Shaun: My mission is learning and racial justice.
And, you know, like yelling at people and attempting to embarrass them and all that
stuff is just not...is not going to help me achieve what it is that I'm going for.
Rick: Hey, I'm Rick Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise
Institute.
I'm honored and privileged to have with my friend, Shaun Harper, of the Allen Chair of
Urban Leadership at the University of Southern California and the man who's been asked and
tapped to build a large new center for thinking about equity and promoting equity in K-12
and higher education.
Shaun, you've been studying this stuff for a long time.
You've been working with schools and colleges across the country.
What are a couple things that people can miss when they talk about the role of race in school
reform and school improvement that get lost just amid the hurly-burly?
Shaun: Sure.
Sometimes reformers attempt to address racial inequities in a raceless way, without explicitly
naming race, without explicitly naming populations by their names, right?
So in other words, I've seen people attempt to carry out reforms by saying that there
are certain populations that are persistently underserved or chronically, you know, absent
or whatever without saying, "We're talking about black kids," or, "We're talking about
Latino kids."
I think that it's really important to name what it is and who it is that we're talking
about.
Rick: And so two questions, so, one, why do folks shy away from naming?
And, two, what's the advantage of naming?
Shaun: I think that we've been conditioned to stay away from what could be misperceived
as racially explosive language, right?
So by naming a particular group, it sounds perhaps like you're singling out that group.
So that's one thing.
And the second part of your question, the advantage of doing so is that we cannot have
a strategy if we're unwilling to name what it is that our strategy is attempting to achieve
and who it is that we're attempting to reach with that strategy.
Rick: You know, so a lot of your work is now trying to apply things that you've learned
about what happens in schools and colleges to training leaders in these organizations
too.
What are a couple of things that people sometimes get wrong when they're trying to do the right
thing to tackle some of these difficult questions?
Shaun: Yeah.
So sometimes people...particularly around racial equity, people attempt to embarrass
white people for not knowing better on, you know, particular things.
I tend to be much more of a patient teacher, and I understand that white people, like the
rest of us, are by-products of our educational upbringing and that we all have been socialized
to one degree or another to think about the racial other in a particular way and that,
you know, part of learning has to necessarily entail some patience for racial mistake-making.
So I just see people be less patient and just like jump down people's throats and try to
embarrass them.
I don't think that that is a productive way to, you know, achieve what it is that we're
trying to achieve.
Rick: You know, and something you and I have talked about over time is for somebody like
me, a conservative who, you know, wants to live in a colorblind society and worries about
racial politics, when I hear something like racial mistake-making, like what does that
mean in your mind, and how are we seeing this differently or talking past each other?
Shaun: Rick, what color is my shirt?
Rick: Light blue.
Shaun: Okay, so you're not colorblind.
Colorblindness is I think a bad way to...a dangerous way to go about reform because,
essentially, it's the whole racelessness that I was talking about earlier, right?
You know, you are a guy who cares very deeply about reform.
You have to be willing to see color in those efforts and in the things that you are...that
I know that you're so committed to, right?
Yeah, yeah, colorblindness is...
Rick: So given this...so given that that's your response, when somebody says, "It sounds
like fighting for equity or being sensitive to the role of race feels like I'm supposed
to sign up for a set of political beliefs about the right way to think of it."
So how do you think about that?
Shaun: Sure.
I certainly don't want to impose my beliefs on others.
I do wanna challenge people to think and to grow and to perhaps consider, you know, a
set of perspectives that are more justice-centered, that are more reflective of communities of
color and honors the realities of race and the realities of people in communities of
color.
But I can't force them to, you know, think differently, right?
But I certainly wanna challenge.
Rick: So what are…you know, so especially as you're training folks out there, as you're
working with, you know, passionate young advocates to improve higher ed or K-12, what are some
of the things that you help people do that seem to be constructive, that help to promote
this reflection, generate constructive discussion as opposed to not moving the ball?
Shaun: Sure.
So I'll give you a concrete example.
We have a series that we call the USC Equity Institutes, which are five-week virtual education
experiences for K-12 leaders and higher ed leaders.
And the instructors who teach in the institutes, you know, we teach them that patience, right?
We also teach them, you know, ways to ask questions that both push but also, you know,
support people in where they are.
We absolutely insist that, you know, jumping down someone's throat or attempting to embarrass
them is not the right way to promote and stimulate learning.
I'm a person who believes that more dialogue, not less, is what our country needs.
So we try to teach, you know, the people who are the instructors for these institutes,
as well as all of the folks who are on my team at the USC Race and Equity Center, we
try to teach them how to listen, right, and how to be an appreciator of perspectives that
might be different than ours.
Rick: Or drive us...
So like, you know, because...sometimes there's people's perspectives, and you're just like
you don't get it.
So when you do those kinds of trainings, are there couple of things that you find yourself
suggesting over and over that have seemed helpful to people?
Shaun: Well, definitely for the participants, I insist that they bring their honest selves.
Like sometimes we are afraid to be honest with ourselves about, you know, beliefs or
missteps.
I think it is important to be honest about missteps that we've made and to share those
missteps with other colleagues and sometimes with critical friends who can help us process
those missteps and learn from them and grow from them so that we don't do them continuously.
But if we don't name them and if we're not honest about them, then I'm afraid that we're
just going to continuously make the same racial missteps over and over again.
Rick: Do you feel like there's a place where, you know, you really learned from kind of
how to get this right or a school or a college where you've seen people really have this
conversation in a way that really made a difference?
Shaun: Yeah.
So, again, with the institutes, we have now piloted the institutes with four institutions
and we've helped them get it right.
We've helped them have tough conversations that they've never had before in their professional
lives and, for many of them, in their personal lives either, right?
We've heard almost unanimously from people who've participated in these that, you know,
these are really helpful constructive conversations that are good for our school building or for
our school district or our university.
But, you know, again, I think that people need support.
They need tools and frameworks.
But they also need a space, like a thoughtfully curated space in which to talk with...sometimes
with themselves individually, right, but then also to talk with colleagues about some really
vexing and persistent racial equity issues in their schools.
The thing that we do know is that doing nothing and avoiding it ain't gonna fix the problem.
We know that for sure.
Rick: So if I'm a reformer and I'm trying to…I mean I'm listening to you and I'm like,
"Okay, this makes sense.
And I wanna in my community help folks kind of have an honest conversation about this.
And it's gonna be people with different ethnic backgrounds.
It's gonna be people with different political perspectives."
How do I do this in a way that it doesn't blow up on me or doesn't turn ugly, or is
that just part of the risk you gotta run?
Shaun: Well, you need to do a USC Equity Institute.
We can give you some strategies and tools here.
Rick, I think that you have to do it like a little humorous, okay?
I mean let's not make a mockery of the exercise, right, but, you know, humor for me helps to
put people more at ease and know that they're not signing themselves up to be attacked.
That's one thing.
I also think that we have to give people really delicious things to read because sometimes,
especially in the beginning of this kind of work, right, people are afraid to bring their
personal selves.
I do think that at some point we have to get to the personal self, right?
But in the beginning, it might be useful to give people something to read and to react
to because then they can sort of hide out behind the, you know, what they're responding
to that you've given them to read or watch.
You know, that's very useful.
I think it's important to give people homework and to check their homework and to let them
know that, you know, there is a real serious expectation that the homework gets done.
And I think also, lastly, I would say, we have to continue to ask the right questions.
I'll give you one concrete example.
You know, people say they're so deeply committed to racial equity.
One question that we ask in the institutes is for people to take stock of their friendships
and relationships outside of work, people with whom they worship, men, you know, go
to the bar with and hang out with on weekends.
And, you know, it surprises people actually when they do the stocktaking exercise that
most of the people that they spend their time with are of their same race, that they have
very few substantive interracial friendships and relationships.
So that's helpful.
That's the kind of question that then gets people thinking much more intentionally about,
you know, "How do I enact the values that I espouse around these things both at work
and in my life outside of it."
Rick: You know, what didn't you know about this stuff?
What has surprised you over the years as you've been researching and helping folks with this?
Shaun: What has surprised me is that there's been a tremendous willingness and openness
to be better and to do better.
I fully expected people to be resistant.
You know, one of the most frequently asked questions I get, Rick, when people, you know,
ask me about my work at the center, they say, "Wow, that must be really tough.
Like you guys must get like a ton of opposition."
Actually, we don't.
We get none.
I mean we do the work very seriously, and we do it very rigorously, and we ask tough
questions and create meaningful learning opportunities for people.
But we don't attack them, right?
Like the goal here is learning.
So I think because of that approach, you know, like professionals, including white people,
are delightfully open.
You know, my belief, Rick, is that educators want to be effective.
They wanna be fair.
They actually want to achieve racial equity, but they just don't know how oftentimes.
They don't have the skill.
You know, they're not genetically bad people, right?
So if you start from that place, you know, I think, at least for me, like I just I get
no pushback.
Rick: I mean this sounds so different from the way we talk about this stuff on cable
TV or on the Internet or...
I mean how does...
I mean you've just posited like a really hopeful vision of like how we can talk to each other
and wrestle with hard stuff.
So how do you reconcile that with like just how ugly these conversations feel to me in
the popular culture?
Shaun: Yeah.
I'm just unwilling to engage in that way.
You know, it just doesn't work for me because I find it to be counterproductive to my mission.
My mission is learning and racial justice.
And, you know, like yelling at people and attempting to embarrass them and all that
stuff is just not...is not going to help me achieve what it is that I'm going for.
Rick: Awesome, man.
Shaun…
Shaun: Rick.
Rick: …thank you so much for taking the time today.
Shaun: Thank you.
Rick: Hey, everyone.
That's the end of our discussion with USC's Shaun Harper.
Thanks for watching.
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