Equity Starts Here

We've all heard the term "rose-colored glasses" and know it means the person wearing them sees the world as better than it actually is.  It can be interpreted as a positive, optimistic interpretation of the world, or just a state of denial that things are not so bad. 

So let's imagine a world that is always cloudy and often raining.  If you live in such a climate, you would naturally leave home with an umbrella on most days.  Let's say that you get so used to carrying an umbrella that you barely notice the clouds or the rain anymore.  In fact, this umbrella is so special that when you look up through it, it makes the sky look sunny and beautiful. 

But one day you look around and realize that a lot of people around you don't have an umbrella, and certainly not one that makes the day look sunny.  They are always getting wet.  Your white friends have umbrellas and you don't understand why the rest of the folks just don't go get one too. 

This is the world we live in, where white people have a privilege to carry a rose-colored umbrella and Black people don't have the right to own one.  White people don't get wet, not even knowing that they would be wet without this privilege, because they can't see the rain clouds overhead.  Black people constantly get wet, while knowing that white people don't understand why.

Racism is the clouds and the umbrellas.  Finding ways to eliminate the clouds is the path to fixing it. But first we have to understand where the clouds came from, what they are made of, and what causes them to rain.  Just giving everyone an umbrella is akin to the famous declaration that those without bread should just eat cake.  

You have done a lot of work for the past 21 days to be able to put down your umbrella and see the clouds. That takes a lot of effort and self-reflection to learn how attached you are to your umbrella, and if you are ready to see how the rain is affecting all the wonderful people with skin darker than yours.  

Your practice today is to reflect on these lessons and think about the ones that were the hardest for you.  Why was that?  What did they spark in you that is still present today?  What couldn't you believe?  What made you mad?  What do you need to do to reconcile those feelings? 

In the next course, we'll move beyond Awakening to tackle Awareness.  We'll explore each topic in a little more depth to bring you more information to fill these gaps and resolve these conflicts.  You may already be taking some action, or may just be paralyzed at the notion of how overwhelming these problems are.  But you are moving forward, and the more foundation you lay under your ownership of the problem, the stronger you will be to help make changes.   You are a small part of the problem, but can be a big part of the solution as you grow towards being a race ally.

A fallacy is a mistake of logic. One of the easiest fallacies to spot goes like this:   Chris is four years old. Chris likes to play in the mud. THEREFORE, all four year olds like to play in the mud.   This fallacy is called the fallacy of composition and is defined as the error of assuming that what is true of a member of a group is true for the group as a whole.  

The opposite argument is valid. All four year olds were three last year.   Chris is four. THEREFORE, Chris was three last year.   You can go from a true statement about the group and then conclude that the individual will also share those characteristics.

The trouble happens when you don't personally have much interaction with the group, so you conclude that the few members you know must represent the whole group.   This is commonly called prejudice—that is, when you believe you already know something about someone based on what you have learned from another member of a group. It's a problem when you use an unrelated characteristic of that person to form your conclusion.

Let's say you are a basketball fan and you watch a lot of it. You've noticed that most basketball players you respect are tall. Each time you meet a tall person, you assume they must play the game.   But this season your favorite team has a very talented high scoring 5'9" player. Do you immediately assume that every shorter person you meet now plays basketball too? Probably not, because being tall does imply more success at playing the sport.

As we look for ways to combat Racism, we need to understand how the fallacy of composition creeps into our thinking without knowing it.   In our example, the tall basketball players represent white people, and the talented shorter player represents Black people. White people, by a genetic lottery, are automatically assumed to be eligible and talented enough to do many jobs, whereas Black people are also eligible to do the same jobs, but must be especially talented to be given the chance.

This brings us to the real challenge that we are facing today. Changes in our laws, corporate policies, and educational admission practices have started to address this bias. So, you can find Black CEOs, college presidents, a US President, and people in just about every job on the way to those positions.   What then happens is the fallacy of composition:   Obama is Black. Obama was president. Therefore all Black people have the same opportunity that whites do.

Whether you liked Obama or not, you likely breathed a sigh of relief that a Black man could actually be elected. Took us a while to kick this Racism thing, but we got there…right? Because you really want it to be over, you took that single experience and applied it to the group. Fallacy of composition. As hopeful a sign as it was, it may have actually hurt our collective thinking.

Your practice today is to think about all the talented Black people you've known in high-profile positions and how you think about that. What conclusions have you drawn from that person's achievement? Did you see their path to that position as the same as their white counterparts? Did you feel comfortable that they have equal opportunities? Or did you wonder what obstacles they had to overcome to achieve that job? Would you rather not know?

We all know the US uses prisons to remove criminals from society. We have over 2.3 million people in prison right now, with over twice that number on probation or parole.  We lock up the highest percentage of our population of any country in the world. Does that statistic make you wonder how that has happened? What made the politicians feel that this was a good strategy?  Do you feel safer having all those criminals off the streets?

Since the 13th Amendment to the Constitution outlawed slavery, the prisons remain as the only place where people can be required to work for little or no pay. You may remember chain gangs from the popular song or images from old movies. This is a more obvious example. But today, many large corporations take advantage of this slavery exception and run all kinds of production and service work using prisoners.  Combine that with the privatization of many prisons, and there is a lot of profit being generated by locking people up.

It might surprise you to know that more black men are locked up in the US right now than were enslaved by owners in 1850.  This is a direct impact of changes in sentencing laws, like the 'three strikes' rule and the 'war on drugs'.  Even though the population of the US is 13% black, the prison population is 40% black.

How do you feel about the size of our prison population? How much of it do you feel is related to Racism?  Are there more blacks in prison proportionally because they are raised in high-crime areas, suffer more from poverty, or face racist judges?  What happens to these convicted felons when they serve their time? Do they return to a society that welcomes them and gives them opportunities to catch up?

Your practice today is to think about how you think about prison and prisoners. Who have you known who has served time? How did that experience impact them? Were they reformed, trained, and ready to live out a productive life when they were released? Or did they find life even harder and return to drugs or crime when they returned? If you don't know anyone who has been incarcerated personally, why do you think that is? Have you known people who were arrested but never served time? Have you known people who were committing crimes (like drug use) who were never arrested?  

Thomas Dartmouth Rice was a struggling young white actor in New York in the 1830's. He wrote a song based on a Black man singing a slave song, which included the lyric, "Eb'ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow." Minstrel shows with actors in Black face spread the popularity of the song and the term. By the late 1830's, the term Jim Crow was established as a slur similar to "coon" or "darkie." By the end of the century, it was being used to describe the legislated oppression of Black people throughout many states.

The Federal constitutional amendment that freed the enslaved people and other Federal laws to follow were supposed to make it difficult for states to treat Black people differently, but states found many ways around that. The Civil Rights Act of 1965 put an end to most of those legal loopholes, but ongoing litigation continues to challenge laws as discriminatory. The ghost of Jim Crow lives on in our legal code.

Most people think of Rosa Parks first when they think of people who challenged the Jim Crow laws. But seating restrictions on a bus was only one of many ways in which the laws oppressed Black people. Miscegenation (inter-racial marriage or procreation) was outlawed in many states, at least temporarily.   Inter-racial adoption was another common prohibition, even in northern states.   Schools, libraries, bathrooms, locker rooms, voting, telephone booths, railroad cars, entrances to public facilities, hospitals, and mental health facilities were all segregated by law somewhere in the country.

It is hard to imagine that world today, if you didn't live through it. And even if you did, you might not have noticed it if there weren't many Black people in your town. Today the challenge is to notice when a law might have a bias that isn't immediately obvious, because it's hidden below layers of other purposes.   We can often end up with "unintended consequences" of Racism when we aren't looking for it.   Only statistics can later point it out.

A glaring example of a new Jim Crow law is the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 that states that a person apprehended with 50 grams of crack cocaine should be sentenced to a minimum of 10 years. A person caught with the same amount of powder cocaine would receive no jail sentence. To receive 10 years, that person would need to have possessed 100 times that amount.  

On the surface, this makes no sense because the drugs are essentially the same in their harmful effects. But the difference was that crack was the drug on the streets in the Black communities, while cocaine was primarily used by white, middle class addicts. This is an example of how a new law can perpetuate Racism.

Your practice today is to think about how you trust your law makers to put their proposed laws through the "race" test. Do you trust that our constitution and the major laws like the Civil Rights Act are enough to fix things that go wrong?   Do you ask your elected administrators to uphold the essence of these laws, even when not expedient? Think about your own town. What happens with transportation, schools, libraries, public accommodations, employment, and all other aspects of life that could be improved?   Are there any Jim Crow laws that are still hiding in your city or state code? How would you know?

The first privilege we encounter is that of our parents.  They can drink alcohol we can't, drive cars we can't, see movies we can't, and stay up much later than we can. With time and reasonably good behavior, we morph into adults who then have the same privileges.

The next privilege we notice is held by our teachers.  Remember the teacher's lounge you were never allowed in, where you had to have a darned good reason to knock on the door? Teachers had control over you in so many ways.   But again, with time and reasonably good behavior, you grew up and no longer had to sit still and be quiet when they wanted you to.

Then came your employers. To receive a reasonable paycheck, you voluntarily give them privileges over your time and actions.  If that person doesn't abuse their privilege, you might happily work there until you retire.  If they do abuse their privilege, you will likely seek employment elsewhere.

As we mature from child to student to employee, we are often reminded of the difference between rights and privileges. You are given rights, but you have to earn privileges. Without reasonable behavior, privileges can be taken away.  But rights are always there.

In a Racist society, these definitions are modified. The subordinate class watch their rights disappear—ones that everyone else takes for granted.  And the dominant class has privileges that they didn't earn and likely don't notice.

The term "White Privilege" describes the set of unearned privileges afforded white people just because they have white skin. These privileges--along with the rights missing for Black people--combine to make the experiences of the white and Black people very different.  It is a complicated path beginning with slavery that landed us 500 years later with systemic Racism. It now feels so natural that we can disavow any responsibility for causing it and claim no possible power to fix it.

Your practice today is to think about the people throughout your life who have had privilege over you.  Who used it well? Who abused it? How easy was it for you to get help from those who were benevolent with their privilege? How hard was it to escape those who misused it? What privileges do you think you have that you didn't earn? Are you benevolent with those privileges or do you ignore or enjoy them without caring where they came from? 

Then, think about any rights you feel you have had withheld inappropriately throughout your life. Why do you think that happened, and how quickly were you able to find remedies?  Are you dealing with any of those issues today?

The Civil War is likely the most obvious episode in our struggle with Racism.  As little as we are taught about so many other pieces of the legacy of slavery, we know and still tour battlefields.  We have a lot of towns and landmarks named after the heroes of that war.

There were two sides in our Civil War. The Confederacy—also known as the Confederate States of America--that unsuccessfully tried to form their own country flew their own flags during the war.  Images that repeat elements of these flags can be a source of pride to some people with Southern heritage.  Blacks and some Northerners see the flag images as representing continued pride in a horrific legacy and ongoing support of oppression towards Black people.

What symbols of your heritage are important to you?  Are there any that signify tragedy? Maybe your family lost men in World War II, and you know where they died?  Or maybe your family was persecuted on religious grounds in Europe?  Or did your family live under a totalitarian regime?

Everyone is familiar with the atrocities perpetrated against Jewish population in Europe during the early 20th century.  The Nazi regime in Germany had several symbols that represented their oppression.  These symbols persist today and offend not only the descendants of the holocaust victims and survivors, but other caring individuals as well. What do you think people who use those symbols today are feeling?  What could be so important to them that they insist on causing others so much pain? 

Your practice today is to think about the symbols in your life that you cherish or worship.  What would life be like without them? And then think about what symbols you shun as reminders of tragedies that you or your ancestors endured. What would it be like to look out the window at a flag with that symbol? Would you feel safe or welcomed?  Have you ever used a Confederate flag image in clothing or decorations?  Do you consider it part of your own heritage?  Do you feel it represents oppression or merely an area of the nation that you love?

Our country has a lot of tillable, fertile land.  With the long growing season in the south, it is easy to grow massive amounts of crops when you aren't even trying. Climates in the north take a little more planning and a little less labor to maximize the yield of a productive farm.

In the early years of our colonies, some devious entrepreneurs found that the centuries-old practice of slavery was attractive to these new land owners, who had acquired land more productive than their family could manage by themselves.

Slavery was an economic system of employing people through capture, transport, imprisonment, control (which sometimes included rape), and punishment (which sometimes included death).  The only compensation for those persons' services was meager housing, food, and clothing, distributed at their owners' discretion. Over 400,000 people were captured in Africa and sold into slavery in the US beginning in 1525. With their descendents, the total enslaved population grew to almost 4 million people--or 14% of the population--before 1865, when the 13th Amendment to the Constitution eliminated the practice in its previous form.

What was your first exposure to slavery? Did you grow up in the North or the South? Do you think you would have heard a different story if you had grown up elsewhere?  Have you seen movies made about the antebellum era? What was your reaction? Do you think of these atrocities as beyond comprehension and not part of your personal family history? Or do you feel shame for the crimes that formed the economic foundation of our country, and have trouble reconciling your personal experience with this collective history?

Your practice today is to explore your relationship with the slave trade in the US of the era before 1865. Do you choose not to think about it? Or do you seek out more information as it becomes easily available?  Do you fear that your ancestors were involved directly, or are you proud that they were abolitionists?  What do you feel when you learn a person is a descendant of a slave?  Do you want to apologize or do you want to tell them to get over it? Was it a long time ago or is it still with you every day?

If your family emigrated from a European country, you likely know something about that culture and your connection to it.  If your family came from Scotland, you might have a family crest or tartan plaid.  You might invite a bagpiper to play at funerals and weddings in your family.  If you're from one of the other 55 or so countries in Europe, you might think the Scots are a bit odd running around in those skirts.

You have likely gained an understanding of the different major cities, popular cuisines, languages, and lifestyles of many of the countries in Europe and maybe even visited a few. But your interest and pride in your own country of origin is central.

Now compare that knowledge to your grasp of the 55 or so countries on the African continent.  In how many of the 2000+ languages spoken there can you say hello? How many of the top 10 cities can you name? Do you know which countries the slaves came from?

Imagine how your life would be if you had no connection to the specific country of your ancestors, but instead only knew you were from Western Europe somewhere. That is how many descendents of slaves feel until they can trace the location of their ancestor's capture.  It is likely that all connection to the rich culture of their ancestors was lost as they became someone's property.  They did not celebrate the holidays, eat the food, sing the songs, or carry the flags of their homeland.

Africa is a very culturally diverse continent.  Just like Europe, from bagpipers to yodelers to flamenco dancers, Africa developed hundreds of distinct cultural groups with their own cultural traditions, many of them older than the European culture your family came from. Recent African immigrants have brought their food, music, and dress to the United States, which we embrace and encourage them to enjoy.  Many have opened restaurants introducing us to food we may never have experienced if they hadn't relocated to the U.S.

Your practice today is to remember and notice all the connections you have to your heritage.  What makes you comfortable? What brings back memories? What holidays or traditions do you try to keep going? Then think of all the Black people you know. How many of them have mentioned their country of origin to you? How many of them celebrate holidays from that country? Has it ever bothered you that they don't seem to have a connection? Or does it bother you when they try to celebrate their African heritage, because it detracts from America as a melting pot?

Africa is the birthplace of humanity.  If we go back far enough we all have grrrrrreat grandmas who lived in Africa. As tribes moved north to Europe, Asia, and North America about 60,000 years ago, genetic pools were diversified.  You may have taken a genetic heritage test through 23andMe or Ancestry.com that tells you the populations you share genotypes with.

Skin color is one of the obvious traits controlled by our genes called phenotypes that changed as people moved around the world.  Another trait was lactase persistence, the ability to digest human (or other animal) milk past the age of weaning. It is more likely that a person with lighter skin will be lactase persistent than a person with darker skin.  But for years we categorized lactose intolerance as a disease, when it was actually the original trait.  Now doctors know that if you can't digest milk, you are the "normal" one. 

How many other traits do we think of as "normal" because they occur in the population that left Africa first?  How about the kinks in our hair?  Do you think of straight, thin hair as normal, and kinky curly hair as out of the norm?  If you look at Michele Obama's hair throughout her life, she has definitely changed her look to have straighter, smoother hair.  Are there other physical, visible traits that you believe are "normal" in whites that you see Black people trying to emulate in order to conform to popular notions of normal?  Think of all the changes Michael Jackson made to his appearance before his death. Why do you think he did that? What message did you take from that?  Do you think Beyonce looks better with blond hair?  Do you think she is expressing her personal freedom of expression?  Or do you think she is sending a message to young Black women that they need to look more European to be accepted as beautiful?

Your practice today is to think about that grrrrreat grandma of yours in Africa.  Would she recognize you as a child in her family tree?  Would she love you just as much, even though you look different than her?  You are still African regardless of how much your appearance differs from your ancestors.  Think about relatives you have that look very different than you do.  Does their appearance affect your love of them? 

We separate people for lots of good reasons.  We put kindergartners and first-graders in different classrooms.  We put customer service reps and accounts payable clerks in different offices.  We even make the Republicans and Democrats in Congress sit on opposite sides of the aisle.  We 'segregate' all the time.

Sometimes we are so segregated from others that we don't even know the other group exists.  Movies have shown us some of these groups that we might never have known about otherwise. Geography is a natural separator.  Chances are, you have never met an Australian Aboriginal family due to the large ocean between you and their homes in the outback. 

Makes sense, right? That is, until you think about how many people you know from China and Japan.  They are visiting and moving here by the millions.  So it isn't just distance that segregated the indigenous people of Australia from us—is it?

Social, political, and economic oppression was written into the laws of Australia that effectively segregated the Aboriginal population.  We did the same thing in the United States to the Black community in the years following the Civil War. Because these economic and social tools for segregation were easily described as applying to people with darker skin, they caught everyone with African heritage, including free Blacks and those who immigrated to the United States after slavery was outlawed.

In the sixties and seventies, we made attempts to change those laws and help us live near and amongst Black families, work next to them, go to school with them, and generally all be citizens sharing common resources and opportunities.  But it didn't work as well as some had hoped.  We are still segregated in many ways.

Does this bother you?  Have you ever wondered why?  Or did you just assume that Black families prefer to live near other Black families?  Do you know exactly where the Black people live in your community or just assume it is somewhere that you never need to visit?  

Your practice today is to think about times when you have been in a situation where you were with mostly Black people?  How did you feel in those experiences?  Can you imagine how Black people might feel when they spend time in places with mostly white people? How do you behave differently when there are Black people in the room?  Does your behavior change?  Does it change even more as more Black people are there?