praying about it but working to oppose it in this case when this homeowners association was trying to sue the white homeowner for selling his home clergy in the area a Christian Rev and a Jewish rabbi rallied people together started handing out literature in the neighborhood saying we cannot stand for this discrimination they created a welcome party for the Wilson's to welcome them to the neighborhood and they actively publicly said they don't stand for this and so we have to acknowledge and build on this legacy of this parallel history of people always working for racial amity oneness and justice this is our legacy we have to build on it and so in some when we walk out of this door we recognize as we diagnose the issues around us racism is not simply about individual ignorance sure not knowing things is part of it but it's also a way of seeing and perceiving others and ourselves it's a form of knowledge distorted but a way of knowing and we have to grapple with that it's not simply about giving people the facts but it's wrestling with what they already what we all think we know most importantly racism is a system of exploitation and resource hoarding and it's rationalized by an ideology of white supremacy that is to sleep at night when you are hoarding the rights and privileges and resources of a society you have to create an elaborate justification that supports your right to do so and racism is that ideology and I want to point out here that the resources that are being hoarded are not simply material resources property citizenship, education, health, safety but they're also symbolic resources we hoard status we hoard respect and dignity for other people when I think about it sometimes I think you know racism allows you to walk down the street and only smile and greet some people and not others it's a way of conserving your energy when you've deemed some people worthy of your respect and others not it's a way we can begin to challenge and undo this right away even if our bank accounts are negative and we feel I'm not benefiting from racism ah but Du Bois called it a psychological wage and so how about we begin to redistribute status, redistribute dignity and respect and as we're told by the writings to have a smiling loving face to everyone we come across not to hoard that our communities are living laboratories we do not have it figured out we have to experiment with new ways of living in community and so when we think about the wisdom friends the wisdom of focusing our our efforts at the neighborhood level think about it neighborhoods have been the place in which mental segregation has been reflected back at us through geographic segregation racism has been naturalized through carving out our cities and towns through policies and norms that keep us apart and unequal right this is the history of racism in our society so the wisdom of focusing on neighborhoods we're told we will learn how best and most effectively to work through diverse populations and about the practical dimensions of interracial fellowship the practical dimensions where our theories about oneness are empirically tested in this laboratory we call a community how different have to we have to approach our feasts our core activities our devotionals if we're there to experiment if we're not there simply to do things that is always done let's reflect on how often we conflate reverence and spirituality with Persian culture or white American sensibilities that is not to be a high when we think of a prayer that's wrapped as somehow less reverent or less sacred as a cultural form that has grown out of the oppressed instead of making those conflations and assumptions let's experiment let's do what Abdul Bahad did and assault the racial and class norms of the society in which we live let's recommit to making our community a focus of love and justice through collaboration over insulation through justice over the discomfort of the well to do through radical appreciation of difference rather than assimilation Abdul Bahad's example and as we do so and we go forth and we think about how we can do this practically let's remember that the Guardian said we're living at a time of twin processes one disintegration and one integration in a very moving talk on pilgrimage Paul Lample said that the process of disintegration the crumbling of the old world it's meeting all of its goals every headline every tweet we can look at it and say good job coming down the question then for us is are we meeting our goals if we say we're recommitted to process integration if we say that we really believe in love and justice we have to work as diligently and deliberately and innovatively as those who are bringing down the old world we have to stay up late at night thinking about how we are going to do this so many lives depend on it thank you