 It is my great honor and pleasure to have the chance to introduce our keynote speaker. As we work to better understand ourselves, our given privileges, and better serve our students, colleagues, and communities, to work through our implicit biases, disrupt systemic racism, and dismantle the prejudice against our historically marginalized, Dr. Ruha Benjamin has inspired educators around the nation and definitely here in Vermont. In her 2017 keynote address at the Rowland Foundation conference, Dr. Benjamin put empathy not only as the primary goal in our work for all of our students, but also as the primary benefit to all of our students. A quote from that address that I carry with me in my work and has been very important to me over the last couple of years from her keynote address, help the over-served understand their privilege and develop empathy so that they can be whole. Dr. Benjamin is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and author of People's Science Bodies and Rights on Stem Cell Frontier. She has studied the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine for over 15 years and speaks widely on issues of innovation, equity, health, and justice in the U.S. and globally. Ruha is the recipient of many awards, including the 2017 President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. Her second book, Race After Technology, Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Crow, examines the relationship between machine bias and systemic racism, analyzing specific cases of discriminatory design and offering tools for socially conscious approach to tech development. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Ruha Benjamin. Good morning. How's everybody doing? Good. All right. So let's get started, really big picture, and then we'll move into the nitty-gritty. We'll start with a line from one of my favorite writers, James Baldwin. And he says that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people. It is not necessary that people be wicked, but only that they be spineless. Big picture when we talk about cultivating courage, not only in our students, not only in our colleagues, but in our self. So over the next hour or so, we're going to mix a bit of social science around issues of equity and justice with a hardy dose of self-reflection, honest conversation, difficult questions. And in the process, we're going to wrestle with this idea that Baldwin is presenting, that it's easy to point out the obviously wicked. In fact, the lights are coming on brighter and brighter. We're living at a time in which the lights are being turned on so that it seems like we're dealing with a lot of new mess, but much of it has already been there. And the people most affected by this mess, right, by these injustices that have been trying to say, look, it's happening, it's happening all around, are now sitting back and saying, we told you so, the lights are on. But in the process, it's very easy for us in this room to feel like the bad guys are out there and we're the good guys, and we're going to pierce that binary at the start and say that we're all in this fishbowl together. And in fact, what's most needed right now is for those who feel like we get it feel like we're seeing the social reality that we're living in to have the spine to act on that. So we're going to marry our knowledge about the social reality and the importance of education as the ground zero for building a just civilization. Our knowledge of that with our courage to act on that knowledge. One without the other is not sufficient. So we're going to work with Baldwin in the backdrop here. And the trailer for this talk is this, just in case people, the caffeine starts wearing out, you know, in like 30 minutes or you start getting notification, your your kid is having some issue and you start zoning out. I just want you to know what the take home points are. And then you can do whatever you want after that. So the trailer is this. What is courageous leadership? And I have three thoughts around this. And I'm sure there's many more. And my my hope today is that we join in a conversation to flesh out this because these are just our starting points, these three points. To my mind, courageous leadership, courage is not simply an individual attribute. It's not that we have courage or we don't have courage as individuals. In fact, courage is about the environment that we create. And that's what I mean by a social model of educational leadership because it hinges less on our individual capacity and much more on the environment that we create that draws out our ability to be courageous. And so the quest for us is how do we actually create that environment? What seeds do we have to plant? What water do we have to pour in order to make our environments, our schools, our classrooms fertile ground where both our students develop a courage to stand up for what's right, but where would they see it modeled in us as well? And so we want to think about what is that environment that we have to create where courage either grows or withers because of this environment? And last but not least, courage, how we know whether we're exercising courageous leadership is in the fruits. It's in the fruits that we see around us, whether those around us are able to be vulnerable, whether they're able to ask authentic questions, whether they and we are able to take risks and experiment with new thoughts and actions. As I said, the lights are on. And one of the things we see when the lights are on and we're living in the midst of a deeply unjust, corrupt, hypocritical civilization in which we give lip service to grand ideals. No doubt grand ideals about justice, freedom, liberty for all. And yet our everyday practices are in many ways diametrically opposed when we look around us. This gap, this fault line is what we're living in. And the big one is coming when we think about the fault lines around us. And so what does it mean to experiment with new thoughts and actions? In many ways, what we have is an inheritance. We have inherited thoughts and actions from previous generations that we are carrying on unquestioning. So the first task for us is to begin to question, why do we do things this way? What are these patterns of thought and action that we're continuing to pass on that we need to question? And in many cases, we need to develop new patterns of thought and action that break with the past, break with racist, sexist, classist, all types of ways in which some human beings are valued more than others, not just in theory, but in practice, in our laws, in our norms, in our everyday encounters. And one of the things we'll come to see by the end of the conversation is changing these patterns doesn't rest on some grand vision, grand mission statements, big platitudes. These patterns are in the nitty gritty. It's in the small print. It's in the little things that we could do yesterday. It doesn't require a Gates Foundation grant, right? Or some big initiative. It's in the things that are mostly invisible. And one of the ways that I know this is that if we took a minute and we turned to one another and we recalled a memory, a memory from our own childhoods, being a student, being a young person, most of us can recall a time in which someone made us feel small, right? Either it was a teacher or a family member could have been a stranger. And that feeling stays with us. We carry the feeling of either being ignored or dismissed or made to feel less than. And usually it's in a look, it's in a word, in a phrase. For me, one of the memories that stands out is being in second or third grade and being in a class that was in like a trailer classroom in South Carolina. And no, in fact, I think it was sixth grade because it was middle, beginning of middle school. And I remember being in this class and the teacher, a white woman would ask a question and I would be there and I would be like, know it all, even then. Wanted her to call on me and she would day after day ignore me and not call on me. Small dismissals, right? This is a pattern. And so it wouldn't have taken a big grant for her to do something different, right? A grand mission statement that the school puts on its pamphlets in that case. They didn't have websites yet, right? It's not the big things, it's in the small things and how we see each other and how we acknowledge one another. And in many cases, breaking those things, although small, it still takes some courage to move past these old patterns and habits. So before we begin, I like us to just turn to our neighbor. I gave you a kind of sort of sour memory. Now I want you to recall a good one, all right? A happy place now, you know? You're in the middle of the summer. So something you like to do outside of work that just gives you energy, brings you joy. It can be strange, it can be commonplace. Share it with your neighbor and then we'll come back together in one minute, all right? All right, this side, give me something strange or commonplace, your happy place. You can tell on your neighbor too, so you don't have to give us your own. Happy place, raise your hand. Yes! Say it again? Bike ride, all right. That's funny that you would say that. My husband is a hardcore cyclist and that's all I hear about all the time. I'm so glad the tour is over. All right, over here in the middle. Happy place, tell on your neighbor. Sailor, oh, interesting. Yeah, I have a good friend who has a sailing for social justice thing, it's really cool. Yeah? Time with family, yeah. Anyone bring their family here this week? No? All right. And then we have away from family. I think I'm in that club, but don't tell anybody. Okay, over here I saw a hand. Happy place, happy place. Telling on your neighbor, yourself, one. Gardening, awesome, wonderful. I have a brown thumb so I can't relate to that. So it's important for us to have that touchstone recalling like what we are, who we are outside of our workouts, I think that's important. We bring our whole self to the table and we want to cultivate that in our students. One of the things we're gonna just get to in a minute is how so much of education, especially the kind of higher up you go, you have to pretend that you don't have a heart, that you don't have cares, that you don't have passions outside of the classroom. And we wanna think about how to turn that on its head, especially the more successful or trained you become, often the less human you become. And so we want to question that. The other thing I want us to do when we recall our happy place in acknowledging it to say that this particular conversation that we're gonna have, most of it is not gonna be your happy place, all right? It's not necessarily going to bring the warm fuzzies, all right, it's not. Are you with me? You still staying here? All right, gonna pretend like you go get coffee and then I'm gonna see you trail down the hall. So it's important just to acknowledge that it's going to bring out things that are difficult, that we often want to sort of shove in the background, but we want to turn the lights on and deal with it in a way that is productive and generative. And thinking about that process, I share with you this image by Frida Kahlo in which she is connecting with herself, her indigenous side and her European side. And in the process we see when we look closely that this connecting doesn't feel good, right? There's an element of pain, there's an element of bloodshed and yet it's vital, right? Both in the way that we connect with ourselves and one another and the kind of connections that we want to cultivate among our colleagues, our staff, our students. That pain, that heartache sometimes is part of the process, right? It's not evidence that we're doing something wrong, but right. So let's welcome that. In a similar manner, I think about the words of another favorite writer, Toni Morrison, in which she says that our future is ripe, outrageously rich in its possibilities, yet unleashing the glory of that future will require difficult labor and some may be so frightened of its birth, they will refuse to abandon their nostalgia for the womb. She has a way with words. So much packed into one sentence. The two phrases I draw your attention to are one, difficult labor, right? The work it takes and intellectual labor is also a kind of labor, emotional labor and working through the issues that we are and that we often tend to want to retreat into our comfort zones, that nostalgia for the womb, that longing doesn't end once we're born. We often in the friendships we create, the recreational activities we engage in, the neighborhoods we choose to live in, the people we choose to partner with are in many ways trying to recreate that comfort of the womb. But if we don't leave the womb, we don't grow, we don't come alive, we're not born, right? When the baby's being born, it thinks it's dying, right? That's why all the hollering. But we know that it's coming into something greater, right? And so similarly over the next hour, you may feel some contractions, right? Gonna be like, Ruha, why are you squeezing me like that? Just welcome it, right? It's part of the process. It's not going to feel good. It's difficult labor. Speaking of labor, these two human beings came out of my womb. On your right, my sons. On your left, my nephews. And they all hate that I use these old pictures. My sons are now 15 and 18, so they're like, Mustache is a cool, you see that picture? I was like, but mother's prerogative, all right. So my sons on your right, my nephews on the left. Now my nephews, their mom, Razzie, and I grew up together. We're not related by blood, but we're sisters so that our sons are like brothers. And they love each other like to the moon and back. But when these beautiful human beings move through the world, first of all, they're not treated as if they're brothers. They're not treated as if they are part of one family. And they're not treated with equal value either. And so when Trayvon Martin was murdered by Zimmerman a few years ago, Razzie decided to put her sons in hoodies in solidarity with the growing movement that was drawing attention to this. And it's a reminder when you see them side by side that that simple piece of clothing has very different meaning depending on what body it's on where my nephews look like just little LA skater dudes. And yet my sons are often seen or treated as a threat as if they're about to do something wrong. And so their love for one another, how much they care for each other and are on top of each other. That is not reflected back at them in the world that we are creating in the environment that we're creating. Their love for one another, their relationships are not evidenced, not reflected back at them. So the challenge for us is how do we create an environment in which the love that they are growing up with, right? It continues to grow and blossom over time. How many of us can say that as adults we have friendships that look like this, right? In which the suits that we were born into, the skin suits that we were born into are not used as a way to rank, to divide rather than draw us together. And so for me, this is my personal motivation of why I teach what I do, why I speak of what I do, why I research what I do. And I want you to connect to your own motivation because it can't simply be an intellectual exercise, right? Because simply looking at the facts, they're overwhelming. They would paralyze us and they would lead us to conclude that there's nothing we can do. We're dealing with 400 years of history that we're trying to address. And if you just look at the facts, we should throw up our hands and say, nope, this is the way it's always been. This is the way it's gonna be. And our grandkids are gonna be in a room, 100 years from now shaking their heads about why things are still the way that they are, right? Unless we begin to change the patterns that we've inherited. And we begin to seed an environment in which people can courageously act in defiance of these old patterns. So what is your personal motivation? We are not aging out of the problems of injustice, of inequity, of racism, classism, xenophobia. We're not aging out of it. It's not that the next generation is magically more enlightened than their grandparents' generation. Exhibit A, when the first Hunger Games movie came out and this actress was starring as the character Rue. And many young people had already read the book of Hunger Games. And so they went to the movies expecting to see a little white girl cast as this. Why? The author didn't say she was white, but the author did imply that she was very cute and innocent. So somehow those characteristics in the collective imagination are coded white. And so you had young people walking out of the theater tweeting things like this. Awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the little blonde innocent girl you picture. Call me racist, but when I found out Rue was black, her death wasn't as sad. Hashtag I hate myself. All young people. And I could talk for an hour about tweets as evidence of how our collective imagination is warped by racism and white supremacy where innocence is coded white. Beauty is coded white, right? No one sat these kids down and said, okay, this is the lesson today kids, right? This is how you have to see everything is color coded. No, they just had to watch cartoons their whole childhood and see that the villains were darker. And that the heroes and the beauty and the love interests were white and blonde, let's say. They learn the associations by soaking in the environment. And so the quest for us is not to throw up our hands but to say, then what do we have to change in the environment so they can soak up other ideas that are contrary to this. And so the thing I love about the last tweet hashtag I hate myself is this young person recognizes that they don't wanna feel this, right? It's an honesty about what they feel but they acknowledge they say, this is not right. I don't wanna feel this. And so the quest for us is what is the responsibilities of the adults in their lives, the educators in their lives to make it so that they don't draw these associations. Not simply in the imagination but also in the way that they treat one another and that they see educators treating one another. That's one of the first training grounds is when you see an educator treat some kids better than others and you learn the associations, you learn what's valued and not. And we can talk about some examples of this when we break into discussion to come to mind is the brown eye, blue eye video, right? When you see how in the 60s, right after MLK's assassination, you see her doing these experiments not with race but just with eye color and how quickly the children internalize, internalize the meaning of what it is to have brown and blue eyes and begin to treat each other with honor or maliciousness based on how the teacher is treating. And another example we can come to is a kind of redo of that that Anderson Cooper did on CNN with the Dahl study. And we can talk a little bit about just how these messages are perpetuated. Young people are not just internalizing the environment but they're transforming it. They're holding us accountable and they're saying, well, if you're not gonna do it, I'm gonna do it, right? This young student upon her graduation, anyone else follow the story? Ruhaa Hagar, and I like her name, Ruhaa. She, for her valedictory speech was beginning to give honor and name some of the young people that had been murdered by police and her principal that you can see there in your bottom right, cut her off. He told the tech people to cut the mic off, right? And so this is an example where they are pushing us to live up to our ideals and say let's talk about this injustice, right? Let me use this platform to raise awareness. And in this case, the administrator is saying, no, that's gonna be, I'm gonna get all the calls, all the papers, right? And what's, I think, most important is by doing that, that amplified her message because then everyone wanted to know what she had to say, right? And so it's an interesting twist but the question for us is what would we do if one of our students attempted to make such a stand? Would we follow in his example or would we take a risk and do something else? And when we talk about equity, when we talk about justice, we talk about racism, we often think that we're talking about students of color only, right? And one of the things I really want to impress upon us is that no, in fact, populations of students that are all white, predominantly white, that is in fact ground zero, that is where the important work has to be done because racism is a relational structure. There is no black, there is no idea of criminality without an association of white or an association of innocence as we talked about that Hunger Game example. And so if your student population is not diverse in the way that people talk about it, it's all white. There are other fault lines and there are other ways in which these issues are percolating and being perpetuated and that is a really important site to begin to plant new seeds. If the new seeds are not being planted among white students, then ultimately we're not gonna be able to change the environment that we're trying to transform. And so just know that that is an important site of transformation if that is the context of your work. And I love this kid by the way. I just love him. I wanna know who his parents are so we can be best friends because he's like, I don't care what you think of my unicorn bike. This is how I'm rolling around. And so the fact of the matter is these rigid structures that we've created, they don't just harm the obvious targets, right? The obvious targets of racism or sexism, classism, they also warp, they warp the humanity, they warp the potential of all young people, of everyone. And we can talk a little bit about practically, empirically how that happens when you look in the arena of public health. Places that have a more equitable class system, countries, states, the haves in those contexts, the people who are richer in those contexts, live longer, are happier than the haves in contexts that are more inequitable, where the gap between the rich and the poor is wider. And so we have to think about how even when you think that you're a beneficiary of an unjust system because you get more resources, you get more respect, right? People give you second chances, third chances, fourth chances, even in those contexts, there's a way in which it doesn't just warp you spiritually, emotionally, but in fact your body is warped. When we think about how you internalize the chronic stress of having to look over your shoulder all the time because so many people are without their basic needs being met. And so we can talk a little bit about essentially the fact that our fates are linked. There is empirical evidence why we should be working together rather than thinking about a zero sum, only some people are gonna win. And so this is ground zero. What is inclusion? We have so many platitudes, we have so many buzzwords. In many places, inclusion boils down to access, right? You can come to the school now, you can have the class now, you can come into the neighborhood, we're no longer gonna keep you out. But once you're in, to stay in, to fit, you have to twist yourself in a knot because that thing was not designed with you in mind, right? And so we have people running around talking about we just need to lean in, right? At the boardroom, we just need to lean in so that people will hear us. Leaning in is like this. You twist yourself so that you can fit, but really this is not inclusion. Just being in the same room together, being in the same school together, classroom together, neighborhood. When the design doesn't change, when the box doesn't change, the structure's still actually making us cut off the most important parts of ourself to stay, to be included, whether it's the way that we talk, or the way that we dress, the way that we wear our hair. In order to be seen as a good person, an intelligent person, right? This are all everyday examples of how people constantly are cutting off parts of themself in order to fit in structures that were not designed with them in mind, right? That actually look down on them. And so what does all this have to do with education? We spend most of our time at school, most people, unless you're homeschooled, right? And so if we're not addressing this, we're not cultivating courage, we're not growing this capacity in our schools, then it's really not gonna happen. We have to think about how we're going to marry the intellectual capacity of individuals with their emotional capacity, right? To act on what they know is right. And how are people gonna do this? How are students gonna do this if they don't see us doing it? So that is the challenge. Modeling, encouraging, cultivating this capacity. And so I'm gonna give you three quick examples of, again, kind of personal ways in which I started to feel the opposite of this, really. This severing of mind and heart as part of my training so that we can change the pattern, we can do something differently. So you're looking at this x-ray, and it's because for the first few years of graduate school, this is not me, but it's just to remind us what it's like to actually embody the stress of having to fit in the box, right? To twist yourself in order to be disciplined and trained. First few years of graduate school, the work wasn't that hard, but culturally and socially, it was a strain and stress to essentially only care about my mind and only have other people value my mind rather than my whole self. And I started to internalize this by grinding my teeth at night. Any grinders in the house? Yeah, all right, yep. And even to this day, like when I try to yell at my kids or open my mouth wide, there's a pop in my jaw. It hurts to open my mouth because of so many years of grinding. And I liken this grinding, this embodying of the stress of fitting in the box to essentially cutting off the parts of myself that I cared most about in order to be disciplined, right? To get all these, to get all this training. And what are those things? It's my community, right? My passion for things outside of the academy, my family, my friendships. I stopped answering the phone for like six years, right? And so part of what we are often doing in this, especially as our students grow, is to say that, no, you can do, we will include you and you can do well, but we don't care about X, Y and Z. Don't bring that into the room. Don't bring your accent into the room. Don't bring your food, don't bring your interests, don't bring your history. Don't bring the stress of living in your body and the way that people treat you, right? Keep it out. That has nothing to do with what we're doing here in this school. Second story, moving from graduate school to being a mom now. My sons go to Princeton Public High School. One of the requirements to graduate in Jersey is to have a financial literacy class. I don't know if you all have something like that. And so it was interesting to me as they started move from middle school to high school to think about this idea that to graduate, to be seen as an educated individual in our state, you need this financial literacy is for your own good. We don't want you to go into debt. And I think that's great. We want them to have a certain capacity to navigate. But it's interesting what literacies are valued and which ones are not valued or optional. All those things that are included but optional teach our students what is essential to being a good citizen, being a good person. So you have financial literacy, but you don't have some basic forms of racial literacy in Princeton and elsewhere. Every single year there are numerous incidents in which our students, the presidents of clubs, the athletes, the people getting into the best schools, the most popular kids, getting 4.8 GPA or whatever they get. All of that on paper doesn't translate to some basic forms of racial literacy. In this case a couple years ago, the students were having a party in a basement and played a very popular game that kids play around the country, a beer pong game that's based on a competition between Nazis and Jews where you even have an Anne Frank cup as part of the drinking game, right? And so the question for us is how are these students considered educated? What dots are we not connecting? That makes them think, oh, I know how to open a bank account and to manage my credit, but I don't have this form of racial literacy as a requisite to be a functioning human being in our society where you understand that this is not a game, right? That this history is still with us, we're not over it. And so we wanna think about how we build in this capacity, in this heart, how we model it. The last example comes not, we started with graduate school, parenting now as a researcher, where I study the social dimensions of science, technology and medicine and I'm often one of the only social scientists, bioethicists in rooms full of people doing amazing sort of scientific advances, in this case a couple years ago, honing the capacity to regenerate cardiac cells so that if one of us needed a heart transplant, rather than look for a donor, we could take your own skin cells, reverse engineer it, make it pluripotent and grow the cardiac cells that could transplant back into you so your body would be less likely to reject it, right? Sharing the DNA. And so I'm watching people do this, in this case they honed it in mice and so the idea is let's have it in animal models and eventually in human beings. And I'm kind of raising my hand, like I was in second, third, sixth grade and asking, so this is a really amazing, how is this going once developed? How is this going to be incorporated in a healthcare system in which the vast majority of people don't have access to some basic healthcare needs where so many people are under uninsured. It's great, a great innovation but in the face of this ongoing inequity, how do we add two and two? And often the response is, well, you know, we know that's a problem, it's a really big thing and it's just not realistic to address that right now. And I'm like, but you're growing cardiac cells in the lab. That seems really amazing and you don't seem pessimistic about that. You're pouring all these resources, all of this imagination into regenerating our biology. But when it comes to actually regenerating our society, transforming the status quo, people become so pessimistic, right? And like that's impossible. There's a critical imbalance here in which we can imagine and invest billions of dollars, both in terms of biological change and also digital, you know, technical transformation. But when it comes to social ills, when it comes to addressing our deep-seated social ills, our imagination goes limp. Then we become very, very practical, right? And I'm like, but you're growing cardiac cells in the lab. And so the question for us is why? Why can we imagine growing cardiac cells in a laboratory when we can't imagine growing empathy for other human beings in our everyday lives? Not just grow that empathy, but actually have that reflected back at them in the policies and laws and institutions that are much more just and equitable, that actually put that empathy into practice, not just give lip service to it, but put it into practice in the way that we organize our environment, organize our society. And so what we're called to do now is to actually rebalance this investment. To say, let's keep doing that amazing science, let's keep doing that amazing technology, but let's recalibrate and actually invest as much if not more in terms of social transformation because it is possible. Bringing it closer to home and we think about regenerating empathy, regenerating and cultivating courage in the environments that we are responsible for creating. How do we do that? How do we create schools with heart? Not just giving lip service, but how do we actually put it into the patterns that we create every day into the way that we talk to one another? I remember one of the most impressive things to me when I was moving from Boston to Princeton was walking around with the principal in the school just trying to figure out, just wanna know what we're getting our kids into. And the thing that made me know that it was the right place to send my kids was that the principal would stop and ask the janitorial staff how they were doing, how was their family? Or do you have everything you need? There was a level of respect for the people who are cleaning the facilities of the school that made me know that was where my kids need to be. Because if that's how you're treating the staff, then I can expect that my sons and other people in that environment are also being treated with respect. It wasn't some statistics about the school, the testing, all of that nonsense. How are we treating each other, the relationships that we're cultivating in that environment? And so we're thinking about the structure. We're thinking about how we're designing the structure. And the example that I often like to give because I like us to have examples that we can use even with our five-year-olds, with our kindergartners to give them a language to talk about why this is important or meaningful. And so the example for me that breaks it down to that level is the example of this bench right here. And so this bench is located in Berkeley, California, which is where I spent six years in grad school and I go back periodically for different work things. By this time I was living in Boston, it was February, and so I was just getting used to Northeast weather and it was back in California, and between meetings, running from one thing to the other. And I just wanted to lay down for like 20 minutes between the meetings on this bench. I had just come from the flea market across the street and got my favorite rotis and I was eating and just like, okay, let me take a quick little nap in the sunshine that I miss. And I couldn't lay down, right? And I couldn't lay down on the bench for that 20 minutes unless maybe I lost 20 pounds and slid in between those little arm rests because of the arm rests. And so I thought, okay, you know, what's this about? It's not like I'd never noticed arm rests before, but I had never really been thoughtful about the idea that they're often designed so you can't lay down on them, right? And my head probably went where yours is going right now, but first I sort of said, okay, what are some practical reasons why these are there, actual resting your elbows, obviously, right? If you're elderly, helps you get up and down. When I was nine months pregnant, could it help prop me up and down, right? If you have issues with privacy, maybe that air wall would help you sit down next to a stranger, right? All kinds of practical reasons, but I also thought, you know, this is the Bay Area. We have a huge housing crisis here that is directly related to the growth in the tech industry, footnote, right? So there's an example of how investment in innovation without thinking about the social dimensions actually exacerbates inequality, right? Innovation doesn't naturally address these things. If you just go from the default settings, the more that that tech industry is growing, the housing crisis is becoming worse and worse. And so I thought, okay, maybe this is to deter people from laying down on them so-called vagrants, right? And I thought, Ruhi, you're being paranoid again, but like my dissertation advisor said, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. So I got on the search engines and I found all kinds of examples and I could literally give a talk for an hour just about benches, which I won't do, I promise. But there are so many examples that illustrate how these design principles, that's the euphemism, design principles of what I rather just call the values. The values and the politics that we embed in a simple object like the bench come to life. There's the single occupancy benches that I found in Helsinki, so no laying down there and don't have a big booty because it's not designed for you. Found caged benches in this town in France and the mayor put this bench out and within 24 hours, the people in the town organized and rejected the benches and forced the mayor to remove them. Christmas Eve, he put them out no less in this little plaza, which tells us that we don't just have to inherit, right? We just don't have to accept discriminatory designs, whether it's a bench, whether it's a curriculum, whether it's a policy or law, just because it's there doesn't mean we have to accept it. We can organize and reject things that we find offensive or opposed to our values. In this case, the people in the town did just that. But my favorite example of all is the spiked bench because in this case, you just go ahead and say, we just put in spikes in the bench and if you want to use the bench, you put in some coins and the spikes retreat. And in this case, I think it buys you about 15 minutes and then the spikes, and then there's a little buzzer. I learned a little alarm that tells you, they're coming, they're coming. And then you put more money in and the spikes retreat. So don't get lost in your favorite book. Don't take Harry Potter because you will be hurting. And you know, what's interesting is this bench was designed by a German artist. And he designed this bench to get us to think critically about our public life, about our public space, about our public norms, about how something can be nominally for everyone, right? It's in the middle of the park. But because of the way that we've designed it, it has embedded in it certain values, exclusions and harms, right? And so this is the task for us just to think about and this is what we're gonna come to when we have our table talk in just a little while. So really think carefully about the spikes in our midst. What kind of spiked benches may we have inherited that we continue to use but that within, because of the way that they're designed, they may be harming or excluding some. And so as an analogy or a metaphor for thinking about the privatization of public life, right? We can think about the spikes in our educational system, in our healthcare system, in our politics, in our neighborhoods, you know? And the task for us is to become more discerning, to have the lights on, to look for them and to take them out of our public life and our public education. In our schools, audit to think about the spikes that exacerbate inequity, that make some students feel excluded, that actually harm some staff and teachers and to begin to actually design differently, design with our better values in mind. And it's not something that can be prescribed. You can't helicopter in an expert to tell you, okay, just rearrange this, do this, take out these spikes, you know? No, it's something that grows out of consultation. Those who are immersed in the environment are the most knowledgeable about what needs to change. And so for that to happen, we have to have some very robust consultation where people can speak honestly, speak honestly and listen. And so we spent a lot of time talking about conversations where the goal is to say the right things or to have the right topics, but we don't build the capacity to listen in such a way that those often who are most harmed by discriminatory designs, they've been trying to tell us something is wrong. This is not working. This is poking us in the ass. Listen. And those who the bench is working for try to gas like them, right? No, you know, I think that's all in your mind. I think you're just thinking about spikes too much. There are no real spikes in the bench, right? And try to write off this experience of knowing that this thing is designed poorly. Who are we designing for? Our technology is reflecting back at us, our existing biases and inequities. In the very simple function of our cameras, on our phones, on our computers, because of who is designing them based on what training sets. There are all types of exclusions and harms that if the camera is seeing you, you don't notice. And so we have a whole host of research coming out that's showing that much of our technology has these racist and sexist biases built into them because a very narrow slice of humanity is designing this, right? With all of their blind spots. Did someone blink? This question does not pop up in technology designed in Asia. They don't have a problem with this because the people designing it are designing it for people who have a majority phenotype that this is not an issue. And so we have to think about the context that creates these biases. They're not inherent to us, but they grow out of the context in which these things are being designed. Whether it's technology or education or healthcare, we have to think carefully about who's doing it, why they're doing it, going back to our intro today about the purpose of our designs. And we have to really begin to recalibrate and to broaden the base in which these coded judgments are emerging. Our technology is reflecting back at us in such a way that we have not been able to face. Now it's hard to ignore. In this case, when you type in the phrase professional hairstyles into a search engine, you're gonna get majority white women and majority hairstyles on your right, with one exception, I think maybe Beyonce, she don't count. On your left, if you type in unprofessional hairstyles, you're gonna get majority black women. We have states now that have had to pass entire laws, California and New York that say it's illegal to discriminate against natural black hair, right? So that's how widespread it is, that you have an entire law that had to be created to say you can't do this. This is a coded judgment. No one is explicit, no one sits down the manager or the principal and says, this is a professional hair or this is unprofessional hair, that's what you need to know. But you have internalized it based on the environment that we have created in which these things are coded, that the hair growing naturally out of someone's head is coded unprofessional and you need to straighten it in order to be taken seriously. You need to be closer to white, all right? So a very, very simple thing on one level, cosmetic even. And yet the connections, when you put it in the larger pattern that we're trying to create, it has all kinds of ripple effects. And so we don't wanna just look at these isolated incidents, individual examples. What our job is now is to discern the larger pattern to see the connection between the image on the slide before in which the darker skinned people are much less likely to be visible by our digital cameras, right? To this example in which black hair is coded unprofessional, right? To all kinds of ways in which our racist analogies and systems are embedded in the bench, embedded in the bench and that we inherit. We didn't necessarily create them. And so people may have a gut reaction and have to be defensive. Well, I didn't mean to do this. I didn't mean for this to happen. But intentionality is beside the point. That is not the measure by which we decide something is a problem. Did you intend for this X, Y, and Z to happen? Like if I'm parked outside, someone is stealing my car. I don't run up to them and say, well, did you mean to be a thief? I mean, in your heart, do you feel like you identify as a thief? No, okay, please, take my car. We don't do that with other kinds of harms, but with social harms, some reason, we wanna know what's in your heart. Do you identify as a racist? No, okay, then you can say whatever you want, right? That's why we have that little disclaimer. I'm not racist, but, and you can be sure whatever's coming after that is pretty racist, right? That's beside the point. Intentionality is not the measure of our action, about the impact of our action. We need to look at actually the outcomes, what the outcomes are for that. We have to listen to those who are being impacted by the spikes all around us. And too often, we put the responsibility on those who are being harmed by our discriminatory designs, by our unjust structures. We put the responsibility on them to change in order to fit into the structure. And one of the phrases we use to describe that change is code switching. So we have coded judgments, and then we say, you know, let's not try to deal with those judgments. Let's ask those people who are being coded in perverse ways to actually code switch. When you enter this room, you need to look this way. You need to dress this way. You need to talk this way. Code switch in order to be legible, to be respected, to be taken seriously, rather than say no. The people who are engaging in the coded judgments need to stop, right? I don't need to code switch. And so we wanna think about where we're placing the responsibility when we talk about change. Rather than code switching, what would it actually mean to rewrite code? And I give you this example of a student, a college student in the Boston area. Someone who was fitting in, who was exercising her intellectual prowess, turned in a paper and her white professor gave her her paper back and circled the word hence and said, this is not your word, a Latinx student. This is not your word and accused her in front of her entire class of plagiarizing the paper. And lucky for us, she has a blog and she went back to her dorm or her apartment and wrote it up in a great reflection piece called Academia, Love Me Back. And eventually that professor was held responsible. But it's not enough to simply look at the individual bad apples when the orchard is rotting, when she is likely to have to encounter this kind of coded judgment that her language by virtue of being Latinx is plagiarized because it sounds intelligible, right? It sounds smart to the teacher. Code switching is not a solution to this. Fitting in is not a solution because those judgments will continue to percolate and the next student will have to face this. We have to deal with the environment that makes this interaction possible. Rather than code switch, what would it mean for us to begin to rewrite the codes, rewrite the underlying values, assumptions that actually structure often invisibly but sometimes visibly, right? In terms of creating benches and environments in which some people are harmed or ignored, what would it mean to actually include in a way that people are not twisting themselves into all kinds of shapes, that they can actually ride their unicorn bike? And so to sort of round out the conversation, I'm gonna give you six examples of how we can begin to decode inequity. And they're a starting point. They're not the end all be all. They're not a formula. It's not sort of add these things and stir and magically things change. But it's a language to get us to the starting line of talking and thinking about this more critically in a more discerning fashion. And so I'm gonna go through these and give an example of each. And then I'm gonna ask us in this room to talk at our tables about how we will begin to incorporate this in our own thinking and action. How do we identify these coded spikes in our midst and begin to transform the patterns in very small, in very, very small ways that add up. So, a historic fallacy. And this example is gonna be longer than the rest. Because I just wanna unpack a few different principles as it relates to ignoring the history that we have inherited, right? It's not the past. And this example draws together the relationship between our educational system, which continues to be hyper segregated in this nation and our housing system, our neighborhood, our geography of race and class. That is more segregated today than it was at the end of the Civil War. So this notion that we are just progressing, we should just leave things alone, don't talk about it as time passes, things will get better, no. We're more segregated today than we were at the end of the Civil War because we become more innovative in how to segregate and create hierarchies and divisions in a way that's more subtle, more coded, rather than explicit signs that say, you can't come in this neighborhood. We have all kinds of other ways that I'm going to give you a little taste of. So if we're gonna transform our educational system, we have to begin to also think critically about this larger geography. Now we take off our hats as principals and educators and we think also just about our actions as citizens, how we make decisions about where to live, who to interact with. And the fact of the matter is it doesn't simply boil down to individual actions or intention to be neighborly, let's say, because we have entire policies that have been designed to keep us apart and to keep us unequal. So even if in our heart we want to transform this, we have to deal with these top-down policies and laws. So you know, sometimes people say, oh, you're trying to socially engineer and make people do things that aren't unnatural, we're tribal, we just wanna stick with people like us, no. That mindset has actually been fostered over time to make us feel that that is natural. And I'm gonna give you some examples of how our government actually did this purposely. So here you're looking at a map that was produced in about 2010 based on census data. It was published in the New York Times interactive map called Mapping America. And each dot represents 200 people and they're color-coded. The green is white, blue is black, orange, Hispanic, red, Asian, gray, other. Crude racial categories, but illustrative of the larger points I'd like to share. So this is of Los Angeles. That's one of my home bases. I just flew in from there last night. And so I'll use this, but it's indicative of a nationwide pattern. Whether you look state by state, you look city by city. And here you see a concentration of green people on the coast, Santa Monica, Malibu, very much wealthier areas, more desirable in terms of being closer to the water, et cetera. You see a concentration of blue people, a little more inland. That's where my family has lived since the 50s. And then you go even more inland, you see concentration of orange people, et cetera. It's tempting to look at a map like this or look at a map of any city and tell all kinds of stories about why this is the way they are. We try to make sense of it. And when we don't have data, we produce stories to explain like why is this? Do people just naturally like to be with people that are the same color? Do some people just work harder, value education more so they can afford the wealthier areas? Some people are lazy. They have family dysfunction, pathologies. So they tend to be poor, they can't afford those areas. We tell all kinds of stories, racist stories that naturalize and justify this geography. Very few Americans realize how this was created. We don't teach it in our schools. It's not part of the racial literacy that we equip our students with. So without the knowledge, they accept the stories that their parents tell them, that their grandparents tell them. They carry it on. For some, they internalize the sense of inferiority of what it means to be part of a group who everyone thinks doesn't work hard, doesn't value education, comes from dysfunctional families. For some, they internalize the sense of superiority that comes from feeling like you deserve to live in this great area. For some caught in the middle, let's say working class, poor white kids, it's a mix of story where you belong to a group that has a high social status, but you don't see the material fruits of that status. All of this talk of whiteness, white supremacy, but I live in this poor area. My parents didn't graduate school, so what the hell are you talking about? The sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois described how for white people of all class backgrounds, whether you see the material fruits of this unjust design or not, you have a psychological wage that you're paid, a psychological wage that says even if you don't see the material fruits, you get the social status that comes with that skin color, what comes with that ancestry. What does that translate to? It translates to even if you have no education, you're working in the factory along people of all different backgrounds. People think of you and you think of yourself as just a little better, if not a lot better, than those brown or black skin compatriots, people by your side. A psychological wage that says you get to come through the front door, they get to come through the back door, you're walking on the sidewalk across from them, they need to step into the gutter when you walk by. So even if you don't have the material benefit of this unjust design, even if you don't get to live completely in the green area, the fact of the matter is, poor white people in this country are much less segregated than wealthy black people. That is to say that even if you're middle or upper class black individual in this country, you are still much more likely to be concentrated in neighborhoods in which the school systems are under resourced, the roads are not being maintained, the businesses are running away. And so simply looking at class without thinking about that intersection of class and race is not an adequate analysis. And so if you're a poor white person, you're more likely to go to a higher resourced school than a rich black person if you're just looking at public schools. And that's why we have the development of an entire private sector. So what are these policies that created this geography? One of them is the practice of redlining in which a government encouraged banks to actually create these divisions and to use maps that were literally color coded. So if we took a map that a bank used from this era of redlining and placed it on top of the contemporary map that I just showed you, you would see that that investment on the coast, on the green area coincides with green lined areas that banks used to invest in the development of a white middle class in which even if your credit wasn't that great, even if your income wasn't that good, you are much more likely to receive a bank loan at a lower rate than a black individual who has great credit and higher income is less likely and not to receive a loan at all. And that's what it means to be redlined. An entire geography disinvested from, invested in one side, divested from the other. And if you ignore this and you just rely on those racist stories about hardworking people, about people just wanting to be close to those like them, then you're actually lying about this history and perpetuating this pattern injustice. What did that look like practically? Like if we go into the weeds, again, we're trying to get in the nitty gritty. This is where the policies emerge. This is where the change has to come from. In this case, this is one of those forms that a bank used in order to decide if this individual is gonna get this loan and if they're gonna underwrite this loan for a house. And so they would look at neighborhoods and look at the detrimental influences, one of which was the concentration of undesirables, upper right. What does that mean? Concentration of undesirables, low-class whites and Negro, in which in this case, in this era, Italians had not yet made it into the white club, right. In which they were still seen as a high risk. And so a concentration of Italian Americans relief, meaning getting a welfare. That was considered a high risk loan. The infiltration of Negro, certainly if that neighborhood was transitioning, that was seen as a place not to invest. Alongside an assessment of the structures and the building. So human life, human beings and groups being evaluated with the same lens through the same sort of survey as you do the physical structures. And so here a bank would decide, you know, no, you're not getting this loan. And so over time, what you had is this concentration and investment of a white wealth in this nation and divestment from black wealth. But it just wasn't just banks that did this. A whole other set of practices put it in the hands of individuals to have restrictive covenants. So if you owned a home and you wanted to sell that home, then you had a covenant that enforced this segregation that said, even if you wanna sell to this black family, you can't because of this covenant. Some of the language here is interesting. If you look at the deeds of many older homes, these are still in there. It's not legally required to enforce it, but it's still in there. It hasn't been completely outlawed. None of the residential lots nor any part thereof shall be least let sold or transferred to or occupied by anyone who is or who spouses or the members of whose immediate family are of other than the wider Caucasian race. And this exclusion shall include persons having 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 occupying the property. I mean, small print, I had to enlarge it, right? So much going on here. This is one of the pillars. If you wanna see how this structure is held up, you have to take the magnifying glass out, right? Which means that change also has to come at the fine print, right? And so here we have an acknowledgement in the first part of this, you know, that they acknowledge that there are mixed families, that all of this ideology, all of these structures are not fully keeping people apart. People are marrying across these divisions, but here they have a provision for that to say, don't send your white spouse to come get this house and pop up afterwards, like, surprise. They have a provision for that, right? In fact, there's a great play that I saw when I was living in Boston that showed the relationships, the collusion between Irish and black families. Black families would give Irish families cash and they would go buy the homes for them, right? So people were always trying to subvert and get around these structures. There's a parallel history of defiance and anti-racism that we need to excavate and we need to teach our students. We don't need to just teach them the story of all of the top-down oppression. We need to also teach them how people worked across racial lines to actually subvert the status quo, right? Because if we don't know that, then we don't have a history to build on. We have something to be mad at, but we don't have a legacy of genealogy to say, what about those Irish families that worked with those black families to actually try to subvert the system, right? Let's excavate the John Browns. Let's excavate the examples of white anti-racism so our students can feel emboldened by that and actually build those solidarities in our present moment. Going back to the phrasing, you see the list of groups here. So depending on what region of the country, you had different threats, right? Different groups that were infiltrating that they wanted to keep out. In this case, you have this long list, but in some places it might just be negro, but in all cases, negro is the polarity against which whiteness has been defined, right? You have to understand this in the law and in our policies and social norms that the goodness of white people was defined against the badness of black people in this nation. And then other groups are somewhere on that polarity and oftentimes new immigrants, whether it was Italians, whether it was Irish, whether it's Asians today or whatever the group they're trying to find how to actually gain status and gaining status wealth position in this country has meant pushing away from blackness and moving closer to whiteness. And that's why you have so much anti-blackness amongst immigrant communities, right? Because part of that is trying to actually gain status in this nation and they discern very quickly how to do that. And so you had Italians actually working diligently to keep black people out of labor unions, keep them out of the neighborhoods, right? Irish actually feeling more threatened by black people because their position was closer to them and working actively to keep them out. And so we wanna think about that range of identities, but last but not least, the main takeaway when you look at this fine print is the provision that says some people can come, right? Some people can live in the house and the neighborhood as long as they're there to serve, as long as they know their place, right? They're not there as equals, they're there as subservient, which tells us that segregation is not simply a process or a structure of keeping us away from one another, right? It's not simply, okay, everyone stay apart. After all, black women nursed white babies throughout chattel slavery, so you didn't feel threatened then, right? As long as you're there to serve. And so what that teaches us today, 2019, if that has how the problem was defined, not simply about apart, but hierarchy, you can be as close as you want as long as you are under me, then the solution that we're trying to cultivate, the environment that we're trying to cultivate does not simply rest on diversity, just putting people that are different in the same room, in the same school, right? Because it was never simply about keeping us apart. If in that diversity, you still have this perverse hierarchy in which some people stay in their place and which some kids are still seen as the smart kids or the dumb kids, right? Then you have not actually pierced the heart of this discrimination. You can put us all in the same room and that will just make us feel good on a surface level, right? But it doesn't actually deal with the problem which is power. Who has power? Who has voice? Who is being seen? So we shouldn't give lip service to diversity and celebrate it if we're not actually addressing the fact that we could be in the same room but some people are still serving, right? Some people are still under the boot. Some people are still seen as the people who get the coffee, not actually speak at the table. Whether that has to do with race, whether that has to do with sex or class, right? If people are still caring on the same roles, if the vast majority of principals are still men, then we haven't actually pierced the heart of this hierarchy. And so let's talk about how we do that. Many people turn to laws and policies. Well, if there's a problem, let's pass a policy a law. It's important, it has its place. But what we know through the second process, the legalistic way that we often think about change is that this can be a stand-in, a proxy for more fundamental transformation. And so we have all kinds of laws that say you can't discriminate in the workplace, right? We have these posters up in many, like the back rooms. Many people even think that there's something called reverse racism or reverse sexism. Because we passed a law that says you can't discriminate, they imagine that the magic fairy dust fell on everyone and we no longer discriminate. And in fact, now the people who were under the boot are benefiting, right? Legalistic fallacy assumes that top-down change is enough. And so when we do actual studies that look empirically at what's going on on the ground, in this case too, University of Chicago economists that an audit study some years back, in which they tested this idea, is discrimination still a thing? We passed some laws, maybe there's reverse racism. Let's send out these resumes. To thousands of employers in Boston and Chicago, right? The only thing they changed about the resumes were the names, same qualifications, education, history, et cetera, and put them out there. Names on some were stereotypically black-sounding names, location Jamal. Names on some were stereotypically white-sounding names, Emily and Greg. And they waited for the callbacks. Let's see who the employers callback, same qualifications. And they found that the white names garnered 50% more callbacks than the black-sounding names, all other things being held constant. And this was true of those employers who, in theory, should be abiding by these non-discrimination policies, people, employers were getting federal grants, big, having large workforces, et cetera. They discriminated just the same as everyone else. And what the economists calculated was that this 50% greater callback was equivalent to the assumption that those white applicants had eight additional years of job experience that they didn't actually have. So that's how much credit they were given for that white name. So when we say, oh, that's just cosmetic, that's just symbolic, that's not important, no. These things, in our culture, carry great weight. And so, practically speaking, should we sell parents? Well, now that you know this, you should really not name your kid Laquisha or Jamal. That's an example of code switching at a much more lasting level. You should fit into the box. This is happening. And that's what happens, assimilation. And we talk about assimilation like it's a straightforward good, fitting into the box. We don't learn how to pronounce people's names. So they say, okay, let me just get an Anglicized name. Many of your relatives did that. The last name you have was an attempt to fit into the box, to say, let me actually get rid of that ethnic history. And we often require that of the next generation, the next generation. Or should we rewrite the code? Should we start to break the patterns in which we associate Jamal, which is my brother's name, by the way. So my parents were quite defiant. We associate Jamal with someone who is lazy, who's gonna be late, who's probably committed a crime, who's all the negative things we can think of, maybe not even at the fully conscious level. And so, legalistic change, just passing a law that says don't discriminate, does not deal with the problem. And so, the third process is the assumption, kind of, I gave you the example of stealing the car. When we just think that the problems that we're facing are simply at the individual level. And we say, you know, if you didn't intend for this to happen, then it can't be a reality. I'm not racist, but black people were a lot nicer before the civil rights movement. I promise I'm not racist, although it might sound it, but Obama needs to get out of the White House. It's called the White House for a reason. Young people, young people. And I could go like 10 more slides full of tweets of young people using the I'm not racist, but like an individual disclaimer to annul the impact of one's thoughts and actions. And it's not that we want people to go back, slither back into the closet. We wanna deal with this. We want the lights to come on and think about how this kind of mindset is cultivated and perpetuated generation after generation, but simply focusing on individual intention to do harm or be discriminatory isn't sufficient. So those are like two opposites, top down legalistic versus individual. And what we need is something in the middle. We need to think about that top down process and our bottom up responsibility as individuals. The fourth process that we need to think critically about is the way that we think about history in a static fashion. The first one, a historic is when we ignore that history, say of redlining and make up all kinds of stories. But in this case, it's people thinking about history, but using that history as a measure of the present. Oh, at least we don't have segregated schools in this fashion, right? In this time, this is progress, right? But we find all kinds of new and innovative ways to continue when we don't deal with the root causes. And so sure, we might not have white only schools or black only schools or schools where some people are excluded, but we create all kinds of other systems that perpetuate this, one of which is a tracking system that's deeply racialized in class in terms of who's considered gifted, who has access to AP, who's labeled at risk, et cetera. How special ed often is a proxy for a new kind of segregation by class and race. And so we wanna think about how things change. It's in your curial. If we only look at the past and say, oh, we're not doing it like that. Oh, no one's sitting at the back of the bus anymore, right? And so we've progressed and we don't look at how the system changes to accommodate the prejudices that we haven't not actually dealt with and the inequality that we haven't dealt with, then we're fooling ourselves, essentially. The tokenistic fallacy, the fifth fallacy is the way that we look at exemplars as a measure of progress, all right? And so in this case, you might look at an Oprah and say, ah, entertainment industry, it's great, it's diverse, right? And then we have Oscars so white, right? We look at who's acclaimed, right? We look at the patterns of hiring, we look at who's behind the camera, who's writing the scripts, right? Look at the more deeper patterns. You look at an Obama and say, oh, you know, we had this with black president, so progress. And we don't realize that end of 1800s, we had the first black senator, right? Senator Rebels and no one at that, no, we wouldn't look backwards and say 1890s, boy. That was a good time for black people. Woo, you know, we shall overcome. We don't do that in hindsight as much, right? But we do that with our present. We look at tokenistic examples and assume that they're indicative of larger patterns of change. In our own workplaces, we might promote or we might hire individuals who represent some group that has been excluded historically. And that's a good move, you know? That's a good start. But what happens is that becomes a placeholder for more fundamental change at the levels that are less evident, less symbolic, right? And so we need, and not only that, but if these individuals are not empowered to make the changes that they are hired to do, then it's even a regression. Because what you have is a symbol that stands in for change, but they're not empowered to actually carry out that change. And that becomes a deep-seated stumbling block that happens a lot at the university level. And I'm sure you can relate. So the last thing I'll just point to, kind of coming back to those early examples here is, you know, the way that technology is incorporated in every sector now, not just education, but it's a way of outsourcing decision-making, right? To say, you know, we realize we have these biases, we have these problems, but you know, there's an app that can fix that. There's a software program that I can sell you that will address that thing that you're having a problem with. It's a way of creating technical fixes. The technology's not the problem. The problem is when we use that as a stand-in for dealing with the root causes of whatever's producing that problem. So for example, in hiring, there's a number of new programs coming online that outsource, you know, human resources. It's a grueling job, like to go through thousands of applications sifting through, right? It's money-intensive, time-intensive. And so what if an algorithm, AI-powered system, can actually run it for you quickly, at least narrow down the pool of people, right? So there's a clear efficiency argument here, but how does the AI decide who to actually shortlist? How does it learn? What assumptions, values, biases are being trained into the software? They don't grow on trees, right? So someone is teaching these systems how to make decisions between applicants. And oftentimes the starting point is a training set that looks at already existing high-performing employees. And if many workplaces are deeply skewed by race and gender, then you're training these systems to code those things as successful employees that we want more of, right? And to exclude those who've been excluded, right? And so the more intelligent becomes you move away from the training data and now the software is just actually learning on the actual resumes, in fact, the more intelligent becomes the more likely it is to discriminate based on these historic patterns. And so you had, for example, Amazon rolling out its own hiring algorithm and had to quickly take it back because it was discriminating against women. Why? Because Amazon itself is like 85% men, right? So the training data and it's not as if the resumes themselves has male or female or, you know, on the actual resume, the smarter it becomes, it finds the coded gender within the resume, right? So were you on the women's chess club in college, right? So that's a starting point. That's one level of intelligence grader. And then it goes and the gendering of our lives, it becomes smarter and smarter at discerning and pulling that out. And so they had to recall this algorithm that was essentially reproducing these historic biases. So we have to become very discerning about how we're incorporating technology. It's not that we exclude technology altogether, but we can't use it as a crutch to solve all the problems we have created. Because our little babies, our little tech babies are gonna be as racist and sexist as we are. The same way our real children are, right? When we don't talk to our kids about race and sexism, then they take in the smog. They take in the environment, right? And so I'll sort of round this out and kind of begin to close with one, coming back to housing. We talked about that in the first day, historic fallacy. You know, Facebook, when you're logged in, you get all those little ads in the margins. You're just looking at those cute shoes and now there's someone trying to sell you those shoes on Facebook, right? So it's targeted advertising. So how does it happen? How does it know how to target you, right? So people who are trying to sell stuff go and fill out a form at Facebook and tell the demographics, who do they want to see their ads, right? Because they wanna increase the likelihood of you clicking and buying. And so one of the things that happens, now go back to the housing. Remember the red lining? Remember the banks, individuals saying, no, you can't live here, you can live here. Now with these ads, and so we passed the whole law about that, right? You can't discriminate in housing. Now if a realtor does it, you can sue them, right? But now the tech can enable it in a much more subtle fashion. So if I'm trying to sell real estate, I can go and target different groups. And so I can say I want first time home buyers and I want only Hispanic Americans to see this. But much more likely I don't want Hispanic or black people to see this ad because I wanna keep the exclusivity of this new development that I'm producing. And so it enables people in the real estate industry to engage in those historic practices that we just looked at, right? With those little surveys through the back door of our digital sphere. And in fact, once this came to light through some investigative journalism, legislators started getting on board and eventually charged Facebook with housing discrimination. And this has been going on for the last two years in which they did the first, they exposed it. And then Facebook said, oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Zuckerberg, oh, we didn't mean to happen. And then another set of reporters came and did it again and within 15 minutes, their ad was approved, excluding black people from seeing their ad, right? And so they gave lip service and then only in one hour that they're charged we have to keep track of this. But this is an example of how technology was gonna reproduce the status quo unless we are much more discerning. And so my final proposition is this. Again, thinking about patterns and changing patterns. I'm giving you a sense that the problem is everywhere, right? It's coming top down, it's bottom up, sideways in and out, outside in, right? You're like, Ruha, this contraction is too big, right? But this is precisely a hopeful picture that I'm painting because if the problem is everywhere, that means that no matter what we do, whether we're doing some top down, legislative policy change, whether we're trying to engage in bottom up individual transformation. If the problem is everywhere, that means that we can begin to create different patterns no matter what we do. The possible solutions and transformation is everywhere. But the first step is to realize that we are actually perpetuating the patterns. If we do the same old, same old, those default settings, we are gonna ensure that our grandchildren are gonna be sitting in a room, be fuddled by the issues that we are today unless we begin to break these things. And so accepting that we are pattern makers is the first step and looking at the details of what our job is, right? And so on the surface, it may look like we're just, we have the same old school that was been here for 50 years. But based on these new patterns that we're creating, in the nitty gritty, we are transforming the old, right? Patriarchy, racism, and we're creating something in which all of our students, all of our colleagues can be seen and heard and where our environments are actually workshopping, experimenting with a much more democratic and liberatory way of educating and enabling, empowering our citizenry. And so I think we have about 15 minutes, right? Give or take? Less. Less, ha, less. Okay, so let's spend with our neighbor, not with the whole table, I think, or just choose one of these questions and just mull it over. And if the question is not appealing, just choose one thing that I've discussed, an image, a study phrase, and just talk out loud about how it hits you, how it resonates, and we'll come back together in just a few minutes, all right? So we have time for here for maybe two or three tables as long as we keep it short and sweet. It doesn't need to be posed as a question, it can be a reflection or if you have a question, it can be a question for the room to mull over that we'll pick back up this afternoon. There's a mic right here in the middle that would help if you stood so that the people on the other side could hear you, but just tell us what either you are thinking or someone on your table mentioned and we'll go from there. Who wants to start? No, I think he was just waving to his friend. So it can address one of those questions or it can just think out loud with us about the themes. There's not a lot waiting for a very short point. But I've just been thinking about as the question that's been bouncing around my head the entire time is how do we seek out and ask our students to tell authentic stories and honor those stories at schools? Yeah, a million dollar question. So as people raise questions, we have a couple of minutes. If you want to think out loud as a response to that, feel free or raise a new question for us to walk away from that too on this table. I think some of the things that got me when I was thinking about things that we perpetuate and continue to do and this might be controversial, but it's okay, I'll use to it. The whole Black History Month concept which drives me crazy, I think it needs to go. When I was a student growing up and actually one of my new colleagues is from the DC area, rivaled with DC public schools and Black History Month was okay, let's put up a picture of Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman and the same people and it doesn't seem to have changed and I'm reading so much more now about the stigma attached to Black History Month where it's kind of like one of those boxes that you checked. Okay, well we study Black people for 28 days a short time. Yeah, that was my design. My design, right, and we can move on and study like the real history as an African American history has not been in twine. I mean, you can't talk about American history unless you're talking about a whole bunch of different people. So when we categorize us to say, okay, well here's your history real quick and we get back to regular history, drives me crazy, so I'm gonna be on a crusade and get rid of it, so sorry. But if you ask, and you know, I'm with you and it's like, and we always, I think we always need to be working in two modes. One is to get rid of things that aren't working but we have to also be cultivating, creating alternatives. So just getting rid of it without actually doing that integrative work, then that's often not enough. And so we need to be both against certain things but also for creating these alternatives. And if anything, I think we need a Black Future Month to actually carve out time, yes, to think about the past but to actually project into the future about what kind of world we wanna live in because most futurism, including speculative future but also policy futures are implicitly exclude the Black experience and a vision of Black people's role in the future. And so that might be one sort of radical alternative that yes, we do integrate a work but we also carve out time to actually project and imagine what we want. When I think about code switching and schools that have adopted PBIS and staff, what's the positive behavior intervention which actually establishes, these are the norms for within our community and this is the common language so that, which is actively taught to ensure that every child understands what the expectations are for behavior. It's not list of rules, it's be safe, respectful, responsible for example in all the Burlington schools. And in defining those, making sure that the reason for any one of the definitions of and how do you behave in the restroom or how do you behave in the hallway are based in social and emotional safety for all students and encouraging learning for all students and not based in perhaps a white middle class social norm. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Yeah, okay, maybe one more? We're breaking the rules, okay. In identifying the spikes, I guess for me, recognizing that as adults we're really setting the tone and the culture in our buildings and when some of our staff maybe have been in isolation or have had less exposure to various experiences, I found as a fairly new principle that sometimes when we talk about community and culture in a place, it doesn't always, it's based on that history and not really about embracing who we really are as a community and getting that mind shift to say, well, we can say that this is our community and this is how we do things, but is that really accepting and understanding who our students really are? Yeah, no, I appreciate that. And it's actually a good segue for when we come back from lunch, we're gonna see a phenomenal film that some of you have already seen and discuss it and then we'll pick up this conversation after that as well. So thank you so much for your attention. I know I went long, I appreciate it.