Transcriber: Jihyeon J. Kim
Reviewer: Ilze Garda
I want to talk a little bit
about race tonight.
Or to be more precise, I want to talk
about how we talk about race,
how we engage in race conversations,
and how we might get a little bit
better at it in some ways.
That's a topic that I have always enjoyed;
most Americans avoid
race conversations like the plague.
We often take our ability to avoid it
and use it as a measure
of our progress and enlightenment,
which, I think, is kind
of telling in and of itself.
(Laughter) (Applause)
But I've always been drawn
to those conversations
and fascinated by them.
In part, because growing up
as a very light-skinned
black man of mixed descent,
I often find myself in sort
of peculiar race-based conversations.
Often times when I'm meeting
someone for the first time,
rather than making small talk,
they'll immediately present me
with a philosophical conundrum,
they will ask, "What are you?"
(Laughter)
And I'll have to explain:
"I'm not a philosophy major;
my father is black, my mother is white,
and what are we..."
(Laughter)
So I've always had a passion
for studying and observing
how we communicate about race
and how we might get a little better
at certain aspects of that communication.
I made a video commentary named
"How to tell someone they sound racist",
which talks about a particular type
of race conversation,
which usually doesn't involve
any explicit racist intent,
there's no blatant racism involved.
It usually involves
well-intentioned people,
but it's a situation where one of us
feels the need to tell someone
that something they said may have had
connotations they were not aware of,
or they may have done
something that had a hurtful impact
they might not have been aware of.
That's a conversation we all find
ourselves in from time to time,
and it's a conversation
that usually goes horribly.
(Laughter)
Because no matter how clear
you try to be in conveying
that you're not attacking the person,
you're just trying
to offer a specific critique
about something that just happened.
When we are receiving
that sort of critique,
we tend to deeply personalize
and take it as a personal attack,
and we tend to respond by saying:
"Are you saying that I am a racist?
How can you so? I am a good person!
Why would you say so?"
You try to explain
you meant [something in particular].
"No! I am not a racist."
And what started out
as a what-you-said conversation
turns into a what-you-are conversation,
and what-I-am conversation
which is a dead end that produces
nothing except mutual frustration,
and you never wind up seeing eye-to-eye
and finding any common ground.
So in my video, I offered some suggestions
for how we might stay focused
on the what-you-said conversation
and find some common ground.
Most videos on YouTube
die off after 48 hours,
but this video really struck a chord,
which I think shows
how hungry many of us are
to find better ways
to communicate on these issues.
The two types of feedback
I get most commonly on that video are
one: "I really appreciated
the perspective you gave
about staying focused
on what-you-are conversation."
And the second type of feedback I get is:
"I tried these strategies you suggested
about staying
on the what-you-are conversation,
and they actually never work."
(Laughter)
And this is true, unfortunately,
no matter what angle you take,
as far as voicing that critique,
the vast majority of the time,
it's still going to lapse
into a defensive what-I-am conversation.
I think framing it as clearly as you can,
in that what-you-said form
is still valuable because it makes
the substance of your beef
as clear as possible to other people
observing the conversation,
especially in public discourse.
And it gives both of you the best shot
at finding common ground
and seeing eye-to-eye;
it's worth going for that 10%.
The success rate might be higher
here in Hampshire College,
but where I live, on the Internet,
the success rate tends to be around 10%.
So since I made that video
and took in that feedback,
I've been thinking
about what other approaches
we might be able to take, and I think
- since we can never
entirely fix that conversation
by changing how we voice the critique -
we might be able to also make it
budge a little bit by considering
how we receive that critique, and how we
might be able to take a suggestion
that we may have said or done
something racist, take it in stride,
and not completely freak out and assume
that the world thinks I'm a bad person.
The first thing that makes it
difficult to accept that critique,
that you may have said something racist,
is that it involves the possibility
that you made a mistake,
and none of us takes that too well,
none of us enjoys that.
But in most other situations,
when the possibility arises
that we made a mistake,
we are usually able to take
a few deep breaths and tell ourselves:
"I'm only human, everyone makes mistakes."
But when it comes to conversations
involving race and prejudice,
for some reason, we tend to make
the opposite assumption.
We deal with race and prejudice
with this all-or-nothing,
good person, bad person binary,
in which either you are racist
or you are not racist.
If you're not betting a thousand,
then you're striking out every time.
And this puts us in a situation
where we're striving to meet
an impossible standard.
[Anything less] than perfection
means that you are a racist.
That means any suggestion
that you've made a mistake
or you've been less than perfect
is a suggestion that you're a bad person,
so we become averse to any suggestion
that we should consider
our thoughts and actions.
And it makes it harder for us
to work on our imperfections.
When you believe that you must
be perfect in order to be good,
it makes you averse to recognizing
your own inevitable imperfections,
and that lets them stagnate and grow.
So the belief you must be
perfect in order to be good
is an obstacle to being
as good as you can be.
It would make our conversations
with each other a lot smoother,
and it would make us better at being good,
if we could recognize
that we're not perfect and embrace that.
So I want to offer a couple of things
that you could keep in mind
when you need to remind yourself
that I'm not supposed to be perfect
when it comes to navigating race.
The first thing is that any time
we're dealing with race issues,
we are dealing with a social construct
that was not born out
of any science, or reason, or logic.
We are grappling with a social construct
that was not designed to make sense.
And to the extent that it is
the product of the design,
the race constructs that we live in
in America were shaped specifically
by desire to avoid making sense.
They were shaped for centuries
by a need to rationalize
and justify indefensible acts.
So when we grapple with race issues,
we're grappling with something
that was designed for centuries
to make us circumvent our best instincts.
It's a dance partner
that's designed to trip us up.
So just based on that alone,
we should be able to keep in mind
that you'll never bet a thousand
when it comes to dealing with race issues.
The other thing that we
need to keep in mind is,
as we are all imperfect humans,
and as has been laid out
in some other talks this evening,
we all have unconscious thought processes
and psycho-social mechanisms that prop up.
There are many things
in our day to day lives
that lead us towards developing
little pockets of prejudice,
that lead us towards
acting unkind to others
without having any intent to do so.
These are things we'll just naturally
develop in our day to day lives.
The problem with that
all-or-nothing binary,
is it causes us to look
at racism and prejudice
as if they are akin to having tonsils.
You either have tonsils or you don't,
and if you've had your prejudice removed,
you never need to consider...
(Laughter)
If someone says: "I think you may have
a little unconscious prejudice,"
you say: "No, my prejudice
was removed in 2005.
(Laughter)
I went to see that movie Crash."
(Laughter)
But that's not how these things work.
In your day to day lives,
there are all of these mass media
and social stimuli,
as well as processes that we all have
inside our brains that we're not aware of.
That causes us to build up
little pockets of prejudice everyday,
just like plaque develops on our teeth.
(Laughter)
So we need to move away
from the tonsils paradigm
of race discourse
towards the dental hygiene paradigm
- (Laughter) - of race discourse.
(Applause)
That's if I could offer
one piece of advice.
And in general, I think we need
to move away from the premise
that being a good person
is a fixed, immutable characteristic
and shift towards seeing
being good as a practice,
and it is a practice that we carry out
by engaging with our imperfections.
We need to shift towards thinking
that you're being a good person
the same way we think
of being a clean person.
Being a clean person is something
you maintain and work on everyday.
We don't assume that I'm a clean person
therefore I don't need to brush my teeth.
(Laughter)
When someone suggests to us
there's something stuck in our teeth,
we don't say: "What do you mean?
I have something stuck in my teeth?
I'm a clean person!"
(Laughter)
I know that this is no small task,
but if we can shift a little bit closer
towards viewing those race conversations
the same way we view our conversation
about something stuck in our teeth,
you'll go a long way towards making
our conversations a bit smoother
and allow us to work together
on bigger issues around race,
because there are a lot of --
beyond the persistent,
conversational awkwardness of race,
there are persistent, systemic,
and institutional issues around race
that are not caused by conversation,
and they can't be entirely solved
by conversation, you can't talk them away.
But we need people to work together,
and coordinate, and communicate
to find strategies to work
on those systemic issues.
Because despite all of the barriers
that we have broken,
all of the apparent markers of progress,
there are still so many disparities.
If you look at unemployment rate,
infant mortality rate, incarceration rate,
medium household income,
there are so many disparities
on the various sides
of the color lines in this country
that it is worthwhile for us
to iron out these conversational issues.
If for nothing else
so that we can get a little bit closer
to working together on those big issues.
So I hope that we can...
if I could have one wish, it would be
that we would consider
how we can conceptualize
being a good person,
and keep in mind that we're not good
despite our imperfections,
it is the connection we maintain
with our imperfections
that allows us to be good.
Our connection with our personal
and common imperfections,
being mindful of those personal
and common imperfections,
is what allows us to be good
to each other and be good to ourselves.
(Applause)
I know that this is no easy task,
and race may be the most difficult sphere
in which to apply this concept,
but I think it's where
we could also reap the most rewards.
So I hope that bit by bit,
if we consider that and are mindful of it,
we can shift away from taking it
as an indictment of our goodness
and move towards taking it
as a gesture of respect
and an act of kindness,
when someone tells us that we've got
something racist stuck in our teeth.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
