 Welcome everyone on a much better Friday and I've a couple of announcements one is cell phones off please second wait for the microphone during the question and answer period the other thing you need to know is that handsome gentlemen there is from channel 17 and eventually you'll be able to watch the whole lecture again now our EE Board is usually extremely brilliant and right on the money but this time we've made a little mistake if you notice on Friday April 6th it says we're gonna have coffee however the lecture is in the sanctuary uh-uh no coffee allowed the coffee will therefore be on the previous Friday on March 23rd yeah the 23rd so the other thing I have to tell you is remember that we are planning a trip on May 9th and sign up two weeks yes the 23rd up to we the trip to Berry is in May and the sign-up sheet is in the back and the other thing I want to remind you all of is that every week Peter our genius here tapes the lectures and the questions that you ask and the answers which is why you got to have a microphone and he makes copies and they are available to borrow you need to go back and sign up take the CD go home play it then bring it back we have CDs going back to 2007 so and they're all arranged by either the whoever gave the lecture or the date so it is a wonderful benefit and of course because I'm standing here before you we would like a volunteer to carry on that work and Kathy has done it for many years and she's an expert at it would be happy to train you but she's ready to retire so we hope that that benefit will continue and now Beth will introduce our speaker very happy today to welcome Paul you know Paul earned his bachelor's in philosophy and his master's in education from Boston College he also holds a master's from the Harvard Graduate School of Education for the past five years he's been the assistant principal at the Frederick Tuttle Middle School in South Burlington he also is a partner in a local consulting firm that helps organizations achieve greater proficiency culturally and just this week Paul began a new position in a different place and so we're very fortunate that he's with us still today he is now the senior advisor for strategic diversity assessment and research at the University of Vermont and if you've been following the news you know that diversity issues are front and center at UVM as they have been in the community and in the nation so it's a great pleasure that we welcome Paul youn thank you very much Beth it is an honor to be here and I do want to just acknowledge first and foremost that having been at UVM now for the past five days I think I might have caught a little bit of a cold and so my voice today is particularly baritone and I hope that actually that is good especially for those of you who choose to listen to this again at another time my mother has joked with me throughout my life that I should become a radio personality and so again I hope that my voice is accessible I also want to make sure with Peter's help that everybody here in this room can hear me so if there is a time where you feel like we need to turn up the volume or if you can't hear me for whatever reason please just let us know I think a simple hand-in-arm gesture would be sufficient or again trying to get one of our attentions as well so as Beth said it is again great to be actually back here in South Burlington as I drove down Dorset Street just a few minutes ago and past the Frederick H. Tuttle Middle School I was thinking about how much has changed just over the past seven days at least for me it is great to be back here to do this Beth and I actually met just a few months ago in South Burlington when I was moderating a discussion on the yearly kind of reading of Frederick Douglass's what is the Fourth of July to the American Negro and that was a great event that I encourage you in the future if you have the opportunity to access that either here in South Burlington or at any number of the other readings across the state I think at the moment there are approximately 40 or 50 plus readings that are done over the course of usually in July but in other places as well and so again I hope that you have the opportunity to access that so thank you very much so I'm going to try here to have a conversation with all of you what I've been asked to do is to try to talk a little bit about the issue of race but before we get into this issue I do want to just first start by saying again how grateful I am I want to actually invoke and really remember a couple of very important people to me when I was an undergraduate at Boston College I had the opportunity to take a class titled the history and development of racism in the United States of America at the time the class was taught by two men named Horace and Paul Horace at the time was approximately 72 years old and had been teaching the course for over 20 consecutive years 50 consecutive semesters it was an amazing commitment to the work Horace and Paul also happened to be white men and what they taught me and what they literally taught thousands of undergraduates throughout the time that they taught this course was the history and development of racism in the United States of America all of the work that I have done over the course of my life frankly can be largely attributed to those two men I have done a lot of learning about my own history I've done a lot of learning about other people's histories as well and what I'm going to try to do today is to synthesize some of that for you in this again presentation but I know that like many of you here we've all gotten to this point in large part to those people who have made indelible marks on our lives and I just want to again remember them for that of course also recently passed away and that was something that obviously hit me quite hard but hopefully in work like this I hope to carry on his legacy of this important work so as I said again this is my name and title I think it's really important to acknowledge that I really do believe that my purpose in life is to passionately pursue justice to make the world a more equitable place I've been doing that as Beth said as primarily a school leader a school-based leader for the past gosh about 12 years now and I'm really excited about becoming a catamount and doing that work at UVM as well somebody over the past a couple of days has shared with me that Vermont is such a small community that there is no such thing as six degrees a separation here I've already learned over the past 15 or 20 minutes all of the different connections that I already have with some of you for example my realtor is very good friends with somebody in this room and I'm sure that there are other ones as well so let's start by just talking a little bit about this whole notion of race because to be very honest it's something that unfortunately I think in my opinion at least few people in this country have actually sat down to think or talk about it's easy enough to go to the dictionary to figure out what the definition of race is but there is this paradox that we in this country struggle with on the one hand right race doesn't exist to some people and on the other there are these very real outcomes for people who are classified as belonging to or not belonging to a certain race so how do we come to grips with this paradox how do we struggle with this seemingly in coherent I suppose way of dealing or understanding this world so the topic of today today's lecture here is really what's race got to do with it this is a question that we not only hear every single day on vpr or on CNN or written in newspaper articles but through social media there are people across not only our country but across the world who are grappling with this question and on the face of it it seems so simple what is race and yet for many centuries now it has confounded us and again what I'll try to at least illuminate is how it has impacted us here in this country as well so before we get there I do want to take a quick step back and talk a little bit about our approach at least and by I mean our the work that I do through the consultancy that I work with you probably recognize this man what I want to start to talk a little bit about is this whole notion of intellectual quotient and about this idea that we as human beings right have something inside of our brains that allow us to make sense of the world in an intellectual way I think for many years we've regarded this as one of the best ways for us to make sense of the world in which we live I think what we've started to do as human beings is better understand that that's not frankly good enough there are other ways to interact with the world and there are other ways to understand it that have re on just again that of the mind there's a whole body of research right now that has been developed over the course of the past few decades that has started to talk about this whole notion of emotional quotient or your emotional intelligence I think all of us can understand what that is I know for example that sometimes if you celebrate Thanksgiving in a very American traditional way and family members maybe from other parts of the country come together after having been apart for a while you have to learn how to make sure that you break bread with that person in an appropriate way there is this emotional intelligence that goes into those interactions that allow you to have a great meal and a good time with family so the intellectual part we know is important it gets us to a certain place we're also learning that there is an importance to the emotional side of how we interact with and how we again understand the world and what we at CQ strategies talk a lot about is also our cultural quotient it's figuring out right how we can relate to people who might have different cultural beliefs about any number of different things and how all three of these things right the intellectual the emotional and the cultural piece come together to help us better understand and interact with the world our plan for today I hope will be relatively straightforward what we're doing right now is just going through a brief introduction next what I'll try to do is engage you in a very short activity on a work called bias and to actually experience that to a small degree right here and now with one another we'll talk about again race it's historical origins as well as some of the impacts of it on our country today we'll start to talk and this is going to be towards the tail end of this particular lecture about isms about the ideologies that have impacted us in different ways and at the end of course we'll have a quick or excuse me a not a quick we'll have a question-and-answer period for all of you as well so what I'd like to invite you to do right now is there's a short video clip that I'm going to show typically I show it twice because sometimes people just need that but I'll ask you after we watch together once if again that second go-through is necessary but what I'd like you to do again is just to obviously watch the clip for the moment and just follow the directions that are in it does the team in white make the answer is 13 but did you see the moonwalking does anybody need to see that a second time no okay if if if you're open to it would you mind just sharing if you saw the moonwalking bear the first time the second time yes okay what's interesting about videos like that is that it truly is easy to miss something that you're not looking for I'm sure you've come across this before when maybe you've made the decision to purchase an appliance or a car or something along those lines right you start to see that type of car everywhere after you've made the decision I'm definitely gonna buy that Subaru outback this year something along those lines what's interesting about videos like this is that it really encouraged us to think a little bit about well what is it that we might be missing that's right in front of our eyes but it's obviously just something that we're not looking for and race is very much like this because it's in front of us at all times when I walked in the room earlier this afternoon right it was present and I walked in here as people started to look at the phenotypic characteristics that make up who I am as an individual I was again making very similar judgments as well but there is again this seeming paradox between what we're supposed to do with that information that makes race such a difficult topic in many circles at least to talk about so I want to ask you just another quick question here and I'll read this to you humans have approximately 30,000 genes on average how many genes do you think separate all members of one race from all members of another race so for example how many genes separate somebody from the white race then somebody from the Asian or black or other race and I'll just give you a couple of kind of options and if you could just raise your hands and let me know what you think you don't have to but if you would be so kind that would be helpful so how many people think that there are zero genes that again separate all members of one race from all members of another how many people think that there might be about 10 of these 30,000 genes that separate some from others how about 50 500 great we could 10 alright the fascinating thing about genomic science right now is that we have been able to as human beings figure out that there are zero there are zero characteristics traits or genes that distinguish all members of one so-called race from all members of another race what some people argue is that this is a myth that has become a part of the air that we breathe that because I look this way and perhaps you sir look that way there is something inside of our genes inside of our very genetic makeup that makes us different and yet again what we'll talk a little bit about a little bit later is that the fact that we are part of the same species is something that is lost behind a very thin layer of epidermis and the old saying right that really beneath the surface we're all the same is very very much true and that again goes all the way down to the genetic level as well so one of the things that research has shown us is that it is incredibly important for all of us to just acknowledge that there are some things that are true about the way in which we interact with the world the video that we showed you earlier was to just illustrate that sometimes if something's right there in front of you it's easy to miss it and that's okay because that is actually what has gotten us to where we are today those mental shortcuts that allow us to interact and interpret and understand the world and yet sometimes it also is a liability or as a blind spot for us and if we can acknowledge that and we can pause the research shows us that outcomes in any number of different areas become very different that's again what we're going to hope to get to as we get through the rest of this lecture today I'd like you to take another moment to just pause and think here and I used former president Obama I love this picture of him just because it shows him being very pensive and thinking very deeply about something before I hope he acts and it also has Abraham Lincoln there in the in the rear what I'm going to do is going to show you just a series of pictures and I'll ask you just a few questions to reflect on after I show you those pictures and what I'd like you to do is just to to yourselves think a little bit about what comes to mind as you see these pictures again just think to yourself what comes to mind when you see these pictures so I'd like you to think about these questions typically when we do this work we talk a lot about the importance of doing the individual work that's necessary in order to understand not only kind of the outside world but to understand oneself as well it's that inner conversation that one needs to have in order to really again begin to understand so what I'd like you to do and again invite you to do is just to think about these questions in the context of these pictures those pictures excuse me that we just looked at together how do you define race and again not how Webster's or any other right dictionary does but how do you right now given your life experience your education etc how do you define race and there won't be a quiz so don't worry about that how many races do you think there are and what are they and the third question is just like you to take a brief look around the room who do you think is similar to you biologically or genetically and it's not a trick question but just take a brief look around the room if I had the opportunity to ask each and every one of you to define the word race my assumption is that I get very different answers from many of you I assume there might be some that overlap with one another but again my assumption is that there will be many different ones my understanding is also that these lectures don't typically ask for people to kind of interact with the lecture I'm wondering if I could be bold here and maybe ask if there was a participant or two that might be open to sharing with the group what their definition of a word like race might be yes ma'am okay I'll come over to you if that's okay and maybe I'll repeat what you say if that's okay with you okay okay language is okay okay I'm not actually not familiar with it no but I'll have to look it up okay okay and what would your definition of race be then okay and what is your name and nice to meet you so and recently read a book titled homo sapiens okay so and recently read a book titled homo sapiens and she highly recommends it so if you have not heard about it or read it before she highly recommends that you do so and one thing that she was talking a little bit about was this whole notion that there is this one race right that which is called homo sapiens and over the course of time there were other species you might have heard about them before the Neanderthals or others that really died off and homo sapiens right the people that we the race I should say excuse me that we belong to is the one that is here right now okay well that is a very helpful definition of race my assumption is though again that for those of you who might not have read a book like homo sapiens that there are other again definitions that might come to mind right that there if you go to our census documents for example there are different boxes that one will check if you belong to a certain race or don't belong to a certain race and that is typically again how race is understood to be defined you belong to something because of some reasons and again the commonality of being a homo sapien is and was talking about is something that again is not either prioritized or acknowledged in that particular way the second question is also an interesting one because and right and the author posits that there is right now at least in our regard this one race of homo sapiens again I think that the common prevailing thought is that there are many and again how can one not think that given all of the different ways right that other human beings around the world look I don't look like this individual how can we right be very similar biologically or genetically that's just impossible right he's much better looking than I am he's in much better shape than I am I I wish I had hair like that there's a lot that right seemingly separates us so how again could we be part of the same race but again I think the common kind of prevailing thought is that there are many races a lot of them right being very easy to describe or understand based on again this or again this and the last question was again just to similarly get you to think a little bit about what it is about each of us here in this room that is either similar or different one thing that I'll touch upon now that I hope to come back to a little bit later is the reality that there is very little that separates us as human beings we might have different cultural values a different language that we speak different ways of doing certain things but the reality is that we as human beings have very little that separates us something has happened over the course of centuries that has made us think very differently about one another and it's had some very real impacts on especially in our country one particular group of people so just to start to acknowledge some of the history here the English word for race turns up for the first time in a poem by William Dunbar in the year 1508 for those of you who might be history buffs you might remember that it is around this time that people from England were starting to explore the African continent in ways that had not been done for a long time the people with the lightest pigment or skin tone in the world were starting to interact more and more with some of the people with the darkest pigment in the world and the English were frankly astonished they were dumbfounded by the difference they just observed in African people in general their dress was different if they had dress right their manners or mannerisms were different their obviously skin tone was very different than theirs religion what religion at least according to the English systems of government were different etc etc etc so they started to try to just make sense of how this was possible how could we look the way that we look how could we do things the way that we do things and how could they look the way that they look and how could they do things the way they do things what I want to also acknowledge is that notions of whiteness and notions of blackness had been well defined in the English language for some time before that word was used in that poem in 1508 and to be honest we know this and we know this well today because it is still something that we I think can understand very much today there was this cultural understanding of whiteness as being pure as being clean as being angelic if you look at the use of again white in iconography and religion and other places get we know that right today there's a reason that in my home we use a white linen for our Thanksgiving dinner table or our Christmas dinner table right there's something about it that connotes pureness or clean this or something again that is divine on the other hand and again this is before the English started to interact more and more with people from Africa there was this cultural understanding about blackness and again these things have continued and obviously are part of our culture today as well the understanding about blackness was that it was somehow right the opposite of white it was immoral right black is associated with dirty right or even demonic and so as the English right from what I understand started to interact more and more with people in Africa they started to think about well what could we use to start to describe this for us this seems so different than what we are you can start to see how as these races started to be defined as being that of the quote unquote white race and another group of people being part of the quote unquote black race how some of these cultural understandings of these two words started to be attributed to other people and there is amazing literature out there that talks about all of the different ideas that went into why right some people had darker skin than others I was born and raised Catholic I was talking to somebody about that earlier today and you know I remember very clearly right reading the Bible and learning all about again all of the things that are in that particular holy book and again having that text and starting to again figure out what it was within that that applied to these other groups of people right that didn't believe in that particular religion again we can start to see how these understandings get overlaid on other people I want to fast forward the clock here a little bit and some of you may be familiar with this work this particular drawing is attributed to a man named Johann Frederick Blumenbach he was an 18th century physiologist and he is frankly one of many people over the course of human history that have tried to better understand this whole concept or notion of race but much later than we were just talking about in 1779 he divided the human species into five races and as I pull these up I just want you to think about where you might have seen or heard these ideas before again so in 1779 he divides the human species into five races that says the Mongolian or yellow race this one is interesting that last one so I ask you how many of these overlap with your thoughts on race I know for myself before I took the course that I talked about earlier this is exactly well not exactly very close to what I had thought about when I had thought about race in all of my schooling this was the primary or dominant just understanding of how races were organized how some of them were biologically destined and the crazy right under the the crazy thing about this is that these are not new ideas and what I'll try to do again at least orally is start to also talk a little bit about the context for those of you again who are familiar 1779 was an interesting time in our country in particular right just a few years before we had declared our independence from Great Britain we were engaged in a war to fight for our independence and obviously a few years after this study we became the United States of America as we know it right now and during this time again right people like Johann Blumenbach were trying to explain the world in this way and a lot of questions for me have come up over time what was the purpose of this Blumenbach argued based on craniometry right the study literally of the skull and I think he had at the time dozens of samples from across the world measuring out the internal capacity of some skulls vis-a-vis other ones and other again scientists tried to use other measures of the body in order to define who belong to certain race and another but for me one of the questions was again why why would we need this if for most of human history right we had not to find people in this particular way for sure we had to find people as believers and non-believers as barbarians or educated people right what role did this play and we'll come back to again the connection between why these frames are so prevalent and relevant today but I also want to acknowledge that there was something that had been going on in our world and something that was accelerating to a large part in this part of the world at that time as well and obviously that was right the enslavement of many people primarily from Africa for forced labor and so again the question is how does this understanding how does this division of race allow something like that to happen and again there have been many many books that have been written by scholars that have researched this far more than I have that begin to help people understand how we as human beings could subjugate other human beings and partially it's the psychological phenomena of cognitive dissonance that we have been able to convince ourselves that somehow biologically or genetically we are different that we are not on the same level and because of that right I can do something to another person because they're not human and we hear echoes of that today as well and part of again what I hope to come out of this lecture is for you to if you don't already right to really celebrate that common right humanity that we have with one another and to understand that some of these things right have been so ingrained in our culture in our history but they don't have to be that way that we can do something about it in our daily interactions perhaps in our families or workplaces as well so I want to ask you also to think a little bit about the work that Blumenbach and many other scholars at the time did in order to create this whole framework of race I'd like you to start to think a little bit about the different institutions that existed at the time that still exist today and how those individual institutions may have been influenced by these ideas and I'll use some examples as we go through this to try to illustrate that as best as possible so first of all the education institution if I for example as an English person with power at the time was able to design the curriculum that students were having access to and I could write the textbooks or the books or the lectures right that were given at the time right whose ideas were the ones that were placed above others and which ones are the ones that were provided as the reality of the situation or the kind of natural order of things and whose again narratives were not if we look at an institution like the criminal justice system right how does again a framework like the one that I just shared with you influence the decisions that might be made in terms of adjudicating court cases on simple things like theft or murder or other types of things and again what I'd like to encourage you to do is think about the impact of these institutions not only over a course of years but really again over centuries in our government who was able to hold places of government who was able to run for things like parliament or the presidency or Congress and who again wasn't how did it play out in housing who was able to own land who was able to rent or have to work right land for other people in business in the media today whose portrayals again are shown in a certain way and whose portrayals are shown in another way how did that play out in the military who was even able to wear the cloth of our nation and in what types of jobs and again I go through all of these different institutions to get you to think a little bit about how each of them may have been influenced by this understanding of race and this is the last one that we'll talk about each one of these institutions if I had the opportunity to kind of project them up here right now and three dimensions for you I would because what I've learned is that each one of these institutions have worked together in what some people consider to be a systemic web of racism where each of the different institutions right have worked with one another in different ways in order to create the society in which we live in right now and we can connect any two or three or all of them together to see how they might have played out with one another for individual people and in our country's context for entire groups of people as well who have been defined by their again so-called race about 50 years ago last week some of you may remember that there was a very famous presidential commission that was put together that resulted in a report called the Kerner Commission and in that report they tried to talk about all of the things that in 1968 were attributing to the assassinations of people like Robert Kennedy and Dr. King and others as well as all of the riots that were going on across the country they came to right the conclusion that we were in a dangerous place that we were a country that was divided along the race of long excuse me this idea of race and that if we were not careful we would have two countries over time one again white with access to certain things and one black without and thankfully I think to make sure that we can acknowledge that 50 years later today we have seen a lot of progress in a number of different areas from the level or the rate at which African-American children graduate from high school and access post-secondary options to things like outcomes within our health care system etc but I'll just share with you three statistics that in the follow-up report that was again just published I believe last week 50 years after the Kerner Commission some of these things are still true right that today black workers still make only 82.5 cents on every dollar earned by white workers and while that might seem too bad only a little bit off right we have to ask ourselves what that again means for that individual person their family etc today African-Americans are 2.5 times as likely to be in poverty as whites and today the medium white family has almost 10 times as much wealth as the median black family and I highlight these three statistics because they show that today right race still has a very real impact on how certain people live in our country and how others live as well and I know that I personally have a unique role to play in this conversation I didn't share with you earlier that I grew up in Manhattan and my parents both immigrated here from South Korea when they were quite young my mother was just 19 and my father was about 23 and they came here right with the promise that they would be able to live the American dream into a very large degree they were able to and they provided me access to quote-unquote elite educational institutions and the privilege that I have having been able to access those types of schools and to have had the privilege of being able to serve the communities that I've served is that I know that I need to illuminate this part of our nation's history because these systems of inequality have perpetuated themselves for centuries and that if I personally don't choose to do something about them the likelihood that in 50 years when we write a follow-up to the follow-up of the Kerner Commission report right that these numbers may not look very different there is a biological anthropologist named Alan Goodman that talked about race is not based on biology just like I hope I've been able to argue but that race is rather an idea that we ascribe to biology and again for me there is a clear purpose to why race has been something that we've ascribed to biology because it has allowed us as human beings some of us at least to be able to justify our actions towards other human beings but hopefully again I have sufficiently at least tried to challenge you to acknowledge that history but to also think a little bit differently I know that my time here is starting to wind down but I do want to go through if that's okay bet one additional piece and this for me is extremely critical to go over as well many times when I do these types of talks or when I talk to especially young people they always ask why does racism like how do you define racism and I want to bring this up here because it goes right along with our conversation about race but it also acknowledges something else that we've been kind of touching upon as well and Horace and Paul taught me this very simple formula to understand racism and I'd like to share that with you this afternoon racism equals prejudice plus power and to take that just one small step forward racism here and in any other country in this world right equals racial prejudice plus systemic power and racial prejudice if we had the time right are those things that we identify as stereotypes that we might again have as biases of other people so for example some people when they first meet me always expect me to speak with an accent things of that nature right systemic power is something that we were talking about before it's how those institutions that we walked through earlier right how they interplayed with one another they create the system that we are in right now and the interesting thing about this particular formula is that actually can be used to understand a lot of different isms in our country and again around the world as well and I'll just offer a few of those to you right now the same kind of understanding of racism can be used to understand sexism right sexual prejudice plus systemic power as I alluded to earlier who had the right to vote in our country right asex did for many many many years asex did not until just right about a hundred years ago and that systemic power the power of the vote power the ballot etc was able to keep some things the way that some people wanted them to be kept that again same right frame could be used for heterosexual prejudice plus systemic power very similar again systems that are used in order to create right our society in the way that it is and I'll just use one last example classism right class prejudice plus systemic power and again any number of other isms can be used in this similar way but what's critically important to understand is that racial or sexual or in this case class prejudice right are insufficient to create the inequities that we in our country are experiencing without the systemic power to do so and part of this work is to really make sure that we figure out ways to address right these systemic systems so as I said earlier what I'd love for you all to do is to imagine a world with me as I mentioned I grew up in Manhattan and grew up on the Upper West Side just a few minutes away from this particular image and many of you may know about this from having enjoyed John Lennon's music but I'd like you to imagine a world where yes to a certain degree we can rid ourselves of the notion that there are so-called different races that the phenotypic again differences between me and other people here in this room are real but they're not so different that I for example am either subhuman right or not human enough to be able to live in brother or sisterhood right with all of you and for a long part of our history this has actually been a pretty novel idea and so again I challenge you to imagine a world with me or that wouldn't right be the case so I want to express my gratitude here again for the opportunity to hopefully just illuminate a little bit of the history behind the word race of some of the current implications of that system or that frame that has again played itself out in our country there's a whole lot more that I could go into but I'll obviously leave it here so that we have sufficient time for questions and answers as well well thank you for your talk and what do you have a definition of race as a working definition a working definition you know actually I'm glad that Anne said what she said about it I think that there are many races on the planet in the sense that there are many species however when I think about race in the context of homo sapiens or human beings my working definition is that that there is one right human race that I belong to and that others belong to as well there may be a time when there are other races that will come about but as of right now there is just that one and so I wish there was a kind of a more succinct definition but that is the way that I again think about race does that help answer your question yeah yes yes well I just initially want to say that I'm very grateful that UVM has you I think it'll be a real gift to UVM but my what is sort of the question has risen in my mind in listening to you Paul is that I would I was going to say oh race is a social construct you know just that's a little facile but because it sounded like in feminism they talk about the lure of the androgyne you know we're all the same right but not giving time for female you know strengths and values to have sufficient time in our culture so how do I like sometimes when I fill out form I'll just I won't I won't even put down race you know or I'll put down social construct right so how do you deal with that I mean I mean obviously there are certain real contributions of different cultures that happen to be different colors right right absolutely one of the interesting ways and my assumption is that some of you in this room have had to do this as well but I have a seven-year-old and a three-year-old at home my son is seven and my daughter is three and I've tried excuse me my best to try to explain to at least my son first this whole understanding of race and he doesn't get it right and I honestly think that most human beings when they are that age don't either they're like what difference is there and I had to try to use a silly example and I said well why do we call this a chair and he was like I don't know like because somebody said that we're gonna call this chair and I said yeah kind of right what I want to say also to what you were just asking about is that there are some times when I do fill out those forms and I you know in a picky way or in a kind of silly way I write human as opposed to whatever it might be but I've also learned how to play the game and I've been taught how to play the game so to speak so that I know that I have to exist within the current structures that we have in our society in order to access certain things and so I play that game and I play it I think fairly well because I know that there will be doors that will be closed on me and on my family if I don't and so I choose again when I fill out the census or I have to apply for a passport I fill out the information as I'm asked to fill it out but I also do so with the truth that I understand that these are as you just said social constructs that again humans have created and have kept and perpetuated for again very specific reasons and so there's an acknowledgement of that but then there's also the work that goes on in my professional life that hopefully we will start to think of other ways of organizing our world or acknowledging those differences as well thank you what is your take on black lives movement and then the kind of counter reaction well all lives matter it is not a relevant question at all so if you are watching the news if you are listening to the radio both here locally and internationally as well over the past few years the black lives matter movement has gained a significant amount of momentum I think for me personally what people are trying to do when they talk about black lives matter is actually to invoke a lot of the history that I try to again touch upon very briefly here is that for again centuries now much of the quote unquote civilized world has considered black people or those again with dark pigment from the content of Africa as something other than human and that again construct has made the reality of those peoples is existence on this planet as human beings very difficult and there are obviously countless stories of enslavement of people who quite literally would jump off of boats as they were being transported from Africa to other parts of the world because they would have preferred death to bondage and I think that again the black lives matter movement is trying to acknowledge that history but to shine a light on the current lived experiences in particular of black people here in this country and elsewhere in the world and so what I think unfortunately is is done in our media and in other places as well is it simplifies that to say well they only care about black people and put them above others but what about everybody else and I think that for me personally that obviously misses the point again I'm obviously not somebody who identifies as black but I understand especially in this country the reality of those people and again all of the outcomes as well so I do believe right that all lives matter in the sense that we right as human beings I think all have the right to be alive and the right to be human beings in the fullest way possible but I also again when I hear black lives matter what I'm hearing is the echoes of people who frankly for much of the past almost five centuries have not had the voice to be able to express how they again have been denied their humanity so I hope that answers your question as well. I think you call them systems in your pitch education healthcare is there a priority list of where you say we need to work? So just one small clarification criminal justice so one small clarification that I just like to make is that those are at least in my experience considered institutions and again we obviously are literally in one at the moment or at least a representation of one part of that institution but there are many other again institutions the systemic piece is the way in which those institutions interact with one another and in other work that I do we might take a case study of an individual who might for example move to a new part of the country and have to access right different institutions within that system so for example when I first moved here to Vermont I had to go to the DMV to get a new license I had to work with realtors in order to access homes I had to think about which schools my children were going to attend etc. and it's how each and every one of those different institutions right interplay or interact with one another that again what some people have defined as systemic or the web of systemic racism you can think of again examples you know 1958 1959 United States if you were in Birmingham Alabama and had to access those same types of institutions how obviously all of those institutions interplayed with one another to result in the way in which Birmingham Alabama at the time was kind of designed right as a segregated city that is so does that help to answer some of that piece about a year ago I went to some presentations down at the Flynn about criminal justice and how it is designed in the 1950s so it's not up to some of the social needs of today so I wondered how much is the criminal justice system sort of stifled because of its perhaps racial overtones right right so I just think that I guess my short answer to that would be that I would argue that almost every single one of our systems still carries pieces of this this frame the mental models that we all have in our minds that we use to interact with the world are all embedded within those institutions because that's where we live or that's where we work and so I think what we are seeing again in and we could go through any number of different statistical analyses to see how how our systems are producing outcomes for certain groups of people and we will see in our country at least very clear outcomes for kind of white people writ large and if you compare them for example to black people you'll see that there are very very different outcomes in virtually every I mean actually I don't think that there is any single category that it is not but that's again how I would see right those types of institutions need to be redesigned to have different outcomes for the future very very very much