White Homework

I've been wanting to try a new format for the show for a while so I took a stab at it this week with Janice Lagata of God Has Not Given. We talk about the fascinating true story of Mary Richards Bowser, a Union spy who was also enslaved. I would LOVE to know what you think about this format, mainly because if you all hate it, I don't want to keep trying to make it happen! 😆 

Sign up for Janice's email list HERE. Go follow her on IG at @godhasnotgiven. Subscribe to her podcasts HERE and HERE.

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Episode sources:

https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/bowser-mary-richards-fl-1846-1867/ 

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/mary-jane-richards 

https://time.com/5609045/misremembering-mary-bowser/ 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/elizabeth-van-lew-an-unlikely-union-spy-158755584/ 

Benjamin Faye joins the show to talk about how grit and resilience mean different things depending on your position in society. Resilience isn't an unlimited resource. The science and experience tell us that is an impossible demand to make on people, doubly so for those who do not have their basic needs met.

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This episode I'm talking to Jessica Dulaney  who is the communications director for the Coalition for Responsible Home Education.

Being Black and homeschooled felt incredibly isolating to me. Growing up, I never once met another Black child who was being homeschooled that I wasn't biologically related to, so being able to connect with Jessica online has been amazing. Protecting kids is something I'm deeply passionate about. Given the huge rise in homeschooling during the pandemic, and the fact that children in this country do not have a right to an education, I wanted to discuss the (mostly racist) history of homeschooling, and the ways Black and queer families are taking up more space in 2022. You can check out the thread I wrote about that history HERE.

You can check out CRHE online HERE

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Personal and political violence are nothing new but examining who is allowed to engage in violence and who isn't is essential to understanding the power dynamics we've built the world on. "They do it so we should to" is colonizer logic and I think we can do better than that when it comes to race, racism, and understanding why people feel threatened by the prospect of losing power. 

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We spend a lot of time talking about the effects of whiteness on people of color but it's important to talk about the impact whiteness has on white people. As a construct, whiteness can only benefit some white people. And even the people who benefit materially are harmed in terms of connection, sympathy, and the demand that you reject your own culture for the monoculture of whiteness. 

Dr. Jonathan Metzl lays out the material ways white people are harmed by their commitment to an ideology that shortens their lives and shrinks their wallets. An association that doesn't serve them yet is somehow worth dying for.

This book gets into data and psychology and evolutionary biology and behavioral neuroscience and trying to figure out precisely what it is that drives people toward a construct that ends in harm. 

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What does it look like when we start dismantling systems of oppression that benefit a small number of people at the expense of everyone else? Black and Indigenous folks are regularly accused of reverse racism for things that are merely offenses, not systematic harm. But to your nervous system, the opposite of systemic racism is probably going to feel bad. In fact, it's probably going to feel like reverse racism. A lot of it. The opposite of white supremacy is going to feel like oppression when you choose to not account for what was taken. 

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If you've ever wondered what to say to someone whose response to another cop committing murder is "shoulda complied", I got you covered. Turns out our bodies are programmed to protect us from danger. Weird, right? And even more shocking: that self-protection programming your nervous system is running? Yeah that's not under voluntary control.

In this episode we'll explore the actual reasons people run from the cops or otherwise fail to follow commands, why evolution contributed to this nervous system response, and what we can do about it. (Hint: it has to do with not murdering people for things that are literally not under voluntary control.)

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Why do people protest things that are objectively good for themselves and their neighbors? Let's look at protests through the lens of evolutionary biology, nervous system responses, politics, nd power dynamics. History has shown us that protests are a predictable result of burning through all the official channels to create change and getting nowhere. When people don't have any meaningful mechanism to change their material circumstances, they tend to get loud and burn things. (And yes, we're talking about the mothertruckers too.)

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Artwork by Slade Sundar

www.sladesundar.com

Music by K.Solis

Today we're talking about rest, sleep, and play, and how they are all integral to self-regulation. Humans don't come fully loaded with equal amounts of self-regulation that some people just choose to use and others don't. Making good decisions isn't the default that some nonwhite people just happened to miss out on. The environment you were raised in has a huge impact on how difficult or easy it is for you to delay gratification, plan for the future, employ critical thinking skills when they are most necessary. 

Most people are doing the best they can with the brain chemistry they have. If [redacted] people actually wanted crime to go down, they'd work toward these very attainable goals. And yet.

Play by Stuart Brown

The Racial Inequality of Sleep, The Atlantic (might be paywalled)

Study finds connection between race and sleep, WaPo

The US is the most overworked [wealthy] nation in the world

White Homework

Welcome back to White Homework! I want to break down some of the common racist myths that exist in western culture. This week: DRUGS!

Let's use address one of the most common racist tropes in US culture: conflating problematic drug use with Black people. Data shows racial groups largely use recreational drugs at the same levels but you certainly wouldn't know that by turning on the news or watching a movie that's come out, well, basically ever. 

But there's something we need to unpack when we talk about self-medicating. While Black people don't use drugs more than anyone else, and aren't predisposed to drug use because of our culture (or whatever nonsense they blame on us these days), people who have experienced trauma are predisposed to not wanting to feel trauma. That's a biological norm. 

Humans have been self-medicating for as long as we know humans have been around. My argument isn't that self-medicating doesn't cause harm. The argument is that harm reduction isn't even the goal. And that's a problem.

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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3202501/

https://www.aclu.org/other/against-drug-prohibition

https://evolvetreatment.com/blog/history-drug-use/