Spirit in Action
The Privilege of Being (and Seeing) White - Making Racism Visible
Our racism is mostly invisible to us because all the assumptions around it seem "normal" to us, The authors of Seeing White: An introduction to White Privilege and Race lead us through a rigorous inspection of the history and present of racism in the USA - and the way out of this ingrained social construction.
- Broadcast on:
- 17 Jun 2012
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(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - Today for Spirit in Action, we're going to engage in a little bit of magic. We're going to make things visible that were invisible. In a moment, we'll be joined by two of the three authors of Seeing White, An Introduction to White Privilege and Race. We'll be delving into the mysteries of racism, invisible to those who are living and doing it, and into the intricacies of facing squarely into the implications of racism. We're fortunate to have with us to associate professors from Wagner College in New York, Gene Holly in the Sociology Department, and Amy Eshelman in the Psychology Department. Their co-author now with us today is Ramya Vijaya, Associate Professor of Economics at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey. Get ready to remove the veil from your eyes as Gene and Amy, co-authors of Seeing White, join us by phone from New York. Gene and Amy, thank you so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. - Thank you. - Thank you so much. - I'm going to start with you, Gene, because you have a particularly interesting background from my point of view. You've got a Master's in Theology from Harvard back in the early '90s, and then you went on to be a prof of sociology. Why did you leave the divine realm to become a common professor of sociology? - That's a great question. Essentially, I thought about going into the ministry, but my family background is Catholic or Irish Catholic. So I would have had to leave that tradition to be a minister or a pastor, and I just couldn't do it. So I ended up having very similar commitments to the ones I had when I entered Divinity School, but I just am living them out a slightly different way than I had thought I might. So at that time, I was working with people who were homeless in Boston, and I lived for a while in a Catholic worker, which is listeners probably know that's an important movement that was started by Dorothy Day back in the '50s. So I was very involved with social justice work that was also grounded in a spiritual community, and I've kind of managed to keep that as the core for me, even though I'm no longer in Divinity School or practicing theologian in any way, really. - And Amy, you're a professor of psychology. They're at Wagner College. How did your interest in the issue of racism, seeing race, seeing white as is the title of your book? How did that come about? - Well, I grew up, my parents are both very religious themselves. My father is a recently retired Presbyterian Church USA pastor, and my mom was a traditional pastor's wife in terms of being very involved in the church. In some ways, very traditional, in some ways, very much challenging the church to think about issues of social justice, issues of feminism, issues of race. So my parents had a commitment, and I can sort of see within my own family, tracing back that my grandmother was very proud as a white woman to have been the first person in her neighborhood to have an African American family over for dinner. But still, racism is so insidious in the United States that while my grandmother's values were very much to be open and accepting, it's so difficult to avoid racism in the country in which we live. And my parents themselves were always pressured by well-meaning people to make sure that we lived in a good neighborhood, with good public schools, and I grew up in the Midwest, and my public school education was all in the state of Michigan. It was always to make sure that we were in a good neighborhood, which essentially meant a white flight suburb outside of a city that was predominantly African American. And my parents struggled with those decisions, but also felt a lot of pressure to follow certain social norms. Then I went to Hope College in Holland, Michigan, which is affiliated with the Reform Church of America, which in history it was such settlers who started that group, the Protestant group. And I was exposed to Quakerism for the first time, while at Hope College we had when people come and visit and I found the practice absolutely fascinating, but haven't had much experience to Quakerism. But within that dynamic, I had this fantastic undergraduate advisor who was very dedicated to feminism, very dedicated to living out her faith through her teaching, who encouraged us to think very critically about racism. And she had written a piece on white privilege and racism. And in that piece, Jane Dickey had written that racism is prejudice plus power, which means you have to have social power, not just bigotry, in order to be a racist. And so only whites can be racist in the United States. And I remember feeling really uncomfortable reading that piece the first time. It really made me challenge and question, what is my role as a white person in terms of understanding that racism is my problem, not the problem with people of color solely. That was a problem that really engaged me and challenged me and made me want to continue and pursue psychology. And this book that we're so delighted to talk to you about today was very much a gift that Jean and I wanted to give to our students in terms of challenging them to have those uncomfortable and life-changing moments of really thinking critically about race. - How did you get into this, Jane? - I had a mother, let me start there. I had a mother who was a feminist and sort of found her feminism as I was growing up. So she came from a very traditional Irish Catholic family. And I was growing up in the late '60s and early '70s and she became increasingly involved with social justice movements like feminism at that time. And so I had that role model. When I went to college, I sort of began to develop my own politics and my own activism, but it was really following in her footsteps. And as a part of that, I was liking me, very involved with feminist thought and feminist activism, but I also was very involved with anti-racism and anti-racism movements. In particular, I was involved with some of what was going on around fighting apartheid in South Africa and activism in the States around that. And also addressing the big tutorial regimes in Central America and what was happening there. So when I left college, I ended up moving into a Catholic worker because I had a commitment to social justice and that time in the Catholic worker also really helped me to see more clearly the profound impact of racism in our society. The Catholic worker I was in was in Boston. It's called Haley House. And we had a soup kitchen in our basement. During the mornings through lunch, we served only men. So at that time, and it's probably still like this, people were often split by gender in terms of which shelters they could go to or which soup kitchens they could eat at. And so ours was serving men. And for reasons that weren't intentional, it ended up being also a soup kitchen that served almost completely African American men. And that was a reflection really of the racism in Boston at that time. And again, that might still be happening. So having that experience of working with these men and the men, I worked with really teaching me about what was happening in our society was one of the primary reasons that I ended up being increasingly interested in race and racism and in ways in which I needed to take responsibility for being implicit in a world where there is profound racism as a white person. So I'm white. - And there's a third co-author for your book, Ramya Vijaya. Ramya is not here. I guess she's over in India at this point. - Ramya is an economist and she's, yeah, she's actually originally from India, although she teaches at Stockton in New Jersey and right now she's on sabbatical for the year in India. And she is a brilliant economist and also like Amy and I a feminist and she's a woman of color. And I think by working with us on this book, she also taught us a lot about the impact of race and racism. - How much of the book did you have to rewrite because she read what you two had written as folks with white skin and said, hey, wait a minute, you're missing the reality that I experienced as a person who's considered a person of color. One thing that was really lovely about writing the book, the process was that we were able to spend a lot of time talking. So when we got together and outlined what the proposal was going to be, I found those conversations to be so eye-opening and so helpful because Ramya is such a powerful and smart and talented individual that she was able to clearly guide us in terms of what her experience was like and why she was interested in working on this book with us. - I wanna go to a topic that I think you addressed already, Amy, and that is the definition of racism. As I struggled, as I read the book and I will admit up front and I'm probably gonna flunk the course because of this is I've only made it about two thirds the way through the book so far. So I don't know, great, see it best, I guess. One of the things you talk about early on is what is racism and as you've already said, prejudice plus power makes racism. And you mentioned also that you can have racial bigotry which is just without the power you can be a racial bigot. That's no problem, anybody can be a bigot in terms of race. How hard do you have to fight with your students to get them to accept that point? You wanna take that, Jean? - Yeah, the thing that's happened with our students which has been I think a really nice teaching experience for me as a teacher, I've learned a lot about teaching when I teach race, especially to predominantly white students. We, maybe and I've been working at Wagner College which is a small liberal arts college in New York City and like most private small liberal arts colleges the student population is predominantly white. Amy and I have co-taught a lot of classes together including a race gender sexuality course where we've worked with predominantly white students around issues of race and racism. And it's been really interesting to kind of work on the gap between us and our white students in terms of our thinking about race and racism and their thinking about race and racism and to do what I think is good teaching to really attempt anyhow to try to do what's good teaching and that is to allow our students to have the ideas that they have and accept that and be respectful of that at the same time as we propose things that are radically different from anything they've ever thought before. I don't know, I think we mostly finesse that well so that our students feel respected when they leave with a different opinion and yet they've got this new idea in their head that they may over time, you know, come to agree with us and they also might not. - I think that you described that very well. And one of the things that we tried to do in our class and in the book is to present a clear evidence that racism might not be intentional. It might be institutionalized in the different ways that laws are written or the ways the opportunities are given out and that, to some extent, by setting things up so that certain neighborhoods are eligible for FHA, federal housing administration loans and other neighborhoods are redlined out of that, that the neighborhoods that had those opportunities to get those loans were predominantly white neighborhoods, predominantly African American neighborhoods, were excluded from those loans and the long-term effects of some individuals historically having had parents or grandparents who were able to buy a home because the federal government made that possible through reasonable rates on mortgages while African American families haven't had those same opportunities. That's one example that we use in the book that Ramya brought to us as an economist. That's just so powerful, I think, in terms of exposing students to a different perspective on race. It's so common today for people to claim that we live in a post-race society, which I completely disagree with. As Gene said, we want to challenge them to think about these ideas and then form their own perspective. - A fundamental part of what you do in the book is to clearly look at what is race. And so I'd like you to both talk about this, Gene and Amy, about what race is and what race isn't because a lot of people attribute much more to race than is justified by the facts. - Well, we make an argument right off in the beginning of our book that race is not biology, which is pretty widely accepted in the university today, but it's still not commonly accepted necessarily outside of the university. So our students are often surprised by that argument. So we make a case, a race not being biological, that there are no different human races. There's just one race and that's human race. But we go on after really challenging that very old and what we call a racist idea, the racist biological. We go on to say that this doesn't let us off the hook. So we're not in, as Amy said, a post-race society because we now know that race is not biological. Indeed, race is a powerful social phenomena that still matters deeply and impacts on people's lives in ways that are profound and profoundly unjust. Amy did some interesting work exploring the scientific history of this old idea, this racist idea that race is biological. Amy, did you want to speak a little bit about that? - I'd love to. Yeah, it was really fascinating to be able to do that. And we thank a couple of anthropologists who work at Wagner College, Celeste Gion, and Alexa Dietrich, who gave me a list of fabulous things to read. So if nothing else, someone should get ahold of the table of contents of our book and read what these anthropologists have written about race and biology. That where we try to draw distinctions, right, that of course there is human diversity in terms of texture or form of hair in terms of shape of eyes and other facial features in terms of shade of skin. But there's so many profound arguments based on evidence from anthropologists that if we even use skin color, trying to separate one race from another, what we have is we have a continuum across humanity. We don't have distinct groups. And so trying to draw a line between one shade of skin and another shade of skin doesn't work. We will end up misclassifying people in terms of how they understand their own race. And then if you try to overlay one feature like hair form with another feature like skin color, the lines blur even further. This is just one of several examples also looking genetically that we don't form into distinct and separate groups. There's a lot of diversity in terms of many different genetic factors, but they clearly don't line up into groups as we socially understand them. And in some ways, this is a bit mind-blowing to some people. Goodman, one anthropologist, wrote that for him, this made a lot of sense because he grew up in a predominantly Irish-American and Italian-American neighborhood where he was one of few Jewish individuals and he was never really considered white. He was always considered Jewish as though that was a separate group. And then when he went to college in another town at a major university, he was suddenly classified among the white students and he himself experienced his race change from one moment to another, that that really helped him to understand how socially constructed race is. Gene brought this fantastic example in as well of Gregory Howard Williams who lived part of his life thinking he was white and part of his life understanding himself to be African-American. It was a really powerful and interesting story. Did you want to talk about that a little bit, Gene? Yes, and then you said it's quite an extraordinary memoir by Gregory Howard Williams that people might want to get a holder that's called Life on the Color Line, the true story of a white boy who discovered he was black. So this young man was growing up in the south as a white boy when around the age of nine, his father and mother split up, his mother actually left with the younger children and the two older children were left with his father and their business sort of went downhill, kind of came undone. And the father needed to go and live with family to kind of get back on his feet. So the father took the two older boys and they went on a bus to Muncie, Indiana which was where he was from. And on the bus he explained to them this shocking news that they were actually African-American, that he was African-American and that he'd been passing his white all those years and they went then from living in a very segregated and race conscious part of the country which is really at that point like today, it was pretty much a lot of the country but certainly in the south at that time with legalized segregation. They went from living there as white and having access to all kinds of things that they wouldn't have had access to as black or African-American. They went from that to being in another very race conscious community where they were suddenly on the other side of the color line. So he writes this story of his experience growing up for a lot of white and then for the rest of his childhood black and about the difference and how he was treated and the resources he had access to and it's really, really powerful but it's a nice look for students at one person's experience that they sort of start the story relating to in like I said, our classes are predominantly white so white students are reading it thinking oh here's a story of a white boy and then at a certain point in the memoir they're suddenly switched on to the other side of the color line and they're still identifying with him but suddenly he's African-American and they get to see through this one person's life and the social construction of race in action. So we try to pull in a lot of different examples to make bad argument that race is socially constructed not biologically clear for students. One of the other ways we do that is through a theoretical approach to sociology and psychology and economics and that is cultural materialism. So this argument, this theoretical approach claims that the way we live say in a contemporary capitalist society shapes the way we think about things and we point to phenomena like the history of slavery in the United States where there was this profound profound racism where people were really understood to be of different species and there was a clear idea white people had that people of color were significantly lower form of animal. So we argue that that thinking was born out of a political economic structure of American slavery. So some people are benefiting from that structure of slavery and some people are being harmed and that the thinking, the race is thinking that white people held onto in most cases was a kind of thinking that came out of that political economic structure and not the other way around. And so we argue that that's in human history, you can see that again and again in a variety of places and times, but that a piece of why it's really important that we bring about economic justice is because the ways in which we live, that the political economic realities in which we live profoundly shaped how we think and feel about one another. Would it be okay, and this is clearly a challenge of sorts because I feel that my own cringe inside as I asked this question, would it be okay if some differences were biologically linked? For instance, lactose intolerance, which I think understand is much more common against those of Native American background or Asian that the ability to digest lactose is more likely to be missing in those groups or the ability to jump higher. One of the great movies I saw along the way was white men can't jump or these kinds of things. Is that okay if we note that or do we have to pretend that doesn't exist? - Well, I think one thing that's interesting is that definitely we can see that there are differences that occur across humans, right? And so there are people who are lactose intolerant like me as a white American woman and people who aren't, but we tend to be so focused on race that we tend to impose race as the socially understood idea on those biological issues. So one of the things that we mentioned in the book is that a certain gene mutation has been found to predict breast cancer in Ashkenazi Jewish women. So the question is, is there something distinct about this group that's a biological difference about this group or could this be understood in a different way? And one argument is that Ashkenazi Jewish women are not in and of themselves a distinct biological group, but they're a social group that has had experiences that affects biologically what's happening in their lives. And so because this is a group that has experienced profound discrimination, attempts at genocide, one author that we use extensively graves argues that probably what we're seeing with the fact that this gene is predictive for this group has much more to do with the social experiences of the attempts on genocide of this group and how our social lives affected the biology of what genes tend to be present in people that we socially understand to be part of this group. And so another example that we use is to look at sickle cell anemia, which historically was understood as an African disease, but it's actually much more about how human genes interact with the physical environment. And so we find that sickle cell anemia tends to be present in populations not based on what continent they're from, but based on whether or not there are stagnant pools of water that tend to breed malaria. And so in places including Greece and a number of places outside of Africa where malaria is very present, the sickle cell gene, if an individual has one parent that gives a sickle cell gene and another parent that gives the dominant gene, they'll end up being malaria resistant while not suffering the full effects of sickle cell. But with two parents giving the sickle cell gene to a child will have all of the terrible effects of sickle cell anemia and the intense pain goes along with that. And so it's very interesting to look historically that sickle cell anemia was understood to be an African-American disease in the United States. And so people with other heritage who also had it were told, well, you must have African roots when really that wasn't happening. And so I find it mind-blowing in a really fun and fascinating way to start to understand that the things that I understood, like, oh, Asians and American Indians are more likely to be lactose intolerant, that there's something about that group that to start to realize, well, wait, we tend to impose those ideas or to see those groups as distinct based on things that actually are much more prevalent across humanity. >> You're listening to Spirit in Action. I'm Mark Helpsmeet, your host for this Northern Spirit Radio production. Our website, northernspiritradio.org. Today, we have with us two of the three co-authors of a book, Seeing White, An Introduction to White Privilege and Race. We have Jean Holly and Amy Esselman. Their third author is Unsabbatical in India, Ramya Vijaya, unfortunately could not join us today. So we've got Jean and Amy here at least. And they're talking about the ins and outs of racism. And I guess there's one more obvious question that I want to ask you. I don't think you explicitly name this in the book, but everything has its pros and cons. Why is it important that we get rid of racism? Why do we want to eliminate racism? I guess maybe it's so obvious that one doesn't feel like one needs to answer this. >> I think for us, it's primarily a matter of justice that we all have a commitment to social justice. And we don't think justice can happen in our world without challenging both economically and socially and in every way the racism that we see to be so powerful at this point in the United States and other places. I'd like to add one other piece of evidence to what Amy was so beautifully explaining. And that is we use a study by the Education Trust, which is a not-for-profit organization that did a national study on schools across the United States and just as one little example of the ways in which segregation and racism happened, the Education Trust found that in districts in the United States that had the highest percentage of students of color versus districts in the United States that had the highest percentage of white students, there was a $1,000 gap per year per student in terms of how much funding the schools had. So if you were of color, you were very likely to have $1,000 less money each year for you put into your education. And that's Amy and I and Romeo were all educators, so we're really acutely aware of what a big gap that is and how it would so profoundly impact the quality of education that a person would receive for that is another reason, right? That's simply profoundly unfair. We want to challenge that. I ask the question not because I'm in favor of racism. In fact, I'm very diametrically opposed to it. But in terms of understanding what gets rid of racism, I think it's probably important that we understand what the advantage is, at least to some people or maybe to a society as a whole, of racism is. So for instance, the fact that Japanese have very strong racial identity and can look down on the Koreans because they're not Japanese. What advantages does that have to a culture? Well, we argue in our book by using cultural materialism that elites benefit from racism and that they benefit because by racism, there's a number of ways, but one simple way is that racism in the United States and our particular history has been a sort of dividing conqueror phenomenon where the white working class in the US has traditionally refused to align with and to organize with people of color. And that's meant that they've had less power. The white working class has in a sense, you know, shot themselves on the foot by refusing to align across racial groups because they could have been a bigger movement. Have they aligned across racial groups by being separate? It's easier, for example, big business to, you know, if white workers are striking, then Napoleon workers of color have crossed the picket line. So there's all kinds of ways that it's a practical matter that, you know, there are people who really benefit by racism and that in the end, not only people of color are harmed by racism. And an additional argument that we also made, Jean said that so well, that white people are also harmed by racism. Of course, you know, individuals of color are very much harmed by racism, but as Jean was saying, white working class individuals would probably have gained much more power in terms of bargaining and if they had worked on focusing on issues of class rather than issues of race. And so racism has harmed those individuals. But also, one very powerful piece, Linda Brent's incidence in the life of a slave girl memoir, brings out the ways that any individual who isn't at the very highest of echelon of power will be harmed by that power that very few people hold. And so, for example, white American women at the time of slavery in the United States were very much lacking power in some respects while having a horrifying amount of power over individuals that they owned and other respects. And so, white women would expect that their husbands would be having sex with enslaved women, raping enslaved women, you know, sex that really couldn't be consensual, for example, and that they were just expected to quietly sit by and accept that because they had the power that they had. And so, you know, as Jean was saying, there's so many ways that cultural materialism will reveal that people will sometimes accept a little bit of power that is sold to them when they might be able to achieve so much more power if they gave up that little bit of power that is promised to them so that they were on equal footing with all others. David Rotiger is someone we use in our book and he draws. He's a contemporary historian, a really wonderful historian who works at the University of Illinois. He draws from the work of W.E.B. DuBois in arguing that what white people gained by identifying as white and distinct from black people was a way, what he called a "wage of whiteness." So, they earned a kind of privilege through the whiteness that replaced perhaps the higher wages they could have earned by organizing across the racial divides. And so, he claims that there is this small, you know, benefit that they have white privilege, but that in the end, it's a benefit that harms them more than it helps them that, as I said before, really ends up being a way to divide and conquer instead of, you know, people working across racial lines to organize and demand more just working conditions in all kinds of ways. Clearly, the issue we have to deal with in the United States is white racism. I've had the privilege of living in Africa for a couple years, so I've been able to see what it is like to be the minority, even one of power and privilege, which I still was when I was a white person in Africa. But I think maybe one of the most telling experiences I had was visiting to Rwanda, where the Hutu Tutsi slaughter happened back 17, 18 years ago. In that case, the Hutu and Tutsis considered themselves to be of different races, although maybe to us, that would have been invisible racism, and we couldn't see the difference. Clearly, racism happens around the world, even though it's a European-based, I guess, here. Again, I want to come back to the idea of what is the advantage of racism? Why do we see it in Japan and in Africa and in the U.S.? Obviously, colonialism, there was an advantage to the colonialists, the imperialists, as they moved out and wanted to take control of other peoples. What is the big advantage? And then, from your point of view in the book, what can we do to get rid of it if that advantage still exists? Yeah, well, as you noted, there is this powerful history of colonization and slavery that's happened that's been global and predominantly perpetrated in the last five, six, seven hundred years by Europeans, yet at the same time, which I think is a really important thing to point out. People who are of European descent don't have a corner on the market of racism, so as we argue in the beginning of our bulk race is not biological, so white people are also not biologically more prone to be racist than other groups, that these phenomena happen historically through time in social situations, and it's developed in this way, in this particular way, with Europeans perpetrating some of the worst really human rights violations in our human history, and yet we're not the only ones who are capable of doing really atrocious things. It just happened this particular way globally in our history. And it's so powerful, the example of Rwanda, of really seeing that race is socially constructed, where from a perspective in the United States, many people wouldn't recognize the difference between Hutus and Tutsis, that that was an incredibly important distinction for those individuals, and an socially constructed one. One thing that we talk about in the book is that individuals, when they have privilege, tend to not recognize their own privilege. They tend to see, well, I'm just a normal person who gets what I deserve. We tend to believe in a myth of meritocracy, that if people in power tend to believe in a myth of meritocracy, that if we work hard, we'll get what we deserve. And so you gave the example of racism in Japan, where Japanese individuals who were very successful would be able to say, well, you know, I work really hard, and those Koreans, they're not working hard enough. That's why they have those problems. And so, often people in power will tend to want to hold on to that power and want to believe in untrobes that allow them to justify that power. Revealing that power, making that power visible, we think is incredibly important for starting to work on changing how power is held. So, some of the things that we talk about in the book are working on empathy. So, working on getting to know individuals from different groups. And so, we talk, among other things, about educational practices, such as Elliot Aronson and Colleagues' creation of the jigsaw classroom, of getting children in fourth grade to work closely with children of groups where there's been a lot of segregation. So, they were called into the Austin School District in the 1970s when the segregation was being forced in that school district. They found that Mexican-American students were keeping to themselves, white-American students were keeping to themselves, African-American students were keeping to themselves. And the researchers created a way to challenge the students, to work closely together, to need to rely on each other, to have equal status in the classroom, which is remarkably different than what it had been before. And so, they created a system where the students were teaching each other pieces of the material, and they needed to learn from each other in order to succeed in the classroom. And it was profoundly powerful in terms of changing how the students understood those specific individuals in their group, and that a lot of empathy building occurred. And then, every six weeks, they would change up who was in the group. So, that pretty soon, as Elliot Aronson has argued, there was nobody left to hate. He uses that as a quote from a play. But if you get to know everyone on an individual basis where you really get to see them for who they are as a person, you start to realize that, "Oh, I've met a number of different Mexican-American students." And they were all different from each other, but they were all really neat people I could connect with. It's going to make it really difficult to hate Mexican-Americans. And so, that was one very psychological approach that we talked about. And I'd love to hear Jean talk a bit about another approach that we talked about, which was the guaranteed income. So, we argue the challenge to racism has to happen on multiple levels. And it's very important that white people begin to understand the ways in which they benefit from racism, and so that they can begin to challenge racism in real ways in their own lives. And we claim that it's really, really important that racism be challenged on an economic level as well as on an individual level. So, some anti-racist movements in the United States have done good work with white people becoming increasingly a conscious of the ways in which they act in racist manners or have racist beliefs. And I think that's really important for white people to do. But we also want anti-racist work to happen on an economic level so that we look at our history, for example, in the United States, where we've had profoundly unjust economic systems that have perpetrated the power of white people over the power of people of color. Slavery is, of course, the classic example. But post-lavery, there was Jim Crow through segregation, legalized segregation through most of the United States. And that was pretty alive and well, well into the 1950s and 1960s. And today, we continue to have not legalized, but very real, segregation throughout the United States. And that plays a powerful role in the access to resources that people have. So, one way we suggest that things could be made more just economically is through the guaranteed income. And the guaranteed income is an idea that's coming on, on and off again, to the last 100, 150 years or so. In fact, the person who put it forth and really got closest to implementing it was actually Nixon, a Republican. But the idea of the guaranteed income is that every single person in the United States, and we argue this should happen on a global level, that every single person gets a guaranteed minimum income. And that's, you know, we say that income should go to everyone rich and poor. And what it would do is play the role of the safety net that would pull people up out of extreme poverty, allow them access to the very basic needs that we all have, you know, food and shelter and clothing and so on. And then from there, people can have a better chance at having a fair access to good educational systems and other things that allow them to develop and do a whole variety of things to have real choices in their lives for the rest of their lives for their community. The topic today is seeing white, an introduction to white privilege and race. And we have two, three co-authors with us here today. Jean Holly and Amy Ashleman are here with us, and Ramya Vijaya is not here because she's in India at the moment. We've made it clear that race is not biologically based, or at least not predominantly. I mean, there may be some threads of a couple genes that relate to some hair color or something, but that really, the essence of it is social definition. One of the things that I wonder if race becomes important in the discussion, and in terms of pros and cons, of what it can do for or against us, is facets of social identity, like the Protestant work ethic. I think of it in another way, because I lived in Togo in West Africa for two years. One of the things I got to observe was how closely families work with and take care of each other, and particularly the vice principal of the school that I taught at. He had a very well-paying job. He could have advanced considerably if he had his money for himself. But in fact, because of the way that their society and culture works, Togalese specifically, in this case, some of his money went to help his brother and sister, who lived with them with their kid. He had three cousins who he was supporting, who were living with him, putting them through school. He's sending money to his mother. Whereas in the US, he might have been mainly for himself, kept most of his money for himself. His culture dictated that the family stick together. When those kind of cultures, and we certainly have that in the US with Latino, or with African-Americans, or folks from Asia, different countries, the Hmong, and so on, who have different cultural ways of being. How do we address that in terms of racism? Because it's actually culturalism. It's not race working there. But it's so determinative in terms of how economic change happens within a family or within a culture. Well, I would argue that those are really powerful and beautiful ways of living human lives, and that is to be committed to one another. I think they make a nice example to challenge the idea that economics has proposed in the last couple of decades, and that is that humans are naturally competitive, and that they make rational choices for their own individual selves, and that that's in. Essentially, there's been this idea that that's human nature. We have so many cross-cultural places where we see different things happening, where people are not competing with one another necessarily, but in fact, actually putting other people's interests before their own. I don't think that slows anything down. It's, I think, a useful thing for people who don't come from a culture like that to look at and think about, and it's also, I think, just another call for justice on an individual and economic level. So if we had a more fair distribution of resources in the world today, people could have their own cultural experience and be more individualistic and competitive or more family-oriented or whatever it was that they are and that they come from without having this profoundly unequal access to resources at the same time. So I think, for me, and I think for all of us in the book, that's sort of a bottom line. Amy, what would you add to that? Just to emphasize what Jean was saying, a concrete example might be to look at, you know, what are the pressures that individuals are likely to face? So a given workforce or a given school might look at, did this principle need to do certain things that may be having flex time rather than a traditional set number of hours that the individual works every week? It could flex time give that individual a chance to perform the job even better than the person already was or could schools offer late arrival or an early dismissal if siblings need to be helping out at home taking care of younger siblings and different ways of looking that if we understand the world to be one normative way and we're not taking into account that there are these different cultural standards and there can be this real emphasis within groups of the importance of taking care of friends and kin, then if we are to understand the diversity within an organization, how could we better serve the people in that organization? I assume both of you have read or encountered the ideas that were included in the book, Guns, Germs and Steel, where the fundamental question is, why did the European folks tend to dominate the world? How did that come to happen? What was the advantage? What made the difference and maybe it was because they're more racist or maybe it's because they innovated in other ways? One of the ideas for instance that he addresses is that in terms of writing, even though China had a very well developed civilization back when Europeans were very much in dark ages, that their form of writing slowed down the development of the intelligentsia, the elite, the class, the folks of people who could read and write and therefore disseminate ideas more quickly. So that's just one facet of that book and he addresses many others. So my question is, have you encountered that book and those ideas and how does that dovetail or not with racism as one of the modes of, let's say, achieving the upper hand? We have encountered the book. We didn't actually do enough with it in this edition and we're hoping to have a second edition soon of our book, Seeing White and that would be one of the texts we really need to address more directly in our next edition. We discussed global history through the work of Emmanuel Wallerstein, who's a social historian. He's a sociologist who does social historical work and he essentially looks at our contemporary situation in terms of phenomena like race and racism as being the outcome of a larger global history where certain groups, I mean, he really kind of starts with particulars, right, that in England and in the western European area of the world, elites had an immense amount of power over the vast majority who were peasants. So there was this tiny group of very powerful elites and the most of the population were extremely poor peasants and the peasants would work the land for food but it wasn't understood to be their land. They had to give some a kiff which is essentially like a wrench from what they produced to elites for the privilege of using the land. So we have this system where elites slowly began for a whole variety of reasons to enclose their land. It was called the enclosure movement and it started in the most western nations and it kind of moved out from there where they began to enclose their land and actually raise sheep and the sheep were being used for the wool for clothing. And as that happened, peasants had less and less access to land and ended up migrating to cities to look for new kinds of jobs and, you know, then industrialization started to happen in western Europe. So with all of this change in that particular locality, western Europeans were interested in accessing resources in other parts of the world including food to feed the populations, you know, these masses that were increasingly congregating in cities. So there was this push to go more global and to actually begin to get agrarian resources from often in the beginning. It was eastern Europe and then other resources such as enslaved humans to grow crops in places like the Caribbean for sugar which began to be sold. And, you know, so we explore a tiny bit and not perhaps as much as, you know, would be good of Wallerstein's work on the modern world system and use that as a way to understand this history that is a complicated history and that has a lot of elements to it. But, you know, we argue that the end result of the history is where we are now, that we can't understand our situation right now in the world in terms of race without exploring that shared global history. One of the things that you address in the book, which I found fascinating because it goes so counter to the cultural narrative we have here in the US, you talk about multiculturalism and whereas that's been touted as kind of the solution to racism in this country, you point out its shortcomings as well as the positive effects it has on the culture. You care to illustrate some of those, why isn't multiculturalism the solution? Well, we argue that a non-critical multiculturalism is problematic and we encourage educators and different people putting together different events, for example, to think critically about social justice issues and looking at issues of power and how to infuse those into a critical use of multiculturalism. So, we have a great concern that if multicultural event looked at very surface level issues, at issues of dress, issues of food, music, that that's maybe going to be a lot of fun and an interesting celebration of difference, but that it's not going to get to the core of these hard-hitting issues that you've been asking these fantastic questions about, about why is racism important? Why is it important to understand why certain groups have had greater advantages than others? Why is it important to reveal privilege? So, we really want for anyone thinking of a celebrate diversity day or some other sort of multicultural event to be looking at ways to address those issues because without them, multicultural events might be feel good events, but they're really not going to get at the core of this problem. Almost all of us, I think, experience some kind of discomfort when we talk about the racism that comes to us natively as being white people in a white-dominated society. And when we look at that, we feel guilty. In your case, Amy, because you're a professor of psychology, maybe you have some insight into this, is it necessary to go through those feelings of guilt or maybe a little bit of self-loathing because we've been consciously or unconsciously part of the machinery of racism in our society? How do we deal with that? Well, Janet Helms is an African-American psychologist who has looked at how whites understand their own whiteness and has looked at a developmental model of this. It's very common at first when exposed to issues of racism to resist seeing oneself as racist. At this point in our culture, to call someone racist, another fantastic African-American psychologist, Beverly Daniel Tatum, says, "You know, to call someone a racist, it feels like being slapped in the face. And as a white woman, I completely agree. You know, I've had wonderful friends over the years point out my racism. It feels terrible when they do it. And I am so thankful for them for being a good enough friend that they were willing to slap me in the face when I needed it. And so Janet Helms, this developmental psychologist, she argues that there'll be a pretty predictable process that someone goes through when being exposed to ideas of racism. And so an initial stage will be to feel a lot of guilt and to want to avoid that guilt, maybe by wanting to not talk about racism or not have to think critically about racism, and that working beyond that guilt and starting to understand that, as Beverly Daniel Tatum argues, we live in a racist world. We're not responsible for the racism that came before us, but we are responsible for what we do from here on out and how we respond to racism. That starting to recognize that we do have power, but we also aren't solely responsible for racism. I think that there's a way to develop a real sense of moving forward, letting go of some of that guilt. So one of the things from the very first chapter is that we make an argument that guilt is probably not a productive thing to be feeling. So that's not our goal. We don't want to encourage people to feel guilt, but we want to encourage people to think critically. And we acknowledge that guilt might be something people have to work through and get beyond so that they really can engage critically with these issues. I think that probably you have to run pretty quickly. So I'm wondering if we can have one last question. And that is, what does the U.S. look like if we successfully go in the direction that you would have us do, that we would be addressing seeing the white privilege that is here? What would we look like if we actually address that and came to a position, I think, of true equality? I think it's hard to know. It's a wonderful question. And I think that out of, if we really came to a true equality, to some great extent, where we had economic justice and where people were respected on an individual level as well, and where our segregation, such as it is, we're a very segregated country in the United States today, if that were challenged, and also to that people had access to the possibility of living in all kinds of places. I think that would be, we're arguing, a really beautiful and powerful thing for everyone that everyone would benefit from that, but what it would look like and what it would mean for us. I mean, that's almost like the most exciting part, right? With more justice, who knows what all we could do, who knows what we would become. It's fun to play with thinking about it, but I think it's hard to know given the history we have. We aren't there yet for sure. It's interesting to imagine what metrics would we want to have in place. As an empiricist, I love to measure things. And so looking at the federal government, for example, how many women senators would we want to see? How many African-American, how many Latino, Latina senators would we want to see? How many Asian-American to look at issues of average income, to look at issues of how much money is being spent per student at public schools across the United States. There's so many ways that just revealing the racism helps me to see what the goals are that any student, regardless of race, will have equal access to a very substantial and powerful education is such an important goal. And thinking about the potential power of that, you know, seems bad. It's hard to imagine, but it's so powerful to imagine at the same time. I love the vision of this world that we could go into where everyone's gifts are accepted into the mix. They're all lifted up. We've become a different nation, a richer nation, a nation where everyone is counted and fully counted. And I thank you for playing the part that you're playing by writing, seeing white and introduction to white privilege and race. Of course, we've been speaking with you, Jean Holly and Amy Eshelman, and we'll send the regards out to Ramya and Vijaya over in India right now. It's a great vision that you're leading us toward. I thank you for doing the work, and I thank you for joining me for Spirit in Action. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing.