Yeah, I have more people who signed up in here. So the left the door open and hooks that folks will come in and lead. Thank you for organizing a ton of work on this and 20th, the team for making a beautiful in here for those of you who haven't been in the lounge before. Well gum, This was an idea. We had to create a space on campus that felt like us. It feels like us. Because these rugs that you're looking at or if you're trade. And this, for instance, used to be something else and it's completely off cycle. I'm sorry, this is recycled and the lamps or upcycled. So they were other lamps and now there's those lamps completely 100% and so on and so forth. Everything you see in here, almost everything fits our value as to the artwork and whatnot. And so it's a place that we decided. It's going to be a place for intimate, real conversation about DEI, diversity, equity and justice issues. Where we can, um, we can There's no handle on this ramp, although the date is exceptional. I remember seeing this this Oprah Winfrey Show where she was interviewing Maya Angelo? Am I answer those said she wouldn't let anybody anybody's hate into her house isn't overset. Sure. But why and she said because the heat stays in the walls after they leave. This room is just a space where we can have the real conversation. One of the things that we decided to do this year was to have a book series because there's so many unbelievable folks on campus who are writing books about social justice issues. And last semester we had Tracy and we had current. So we have two of our prior authors here with us. And this semester we have an and later on in the semester we have somebody from outside at Bentley, actually, a good friend of mine, Adam Saltzman, who is writing about refugees. And you'll be seeing that soon. And book. If you didn't see it in my email, is exceptionally important. And it's winning awards because it shouldn't be AMS word, body of work is exceptionally important. One of the reasons I came to badly to be in the sociology department. I don't think I've ever even told, you know, I was gonna say I didn't know that. Yeah, important to surround yourself with people who are doing the important thinking about the important issues and has been on the cutting edge of that, in the leading edge of that for years. I actually have read the book ions now, including last couple of days for your preparation for today. And it was completely new book for me. So excited I could say so much more benefits, so excited for you to present for the conversation that way. Okay. Go ahead. Thank you. Yeah. I want to say a couple of things before I move to the first slide. One of them is just an explanation for the birthing of the book, which I started work on around 90 to 93. So it's 30 years and it's been out a couple of years, but, you know, 30 years of research on this. I had a book manuscript in the late '90s. And this is also a footnote on how the cultural atmosphere changes. Because in the late '90s, we were still in a period of all trying to be colorblind, colorblind racism right? Beneath a silver, hadn't yet published that. Book. Publishers saw it. They said, Oh, no, we can't publish this. You're making the problem worse, right? Because you're showing that it's real. Real. I'm pretending it's not real, you know, it's not going to make it go away. So Trump changed that. And, you know, when I'm teaching a lot of the time, I end up saying, I'm really glad for Trump, right? Because without him, we might have continued pretending. We didn't have a race problem and tell all of a sudden, we're living in a dictatorship. So he gave us a big wake-up call and I started this particular version of the book that spring in 2015 when I realized he was going to be the Republican nominee, probably win the presidency because I did not believe we were all locked. A woman. So I want it to get this book out and, you know, it does feature Trump and sort of counter poses the values Trump's stands for the individualism and individual strong man with the vision of black masculinity that WEB Dubois was talking about the submission to the good of the whole, the self-sacrifice of the individual, you know, for, for the group. Okay, I'm gonna start with some background. I want to get to talking about what Tacit Racism is. But I got a few slides where I'm going to talk about background and I need to talk a little bit about what race is before, before I get to the things I'm calling Tacit Racism, and I'm gonna begin with a quote from Eisenhower, because he's a good old Republican. Alright? And so what he said in 1954 is, should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and a liberal eliminate labor laws and farm programs. You would not hear of that party again, in our political history, how much things have changed, right? There is a tiny splinter group, of course it believes you can do these things. So among them are HL haunt a few other taxes, OIL millionaires and he's talking about the copes here. And an occasional politician or a businessman from other areas, the number is negligible and they are stupid. You know, to call it a random conservative Republican in 1954 could never happen. And of course it did. So we, now how did we get here to the point where politicians are openly talking about getting rid of all these things that Eisenhower said you could just could never talk about. To the point where we're passing laws banning teaching of the history of slavery, critical race theory, anything about race? And, you know, as I said in Senate to hate that we have students who don't know what the end of LACP is. They don't know that slavery was abolished in 18, 65. Some of them think it was 1965. So i'm, I'm thinking it was 17 something. My students have earned doing observations around campus. So it's just amazing. We've gotten to the point where pointing out how racism is embedded in our laws and social policies is illegal. And 800s tapes now 18. And there are more, you know, they have it on the books. And so the answer, you know, how do we get from what Eisenhower was saying to where we are, is racism against every point of progress toward black civil rights in US history. Now Carol Anderson wrote a book, she wrote a number of books, but one called White Rage, and she actually has recently they posted a talk she gave so you can watch this on YouTube. But what she talks about there is, you know, it everybody's calling it black rage, right? Why are black people riding? Why are black people annually? And she said, she was thinking about, I realized though it's white wages not black rage is white rage. And so you'd go back to all the times they almost got it right after the Civil War. Reconstruction could have solved all of these problems. The progressive is that what it was called Populist Party in the South almost elected a white president and a vice black Vice President. They got really close. That's why the other party's doubled down and started voter suppression. And the Klu Klux Klan got into action and started lynching black voters because they almost made it half after the second Civil Rights Act. It happened again as those opposing civil rights more mobilized to defeat the progress. And I don't know if you've seen, I can't do names. The person who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, which everybody reads, it's America's favorite novel. She wrote another book, which was actually the book. And I'm blanking on the title of it. To call a Watchmen. Watchmen. Yeah. Yeah. It's got a couple of other words in it, but it's Harper Lee and it's got the watchman in the title. That was the original draft that she talked into the publisher. And in it, Atticus Finch is one of the heads of the local KKK. And he's holding meetings in the City Hall to try to figure out how to run the end of LACP out of town and make sure nobody black votes. And the publisher thought, well, that's not being their narrative America wants to hear, if you want to write the book and publish it that everybody is going to buy. You need Atticus Finch to be a hero. You need to get rid of this suppression of civil rights, of golf color watchman. That's what so I encourage you to read that. So that's another time we miss the boat. People asked how racism could be the problem. I get asked this a lot. How can it be the problem? Because there are not enough racist around, right? To create that much racism. And so my answer to that is we have to stop looking for racist. This is not about racist, right? Black scholars have been urging us to stop looking for racism and racist attitudes since the 19th century. You know, telling us this is a wrong way to look at what's happening. It's not about hate, is not about attitudes. It's not even about implicit bias. It's about structural things. In order to find institutionalized racism, we need to locate how it's become imbedded and social practices critical race theory has been doing that for law and courts and policing. But the almost exclusive use of statistics in the work to uncover racism actually helps to hide it in many cases because formal institutions are really good at knowing that people are going to look at their statistics. So they're all kinds of ways of making sure that the racism doesn't show the body of work. The people who I studied with started looking at that research back in 1940, showing that court cases that were based entirely on race, the race disappears right? In the outcomes. And I'm not gonna go into how that happens except if you reward some black men for killing black men, or reward some white men for killing black men. They end up with same sentences. But really what's happening is you're rewarding people for killing black men, right? You know, anybody wants to know more about that? I can send you the work. Okay? So want to talk about race as a social fact and B, before I go through this list, I want to talk about waves. Because for race to be a social fact, it needs to be social, right? And the history of how we ended up with race at all. And in the United States is something most people aren't familiar with. When the colonists first came to Virginia in 160791 of those two, race wasn't an issue, class was an issue. You had mobility in Europe and serfs, right? The serfs weren't free there, what we now call white, but they weren't free, the nobility on them. And when they came over here, they came over with the ideas they had. They bought and sold white people on auction blocks. They, after 20 years, they started buying and selling black people on auction blocks. It was indiscriminate. It didn't matter, right? Whether they were African or whether they were from Ireland or London, they were treated the same way. So waste developed in the United States for reasons that are particular to what was happening here in the 1600s. I'm Carol Anderson and Nell Painter. She has one called The History of white people. That's a nice book. Nice descriptions of how you couldn't even have an idea of permanent racial differences until after Darwin, right in the 1800s. But legal discrimination by race and the development of social and legal conceptions of race begins to developing 16, 75 somewhere around there. Why? The English had no direct access to the African coast. So they were pillaging Ireland, which in some sense he's still doing Ireland as a colony of England and selling the Irish and Scottish over here to use as slaves. There's a treaty of Westminster in 16, 54 with the Spanish and the Dutch that gives the English access to the African coast. Now we're going to have access to African slaves. At the same time this happens, we're talking right late 1600s, the Industrial Revolution is kicking off in England for complicated reasons. In all that also have to do with the racialization of slavery in Spanish and Portuguese colonies. So they need their white people working in factories. So the forced labor is going to be black. There, there's good book called The Invention of the white race by Theodore Allen. He goes through the archives. You find black people, white people, they weren't calling them that. It was Irishmen. And an African and a Cherokee, right? Would plan to escape together. It's all over the Virginia archives. So you're not using race terms, the inter marrying their best friends, they're helping each other. And the plantation owners needed to stop that, right? We got to stop these people who are gonna be free soon from trying to help these people that were changing the rules on who and I'll never gonna be free. And so race begins to comment to legal decisions and contracts around 16, 75 in a way that's going to buy 17, 25 lead to permanent slavery for Africans and no forced labor at all for people who are white. So this idea of being white, setting you free, which is a part of phenol. White supremacy is actually real in the sense that these are people who will never free, who, because we invent whiteness, become free. I just, I spent a lot of time in Europe. We've just published a special issue with a lot of European scholars. These ideas are different. They're, they're colonialism created different categories, right? But we exported our race categories as well. So most people around the world are using our race categories not quite the way we are, but very close to the way we are, even though the histories are different. I'm, one of the things about our race categories is that they, they're like a sex there, a binary choice. Either you are one of the yellow right here it all the time. Now on TV, you can't tell a man from a woman, right? You can't tell a black person from a white person like, you know, it's just set in stone. And this absolute oneness of the American white-black binary is actually one of the things that WEB Dubois is going to say creates the solidarity in the black community. So it ends up being a good thing. The other categories, native people, indigenous people, Chinese people, you know, some categories that switch from one side to the other. Like me, the Eastern people who after 911 and I had friends who were Arab is a suddenly I'm on the wrong side of the color line. I was white. Now I'm not. But most of those other categories end up being permanent foreigners no matter how long their families have lived in the United States. So they don't fit in the binary, right? And Americans will be very persistent. Where do you come from? Boston, yeah, but where do you come from? You know, Boston, yeah. But where do you come from? So when I say the binary is absolute, it's also absolute in the sense that it's as if these other categories didn't even belong in the country. Just got a weird way of doing this. So if we think of race as a, as a social category and I talk about interaction orders. We have to make it. If we don't make it, it doesn't exist. I mean, it could stop being a thing tomorrow if we all quit making it. So what I'm interested in is how do we make when we interact with each other, how are we making it real? How are we acting on it? How are the practices that involve race collected into interaction orders? And when we're talking about people on the black side of the binary, how do their survival strategies developed within block interaction orders? Very different and conflicting and clashing expectations that then when black and white people start talking to each other, it's like, wow, you know, what's wrong with them? There are survival strategies are that we talk about, are the wrong direction. We use. I said Based on there, where we're using a couple of Dubois ideas. Double consciousness is one of them. Second site is another one. And that in what I'll refer to as the black interaction order, interactionally quality, this, this idea of community that goes with submissive civility on the ability to see double consciousness. What's happening becomes much more important than in the, in the white. I can't say community, there is no community. So I just want to tell a quick story to explain double consciousness. I think it was 1994. I know Clinton was president. The US State Department had Clinton's brilliant idea that capitalism cures racism. So he had gathered together leaders from a dozen, 12, 14 African countries. I know Liberia, Togo, Rwanda. I don't remember what a lot of the other ones I remember Rwanda because the genocide happened the next year. And I can remember that guy sitting there. So, so they stage to sit down strike. When they got to Detroit, which is where he was teaching, they said, We're not gone anywhere else the United States and tell somebody tells him the truth. I have the same reputation than that I do now. So I get a call from the Pentagon people, the president says, if we want somebody in Detroit to tell him the truth, we should call you up. I felt okay. Yeah, I'll tell these guys the truth. So I spent five or 6 h that day telling him, No, capitalism is not going to get rid of race. On the other hand, there is stuff it does. It gets rid of some tribal boundaries, right? Yeah, it doesn't get rid of race. It actually makes raise worse if that's what you're telling them that that's not correct. So we spent that afternoon, myself and my graduate students, we went to a party that night. Detroit is a black one. City. Behalf of the city council is a black man. He'd invited everybody to his house. So we were all there. These world leaders and my graduate students and a few of the city council on school committee in Detroit. And after we'd been talking for five or 10 min, we had drinks, Was were standing around chatting. This guy said, You know, Dean being gang, can I have a moment of silence? And then he said, I want to welcome my black brothers to my home. I was talking to the vice president of Liberia and somebody from Togo whose title light on half. When he said that, they turned to me and they said, Oh my God, he just called us. His black brothers. He's had they said, you got to understand. We just concluded a treaty 30 days ago. We've been killing each other for the last five years. Nowhere in Africa any of these people, my black brothers, I had to come to the United States to hear that. And he said, Now I know what this trip is about because it really is something happening in the United States is not happening in Africa, which is a black brotherhood that you can actually say. I welcome my black brothers to my house. And they understood it. They talked about it for the rest of the night. It was a huge thing. This is Dubois idea how we're using it when we look at what the black interaction order looks like, how is this feeling of identifying people as brothers in this way? How does it play out interaction in ways that prevent white people and black people from, from understanding each other. Okay, So, so just to go back and bookended with the first slide. So we're not looking for racists anymore. We're looking for racist practices, social practices that embed the racism so that people are acting racism out without knowing. Tacit Racism refers to ways that systemic racism has been coded into the structures of daily life. And this is one of the places where my career has been arguing that interaction isn't just individuals randomly doing things, right? That there's a code to it that the patterns of behavior that we're using, It's like chess or checkers. So a rules there, we learned this stuff. And one of the things you can do in research is figure out what that code is. And so when racism is coded in, every time we interact with another human being, we're drawing on a set of unconscious, taken for granted social expectations and taken for granted. So somebody asks, you, can't tell them what you're doing. And we share these with those who share our social world. One of the problems with race is two centuries of segregation. We don't share social worlds, right? We're not in the same social world. So the codings we're using, it's white, black students talk about code switching, right? They realize this is double consciousness. This is second site. They realize we're playing a different game. Being on a Y always they don't quite understand, you know, what we're doing, but they know it's different. We don't know they're doing something different. So when they do something different, we just think they're being stupid. Right, So we don't have that second sight. We can't see past the difference. Okay, So with the idea of interaction orders that these are clusters of institutionalized rules, codes taken for granted however you want to think about them. And building on Dubois idea of double consciousness, he identified three basic different orders of interaction. And I'm going to spend most of my time just talking about the first one, the black-white introductory sequences. And maybe I'll get to the second one. Probably not, but you can ask me questions about them. Right. So okay. And a little background on this because I had gone to college in the first place to study race. I spent my first two years gears taking courses in race and, you know, American, Black American politics, African religion, that kinda stuff. And then I'd gotten to a place where I can study interaction with people. And I hadn't realized that this was a way of getting at what I was interested in with race and inequality. When you're doing something controversial, it can take a long time. So more than ten years later, I'm still studying interaction. I'm writing about how it works. I'm writing about interaction orders. And I was at the University of Chicago giving a talk on that. And there's a very famous black sociologist, William Julius Wilson, who I'll call Bill, who is trying to hire me. And he said, if this is why you doing it, then you got to find the racing interaction. Why aren't you doing that? Right? I mean, you have to do that. Well, I knew he was right. But how do I find the race and the interaction? And remember, I'm a white person, I got no double consciousness. I mean, my black students are much more likely to have a clue than I am. And I'm trying to get them to give me a clue. So I'm a pest. I wouldn't let it rest. I'm interrogating students, I got colleagues, I have black graduate students, and I'm out at the campus level Aqaba, what do you call it? Cafeteria. And we're sitting, sitting across from Perry Hall, who ended up as the head of African studies at North Carolina, Chapel Hill, wrote a really good book on how black studies came into being called working in the vineyard. Anyway, sitting across the table from me and I'm saying Perry, how do I find the race and the interaction over and over again. So he finally says, Oh my God, you just like every other white person, you are so nosy. And I said, Oh, that sounds like a thing. You tell me about that. He said, Oh my god, shut up your nosy. And so he got up and we walked back to the department and we had a couple of blocks secretaries in the front office. So I walked in and I said, why people are nosy. And they started laughing. And I would say the white people and they kind of look at me like, What are you talking about? I went into my classes and I would take white people are nosy. All the black kids would crack up. Now I'm at Wayne State, so half of my students are black, half white, and they're laughing and the white kids are looking at them. What are you laughing about? I will go around. Can you tell us why people are nosy story? Every single black hidden and Rome had been. So he started sharing the stories because they had double consciousness, because they were seeing that they could describe it. And after a couple of years of collecting the stories, I began to understand what they all had in common, right? And so, um, I, I'm doing some things here that I'm not really going to worry about right now. Okay. So what were they getting at? There is what I call a typical white white introductory sequence, name, occupation, education, location, marital status, where do you live? Yeah. Hi, I'm so and so who are you fight and then you do it. You asked me questions. Where do you live? We discover what? We went to the same school or are our husbands and wives work at the same place? So we both have kids the same age. Maybe they're both studying violin, right? And it seems very normal. Seem very normal to me. I had a lot of black students. And so they would say, why do you do that, right? And I said, Well, what do you mean? Why do I do that? So we're trying to find something we have in common. And they said, Well, don't you realize that like you're discriminating against people, your, your outing people's social class. What do you do if you discover you're talking to the janitor, right? Let me what do you do if they didn't go to school? They're not married. They don't have kids. And and so I can remember realizing, well, if it's a janitor, I'll still talk to him, but maybe we're going to talk about the company softball game, right? I mean, it isn't gonna be the same conversation. They're right about that. And then they went farther, right? One-third of all black men have spent time in prison. They got gaps in their employment records. They didn't get to go to school. It was interrupted and you're asking all these questions and being a wanna answer. I've had students who have Bentley here actually told me they've been told by their parents. Don't answer these questions. What your family does is secret. You cannot tell that they have these exercises is supposed to do in school, sometimes elementary school, right? Build your family tree, right? Who all the people aren't there instructed. You can't do that assignment. You can't write the names, you can't talk about their relationships. And so they don't know what to do. The other kids make fun of them. It's a problem. I had a graduate students say to me one day when we are leaving one of these groups, you know, where we talked about this for a while. She said, you know, we always knew that you guys did this to us. We didn't know you did it to each other, right? Because it's such an odd behavior. Because it turns out black Americans don't ask each other these questions. And so they just figured, okay, well we're doing it to them. It's another form of racism. Well, it is in a way, but I mean, we're not doing it on purpose to black people were doing it to each other, right? And I argued forcefully for a long time before I finally gave up that it was a perfectly good way of doing things. And then over and over again I realized, yeah, no, because so much social class and this is so much elitism in this, I'm kinda discover where people live. I'm going to know how much their houses cost, stuff like that. And so I started getting students to role play this in class. Talking about how black students do this. I would ask black students to stand up in the front of the Roman. Do the greeting. Now white students, no problem. You say stand up and do it. They just do it. They've really at all Black Pete students would stand up and they would say, Okay, where are we? Okay. You are in a line in the cafeteria to get food. They would say, Well, we can't talk there. Okay, you are in a line at a bank. We can't talk, they're either. And so by playing with this, I was able to discover if I put them in. This is back before electronic enrollment, right? In one of those long lines to pick your courses. And my line was long enough and they knew they were gonna be there for a couple of hours. They could look at each other and see what books they were carrying. And if a person was carrying a chemistry book, they get asked him about the chemistry book. I see you're carrying a chemistry book. Are you interested in chemistry? And I started to learn what the rules were that they could ask you about things that they could see, right? If it was made visible in the environment they were in, then another person could ask them about that. So you can ask about, you know, what you see on a person. If you hear an accent, you might be able to ask about that. You can ask about if you're at a party, you know, whether you're enjoying the music, who are, you know, stuff like that. But for the most part, what's supposed to happen in a Black, Black Greek introductory greeting sequences of people self-disclose. Even if you're asking about things that you're permitted to ask about, you're not really supposed to ask questions. So as I started recording these, because I have this laboratory, we call it the Starship Enterprise with all the bells and whistles, right? And I would hear this over and over again, that white people question answer, question, answer, question, answer. And when I had a black pair it with self-disclosure, self-disclosure, self-disclosure. I asked a friend of mine, black woman who sat on a lot of boards of directors at that point. What do you do? I mean, is this a problem for you? She said, Yes. I'm always the only black person on the board. And she said, I've learned. Then if I don't answer the questions, why people get very upset with me? So she said I answer. And she said I also know that I'm expected to ask them back the same question they asked me. She said, I find that to morally abhorrent, I cannot bring myself to do that. So she said what I do instead is I ask questions like this. What would you be doing if you weren't here? Right? Open-ended kinds of questions that allow the person to tell you what they want to tell you and will not tell you what they don't want to tell you, right. And recently I give this talk in Texas. There was a black woman there in the audience who apparently told her colleagues that when she was on Zoom, those couple of years when all the meetings over Zoom people would ask white questions right on the Zoom and she would not answer them. And people would in the chat, right. Does she was using her name and color out for being rude and the chat. Yeah, so she could see it. And the title of the chapter is why people are nosy, Black, people are rude. So I thought it was great. The Cassie was being, you know, actually imprint called out for being rude, you know, and I asked her how she felt about that and she's Emily, I didn't like it. On the other hand, having boundaries with people who will ask you questions like that is good. I don't want to get any closer to me. So I think it's really important to understand how serious this is. I had a student say to me the other day in a Zoom. Well at least it's not as bad as slavery. And I thought I wonder about that. I said we could add slavery by passing a law. We can't end this one by passing a law. This is a thing why people don't know they're doing. And I've found lots of them that just make black people want to run the other direction. They don't want to have anything to do with us and they don't trust us. Because one of the things about the interaction order, if you think of it as a game like checkers or chess, is a, we're not playing by the rules, right? Because they have a different set of rules. So we're cheaters, we're violating the social contract every single time we do one of these things. That's unexpected. And if you understand that there are two sets of rules, you can at least be mindful of that fact. And I have tried different things like saying to somebody who I knew I was going to be in a car with 440 5 min. Pick any two things about yourself, you want to tell me, cheryl, them using that right to build a conversation forward. So I'm getting the signals from from John that I should stop and let you ask me questions at this point. He wanted his conversation. Yeah, No, no, it's fine. Yeah. Presentation where I have about 100 things myself, I think. Let's turn it over to format that we like it is. So it's both folks asking questions and also puberty. You're going to find it and ask questions as well. Researcher that. So the only last thing is we have faculty, staff and students in here, so it'd be wonderful. Yeah. So I asked her what was shocking to me, what you just described. I had never thought of it that way and like growing up, It's like if you don't ask questions about somebody, you're the root one is showing you're not interested in this term. And this is a way to be like, I want to know about you and your friendships. And so the idea that it could be so threatening and have such a visceral response to Anatolia. Understand that, you know, like why, why would I share information with me? I don't know you how are you going to use it against me? But now I'm like kinda cataloging in my mind only interactions and like, oh my goodness, yeah. My mind is blown to. This is no huge truth bomb that you're just to give you a sense of how deepen strong the reaction is. I had graduate students who knew each other in black and white pairs play at this, knowing they were play-acting it, right. They knew ahead of time what I was describing as the black interactional style and the white interactional style. And so, you know, they stayed in their styles. And then afterwards I talked to them and I remember this one in a really smart white graduate student. He was just really pissed. He said, You know, I couldn't get them to talk to me, wasn't responding. I kept asking him, you know, he wouldn't answer. And I said You do remember Mike, right? We've talked about this ahead of time and he said, I know I even remember that and it still made me really angry. Right. So it didn't matter even if they knew they were just so frustrated because it was it was a taken for granted way of making sense. Suddenly wasn't working. And when that happens, you just can't make sense. It breaks the interaction, right? So I got the idea that if people got aware of this, you know, and could play with it and could talk to each other about it. It's really easy to talk about this with mixed race class. Nobody has trouble talking about this because it's not about whether they are racist or not. It's about Oh my God, I do that, right. You know, and so they're talking back and forth and the black kids could say, yeah, I never understood. And the white kids because they oh my God, I didn't know. And it just opens the conversation right up here. And discovering just how what I was because as I've tried to play act this, when I've only got one or two black kids in class, I do the black part. I'm not going to make them do it. And I can't do self-disclosure. I keep asking questions. I say, Oh my god, listen to me while I can't. I ask questions about the things say we'd self-disclose, but I'm still asking questions. I can't make the chain. Yeah. Somebody else. Yeah. I mean, I find this fascinating. I, unfortunately, I came here to learn about this book so that I will do more exploration. So I don't have the background foundation that you have as kind of a pre-suppose to four for this. But if you could explain to me. So this Tacit Racism you defined as institutional racism that has become part of the discourse, right? And we, we are kinda racist, quote and unquote without realizing that we're racist because this is how the society and culture is. Yeah, I wouldn't use the word that way. I would say we're doing racist things. All right. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. That The racism has become institutionalized in the interactional moves, right? Right. It's, it's a new idea. People want to think of institutions and you'd have interaction, right? What I'm trying to say is interaction isn't just random. It's learned, it's social, it's structured. So I'm trying to talk about things that are actually institutionalized in their action completely independently of institutions or individual attitudes. So you don't know you're doing it, right, right. I guess I guess what I'm wondering about is this is kind of shocking. I never thought about it when you talk about like how people act differently. I mean, I come from East Asia. Yeah, we have at who totally different, right? You were just talking about nosy white people. I mean, Asians are nosy. They're the nose, the extra, right? Yeah. But so when do you want to take this? So I get that white nose. Enos can be very offensive and you know, very uncomfortable for, for black people, right? So where do you want to take this? What is the direction that you wanted to? Okay, so there's sort of three things I want to say here. The first one is, and I had Jewish students and Jewish friends and they talk about being ultra nosy on, on this scale. Yeah, particularly with regard to particular kinds of information, like health information that black Americans don't share. But there's a contrast with Europe. And ironically, Black Americans are more like white Europeans, right? So when I go to Europe on a nosy American, which I use to my advantage, by the way, when I want to be nosy with like a German friend who's just gotten a divorce. And I want if I say remember, I'm nosy white person and I want to know about this way. It works is as long as I'm identifying myself that way they can choose, they very often will, so it enables me to get closer. I think you could even do that in cross race interactions, right? As long as you sort of, you know, I explained what it was you were doing. So and I think that's because in Europe family is more important. It's not for the same reasons that happens in the United States. Okay, So then the second thing is, I started to realize that we'd never had a national conversation about race. We've never had it. South Africa had it sort of truth and reconciliation movement, you know, we never had that. And that the big reason why is because white Americans, particularly liberal white Americans, having realized that race is a problem and having committed themselves to being not racist, are scared to death of having this conversation and discovering that they're thinking or doing anything racist. And the good thing about this, and I start every semester out with this in class, is don't worry about finding out you're doing racist things. Is that every single one of you is including me. And it's going to happen in class and I'll call myself out for, I mean, just quit worrying about it. It's not about whether as an individual you harbor racist attitudes. It's about whether you can recognize, you know, where the racism is embedded in the things that you're doing. A concept people free in all in it. It, it, it makes it possible to have really interesting conversations where kids aren't worried about that, of how a lot of them telling me I hated you on the first day, you know, not so much anymore, but, you know, but after a few classes, I realized you were right and then, you know, they they really get into it and I can't remember what the third one was. You want to take this? I mean, this is a very interesting. This is part of like you're, if I may call it, solution to improving our American culture towards right? Right. Anti-racist. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Where do you want to walk if you've reminded me? Yeah. Okay. So the second one was part of that third one because I think this conversation will help to get us there. But the other thing, and I tried to outline this in the introduction of the book. If you're going to look at it, is most white people are still focused on assimilation as a good thing, right? We know there are cultural differences. We really want to be tolerant, but we're still hoping that black Americans will assimilate and become more like white middle-class people in that would be a solution to the problem. And looking at the reason why black people are treating each other the way they are and realizing that what they're doing is being respectful. They're creating an oasis of equality in the midst of a social context that's in a highly divisive than unequal. And that they can talk about that and that they're aware of that. And when they criticize, you know, what I am identifying as white practices, it is for their divisiveness and for the way they went out people and penalize people in status terms. I've begun to realize that some of the ideas that you boys had, you know, about double consciousness, creating this sense of community. This is something that white Americans need to learn from, right? What we need to be doing is a reverse assimilation. We need to be taking on board some of these lessons. The black Americans have learned that there we could adopt some of these things. And so in going through the book, I've tried to outline a number of different ways in which that would work. Broadened the American sense of what justice is, right? When a democracy really requires of people to do in terms of building these structures in, into our daily practices where we're always treating the person we're interacting with as a human being, a full human being, not as a, this kind of person or that kind of person, you know, but dealing with them as a human being in a way that creates more equality for them instead of making their equality precarious, right, because of what's happening in the interaction. One of the things we did was we talked with pimps, we talk with drug dealers. And it's really interesting to hear them talking about this stuff, about what's important about women's equality and how they can do their masculinity in a way that kids, women, Rome in order to experience there personhood and so on. There's another idea that keeps floating in and out of my head. But if I take another question, I will come back to me. Yeah. This is really helping me think about some of the problems I have done. I've been talking to students about LGBTQ identity. Because I realize now why so many of the white students struggle with the idea that you need to know certain things about a person to interact with them. And that includes assumptions about their sexual orientation and gender identity. And some of them just are like I can't like, and I think, sure you can like you can talk about 100 different things. And I realize now it's because they're so used to being able to pin down the purse output, right? And sometimes I say to them, Look, if you're just talking to them and you're not asking them certain questions. They will tell you when they feel that you're safe enough, that you're not assuming that they're not this or that. And again, it now I'm understanding lot better about why that's so challenging to them because it's almost like they need to establish a sense of sameness or difference yeah. Immediately. And that's it. So hostile to their own ways of being, correct? Yeah. I mean, if you're doing, I call it the categorical self, right? You're assembling your self-identity out of collections of categories. And when you interact with other people, you're looking for what collection of categories you know, this person's identity is comprised of. And if we're doing that and we're interacting with people who, the last thing in the world again to do is that I heard a black woman describing, and I had a hard time understanding there was a black woman at a conference and she was complaining that this white woman had come up to her and said, Why are you with the conference, right? Which is perfectly ordinary question. All I came because they wanted to hear this or because I'm a sociologist or a smile. And she said I was so offended, why wasn't it enough for her that I was a human being? Right? And I realized it's so normal to try to figure out what identities stands. This person with whom I'm interacting. So that I can do what I'm going to select from things that I wouldn't talk about if they turned out to be in a different identity. It's like, Oh my God, I'm really doing that. And at first it sounded crazy to me. What do you mean? Interact with me as a human being? I mean, of course I'm interacting with you as a human being, but I wasn't, right. So I theorize this thing I called the category itself and described how it's different from this second site double consciousness member of a community who is working really hard to offer in all personhood, right? In a sort of a stripped-down sense to everybody else that they're, that they're interacting with. It. It goes to things. I think it's the Chapter three in the book. It's black, honesty and white. I forget what I called it. Maybe I'll just call it black honesty. I had black graduate students say to me, You know, again, you're just like every other white person yourself, fake you. So plastic. And I really tried to figure out what they meant. What are you talking about, right. And so we would have these long, thank God, they put up with me, right in all to really figure out what these things meant. And one of the kinds of things it means that has consequences for on-the-job and for business school like Bentley. Is that when we talk about the kinds of things you should say to your employer and the kinds of things you shouldn't say, right? Like for instance, if you're at your job and the work they've given you only takes you an hour and you finished it. I've had it described to me that white workers will paste it out. So if they're busy all day and they're Black coworkers look at them and say, Oh my God, these plastic fake cheating white people. What they do is they finished the job in an hour and then they sit there doing nothing because they are honest. And, you know, if people are given more work, they do it. But because the employers are using their institutional lies, ideas, you know, their expectations are what's supposed to happen. They see them as not doing their job when in fact, they did it really fast and really well. And they don't understand why their efficiency is not being appreciated. So again, these conversations I had at Wayne State, we had alumni come back. We will talk about what happens at work. And black workers would say, if I don't want to do something my boss asked me to do, I tell them I don't want to do it. And the white workers would say, Oh my god, I wish I could do that instead of taking it home to my husband or wife and ending up divorce because I'm complaining all the time. And so they wouldn't have these conversations. Well, then why don't you tell them, right? And then bosses would say, yeah, but when somebody says that to me, I fire them, you know, so I mean, the consequences are coming. But, you know, this idea of honesty plays in, in a big way in the workplace. And I had a video I made for real with a graduate student of mine where I knew I was going to tell her she had to do some vague and I knew she was going to refuse. And so I videotaped it and she agreed that we could use this in some of these sessions because she thought it was interesting too. And what she said to me afterwards was, you know, I wasn't really telling you I wouldn't do it. I was just scared. I was telling her she had to go present a paper at a national conference. Right. And I knew she'd say, no, I'm not doing it, you know. And and so we had this long discussion that we also videoed about how she wasn't telling me she wasn't gonna do it. But first of all, honesty required her to tell me how she felt and how she felt was Oh, my God, no, I can't do that. And so she had to say it. If she didn't, she wasn't being and then as a person working with her, I had to understand that she didn't really mean she wouldn't do it. And I had to coax or into it and I had to explain why she should. And then she went, she gave a brilliant paper, you know, and, and it works. So a lot of this stuff is really consequential. There are any students who have questions. No pressure. Now faster but ask one. Yeah, I was actually thinking about a connection I made. In high school. I worked with two black student leaders, one from the Bahamas and one from the Caribbean Atlantic area. And I would get off a phone calls with these two very brilliant liters. I feel like Why am I so uncomfortable? Like this is not, I don't understand where this is coming from. And I realized after a long time that they speak much slower and they take long pauses before they answer. Unlike Americans, like like me, I fit in all my words as fast as I can. I don't pause if you asked me a question, I'll answer it right away. After that realization, I would get on the calls and I would be like, okay, this is why I'm feeling this way. And without that moment, I would never realized that I would have treated them differently or I would have thought differently about them as a leader. And it came down to this tiny little thing about speech. But you made a comment about how it breaks the social script. Yeah, and that makes us really uncomfortable, right? And it makes it harder for groups to interact. And what I wanted to ask was, what are some of the other rules? Like you say that like black people and white people are playing different games. They're playing by different rules. What are some of the other? While there are lots and lots of rules, basically, they all have to do in general with, you know, what creates more equality, right? Versus what gives me more information. So I'm not sure I'm going to try to enumerate the rules. I think when I'm going to talk about in response to what you're saying and, you know, maybe I'll get into some rules, but is what I do with my students to try to get them to have that moment, right, that you're talking about. Because I think it's not so much up, hey, here are some specific rules, you know that white people are following and black people are falling. One of which would be, don't ask your black friends about their sickness, right? You know, they're sick. They say they're okay. Say yeah, but I know you were sick. What's wrong with you? Don't pursue it. If you're white, you have to pursue it. Because as one white students said to me, How can I be a good friend if I don't write, ask about that. But that's one of those things that if you block is personal. But I think what, what, what's, what I'm trying to do is create a called it white double consciousness in the book. It won't get you to a full sense of community because that requires really being an excluded category. People that's experiencing the commonality. But it'll get you the second site, part of the double consciousness had two boys talks about. So I have all my students do observations of ordinary things where they'd begin to see what's the social contract involved too. They get really good at seeing this stuff. And some of them are simple. Like this last week I got a couple of papers back on doorknobs, right? Whereas the social contract in a doorknob, when you walk up to a door knob, subconsciously, why are you taking for granted what the rules are for using a door knob? So if it's a bathroom, right? In a dorm room is got different rules from a bedroom. If it's on the hallway and as somebody else's dorm room, it's got different rules from your own right. Bedroom. Door knob. Whether you knock or not and then go in, or whether you knock and wait. And when they start thinking about this in terms of social contract, right? That we've actually promised each other, that we're going to follow the rules about these things. Then you can start figuring them out, having that moment that you're talking about. And Mary Marcel was talking to them about this book on a black, on, on activism. I forget what they call this. I can't remember the title of the book, but on, on black activism. And my chapter for that book is about how most of the disciplines that we work in, our working at the level of assumptions, things that people are consciously aware of, categories that we're consciously aware of, and we're counting those up. And we're talking about the relationships between them. But we're not looking at this interactional work that goes into constructing the substructure on which all of this stuff rests and that it requires awareness. Now, the people who I studied, Goffman and Garfinkel, they were studying people who had trouble with interaction. That's what WEB Dubois was doing. If you're black, you have trouble. Garfinkel was studying a trans woman in 1959. She was perfect because she had trouble and she could articulate her trouble. Now, in order for me to pass as a woman, these are the things I have to do. She was very aware of it. Women aren't. Yeah. I mean, we might know a couple of things, but she really had to know it well in order to be able to pass. They were Jewish, so they also were aware of passing as Jews, right? In circumstances where that was problematic. They talked about people with mental illness, people who have criminal records, people who had epilepsy, and all of the extra work that these people were doing to mask their stigma, as Goffman called it. And because they had to do the work, they had to be aware of how they were doing the work, which meant that you could actually talk to them. As you talk to the rest of us, we know what we're doing, right? I mean, a lot of surveys, questionnaires, interviews, stuff, interviewing ordinary white, middle-class Americans. You're not gonna get anything because we don't know anything. I mean, it took me years to find the first parts of this race puzzle in interaction. So developing the awareness yourself by creating trouble, by looking for trouble, by doing interactions in class, and making them troubled so that people begin to see things, right? But they wouldn't ordinarily see sending students out to observe moments had trouble and then talking about those in class to develop this white double consciousness, right? And I have black students in my class now is the first time this has happened. Actually, I've got a couple of them. Jose, they grew up in white environments with white best friends. And being able to talk about this stuff in this class and get their experiences confirmed is a first time in their lives. Fake. Don't feel crazy because he only God, I know I'm not crazy now. These are really bright kids. And that's huge, right? And to be able to talk about that with the other kids in the class and realized yet it really was happening to me. I'm not crazy. And to begin to develop this way of seeing that this stuff is actually happening. Again, that's one of the places I'm hoping it goes because if everybody starts to become aware of this stuff, the problems can go away. Yeah, John. Well, that was a really interesting story. That question. The whole discussion it was, it was just like My mind is blown really good. So it's funny because there was a survey that I put into a book I'm writing from two years ago from the API. But 93% of Americans think that racism is a big problem in the country. Less than 5% think that they have anything to do with it? Yeah. Yeah. And that's, you know, that's at the heart of that. So it's like, okay, well, it's here but we're not in class yesterday. Sarah and I were going over very Dr. King's letter from a Birmingham jail and, you know, there's this one section of it where he's basically saying it's the white moderate. They try, you know, that is the problem with racism. It's actually not the basis. You started your talk, the talk, but yeah, it's actually at the beginning of the book. We have that quote on the face page. Yeah, exactly. It's funny listening to the conversation because all of us I haven't spoken up yet, but I'm asking the same questions you're asking you're asking, which is like ok, so now I get it right. Like institutional interaction is racism again, a great concept? What do I need to do? Yeah, It's funny. I spent my sabbatical on the Arizona, New Mexico border and everybody I was friends with, there is white men. And they would answer me one way if I were to ask questions like that, do the work. Do the work like what soup. So what do I get to do the work? You know, don't look for a list of the thing that somebody has researched and told you to do the work, anti-racism work. So my question to you is slightly unrelated to that point I just made. If, if your book is pointing to interactionists, institutional interactionist, racism, which cake, which is like did it really is this groundbreaking concept today, interactional mode, weird? Does structural racism in your analysis? Yeah, well, I mean obviously there's structure there. That's a critical way serious talking about, right? There are laws and ways of interpreting laws that are still racist. The one that Kimberle Crenshaw started with back in 1977. You've got a civil rights law that says you can't discriminate against black people and you can't discriminate against women. So you have a black woman and she files against the company for discriminating against her as a black woman. And they say, Well, we're not discriminating against black people because they got hundreds of black men, right in menial positions. And we're not discriminating against women because all the secretaries are white women. So we're not discriminating against you. And she says, Yeah, but I'm a black woman. May say, No, you're asking for special treatment because you want us to consider two categories. We'll only consider one now that's structural, right? That's in the way the law is written. It's in the way it's being interpreted. I would say in Garfinkel 1940s study of homicide cases in North Carolina, you've got some structural racism too, because he's he's, he's writing down as an ethnography in the courtroom the reasoning that they're using. And when you say this, you know, good old. And then they're going to say inward, did us a favor by killing this bad inward. So We're gonna give them a short sentence. You're taking institutionalized over racism and you're using it as my courtroom as a justification for giving this particular black man of short sentence, right? And what he's finding there is that because most homicide is within race and that's including for white people by the way, this black on black crime homicide. That's a fiction. Why people do it just as much. It's 95% within Raisa, you're only talking about 5%, that's between races. So when you take all of the black eyes killing each other, if you consider all the people they killed to be bad, then you're rewarding almost every single one of them with a light sentence. So the only black men ever get the big sentences are the ones that kill white guys, right? So that's why when you do a statistical study of whether or not race is informing sentencing, everybody says No, it's not. It's fair, it's even. But you see you get these structural over racist reasons. Why so? Yeah, there's structure in a couple of different ways. So the beliefs get embedded, the dean, all the legal stuff gets embedded. But this other thing is operating differently when you get people who know the legal system is wrong, they're fighting against it. When you got people who know lid or overt racism is wrong and they spent their lives, you know, trying to get rid of it. You still have stuff happening in interaction. And I've been doing this for 50 years and I still catch myself, you know, I mean, it's never going to stop. And I just embrace it. Okay, I'm gonna go into class. I've got another example for him. I did it again. So it's it's different. It's, it's, it's like I talk about other structures of interaction a lot to give them examples. So I'm gonna do one here just as a, as a role-play. It wouldn't be appropriate between me and Curtis, but we're here, so I'm gonna deal with Curtis. It's a thing people do. So if I say, what are you doing Friday night and assuming that, you know, I'm not the chair of his department and, you know, he's not a faculty member, is just ordinary people. What are you doing Friday night? I'm going to a party. Okay. So he did an interesting thing there. He made himself busy. And essentially, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Because the kind of Sociology I do that's called the pre-work West. And in the chess game, you're supposed to understand that if you say nothing, I'm going to issue an invitation. So I do this in class and I told the kids, okay. So when I asked you have to say nothing. Right. So what do you do a Friday night, you have to say no. So would you like to write? And then you have to say no. Now? Of course everybody laughs because you can't do that, right? I mean, that's that move breaks the social contract, right? And what I'm trying to get them to see is that there really was a set of obligations here. We both knew what they were. As soon as you hear the words, What are you doing? You know, you have to am I going to give the green light or am I going to sound busy? And you said you were busy. And so I use examples like that and they begin to see almost everything that we do has these implicit or tacit structures. And if you begin to focus on those, um, you know, Ben, you can reorient what you're doing, what I was thinking while you were talking about the long pauses which indigenous people also have, is that when white Americans here, those, they fill them with Smalltalk, you just jump in with, it's not even just asking question. We fill it with this small talk stuff. And so learning to hear that, you know, that there are these long pauses is an extremely important thing. So again, Yeah, The becoming aware of, you know, little things like that, you know, that, that helped to understand it is to talk about it being institutionalized in interaction. Wow, Thank you. One of the things about this big open, so we know that this is around the time that we said we would end, but doesn't mean the conversation has the editors kind of allows people to leave a favorite. I don't know what end is up to. I got an awesome yeah. I am I am washing my hair. Which is the alternate put down, non put down, right? Yeah. Normally we would just end by talking about some of the upcoming events today. Most of the people in here are pretty aware of of of the stuff that we're doing in the center. I will not let us leave out whatever. Not thinking. Thank you. Want everyone here. Thank you so much for being here for these conversations. I find them, I find them exceptionally deep and I think we have a lot of spaces on campus to thank you for creating this community. And don't leave us with cookies. Thank you all. Thank you.
SOCIAL JUSTICE BOOK SERIES - Anne Rawls - February 15, 2023
From Kaltura MediaUser February 15th, 2023
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Professor Anne Rawls (Sociology Department) presents on her award-winning book Tacit Racism.
The Service-Learning and Civic Engagement Center's (BSLCE) SOCIAL JUSTICE BOOK SERIES, features recently published social justice books by Bentley and non-Bentley authors. This semester’s first event is co-sponsored by the Valente Center, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, the Department of Sociology, and the Nonprofit Minor.
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