Through the Prism: What Was the Middle Part, Again?

This week I'm leading an all-day workshop for high schoolers three times on the topic of Race. It's the first of four times they'll be getting together this semester. I've scripted the opening and closing items on our agenda, so I thought I'd share those parts here (along with their accompanying presentation slides).

Introductory Activity

[Start standing in a circle, if possible]

Let’s go around the room and have each person share:

Name
Pronouns
School
One Word - It can be a word to describe you, a word you like, a word about how you’re feeling, a word about something you like. One word that represents you at this moment in some way.

[Find the five other people with the same color cards as yours. Sit together in a group.]

Script:

Whether you want to or not, you have already made assumptions and judgments about the other people in the room today. Some of those conclusions you are aware of; others you are not. And you can’t help it. It’s part of how the brain works, to quickly gather input from surroundings and find labels and categories for everything you perceive. It’s how we make sense of the world and keep from being overwhelmed by all that data. And the things we label and categorize include people. Some of those judgments are positive, some are negative. Some are accurate, some are not. They all happen instantaneously, or close enough.

Most of the time we accept these assumptions without question. Yet they impact how we interact with each other. They are the baselines from which we operate, as though they were proven facts we already know about each other. Our brains want to find evidence to confirm the assumptions, to prove themselves right. We doubt evidence that contradicts our snap judgments, and it takes a lot of work for us to accept our instant labels and categories as wrong. Yet we can’t get to the truth about other people until we make ourselves aware of the thoughts we have about them. We can’t examine our assumptions and judgments until we know what they are. So the first step in truly getting along with others, in knowing and respecting them, is figuring out how we have labeled and judged them so we can actively decide who they are instead of subconsciously assuming it.

Take five minutes to jot down some of the assumptions you have made today about those in the room. No one else will see what you write and you won’t have to share with anyone; this is just for you. Have you looked at some of us and thought we might be rich? Poor? Fashionable? Fashion challenged? Athletic? Artistic? Friendly? Hostile? Attractive? Ugly? Scary? You probably ignored these thoughts, but they are there. Challenge yourself to think hard about what your brain has been doing, and be honest with yourself about the thoughts you’ve been having. There’s no shame in them. We all do it. But you can’t examine them until you know what they are. Take a minute and write some of them down.

[Time to journal]

Now take a few minutes to think about yourself. What you look like, how you’re dressed, your typical body language and demeanor. The group you arrived with. Think about how you’ve carried yourself since arriving today and what actions you’ve taken. Now jot down some assumptions and judgments others might have been making about you based on what they’ve seen. Again, you won’t be showing this to anyone or sharing it, it’s just for you.

[Time to journal]

Imagine, for a moment, that you had never seen a four-legged animal before. Never read about them or heard about them or knew they existed. Then you go somewhere and have an encounter with one, and it bites you. A friend tells you it was a “dog” that bit you. What will you think the next time you see a four-legged animal? That it is a dog and it might bite you. That’s all you know about four-legged animals, that they are dangerous. But then, suppose, you go to a friend’s house and they have a fuzzy “dog” that cuddles up in their lap and purrs, and you learn that some four-legged animals are friendly and called “cats.” Then you go to the zoo and learn about lions and bears and meerkats and all kinds of other animals. Now you know that dogs are only one small category of four-legged animals. And then you go to an off-leash dog park, where you are surrounded by all different sizes and types of dogs and you see how much variety there is within that category, and you watch them play and see that some are rough, some are gentle, some are social, some are withdrawn, and the like, and you begin to realize that every dog has a different disposition and personality. And most of them don’t bite. Then you adopt two dogs and live with them, and really get to know them intimately and come to love them. And by that process of spending time with them, learning to see who they really are, you’ve changed how your mind automatically responds to the word “dog” from danger to affection.

We’re here to get to know each other. You come from different schools, neighborhoods, and backgrounds. Maybe you’ve never known anyone from Wyandotte County or from Johnson County or from some of the backgrounds in this room today, so all you have to go on are broad assumptions like “four-legged” and “bites.” You have the automatic judgments your mind has made about the labels and categories that apply to each other based on appearances. You have the stereotypes and things you’ve heard from others about who they are. What’s the media narrative about pit bulls? Even if you love dogs, that information is rattling around in your brain impacting your instinctive reactions to pit bulls when you see them. There are also media narratives about our backgrounds, schools, and races. They’re rattling around in our brains as well, impacting how we feel even when we don’t want them to. We can’t change them if we don’t know they exist, know what they are, and actively decide to change them. And we do that by coming together, getting outside of our normal experiences and having some new ones with each other. We’re here to tell our stories and to listen to each other.

Now it’s time to start doing that . . .

Do the Adjective Icebreaker individually, then get together in groups of six to share . . .

(same groups will be used for identifying with photos from art gallery and eye gaze at closing)

Three adjectives to describe yourself
Favorite music
One skill you are proud of
Favorite movie
Favorite book
Favorite food
Favorite hobby
Favorite color
Personal motto
Number of siblings
Birth order

Reflection and Closing

Please complete this next activity in complete silence.

There are few things more intimate, few ways of communicating more intense, than looking directly into another person’s eyes. Eyes can’t hide and don’t lie. Eyes allow vulnerability and honesty. We are here to know each other. Now it’s time to know each other through our eyes.

Within your groups, grab a partner. Stand close, facing each other. We’re going to take a full minute to gaze into each other’s eyes. As you do so, silently communicate good will and a desire to understand.

Switch partners. Repeat. Silently communicate good will and a desire to understand.

Switch partners. Repeat. Silently communicate good will and a desire to understand.

*https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-meeting-another-s-gaze-is-so-powerful
*https://getpocket.com/explore/item/to-read-someone-s-mind-look-into-their-eyes

Today has been our introduction to each other. Our focus has been getting to know each other, getting comfortable with each other to create community and trust. When we’ve delved into the topic of race it’s been from the perspective of identity. We’ve looked at who we are as individuals, our implicit bias and how race informs our individual identities. That’s where this work begins and ends, with individuals. The journey in between, though, is about structures and systems. Racism is a systemic problem. Even if we took all of the racists and put them on the moon, we would still have racism. Because racism is not about individual attitudes and actions, it’s a system we all live within. Racism is all around us, permeating our society and defining our relationships whether we want it to or not. In the months that follow, we’re going to dig deeper into that aspect of race, hopefully doing so not just as individuals, but as a community. We’re going to explore together in the hopes of not just discovering new information, but new ways of being together. Welcome to Race Project KC.

That's the plan anyway.

Now some recent reading on related topics:

Slavery Reparations Seem Impossible; In Many Places, They’re Already Happening

Minds are made up — according to a recent Associated Press poll, 74 percent of African Americans now favor reparation payments, while 85 percent of whites oppose them — and Congress seems unlikely to take up the matter. . . .

Yet, for some African Americans, reparations are within reach. In the past few years, several groups have found success pursuing restitution at the local level, instead of awaiting aid that the federal government is disinclined to give. New policies in Chicago and at Georgetown University suggest a specific set of conditions that could lead to action: an institution culpable in the past and still in existence; a discrete and identifiable population able to show that they or their ancestors suffered harm; and a community to fight on the claimants’ behalf. At the local level, activists have more immediate access to institutional pressure points, while decision-makers are often less shielded from criticism and thus more likely to yield.

That class of organizations can include cities and schools, as well as churches, the military and even corporations. Thus far, reparations payments from such institutions — whether realized or promised — have totaled in the tens of millions of dollars. And it could be just the beginning. All politics is local; for now, so are reparations. . . .

A few dozen torture victims. A few thousand descendants of a slave sale. The numbers are not statistically significant in the context of the millions descended from enslaved African Americans. One form of reparations offers restitution for living victims who suffered in the recent past. The other focuses on descendants many generations removed from the original injury. In Chicago, survivors received direct financial awards; at Georgetown, the money will be spent on charities and other indirect benefits.

But these two examples nevertheless offer a model that can apply to four types of entities: churches, municipal governments, corporations and the U.S. military.

The Unfinished Work of the Civil Rights Movement

A recent poll found that a staggering 78 percent of Americans are now in favor of a federal job guarantee. Although it has been largely erased from public memory, the job guarantee was a centerpiece not only of FDR’s second bill of economic rights, but also of the civil rights movement’s policy agenda. Coretta Scott King mobilized 1.2 million people to march for full employment in the late 1970s. This culminated in the disappointing passage of the watered-down Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1978, a bill that initially included a job guarantee. It is time that we complete the unfinished work of the civil rights movement. . . .

The key point to observe about our current economic arrangement is that it is explicitly designed to fall short of achieving full employment. Much like a game of musical chairs in which someone is left out by design, our system engineers an economic environment in which millions find themselves unemployed and underemployed. Our policymakers actively and intentionally enforce an economy of mass unemployment, which happens to disproportionately claim black and brown casualties. . . .

Today, even in a period of historically low unemployment, we still have 11 million Americans unemployed or underemployed. That’s 11 million Americans without proper “seats” in this game of musical chairs our policymakers have us playing. Nothing pushes one into a life of crime more forcefully than the inability to provide for one’s self and one’s family. In the context of mass incarceration, our mass unemployment regime pushes the unemployed into the waiting arms of the for-profit prison industry. . . .

A great legacy of the civil rights movement is the understanding that society need not refuse the contribution of anyone. The job guarantee is a practical affirmation of the value of the contribution of each member of society. By accepting and facilitating the contribution of every person willing and able to work, the job guarantee adds to society’s abundance for the benefit of all. . . .

The great advantage that efforts to pass a job guarantee have today, which previous generations did not, is a robust theoretical defense of the proposition that a job guarantee would neither cause excessive inflation nor require tax increases.

We are living in a time in which the foundational justifications for choosing mass incarceration over full employment have collapsed, but we still have yet to reverse our choice.

Report: Where Parents Have More Choice, Schools Appear To Become More Segregated

A new study out of the Harvard Graduate School of Education Wednesday finds that a majority of parents across the country say they'd prefer to send their children to integrated schools.

But researchers at the school's Making Caring Common project have found that when families are given control over which schools to send their children to, they make choices that perpetuate school segregation. . . .

It looks like there a number of different things that are going on here. One is, (families) are making judgments about school quality ... but they're basing those judgments often on poor data, on average test scores at a school, which is not a good indicator of school quality. And sometimes all kinds of biases can get in the way too. It looks like, from other research, that white advantaged parents often make decisions based on the number of other white advantaged parents at a school, not based on any real research about school safety or school quality or these kinds of important indicators. . . .

What our data is suggesting — and what a lot of data suggests — is that integration is good for your own kids, it's good for other people's kids and it's critical for the country as a whole and it's critical for a thriving democracy.

Here Is Why The Diversity And Inclusion Needle Is Not Moving

“The plodding pace of change a half century later makes clear the need to reframe the diversity conversation... Unless and until White America–including those who claim progressive values–comes to terms with its complicity in persisting injustice, diversity initiatives will continually fail.”

This powerful statement in the introduction of Pamela Newkirk’s recent book, Diversity, Inc., The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business., is followed by page after page of data highlighting the dismal lack of progress in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) since the passage of the Civil Rights act of 1968. Newkirk also speaks eloquently about the influence of economic interests in supporting systemic injustice: “It’s impossible to understand diversity without exploring the big business of it, the tension between the rhetoric and expenditures, and the chronically disappointing results.” . . .

My work is grounded in the belief that we can identify economic motivations to persuade large numbers of privileged individuals that a more inclusive and equitable society is in their own self-interest. My optimistic belief stands in contrast with Kendi’s assertion that “if there is anything I have learned during my research, it’s that the principal producers and defenders of racist ideas will not join us. And no logic or fact or history book can change them, because logic and facts and scholarship have little to do with why they are expressing racist ideas in the first place.”

Kendi’s pessimism is shared by others who are battling different forms of inequality. . . .

But I believe that a more fundamental problem is the profound asymmetry in the way arguments are made for and against DEI. The “producers and defenders of racist ideas,” as Kendi so eloquently calls them, appeal to the masses by pointing out the material harm that may come to them individually as a result of DEI, with claims such as “desegregating schools will cause your children to have a poorer education” or “affirmative action will cause you to lose your job to a less qualified Black person.” In contrast, arguments in favor of DEI tend to focus on societal benefits or the desire for fairness, such as “allowing low-income students to attend schools with more affluent students reduces the achievement gap” or “affirmative action is needed to make up for centuries of discrimination.” If you are a member of a privileged segment of society, the most you will get by supporting DEI is the satisfaction of having helped others–a benefit that you must weigh against the potential, specific damages that DEI detractors claim you will incur. . . .

Until and unless we can find ways of identifying very direct, very specific benefits of DEI for those who are already privileged, our efforts will continue to disappoint as companies and individuals alike continue to choose inaction, thereby perpetuating inequities.

Voices of Change
Tomi Adeyemi, Akwaeke Emezi, Elizabeth Acevedo, Angie Thomas, and Nic Stone are rewriting the rules of young adult fiction.

The room is buzzing with laughter and mutual admiration, but also solemnity. After all, less than a decade ago, such a scene might have been hard to imagine. An annual study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin found that of the 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, only 94 were about black people. The late Walter Dean Myers, who’d written over 100 books about young people of color, took the publishing industry to task in a Times op-ed: “Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books?... There is work to be done.” In the years since, to the benefit of all young readers, that work is being done: In 2018, those numbers nearly quadrupled. And the authors in this room—and countless more outside of it—are just getting started. “[Growing up], I was always searching for brown girls and black girls in literature that felt like they were written with love,” Acevedo says. Here, she and four of her peers share their influences, their creative process, and the very real impact of representation.