Defining “Racism”
Episode 10 from the Educational Equity Emancipation podcast.
(This transcript has edited for clarity and readability.)
Hey there, my equity warriors. As always, I'm glad that we are together again today. You know, you can't do the work of anti-racism unless you fully understand and embrace the concept of racism as being something that is systemic; that is baked into the very fabric of the United States, and our laws, and our institutions. So, I want to talk to you today about that thing that scares so many of us: racism.
Before I finish, today, I'm going to make sure that you have an extraordinarily clear visual, a lens, or a framework. No, a template. Something that you can rely on to understand what racism is. And with that understanding, how you can go about the work of being or becoming an anti-racist and dismantling the systemic racism within which we operate.
So this is one of those where if you're at recess…
Turn off the lights.
Close the door.
Lock the door.
Ignore the knocks until the bell rings.
Turn off all that background noise.
And if you are a copious note taker, grab something so that you can take some notes.
Are you ready? Three words:
race
racist
racism
In every single workshop, every session, where we are focused on DEI&A, I have to start with this foundation. First, of race.
What is this social construct that governs so much, not only of our thinking, but about our day-to-day behavior? And as we talk about race, racism, and racists, I want you to sort of take this larger context of the five stages of grief:
denial
anger
bargaining
depression, and
acceptance.
I spend a lot of time on these three concepts in my sessions, because not so much for people of color, because we live with this concept of race and racism and people who are racist impacting our lives on a daily basis, and in so many different ways. But for the White people who are in my sessions.
Very often, they've had the luxury of ignoring race, not recognizing that the race that they are impacts their day-to-day existence and their day-to-day lived experience very differently from ours. And that these concepts have impacted our lives from a very, very early age.
The challenge, though, is that discussions of race and racism are kind of in your face now. So, it's hard to escape from it.
And so, for some people, they are in those early stages of grief. They're in denial. They're in anger. And they're doing a whole lot of bargaining.
Let's start with the concept of racist. What it is to be a racist, or wanting to make the actions of some people of color racist.
Now, this, this part of the workshops I do, takes a lot of time. This is the concept, first and foremost, that creates the most “white women tears.”
The denials: “I don't see color.” “This doesn't happen in our classrooms today.” “No teachers would ever do these things.”
There's the anger that comes when people's lived experience… when people of color within that workshop share their lived experience about their educational journey and the first time they had a racist incident in school. I've had folks talk about kindergarten teachers, and experiencing racism as a four- or five-year-old child in a kindergarten classroom, at the hands of their teacher.
So, there's the anger:
“But I didn't do that!”
And then there's the bargaining. Because again, to shove this to the background; to say that it's not important; to say that it doesn't really matter; to say that it doesn't exist anymore...
They have to find something to frame a different narrative.
So, I'm always asked, “But what about Black and Brown kids who don't like each other? For Black and Brown gangs who are fighting over turf, or, you know, seem to just don't get along?” And it seems to have that racial connotation to it. “Isn't that racism?”
No, it's not.
And here's why:
Because to understand what racist is, or racism is, we have to understand that racism is a system. It's not just a thing that one person or another person has or behaves upon.
It's baked into, structured by, a system.
A system that structures opportunity based on race.
It is a system that assigns value based on race.
And Black and Brown folks are not creating these systems. And when we talk about race, we're talking about those physical properties: skin color, hair texture, the fullness of lips, (naturally, not surgically).
This system that looks at people and assigns them as Black, Latinx, Asian, Indigenous, or White.
This system that says that people other than White are going to have an unfair disadvantage based on that race that they belong to. And these are systems that have the power to damage health, to damage mental health, because of the structure of the system: the laws and policies that have been put into place to keep people of color from having power over the system.
These systems are the ones that control the opportunities for education, for housing, for employment.
These systems create outcomes that show in the disparities in health.
Remember, the beginning of COVID? One of the greatest populations of people being unfairly or disproportionately impacted by death from COVID at a very early stage were people of color. Black folks in particular.
This is a system that results in the income gaps and the wealth gaps that we see in this country.
This is the system that creates the disproportionality in justice outcomes and encounters with law enforcement that we see in this country.
And the system that seems to make it okay for us to have that disproportionality in justice.
And this is a system that allows the suppression of votes of people of color. And I say suppression of votes of people of color, because nowhere ever have I heard, and as I challenged the people in my sessions to give me an example of, where White vote has been suppressed.
And they can't.
Because it doesn't happen.
Because even post-Civil War, when there were very poor Whites, and even some affluent Blacks, poor Whites didn't have to pass a literacy test to vote. But affluent blacks did.
So, voter suppression. Yes! Is alive and well today.
And even though that sounds very political, it is impacting our school systems. Because our school systems have to operate under our state legislatures. It is a system that unfairly advantages specific people who belong to social- and political- dominant groups. And those are not Black and Brown folks.
So, to put this into a framework that is very helpful, I hope, for educators:
Most of us are very familiar with either multi-tiered support services (MTSS) or RTI (response to intervention) systems. And typically, those are three- or four- tiered systems.
Now think about your tier one or tier two and tier three. Get that visual in your head. I'm going to give you a four-tiered system, because racism operates in a four-tiered system.
In tier one RTI system, tier one is general education. Right? This is what everybody gets, this is our core instruction. This is the way that we build our entire instructional framework. Right?
Tier one, in terms of racism is structural. In tier one are the laws, the rules, the policies in our society that give the continued unfair advantage to some people (White people, in this case), and unfair or harmful treatment of other people because of their race.
Those other people being melanated people, people of color. So, tier one everybody gets. We all operate under the laws of the United States or the state in which you live. That's our tier one.
Tier two, just like in education in an RTI system, tier two is just a subset of tier one. It's a piece of it. Not everyone gets that piece. Not everyone is part of tier two.
The Four Tiers of Racism
Tier two is institutional. So, think about a school district, or a school and institution. It could be the company that you work for if you're not working in public education.
Tier two in racism is the discrimination within that organization that disproportionately impacts people of color.
The discrimination within a school or school district that disproportionately impacts Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous children.
That's the disproportionality that you see in suspensions and expulsions.
That is the achievement gap that we see between Black and White, or Brown and White. That's our tier two.
Tier three, just like in an RTI system, is an even smaller subset. Tier three is interpersonal.
Tier three: these are the jokes, the harassments, the threats.
Tier three is, as I say, “What White people do to people of color up close.” The micro aggressions.
It could be the teacher who disproportionately sends Black boys out of her classroom for disciplinary issues that she ignores when it's a White child that does it.
That's tier three.
And tier four, an even smaller subset. Tier four is where you find the individual racist. This is personal.
These are the biased responses that happen when an individual is interacting with other people who are considered to be racially different from themselves.
Now, just because you're White, and you're operating in a systemic racism environment, that doesn't make you a racist.
I don't know how many times I have to say this over and over and over in sessions. Just because you're White, just because you're operating within a school district that is clearly benefiting in some way, or fostering systemic oppression, systemic racism, that doesn't make you a racist by the very nature that you're White.
Even though you benefit from that system.
Because it was created to support you.
And so, this is where that grief process really starts to kick in. This is where we get the anger and the denial:
“I didn't create the system!” “This isn't me!”
And that's okay. If that's you, and you think it's wrong, then you probably want to become a better ally.
And to the question that I also get quite frequently, the question of whether or not people of color can be racist?
The answer is, “No!”
Now you can be an idiot.
You can be an absolute jerk.
You can be a jackass.
You can be filled with tremendous self-hate and anger for the color of your skin, and being locked into the systemic racism upon which this nation was built and within which the organization or organizations that you belong to operate in and possibly are complicit.
But you can't be a racist.
Because that system – think of that outer layer in your RTI – that tier one system was designed to keep you from ever having the power to impact the outcomes of people who are racially different from you.
As a person of color, you can live in what I call “the sunken place.” Where there's some part of your brain that's telling you that if you just subscribe to White supremacist thought, and if you just act that way, like they want you to, then maybe you'll be accepted by those who hold the political power.
For those people of color who are in that sunken place – and we are constantly, in the news, seeing people of color in the sunken place – you're still at that denial and anger and trying to gain power against people who look like you.
In a system that was designed to oppress you as well.
It won't work.
So, what do we do? Much like RTI, we have to examine the structure. We have to examine our protocols. We have to examine the resources at each tier in order to make sure that we are doing better.
So, at tier four, that very small circle in the middle, that personal level: You have to look at yourself.
If you got my free gift, if you went to 3epodcast.com and signed up and downloaded the free gift, then that's that first checkpoint in working on yourself first.
Looking at your own personal actions and doing some critical self-examination. Checking your own actions, your thoughts, the things that you say.
You do that work and you can get out of the racist bubble.
If you're in it.
Even if you're not in it, you still want to do that work just to make sure that you don't have some, what D'Angelo refers to as “nice racism” going on.
Moving outward at tier three, that interpersonal level:
Call out the racist behaviors that you see. Call out the racist structure and system that you're operating in.
If you're a White ally, if you consider yourself to be an ally, you've got to put something on the line. You cannot be an ally without being willing to risk your own personal safety.
And you have to realize you have so much more power in calling out something that is racist than does a person of color. Because of the structure of the system that we are in that assigned you more power, that assigned you greater credibility, because of the color of your skin.
Now remember that interpersonal is what White people do to people of color up close.
And if you consider yourself an ally, you're saying something about it.
Otherwise, you're just a bystander.
And if you're a bystander, you're complicit.
And if you are complicit, you are equally as racist as that person who openly says or does something that is clearly racist.
And then at tier two, institutional, the school or school district that you operate in, the company that you work for:
If you're an organizational leader, ask, examine
Are you providing the opportunities for professional learning to move your people to becoming active anti-racists?
To move your organization to a place where it is not discriminating against people of color?
Have you examined the policies, the procedures, the norms, the opportunities of your organization and the glass ceilings of your organization?
Have you looked around the higher and highest levels of your leadership and ever wondered why it does not reflect the demographic of this nation as a whole?
That's what you do at tier two.
And then at tier one, systemic, this country that we live in, the laws and institutions in it, that's politics. As individuals, the one thing we can do is vote as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.
The lives of our children and our grandchildren depend on our actions.
You can run for office, because we can't change the system without getting into it.
And then you can join me every week. Send me your questions, topics and request to AskDrBerry.com. And I will answer those questions and bring you information and experts to help address those topics.
As always, don't worry about the things you cannot change. Change the things you can no longer accept.
I'll see you next time.
