 Thank you, well this is one of the warmer crowds I've been in front of in a long time And actually that's gonna cause me to relax and then I'm gonna be even more provocative than I usually am But Jody stole my cylinder there a little bit I usually start by pointing your attention to the fact that I'm white and Asking you to actually look at me and think about it for just a minute And part of what it means to be white is that goes against all my conditioning and all my socialization Because I was taught that I really didn't have a race. I was just the universal human race is what they had And certainly I was taught not to be drawing people's attention to it So how did I come to be standing in front of groups of people saying look at me? I'm white and that has meaning Well for me it started when I got a job as a diversity trainer in the early 90s And I was going to go into the workplace in interracial teams and lead discussions on race and racism And when I applied for that job, I sincerely thought that my qualifications were that I shopped at PCC I'm a vegetarian. I went to evergreen And I drive a Prius Okay, so we didn't actually have Priuses in the 90s, but I hope you get my point I really thought that what this was about was open-mindedness and that since I was clearly open-minded I was good to go and I was qualified and it was just about getting other people to be open-minded And I was in for the most profound learning of my entire life on every level and One is to realize in no way was I qualified to be leading conversations on arguably the most Emotionally and politically charged issue since the founding of our country, right and this is also part of what it means to be white is That I could get to that point in my life with no really good information and understanding of racism and still see myself as Kind of done with my learning and able to lead other people And I'm sure some of you have seen that dynamic in other white folks so I Spent a good five years for a living going into primarily white workplaces and trying to have these conversations and Aside from not really being qualified to do it. I also was unprepared for the depth of hostility Incredible hostility in primarily all white spaces employed White people who were just really angry about about having the conversation at all And so over the years I just got better and better at figuring out What it means to be white in a society that Professes that it means nothing and yet is profoundly separate and unequal by race, right? And so I wanted to kind of apply that experience To impact people on a larger level and I went on I got my PhD in whiteness studies anybody ever hear of whiteness studies That's not kind of weird For decades if not millennium when white people Studied race we studied them You know, what's with them? Why do they have their problems, etc? And for just as long people of color looked at us and said why don't you look at yourselves? You are our problem and eventually early 80s 90s white academics took up that call and began to put the lens on us right and the Relationship between us and that that field is called whiteness studies So When when I started people literally would be pounding their fists on the table and and all of this It doesn't look like that anymore for me So I want to I want to talk about what new racism looks like right? How is it that individually most white people feel like they are exempt from any any racist conditioning? And yet we have so much racial inequity right prior to the civil rights movement It was pretty socially acceptable for white people to just come out and say that yeah, we're superior That's no longer as acceptable in public spheres. Although if you listen to political debates, I'm starting to question that But it looks like this so what I I just Left a position as a professor of education. So I'm I was in a college of education That was 98% white so 98% White school producing our future teachers. We were located 10 miles from a city. That was 57% black and Latino Springfield mass and I Would at the first day of class have my students Take out a piece of paper And write an anonymous essay based on a couple key questions But before I mentioned that I would just say hi I'm your professor and then immediately have them take the paper out And the reason is I was trying to minimize my influence on them Right beyond the reality of my body So I want to take a moment just to say that the way you hear me today Will be influenced by the fact that I'm in this body whether you're aware of it or not Overall white people can hear this message From me much better than they can from people of color and I want to acknowledge that the vast Majority of what I have come to understand about how racism works has come from people of color who've been saying what I'm saying for decades But can't be heard and so that's what I call the master's tools dilemma Audrey Lord was a poet African-American poet and Activist educator and she had this phrase the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house And what she meant is how do you challenge a system using the tools within the system? So that's a dilemma for me too as I stand up here as the authority in to a degree right on whiteness I am necessarily reinforcing the centrality of the white voice and the white perspective And trust me I go home at night and toss and turn over that dilemma at the same time because I can be heard I'm going to use my voice and when I feel like giving up I say Perfect you'll really be white then don't talk about race and That will perfectly protect your position So I just want to acknowledge that kind of both and nature of this work that Simultaneously, we're reinforcing racism as we seek to challenge it Okay, and I also want to acknowledge all those incredibly patient and brilliant mentors of color that didn't give up on me So that I am kind of at the place that I am today. So what are my students essays look like I say I? Asked them three questions. How racially diverse were your neighborhoods and schools? what messages have you gotten across your lifespan about race and What are some of the ways your race has shaped your life, right? So keep in mind 98% white classes I rarely actually ever had a student of color and were 10 miles from a city That's 57% black and Latino and what I'm going to show you is representative of the hundreds of These essays in breadth in depth My neighborhood growing up was not racially diverse at all every family in my neighborhood was also Caucasian Throughout by time in school. I've been continually taught that skin does not matter Right these are juniors and seniors in college who are going forth to be teachers And this is the extent of what they can be bothered to write About the most profound profound and perennial. I think issue since the founding of our country Okay, and I'm hoping that you recognize some of this if you're white You might recognize it in yourself if you're if you're a person of color or Try white and try to talk to other people you recognize this narrative. It may be a little more bald But it is the way we do race today, right? And I see a major contradiction in these three sentences. Do you guys see that contradiction? How how can we be taught that race has no meaning in segregation? Right, I think that's that's the contradiction and yet I've never met anyone without an opinion on race and racism. Have you? If you're not sure bring it up at your next family dinner and They go beyond want the first round of meaningless platitudes go to the next round ask just one more forward question And watch what happens? And if you're hesitant to do that because you don't want to ruin the dinner that should tell you We've got a lot of feelings about this thing that has no meaning, right? and so I'm gonna say Maybe my first provocative thing if you are white, of course you have an opinion on race and I don't know you And I don't know your life experience. I don't know who you're is in your life. I don't know where you've traveled I don't know what you've read, right? And I can assume that you've gained your opinions from all of those things across your life span and Yet if you have not devoted sustained ongoing Continual education and practice on this topic your opinions are necessarily superficial and uninformed Just gonna say it How can I say that not knowing you? Because nothing in dominant society gives us the information we need to have a complex and nuanced Understanding of this topic coupled with our investment in it Okay, so please hold your opinions lightly and with humility And just let me stretch you no matter where you are. I can I can get you in another place a little bit, okay? Now people of color You might be thinking okay, so it's just white person focused on white people Which is what I'm doing. How can this be valuable for people of color? Well, I'm gonna admit to things that white people rarely if ever will name and admit To so that can help with the crazy making And you got to navigate this water too, right? You got to deal with us because we are the gatekeepers You look like a really diverse student body, but I'm confident your faculty administration isn't right? We are the gatekeepers We are who you're going to be in front of when you go to apply for jobs Etc, right? You got to navigate us. So this could be useful to figure out what is going on with those people And Because nothing in society gives anybody good information now You have to kind of know my reality as well as your own But still there's so much denial and so much like no if you have a problem around this This is your problem. So this can be really useful for students of color, too. All right Where are we? So we have to start with some shared definitions because these words prejudice discrimination and racism get used interchangeably in our society and right there where we're talking at cross ends, right? We So prejudice is pre-judgment we get it from everything it goes well beyond whatever your parents may have taught you are told to you We get it from every source. We get it across our lifespan, right? Everybody has prejudice about other groups of people to which they don't belong, right? It is not humanly possible not to have prejudice Human objectivity does not exist. I don't care what your science professors might tell you There is no human objectivity You can only make sense of the world through the cultural framework You were conditioned to make sense of it through okay, and then discrimination is when we act on Our prejudice and we all do it, right? I was taught that prejudice was Hatred and discrimination was violence and slurs and things like that Which is why I didn't relate to it, but it can be much more subtle than that, but it always manifests Because the way you see the world drives the way you respond to the world and it can be just lack of interest Comfort with segregation, right? There are many subtle ways and I would just direct your attention to implicit bias I'm really grateful that we now understand that most bias is actually not conscious But there's no way we could miss absorbing these messages Because we we all kind of navigate the same water. A great example is next time you go into Target or Walmart Go through the toy aisles and tell me if there aren't any collectively sent gender messages out there, right? We're all you know I can tell my daughter all kinds of things, but the collective socialization is very very powerful We're all getting it Okay, but then when we get to oppression We take a group's collective prejudice and we back it by Legal authority and institutional control and that transforms it and it moves it beyond individual actors and Into a system that is embedded in the fabric of a society because this group is built a society So there are prejudice is built into the fabric, right? So it gets embedded in all institutions and also cultural definitions of what's real What's beautiful? What's valuable? What's normal? Whose story is testified to whose story is not whose norms are others measured through? And of course, we'll always fall short Okay, so I want to give you two illustrations. This is like foundational if we can't grasp the difference between personal prejudice and discrimination and Systems of oppression. We're not going to understand how racism is able to flourish today Despite individual people believing that they're against it. Okay, so I want to start with women's suffrage So when did women get the right to vote in the US? Does anybody know? 1920 okay, who gave it to us? You can say it. I didn't just say that's right. All right Was there any other way outside of a violent and bloody revolution, which I'm not publicly advocating Was there any other way for women to get the right to vote except for men to give it to us? No, why not? Because we literally were not seated in the seats of institutional power. We couldn't grant ourselves the right to vote That's the difference Right a woman Could be prejudiced towards a man discriminated against a man. I like to say a woman can make a man's life miserable I've been accused of this at least twice in my life in 2016 But women as a group couldn't oppress men or deny them the right to vote Okay, and if we don't acknowledge that difference, we just take power off the table It's not all the same right a woman's prejudiced against a man at that time. It's not the same And keep in mind that it wasn't just the house in the Senate that you know Denied women the right to vote and then that it was up to every institution work together right so the And every male-dominated institution so the clergy Literally preached from the pulpit that it was God's will that women not vote and by the way, that's a that's a real hard God's will is a hard one to challenge right Psychiatrists male-dominated psychiatrist wrote the studies that said women are inherently irrational The medical doctors wrote the studies that said if women use their brains The blood will leave the uterus go upward and the babies won't come out as well This is literally in the books And ultimately the military if the women if women rose up in the street the military would could come and quash that Do you see that difference? That's really really key. So we're talking about oppression. We're talking about institutional power and oppression comes in different forms Right, it's always about kind of two groups that are that are set up in a binary of either or and then one Controls the power so that one was one from patriarchy and by the way today if men as a group want to take away our right to vote Could they this is another way that oppression works, right? It's so normalized and taken for granted that it's really hard to see so 80 80 to 83 percent house and Senate is male. The the presidency has always been 100 percent male this executive the Economic Fortune 500 CEOs are 98 percent male. I could go on They could if they wanted to which is another example of how oppression works, right? It's deeply historic embedded take it for granted It's not fluid and it doesn't change over time patriarchy didn't end in 1920 and if Hillary gets the presidency I'm confident patriarchy will not end on that day. Okay. All right, so that's from sexism. Let's look at one this from From racism so Jackie Robinson. What do we know what in a nutshell? Who's Jackie Robinson? So he is the first african-american To play major league baseball Jackie Robinson broke the color line, right? You've all heard that narrative, right? And you always need to listen to the story being told who tells it and who it serves So when we when we put this as Jackie Robinson is our hero. He did it. He did it He broke the color line It's this it reinforces this idea of an exceptional actor who finally had what it took, right? And I get this image of like a ticker tape, right? And he's running and he's running and he finally busts through it. Yeah, right now What if the story went like this? Jackie Robinson first african-american that whites allowed to play baseball That is actually the story Jackie Robinson could not play major league baseball if we didn't allow it Right walk out on the field Police are going to come and take you off, right? We wrote the policies that denied him. We changed the policies that granted him access That's the difference and he might have some attitude towards white people. Huh, I'm pretty sure he did and does But that he doesn't his group doesn't hold institutional power. Okay, so this came out I Apparently August 26 was the anniversary of suffrage. I guess it was August 26 in 1920 And you know how Facebook will put out these like happy 4th of July happy this happy that They sent this out and then somebody did this and It came out a little bit when I asked you who gave us the right to vote So which women got the right to vote in 1920, right? And that's that's also how oppression works the dominant groups experience stands in as Everyone's experience, right? There's some universal Woman's experience which I would say no there is not right so while we were oppressed as women We were elevated as white women. We do this on the 4th of July. We take all this for granted What are we celebrating on the 4th of July? freedom When what's the date attached to the 4th of July 1776? Yeah, what was going on then? Right, but this is you know, the whole country is just celebrating right again always whose story right Okay, so racism is a form of oppression it is it is a system operating on multiple levels and it works to ensure an unequal distribution between Of everything between white people as a group and people of color as a group With whites the beneficiaries of that system. Okay, it has nothing to do. Well, it's connected to but it is not Dependent on individual actors It is going to reproduce itself because the system is set up to do that So I'm going to show that to you Marilyn Fry is a scholar that has a metaphor of the of a bird cage that oppression is like a bird cage If you walk right up to that cage and put your face right against that You're going to get an unobstructed view of the bird right because you've got a very micro or myopic view That's putting your eye in a hole in a fence, right? And you're going to say what's the problem the little doors open? Why doesn't the bird just fly away? Why don't they just do x y and z and then they won't have their problems, right? But if you step back you begin to see these bars and then these bars and then these bars When you take a macro view you begin to see this interlocking network That while won't make it impossible for that bird to fly away We'll make it very unlikely and we can predict that it won't that it certainly will have many many more barriers So what are some of those our? institutions our ideology isolation Rewards for conformity our culture internalized oppression microaggressions the constant threat of violence our history the burden of representation invisibility and Unacknowledged historical trauma those are just a few and anyone who's one of the few people of color in an organization understands the burden of representation Isolation the pressure if you keep white folks comfortable around race you'll get further All all of this weight that I do not hold carrier or have to navigate Trying to challenge this dominant idea that Oppression is just a racism is just whether or not I tell racist jokes and I don't tell them so therefore Okay, well, this is my metaphor Because as I listened to as I listened to white folks day in and day out Respond in conversations about race. I got this image of a peer or a doc because for me that signifies how superficial and Surface these narratives are so let's see if you recognize any of these I Was taught to treat everyone the same Anybody ever hear that one? Okay? No, you weren't I'm gonna say it again. No, you weren't You may have been told that you cannot teach human beings to treat everyone the same We don't treat everyone the same and We certainly do not want to in this particular society because we need to understand. What does that person need based on? this backdrop I See people as individuals. I don't care if you're pink purple yellow or polka dotted anybody ever hear that one Okay, if that's in your vocabulary, please drop it and never use it again, okay? It's incredibly demeaning people don't come in pinks and purples Let's just get let's just get real racism's real. Let's talk about it. Okay What else do we have? Racisms in the past mace doesn't have any meaning everyone struggles Okay, my parents weren't racist. That's why I'm not racist or my parents were racist That's why I'm not racist. It doesn't really matter what comes in front. What comes behind must always be I'm not racist So-and-so just happened to be black It has nothing to do with anything although I do need to let you know that and now I'm gonna tell you about a conflict We had an insist that race had nothing to do with it. I'd actually Also drop that for my vocabulary. I would drop regardless of race or Just happened to be while I might not know exactly what race had to do with that conflict Or interchange It had something to do with it because there's no way you can take that out any more than you can take gender and how it's Operating cross cross relationships Okay, now oh I got to do this one. I was in the military I have actually gone back and forth with white people who insist that the reason they're not racist is because they were in the military and Well, I might give them All right, you're all wearing green. That's usually what they say. We're all wearing green. It's like I'll give you that But first of all who got who gets recruited into the military. What kind of strategies to are used? I would also say Who are you killing and how are you being trained to kill them, right? All right, now if we're sophisticated We might not say those things, but I'll get us to So what do we say we say stuff like I work in a very diverse environment I Have people of color in my family. Okay, so I'm gonna ask you have any of you This one's popular in Seattle I live in the most diverse zip code in the United States nine eight one one eight Which is by the way, it's Columbia City and it's no longer the most diverse of code in Seattle But let's start with those first two How many of you in a conversation with a white person about racism have heard some version of I know people of color I have people called in my family. Okay, right, so When when a white person tells you that they're giving you evidence, right? They're they're giving you their evidence for what in their mind What are they giving you their evidence of? That they're not racist, right? So if that is my evidence How do I define racism? So this is actually really this has been really useful for me to kind of go under the surface and think okay So then and then if I could figure out how they're defining racism then I can speak to it Okay, so I would say they're defining racism as conscious dislike a Racist doesn't like people of color therefore they I guess couldn't work three cubicles down from somebody Or if they have a person of color in their family and clearly they think they have love for this person They also couldn't possibly be racist, so they're defining it as conscious dislike Right, and they're not understanding the power of implicit bias if we really I've ever had somebody say I used to live in New York And that's why I'm not racist. I've actually heard all of these things, right? So I guess a racist couldn't walk by people of color without losing their shit, basically and See I can walk by them and they're you know, they're around me I Work here, right? Therefore I couldn't possibly let me let me ask you how many of you are in an cis gender Do you know what I mean when I say cis gender? Okay, if you don't I'll let your professors help you with that Not transgender, okay, so you're in an opposite sex relationship. How many of you are an opposite sex relationship? All right So for the women in the room you so you would you were the man, right? You got a man in your life And the moment he fell in love with you all his sexism disappeared, right? No, how could he have any sexism? He loves you There's no gender dynamics in the relationship, okay, so we see the ludicrousness of that But we think that racism disappears. There's no racial dynamics between people if they're in an intimate relationship All right I used to live in New York My children are so much open the problem with this one is we like to romanticize children But by age three or four all children know the racial order. This is well researched. They know the racial order What's the racial order? It's better to be white They know that and you get out if you are a parent of color You got to work very hard to instill Worth and pride in them in the face of that relentless message We don't like how white our neighborhood is but we had to move here for the schools This is actually I think another really disingenuous. I think white people do like how white their neighborhoods are Okay So we have to go under the surface and figure out what is propping this up if we want to address it and I think Let's look at these questions How racially diverse was your neighborhood growing up and what messages did you get about race from your neighborhoods? The overall pattern across the United States is that if you are white you most likely grew up in a white neighborhood I'm going to put it this way. You probably grew up in segregation If you are whiting you did not grow up in racial segregation You're probably urban and poor or working class And you probably don't still live in those neighborhoods because upward mobility takes us away And we don't tend to maintain those relationships. Okay, so the so the vast majority of white people grow up in segregation and All just because of time I will let you think about what messages are we getting about race in Segregation right we can say everybody's equal, but the practice of our lives is phenomenally more powerful than whatever we say right Here's another question When's the first time you had a teacher of the same race or races if you're multi-racial as you and how often did that happen and When's the first time you had a teacher of a different race and How often did that happen and the vast majority pattern across the US is if that you're white From the time you began and you can get through graduate school without having a teacher of color So put another way if you're white from the time you begin you are Relentlessly reflected in your teachers and then of course your textbooks and everything else if you are a person of color and you're With a rare exception for blacks and say Atlanta and certain parts of DC Then the answer to this question is rarely if ever did I look up and see myself reflected in that in that person now the teaching force is Upwards of 93% white it is getting whiter not less white and those Teachers answer these questions in the same way grow up in segregation rarely if ever have a teacher of color So where do we get our information then? About people of color Well, really problematic sources, right? Media TV jokes admissions warnings, right? Where do I get my peak? I watch MSNBC lockdown. I watch cops. I watch Jerry Springer, right? So picture those are my and those are my sources and now I'm gonna go and socialize everybody's children and I'm gonna decide who's smart and respectful and well-behaved and who deserves to be punished in what way and Who deserves to go to special ed etc, right? And we have the school to prison pipeline which again, it's not about individual teachers intentions It's about our very deep socialization That we cannot admit to and that comes out in in our assessments So I'm going to show you My image I like to use images for This dynamic of the teaching force. So this is the college jeopardy champion playoffs These are our best in our brightest Certified as highly educated by our universities And this is the board at the end of their grand champion round And as we can see there's a category not one of them touched. So it was probably the hardest I would assume and they didn't want to lose and for me it would be astrophysics or Chemistry or something. All right. Well, let's just see and I I don't know that I can Express What this means in terms of the ability for white supremacy to continue when I say white supremacy I mean whites is central and superior if you disconnect us from our history and we do not know our history We cannot challenge racism. This is a a crisis Our schools are getting more segregated our teaching force is getting wider, okay All right, so Joe Fegan is a sociologist that has this concept of the white racial frame You can think of it as those pillars. It's it's the framework through which whites make racial meaning and that It functions to position whites as superior and it's passed down and reinforced across the society So I'm going to start showing you some images. I think that's a great example of the white racial frame Right ideal beauty for the world, right? You don't have to read Vogue magazine for this to affect you It's affects all of us anyone who tells me that advertising doesn't affect them is telling me they don't understand socialization Not to mention the multi-billion dollar advertising industry Here's an ad I got on a Delta Airlines flight last year And I my initial response to it was oh my god. It's just there's the racial hierarchy right there So you have your white women in the front with the red hair wearing green you have Asian women in the middle wearing yellow and You have black women in the back wearing brown. Okay, so right there You've got your racial hierarchy, but look at that. Look at the ad is for a purse So look at the three sets of women's hands The black women don't even have the purse right just this kind of Just again in just an instant, right? We're absorbing This one maximize the Performance of your employees the sixth shirtless black men nailed at the foot of this white man and look at the body language Right, we're absorbing this nothing. I'm showing you stands alone We can read it precisely because it connects to the millions of other images that circulate around us You know when you're reading a CNN or Huffington Post or something and there's these constant flashes to you know Go to this story. Go to this story, right? And I saw one that said the most beautiful women in the world, right? So, okay, I got to check this out representing South Africa By the way, which is ninety two percent black South Africa is eight percent white That that to me is white supremacy There was not one Asian woman Asian women are the majority of women in the world and in this most beautiful women in the world No, Asian women. So I think the most powerful adaptation of racism over time is this good bad binary You make racism so bad that white people cannot tolerate Looking at it in themselves, and it's the root of virtually all defensiveness You've ever gotten from a white person trying to talk about racism. So let's fill it in a racist is ignorant and bigoted and prejudiced and Mean-spirited and old and southern Well drives a pickup truck we'll get some classism in there Not racist is progressive and educated and northern Open-minded etc, right? So keep noticing how powerful this is in the dominant narrative about What it means to be complicit with this system and how Fantastically it functions to make it hard to talk about okay So I'm going to use the example of my life to talk about How what it means to be white? So the first thing is that I was born into a society in which I belong Okay, I belong at that faculty meeting. I belong at that church service I belong at that block party dealing with my daughter's teachers her camp counselors that wedding Right day in and day out and I do not ever take for granted the power of belonging It's in my bones. It's in my muscles Right any space deem neutral or normal I belong as a white person. It's a it's a fantastic Psychic freedom and nothing I'm about to say can be said by a person of color in this society Hey represented in the government. So let's look at that All right I don't know that there's a more powerful image than God Right, and here's what I I saw as a child looking up. There's God creating man There's Jesus who by the way was a man of color And Moses and Mary Whites are the norm for humanity. I was thinking trying to think I had a how to represent this So you all seen those things? Okay, here's a close-up even with their skin off their white Here's Adam and Eve the first human beings Constant messages that it's better to be white. I'm just gonna say this again. Nobody misses the message. It's better to be white I don't on a on a conscious level believe or want that message. It comes at me 24 7 Right. So here's best hair. We have Halle Berry here, but of course her hair is straightened This little girl has been been dubbed the most beautiful girl in the world I have a problem with that on many levels, but in terms of white supremacy This is on a science website right now. What would a scientifically perfect face look like? Contrasted with what I'm gonna show you next which ran in psychology today in 2011 this this Comes through in in dating practices in pornography in in everybody is affected by these messages, right? I was racially affirmed throughout my childhood And I'm gonna use images from today's childhood. I'm wanting you I want you to get the water Okay, this this has been exported worldwide. I've seen so many little girls of color with these backpacks Just again that relentless image of whiteness as ideal. This is Aella Jackson. She's a little girl that was killed in a police shootout in her home in Detroit But what's so particularly poignant about that picture is see posed in front of those Disney princesses Get the white the boys in here because childhood is so gendered This is the Academy Board of Governors who decide the Oscars. These are who write our stories These are who shape all of our understandings and their depiction of the other, right? Let's just leave it at this photo, okay? I have a whole chapter on this movie if you are white and you love a movie about race that should be a red flag Is it probably reinforced a really cherished narrative? Which is usually there's good whites and there's bad whites and we're the good whites and I would get get rid of that That's rooted in the good bad. This reminded me an awful lot of that and of course these are the images You know here here's his community and Then here is you know He was saved by his white family Can you even see the brown girls in this? There's one on each end as usually that's what you get you're gonna get one on each end or one to the to the side When you do get Latina here in this one Latina devious maids Let's just do Lord of the Rings. I'm gonna go fast. Okay 100% every creature and Lord of the Rings is white They're literally trying to get to the white city They're trying to escape the dark Lord of Mordor. Here's our hero and then these are the monsters It's relentless Okay, I'm going to end this piece by looking at these TV shows that many of us grew up with they span the decades We've got Seinfeld in the 80s sex in the city 90s friends in the 2000s We've exported these worldwide Every one of these shows is about ideal friendship and every one of these shows takes place in New York City Arguably the most racially diverse city in the US the message over and over These two proud people made an app that's been very successful. It's called the sketch factor When you go to a new city the app will tell you what neighborhoods to avoid And I bet you had to be a lot of the neighborhoods that you all come from right so I'm gonna end by saying the most powerful way my Life has been shaped by my race or what it means to be white is that I could be born into I could learn I Could play I could worship I could study I could love I could work and I could die in segregation and Not one person who's ever loved me or guided me has ever conveyed loss and The message of segregation at the good schools and good neighborhoods We love so much is that there is no inherent value in the perspectives and experiences of people of color And then you get to this point in life and now I'm a professor I'm gonna have a hard time even noticing they're missing much less being able to take in their value This is how white supremacy is circulating And so under the surface we have the good bad binary individualism Universalism internalized superiority and investment in the racial order and segregation these are the linchpins of white supremacy or racism today that allows us to live so unequal by race and Confess that it has no impact or meaning for us So I'm going to end with just putting these up here And I'm gonna I feel the need to say it should be clear that I am a pretty empowered person Right. I'm not coming across to you as a guilt-ridden person. This is not about Being bad, but it's about waking up and Seeing the water because I think the most toxic and hostile condition for people of color Every day is unexamined whiteness. This socialization comes out of my pores and Keep noticing. This is my socialization, but I'm objective. You play the race card. I Get to decide whether your claims of racism are legitimate or not from this background From this deep investment in a system that serves me, but never being able to admit that to myself Right. This is the level that we have to start to change those pillars And within ourselves and in our relationships if we're gonna move forward. So I thank you very much for your attention