Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
My parents met as teenagers,
both working really hard to emancipate from their families of origin.
They were working really hard at it for two very different reasons.
They found each other, probably, in the backseat of a Chevy,
and at 16-years-old, they got pregnant with my brother.
They promptly dropped out of high school,
got married,
moved in together
and took the kind of low-paying jobs that high school dropouts get to take.
Ten months after my brother was born,
I was born -
ten months after my brother was born.
The joke in my family growing up
was that after my brother came out, my dad went right back in.
(Laughter)
On the eve of my fourth birthday, my parents separated and divorced.
All four of my grandparents are Ashkenazi Jews,
making, obviously, my parents Ashkenazi Jews,
making me 96.2% Ashkenazi Jew -
I did one of those DNA tests you can find on Facebook.
(Laughter)
Both my parents remarried by the time I was seven.
My father, he remarried another Ashkenazi Jew.
My mother, she remarried an Irish Catholic man.
This was problematic for both of them.
It was a problem for my mother because she married a guy who wasn't Jewish.
Now, you've got to remember this is the 1960s, the early 1960s.
Nobody broke that chain back then;
you didn't marry out of your race or out of your religion,
especially if you were an Ashkenazi Jew -
there aren't that many of us.
It was a problem for my stepfather because he was a Catholic man
and he was marrying a woman who was divorced.
They moved us to a very white, working-class neighborhood
in Northeast Philadelphia.
That's where I got my first taste of prejudice.
Kids in the neighborhood made fun of me for the shape and size of my nose.
They teased me for being short.
They teased me for having big ears.
I remember one time the kids came home from Catholic school,
and they formed a circle around me
and said, "Let's beat up the Jew."
They called me a "rich Jew," and they called me a "dirty Jew,"
and I was confused by all this.
Sometimes they called me a "kike."
I thought they were calling me a kite.
I didn't know why.
I didn't feel like a kite.
The "rich Jew" thing was really confusing.
These rich Jews, where are they?
Not in my family of high school dropouts.
I keep looking for them, hoping they'll show up.
I want them to send me their money - I'll do good things with it.
But there were no rich Jews in my family,
and the "dirty Jew" thing was also confusing to me.
I mean after all, I was a seven-year-old boy in a city.
I was probably pretty dirty,
but my family was not and my house was not.
In my house, you didn't have trash in trash cans in my house
because if somebody came over and saw trash in the trash can,
they might think you were dirty.
So my house never had trash in the trash cans.
In my house, if you were watching a TV show,
and you had a drink and you got up to leave for any reason,
anyone in the family
might have picked up that glass, washed it and put it away.
My house was not dirty;
we were not dirty Jews.
My stepfather and mother then moved us
to an even more segregated neighborhood outside of Philadelphia
called Levittown, Pennsylvania.
And Levittown was deliberately segregated.
In Levittown - Levitt was a bigot,
and he made a neighborhood that was just for the black folks;
it was called Bloomsdale.
Black folks didn't go to where white folks lived,
white folks didn't go where black folks lived;
that's just how it was.
Busing was a big thing when I was a kid in the early 1970s,
and so people started getting bused to achieve racial integration.
So I was bused past one school five minutes from my house
to another school a half-hour from my house
to achieve racial integration.
My black friends often remind me that we only started talking about busing
is when white people started to get bused.
I think this is true with a lot in this country -
we don't start talking about this stuff until it happens to white people.
When I was a senior in high school,
I had an opportunity to take Black History or American History.
It was interesting to me that they gave us this option
as if they were different.
Three of my white friends and I, we took Black History.
And I again felt like "other" in that classroom
as one of the few white kids in a class of all black people,
but I felt welcomed there,
I felt at home, I felt accepted, I felt nurtured, I felt loved.
You see, I grew up in a house where language was big, words were big.
I grew up in a house where curse words weren't the regular curse words.
George Carlin used to say that there are seven words you shouldn't say on TV.
Curse words in my house weren't words like the "F word."
I grew up in a house where the F word was used all the time.
I thought it had to be used in every sentence; I didn't know.
I love looking out and seeing college students
because you all say the F word walking across campus and in your songs;
I feel like I am at home when I'm with you.
(Laughter)
In my house, curse words were words like the "N word";
you couldn't say the N word in my house.
You couldn't say the "B word" or "C word" for women.
Every group had curse words.
The Italians had curse words; we couldn't say those words.
You couldn't say the words we say for gays, lesbians and bisexuals
that you still hear used;
you couldn't say those word in my house -
you'd be in trouble.
There are curse words for people with disabilities that still get used;
we use the "R word" like it's nothing.
We still call people with disabilities "invalids."
Listen to the word.
We're calling people "invalid."
These words were powerful in my house,
and I grew up learning that these are not words you use.
Those other ones, be careful where you use them,
but you can use them here.
I also learned that a bigot is a bigot is a bigot.
So if you hear someone saying the "N word" when there's no black folks around,
or the "B word" or the "C word" when there's no women around,
"You can bet, damn sure, Mark,
that they're saying 'dirty Jew' and 'kike' when you're not around,
because a bigot is a bigot is a bigot."
And so I grew up about prejudice in a very different way than most people.
When I got to college, I wanted to study prejudice
because it confused the hell out of me, I didn't understand it.
I passed for white, so I would hear prejudice all the time.
So I read this book, written in 1954, by a guy named Gordon Allport
when I got to college.
He talks about a couple different things in this book,
but three that I'll highlight here.
He talks about the idea that prejudice is normal, natural; it's to be accepted.
We're going to have prejudice and stereotypes;
we can't meet every one of any certain group.
So you're going to have stereotypes and prejudices.
If I'm the first Jew you ever saw, you might think this is what Jews are like.
You know what? We're kind of like this; this is how we look.
He says that many stereotypes are based in kernels of truth;
they don't come from nowhere, they come from somewhere.
And he says not only is prejudice between groups
but prejudice is also within certain groups.
Now, I know about this because as a Jew,
when people would ask me if I was Jewish,
I would apologize and would say, "Um, well, yes,"
almost as if I felt bad about it, which I did.
I'd say, "Yes, I am. But my stepfather is Catholic."
It wasn't until much later in life
that I realized that being Catholic was just as bad as being Jewish -
I didn't know.
As a little kid, I wouldn't let you look at me from the side;
I would want to sit in a way you'd never see my profile;
I was embarrassed and ashamed and scared
that you would see how Jewish I was.
When I got to graduate school, I studied Carl Rogers.
He says that the distance
between who you are and who you dream yourself to be - the greater the gap -
the more psychologically impaired you probably are.
So I applied this to prejudice.
I thought, "I can't apply this to me. I'm not prejudiced.
I grew up in a house with no 'N word,' with no prejudice.
I learned from my mother that a bigot is a bigot is a bigot."
And then I realized, "Oh, no, Mark. Until you can look at your own prejudice,
until you can look at the fact that you have prejudices and then examine it,
like an alcoholic has a problem with addiction
before they can do anything about it,
I have to realize I am prejudiced."
So I'm going to stand here and say something that might sound a little crazy.
I am a racist, sexist, ageist, classist,
homophobic, heterosexist, able-bodyist and lookist person.
And with all due respect, so are you.
So are you.
And until you can admit it, until we can admit it as a society,
we will not move anywhere.
Because in our culture, we try to convince each other how cool we are.
We say stupid things like "I don't see color," or "We're all one race,"
or that "All lives matter."
It's crazy talk.
I can't stand here and pretend I don't see your age.
I can't pretend I don't see that your skin is black and mine is white.
I can't pretend that.
I can't pretend I don't notice your eyes are shaped differently than mine.
I can't pretend I don't see your hair is purple.
I can't pretend that I don't see these things,
and I can't pretend that it doesn't impact our relationship
because it does.
And until we can come to grips
with recognizing that the way we see each other,
just based on limited information,
impacts who we are and how we relate to each other,
we will do nothing about this problem.
We've got to stop pretending that we don't have prejudice.
It's absurd.
So I started to research who's done work on this prejudice thing,
and I was surprised as heck to find out
that the group that did some of the earliest research on prejudice
was the U.S. Military.
Before World War II, the U.S. Military had separate barracks;
they had enlisted men's showers that were for white folks
and enlisted men's showers for colored folks.
And they had barracks and showers that were separate.
And so what they did is sensitivity training
to try and reduce prejudice.
They put these people in a room and did this sensitivity training -
something like what I'm talking to you about, sort of -
and what they found out is that prejudice did not go down.
It didn't go down.
All the sensitivity training in the world didn't decrease prejudice.
Finally they said, "The hell with this,
let's just move these dudes in with each other.
Let's just move them all in together."
Guess what happened to prejudice?
It went down; it went down dramatically.
And the researchers said, "What the heck happened here?
How did prejudice go down? What did we do?"
And so they found that when they met four specific conditions,
when people share intimate beliefs
in an atmosphere of cooperation and they are of equal status
sanctioned by some authority,
when we do those things,
prejudice almost always goes down.
It almost always goes down.
So how do we keep prejudice in our head?
How does it stay in our head? What happens to us?
So, I'm driving on a very nice day from Los Angeles to San Diego
with my two favorite bigots, my biological father and my stepmother.
They're the kind of bigots
that are bigoted in a way that they pretend they're not bigoted, but they are.
They use all those words when no one's around.
And so on this day, as we're driving to San Diego,
and there's a car driving erratically.
Sure enough, my stepmother leans over to my father when she sees this car,
and she says, "I knew it."
I lean forward and say, "What is it that you knew?"
She says, "Never mind, I'm probably not supposed to say this to you."
I say, "My guess is that you're not supposed to say this to anyone."
(Laughter)
"But tell me anyhow."
So she told me, she said, "Okay, I knew it would be an Oriental driver."
Now my first thought was "Oriental" refers to food and rugs, not people.
But I don't correct her just yet; I am capable of that.
She says, "You wouldn't know. You live in Colorado. There are no Orientals there.
You wouldn't know."
So I say, "Let's do a survey. We've got two hours.
I'd rather do this then talk to you.
Let's do a survey.
From Los Angeles to San Diego, on this given day,
let's see how many Asian folks or Pacific Islanders are bad drivers."
And we find out on this day
Asian and Pacific Islanders do not have a monopoly on driving poorly.
We know who the worst drivers are in this country.
They're 16 to 17-year old boys.
(Laughter)
So how does my stepmother hold in her head
that Asian and Pacific Islanders are the worst drivers?
She holds it in her head the same way you and I hold it in our heads.
She has a file, a file in her head that says, "Bad Asian driver."
So when she sees a bad driver that's not Asian - no file.
When she sees a bad driver that is Asian - boom, she files it.
So what's in your file?
What's in your file?
I have a file.
I have a file for black folks; I have a file for brown folks;
I have a file for Republicans;
I have a file for people from Nebraska.
Okay, I have a file. And so do you.
And you need to look at your file.
So I started to examine:
has anybody in current events done anything that's reduced prejudice
or shown it can be reduced by meeting those four conditions?
And sure enough, I get online and find this guy named Daryl Davis.
And Daryl Davis is an African-American musician
who plays in a white band, and he ended up playing at Ku Klux Klan rallies,
and he stands around, and he talks to people,
and they share intimate beliefs in an atmosphere of cooperation;
they're of equal status, and prejudice goes down.
He gave me permission to use this photograph.
You can read about him online, if you like.
Daryl Davis goes to these places and talks to these folks.
Anne Wilson Schaef wrote a book called "Women's Reality."
And in her book, she says that "Prejudice is like air pollution.
When you're in air that stinks really bad for a really long time,
you stop smelling the stink of the air; it's just the way the air smells."
And so the air - as a white, male, heterosexual,
temporarily able-bodied man - is almost always mine.
And so when my black friends tell me that a place feels racist,
when my women friends say it doesn't feel safe to walk through the garage
or their workplace feels like there's a creeper working there,
I go like this (sniff, sniff): "I don't smell that,"
because it's not my air.
So my job is to smell the air when it stinks,
especially when it doesn't stink for me.
White people, I'm talking to you.
White, male, heterosexual, temporarily able-bodied folks,
I'm talking to you.
Smell the air when it stinks, especially when it doesn't stink for you.
So, I'll just bring this to a close here.
I've been to some of the richest places and poorest places on the planet.
We all want the same stuff.
We want a safe place to sleep at night,
water to drink that's good for us,
clean air to breathe,
we want the kids of the world to have a chance at life.
We might want healthcare,
we might want an education.
And what we want to do is we want to connect.
So, in the 60s when I had a VW beetle,
we would ride by other VW beetles and do this.
Ask your parents, young folks.
And it felt good.
I had a Harley Davidson for 25 years.
I don't know if I liked driving the Harley
as much as I liked getting the wave from other Harley riders.
I go to football games, and I'm a fan,
and I see people raise their hands,
and I think. "I don't want to do the fricking wave."
Everybody starts doing the wave, and then I start doing it,
and I look across the stadium
and see even the team I'm fighting against is doing the wave.
You see, we want to connect.
The desire to connect is great; something's in the way of that.
So, maybe, if we smell the air when it stinks but it doesn't stink for us,
maybe if we can come to grips with looking what's in our file,
maybe if we can start to look at the words we use and how powerful they are,
maybe then, maybe then the divide you see
in the United States and the world, right now,
maybe then we will actually find out we can all come together
and fix this stuff that's going on right now.
Thanks.
(Applause)