Transcriber: Raquel Vasconcelos Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
When I was younger, I had the pleasure of working at a wonderful summer camp
on beautiful Lake Thompson in West Portland, Maine.
For many days, my friends and I would look out across the lake,
over the green, beautiful meadow on a hillside in the near distance,
and we really wanted to go there.
So on one of our days off, we set out to do just that.
We figured it couldn't involve more than driving down the camp road,
taking a right, following the road along the lakeside
and arriving at our beautiful green meadow.
Well …
over an hour into our precious 24 hours off,
we were frustrated, lost and desperate enough to ask for help.
So we did.
We stopped at a typical Maine small grocer, coffee, pizza sub,
soft serve ice cream, deli, bait and tackle, guns and ammo,
foreign auto repair,
real estate broker, laundromat and gas station …
and asked for directions.
(Laughter)
After we explained our situation to the kind, suspendered,
plain-speaking proprietor, he said …
“Heya, that’s Johnson Hill. You can’t get there from here.”
(Laughter)
Now, while that sounded like more of an indictment than a helpful pointer,
it was meant to make us aware that the route we had in our minds
didn’t match the terrain we needed to navigate.
The directions our Maine guide gave us
didn’t remotely match the maps we had in our heads.
But the maps we had in our heads didn't remotely match reality.
Once we reoriented to the correct view of things
and followed the right directions,
we were in fact able to arrive at our beautiful Green Meadow on Johnson Hill
and have a beautiful day.
Like our helpful Maine guide,
I want today to provide us with an reoriented way to think about race.
I want to help correct the bad road maps we have in our head about race.
I want to provide directions that can lead us finally and truly beyond racism.
The map you likely have in your head about race
tells you that to get beyond racism,
we have to somehow arrive at racial equality.
But racial equality is an oxymoron, an idea that contradicts itself,
kind of like jumbo shrimp.
Race is by definition about inequality.
Race was invented to separate people,
based on the false notion of unequal capacity and unequal worth.
What I’ve learned, standing at the intersection of my identities,
as an immigrant, as a child of poverty,
as an adult who’s in the middle class,
as a father, as a teacher, as a social worker and a psychotherapist,
and as an adversely racialized person,
is that we haven’t moved beyond racism
because we’re using a map designed to separate us,
because we’re using a map designed by the racists.
Audre Lorde famously said
“The master’s tools will never destroy the master’s house.”
In the spirit of Lord’s wisdom, we need to realize
that the master’s map will never lead us past the master’s boundaries,
boundaries constructed to keep us on one side or the other
of social advantage or social disadvantage.
The master’s map is a product of something called racialization,
the process by which we literally create races,
which in turn, serve as the basis and justification for racism.
We haven’t successfully overcome racism
because, and some people might say, in fact, that it’s worse than ever,
because we continue to use a map that separates us on the basis of race.
I'm going to provide some directions, some corrective road signs,
and take us on a journey beyond our misunderstanding about race,
so that we can finally get beyond racism.
But before we take that journey,
let’s conduct a small vision test to make sure we’re ready for the drive.
What do you see?
Which two substances in these jars are most alike?
Jars one and two? Jars two and three?
Or jars one and three?
And on what evidence are you starting to draw your maps
of difference and similarity?
Well, it turns out that jar one contains white sugar,
jar two contains brown sugar
and jar three contains, wait for it …
salt.
Now that you know what’s actually in the jars,
which two are most alike?
What’s the difference between white sugar and brown sugar?
It’s just one thing …
molasses.
Now, if you’re like most people who do this activity,
you’re feeling a couple of things right now.
One is cognitive dissonance,
that unsettled feeling when the world tells you
that something you thought was pretty right, is actually pretty wrong.
And perhaps you’re also feeling that
“I can’t believe how foolish - how easily I was just fooled” feeling.
But that’s OK.
It’s alright to make mistakes, right? As long as we learn from them.
So what's the lesson here?
Well, one way of putting it might be “It’s stupid to draw conclusions
based on superficial and meager evidence; don’t be stupid.”
But that’s a little harsh.
It’s true, but it’s a little harsh.
(Laughter)
And we can go deeper into our lesson to actually understand
why it is that our brain makes this mistake.
You made the mistake about the jars
because your brain was doing what brains do:
thinking fast, making assumptions and then acting on them.
Your brain was going through five steps that are pretty simple,
but incredibly consequential.
They are selecting, sorting, attributing, essentializing and then acting.
When I asked you to figure out what’s different and the same about the jars,
the first thing your brain had to do was select something to differentiate.
That’s step number one.
And then you sorted based on the criteria.
And for most of us, the criteria was color.
So white things over here, brown things over there.
At the third step, things start to get really interesting.
Your brain goes beyond what it can see to develop ideas about what it can’t see.
It starts to attribute qualities to things
it only knows about on the surface level.
Your brain says, “I bet if I could feel and taste those white things
that look so much alike,
they would feel and taste the same.
And I bet if I could feel and taste that brown thing,
it wouldn’t feel and taste anything like the white things.”
At step number four, we lock in our confusion.
Your brain starts to essentialize differences about things
it only knows about on a surface level.
These white things are naturally and immutably white, and can never be brown.
This brown thing is naturally and immutably brown, and will never be white.
When I do this exercise with kids,
I like to ask them “How many of you would accept brown sugar as a substitute
for white sugar in your cereal in the morning?”
Almost always 100 percent, because most kids know that they're both sweeteners.
When I ask them
“How many of you would accept salt as a substitute for your sugar?”
zero percent “yes,” 100 percent “yuck.”
And that takes us to the fifth step, which is acting.
Once you have performed your flawed process of selecting,
sorting, essentializing, attributing, you’re ready to act, right?
You’re ready to act on the false logic you created,
on the dots you connected incorrectly,
and you end up putting salt in your cereal.
Now, once your flawed mapping was corrected,
you were able to understand the substances in a way that actually matched reality.
And it wasn't hard for you to make that correction.
Cognitive corrections aren’t hard
when we’re talking about things that we’re not very attached to.
But as the stakes and as the meaning of our conditioning
and our convictions get stronger and deeper,
it’s harder and harder to let go of our bad maps.
What do you see?
What’s different about these two people?
What’s alike about these two people?
What’s the relationship between these two people?
And here’s a hint …
Try to remember the lesson we just learned with the jars.
(Laughter)
Selecting, sorting, attributing, essentializing, acting.
The person on the left is yours truly,
the person on the right is Evan Carlos Hoyt,
Evan Carlos Hoyt is my son.
I made him.
To be more accurate,
I played a small part in making him with his mom, my wife, Leslie.
Thank you, Leslie.
If you allow yourself, if you allow your brain
to push past the master’s false cartography of difference,
you’ll see that Evan and I actually share a lot of similarities in our appearance.
Even at this young age when this was taken,
he’s starting to grow his dad’s bushy eyebrows,
I’m sorry about that, sweetie.
You can see that our eyes are the same shape.
So is our mouth, our ears are the same shape and size.
We even share freckles in common.
What stops you from seeing how similar my son and I are in appearance?
What’s the difference between dark skin and light skin?
It’s just one thing …
melanin.
When we apply the process of selecting, sorting,
attributing, essentializing and acting
to how we understand and should treat human beings,
we are performing the process of racialization.
We are literally creating the social construct of race
within which we stay trapped and harmed.
Here’s what your brain does on racialization.
I’m going to read you a quote of somebody’s process of racialization.
“Anyone who thinks that white and Black people
look as different as we do on the outside,
but are somehow magically the same on the inside, is delusional.
How could our faces, skin, hair and body structure all be different,
but our brains be exactly the same?”
And I’m guessing that sort of matches the way a lot of us think about race.
In this case,
this articulation of racialization belongs to Dylann Roof,
who massacred nine Black racialized people
in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17th, in 2015.
Roof’s process of racialization led to some terrible action.
Now, I said here’s what your brain does on racialization,
and then I read you a quote from an evil racist murderer.
Please know, I mean no offense by seeming to put you in the same category
of an evil racist.
I don’t think any of you are evil racists.
In fact, I’m pretty sure all of you are very kind racists, right?
(Laughter)
I’m sure all of you are like doctors, you know,
who are very kind people and dedicate their lives to healing and doing no harm.
But it turns out that at least half of all medical trainees and interns
believe that Black racialized people’s blood coagulates more quickly
than white racialized people’s blood.
That Black racialized people’s skin
is thicker than white racialized people’s skin.
And that Black racialized people have nerve endings that are less sensitive
than white racialized people.
And you can imagine the results of that in terms of care and treatment.
And let’s be clear, this is not just true of white racialized doctors.
Doctors, biologist, lawyers, politician, police and you.
Almost all of us harbor these kind of racist beliefs on which we too often act.
How could this be?
I say, how could this not be?
We are trained and conditioned and expected from an early age
to racialize others and ourselves.
For some of us, this false logic justifies discrimination and violence.
For some of us, it leads us to try the best we can
to bring about some sort of state of separate but equal racial equality.
But we can’t.
Race is predicated on separation -
separations that aren’t equal.
Separate and unequal is the essential logic of race.
Evil racists like Dylann Roof use it to perform terrible atrocities.
Systems and institutions are rooted in the same false logic.
And good and kind racists like you apply the same false logic.
You apply it when you see families like mine.
You apply it when you think about what neighborhoods to live in,
who you’ll date,
who you’ll marry and have children with,
where those children will go to school …
You apply it when you think about who you’ll vote for …
who you’ll march for …
who you’ll fight for … who you’ll die for.
All these decisions about how to act,
stemming from the process of racialization,
no matter your best intentions to be anti-racist
and bring about a world in which there’s racial equality,
only end up reifying, recapitulating
and reinforcing the very essence of racism.
If you truly want to be anti-racist,
you’re going to have to learn to be anti-racialization.
If we truly want to get past racism,
we’re going to have to stop seeing and navigating the world
according to the master’s false and devious cartography
of human differences.
Using that bad map has only kept us stuck
in a kind of terrible rotary
trying to drive away from racialization while holding onto the basis of racism.
We intend to drive away from something and end up where we started,
and we’ve been going around and around like that since race was a thing.
Driving while racialized,
trying to get beyond racism
while reproducing the very thing that makes racism inevitable.
Before we knew better,
this mistake was understandable, even though it was tragic.
But we’ve known better for a long time
that race is not just absurd, it’s lethally absurd.
And yet we keep behaving
as if race is every bit as real as it was when we thought it was real.
We broke the shackle of the body,
but we allow the shackle of the mind to stay intact.
Is it too late to adjust to a more accurate map
of human differences and similarities and solidarity?
No, it’s not.
And I can give you proof that it's not too late.
I offer myself as an example.
I am not a racist.
And I know I say that at a time when it’s popular and almost expected
for everyone to confess that they are a racist.
But I’m not a racist.
And I don’t say that meaning that I believe in colorblindness,
ignoring how people look;
we can’t do that in the state that we’re in.
And I don’t say that meaning that I think we are in a post-race zone.
We’re not there either.
As a matter of fact, we’re literally up to our necks in race and racism.
We’re still very much stuck in the race rotary.
I’m not a racist because I know better
than to believe a false construction of human difference
that only results in separating people into superior and subjugated.
I’m not a racist, because I understand how racialization works,
and I dedicate my life to fighting against the peril of racism,
which is the product of racialization.
And I can introduce you to others
who have also found the exit ramp from the race rotary.
If you’d like to join us,
here are four simple directions you can use to get started.
One: Be aware of your racialization habit.
Right?
Admitting you have a problem is the beginning of solving it.
Stop referring to people as members of categories that don’t exist.
Start recognizing people not as races, but as racialized.
And understand that racialization is the source of race and racism,
and resist it mightily.
Now, being a therapist, I know and honor
that people get where they get when they get there.
As a therapist,
I know that a critical step to helping people move forward and heal
is helping them abandon
some of the false constructions they have of their world
that keep them harmed, and hurt and stuck.
But it can take a while to do this.
Directions aren't dictums.
We could’ve ignored the sage advice of our Maine guide.
It took a while for us to stop thinking that the world was flat.
It took a while for us to stop thinking
that the world is the center of what we know is the solar system.
It’s taking us a while to let go of the misguided belief
and attachment to race.
We get where we get when we get there.
That’s a tautology, an undeniable truth.
Here’s another one regarding moving past racism
while continuing to racialize people.
We won’t get where we want to get by doing that.
We won’t get there by using the master’s maps,
but we can get there if we reorient to a better map.
Ready to use a better map?
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)