Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 254: White People Talking About Whiteness | Eleanor Hancock

Episode Date: June 8, 2020

Many, if not most, white people don't think of themselves as racialized. Race, we might tell ourselves, is an issue for people who have different skin colors than ours: black people, Hispanic people, Asian people, indigenous people, etcetera. But, of course, white is a racial category. (Important side note: race, for the record, is not a biological thing; it's socially constructed.) Sadly, the white people who seem to have most clearly grasped that white is a race are white nationalists. But now it's time for white people to see whiteness, to talk to one another about it. This, many people in the racial justice world argue, is the key first step towards white people engaging fully in creating a more equitable society. My guest is Eleanor Hancock, who is the Executive Director of a group called White Awake, which employs "educational resources and spiritual practices" to engage white people "in the creation of a just and sustainable society." Eleanor was recommended to me by Sebene Selassie, who is one of the core teachers on the Ten Percent Happier app. Eleanor and I talk about why this work is so important, why so many white people resist it, the barriers white people face when they begin the work, the role of meditation, and the problematic aspects of white wokeness in these discussions. Where to find Eleanor Hancock & White Awake online: Website: https://whiteawake.org/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/White-Awake-325759947539605/ For updates on upcoming courses from White Awake, check our their website and social media pages. Other Resources Mentioned: Assata Shakur / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assata_Shakur COINTELPRO / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO Kara Dansky / https://www.shambhalamountain.org/teacher/kara-dansky/ Anne Braden / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Braden Ann Atwater / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Atwater C. P. Ellis / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._P._Ellis 7 thoughts on “Roots Deeper than Whiteness” / https://whiteawake.org/2018/10/27/roots-deeper-than-whiteness/ Neoliberalism / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism Bacon's Rebellion / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon%27s_Rebellion Jacqueline Battalora / https://www.speakoutnow.org/speaker/jacqueline-battalora Down Home NC / https://downhomenc.org/ What is white supremacy? By Elizabeth 'Betita' Martinez / http://www.pym.org/annual-sessions/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2017/06/What_Is_White_Supremacy_Martinez.pdf Ian Haney López / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Haney_L%C3%B3pez Solidarity for Survival / https://www.davidbfdean.com/ian-haney-lopez Defund Police: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Says Budgets Wrongly Prioritize Cops Over Schools, Hospitals / https://www.democracynow.org/2020/6/1/keeanga_yamahtta_taylor_defund_us_police Birth of a White Nation / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riVAuC0dnP4 Who Invented White People? / http://uuwhiteness.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/READING_-Who-Invented-White-People.pdf Handout 2: Not Somewhere Else, But Here | Building the World We Dream About | Tapestry of Faith / https://www.uua.org/re/tapestry/adults/btwwda/workshop7/handout2 White Awake Summer Study & Action Group / https://mailchi.mp/whiteawake/study-support-action-summer-2020 Resources to support: List of Bail Funds for Protestors across the Country / https://bailfunds.github.io/ National Bail Fund Network / https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/nbfn-directory The Bail Project / https://bailproject.org/ Color Of Change / https://colorofchange.org/ Additional Resources: Ten Percent Happier Live: https://tenpercent.com/live Coronavirus Sanity Guide: https://www.tenpercent.com/coronavirussanityguide Free App access for Health Care Workers: https://tenpercent.com/care Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/eleanor-hancock-254 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. For ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, many, if not most white people, don't think of themselves as racialized. Race, we might tell ourselves, is a reality for people who have different skin colors than ours. Black people, Hispanic people, Asian people, Indigenous people, etc.

But of course, white is a race. Quick, important side note here. Race is not a biological thing. It is socially constructed. Sadly, the white people who seem to have most clearly grasped that white is a race are white nationalists. But now it is time for the rest of us white people to actually see whiteness and to talk to each other about it. This, many people in the racial justice world would argue, is the key first step toward white people engaging fully in creating a more equitable society. My guest today is Eleanor Hancock. She's the executive director of a group called White Awake, which employs, and I'm quoting

here, educational resources and spiritual practices to engage white people. And I'm quoting here again, in the creation of a just and sustainable society. End quote. Eleanor was recommended to me by Sebenei Salassi, who's one of the core teachers on the 10% happier app, and was on the show last week, in a really powerful episode, which I recommend you check out. In this episode, Eleanor and I talk about why this work is so important, why so many white people resist it, the barriers, white people face when they actually do begin the work, the role of meditation, and the problematic aspects of white wokeness in these discussions. Here we go. Eleanor Hancock. Well, nice to meet you virtually. Thanks again for doing this. Absolutely. So I'd be curious to hear how you came to this work. How and why you came to this work. I would start with just a little bit about my background and the different stages in my life that have led up to it.

I grew up in West Texas, kind of a mid-sized city, very conservative environment. I'm solid Gen X, so, you know, I didn't, you know, I was, we had an integrated public school system. But that said, there's, I think, a lot of, kind of, just default segregation that happens socially. So my developing awareness of the differences that folks of color, the differences of their experiences in the United States in particular versus my experiences of white person, that began to happen for me in graduate school. It was a variety of different circumstances that led to that. One of them like having a roommate that was reading

the autobiography of Asada Shakur and just realizing, you know, I knew about, I knew about Amnesty International and that there could be folks who are imprisoned for political reasons, but I just was shocking to me to realize that was something that happened here in the United States. And then the other thing was very influential to me. Sorry, sorry to jump in. I hate interrupting my guests, but it might be worth just explaining a little bit of a

satish Accord in that backstory just so people know. So she's, you know, part of the Black Panthers and during this entire time period where the FBI was targeting civilians through their Cointel program and a lot of just extreme aggression on many different levels, including the outright murder of Fred Hampton while he was sleeping in his bed at night. And it was a political assassination. And during that time period, they were able to capture Asada and create these charges against her that kept her in prison for a long time, and she escaped to Cuba.

You know, I think that all of that history, I would really encourage people to read about that. You can look up Cointel Pro and the FBI and understand the destruction that occurred to a lot of the movements that brought us so much during the 60s, the 50s, 60s, and 70s, the ways that they were destroyed. And part of what happens when you infiltrate and destroy a movement from within is not only

harm it externally, but you create so much paranoia and violence within that then people also begin to destroy one another in different ways. So in terms of my own, you know, just how I came to this work, I try to belabor the story too much, but I was in a series of classes in graduate school with a Chicana professor who was teaching performance art, and this was in the late 90s. And I really, you know, learned a lot about what at the time we would have simply called identity politics through art. So, yeah, being part of those performance art classes for the entire time, I was in graduate school, was really an eye opener. That was also during this apatista rebellion, and so, and we were all just starting to get online, and that was part of what was so incredible about that time period, this apatistas of Southern Mexico, who are indigenous people who had risen up against their own governments, specifically in response to NAFTA,

the North American Free Trade Agreement. And there are a lot of aspects of my worldview that developed during that time period. And then as I lived my life, I have a biracial daughter, her father's African-American, during the time that we were married. I had the privilege of spending a lot of time with his family and developing strong relationships with them and experiencing myself as the minority.

I think that that's a unique experience that not every, a lot of people don't have that opportunity to be inside of somebody else's space, racially speaking, and have to understand their norms and their experience and adapt to that. I think that's a really valuable experience. But at any rate, this particular project came about because I met a Buddhist practitioner who was part of a small group here in Washington, DC, that were bringing their mindfulness practice to their own study of racism. And this is a group of white people. And I had been kind of at a personal journey of thinking about whiteness myself throughout my entire adult life,

but it was novel to me that white people would get together and have a purposeful study together. And then it was especially really valuable what they brought to this work and that they were mindfulness practitioners. And so they were bringing their mindfulness practice, especially really valuable what they brought to this work and that they were mindfulness practitioners. And so they were bringing their mindfulness practice, which a lot of times what happens in anti-racism,

education spaces is more intellectual, it can be kind of sharp, it can be rigid. Sometimes it's outright hostile. I know a lot of people work really hard to create, environments where people can learn and not feel attacked, but to have a space that centered curiosity and compassion and our heartfelt experience as we're learning about material and the intellect as part of that. It was really a beautiful thing to kind of come into relationship with.

And I began creating some curriculum. It was really designed to just be on a website for people to use to do their own work and then had the opportunity to begin doing some workshops in the local Buddhist community. And eventually now we do online workshops and for a pretty extensive network of folks coming from a lot of different backgrounds.

And were you a meditator at this time? I had been introduced to mindfulness through just the Western therapy practices as like a great emotional regulation, grounding, technique, just good mental health, that kind of thing. I'm not a meditator per se. Is meditation a part of the white awake curriculum? Not long extensive meditations necessarily, but yes, our curriculum always includes some type of contemplative

or reflective process. One person that I've worked with early on, Karadanski, who's a meditator and also a lawyer, she's a shambhala practitioner and she had developed a simple practice that I use a lot now, which is to contemplate a statement and first notice how you feel in your body and then you repeat the statement and notice what emotions are arising and then you repeat the statement and notice what thoughts are arising. So we use different techniques like that to help people get a little space, which is really a lot of what mindfulness is and meditation practices is to get some space from things and be aware of different aspects of what's going on in our relationship to them.

So you were talking before about the difference between the bulk as I understood it of anti-racist workshops for white people and the approach that you saw among these meditators, where it was less intellectualized, less sharp. Can you say more about that and how it's informed your current approach? Yeah, I would say at the heart of it was to love and care for other white people And to come from that space, you know, there's a great quote from Anne Brayden who was a White woman in the South who had an incredible leaves an incredible legacy as a anti-racist activist. And I believe this is her quote.

She said, you cannot organize people that you hate. And I think the thing that is really challenging for white folks, one thing is that for those of us who have that all-how moments, whenever it happens for us, or maybe we grew up in such a way that we're always aware of just how bad racism and white supremacy are. And the kind of privileges that we have, often privileges simply something that everybody should have,

but it's denied to certain people, they shouldn't be a privilege to feel safe to walk down the street, you know? That's just like, that should be normal. And it shouldn't be a privilege to feel safe to walk down the street. You know, that's just like, that should be normal. And it shouldn't be a privilege to have like decent education for your kids or what have you, all these things. But at any rate, when we realize that our lives that we're treated differently than other people, and we realize how just how bad it is for folks of color. It's really easy to have a lot of self-directed anger and hostility.

It can be towards ourselves personally. It can also just simply be to other white people. And often that's a stage that people go through. Is this anger and this kind of zealous energy of wanting to go out and tell white people how terrible you are and all of that. So sometimes that happens and that can be part of kind of an emotional landscape. But yeah, I think that, I mean, we have to look at everything that develops in our society and context with the larger society. We live in a world that's dominated by a profit motive. Our society that continues to degrade and devalue people in every way,

including our human connections with one another, it's incredibly violent. And it's difficult to create a culture and a way of being in a way of communicating, even if we want change, we want good and righteous change in the world, we are also conditioned by the society that we're in. And so I think it's very important to develop these,

in a Buddhist term, maybe these loving kindness practices and include them in everything we do and bring curiosity. I mean, those were things that were really powerful for me in spending a lot of time in Buddhist communities when I started doing this work, both learning from them and holding workshops with Buddhists is the priority of curiosity. Often there's so much rage and anger there's so much rage and anger, justifiable, but there's so much frustration and anger on all sides.

I mean, no one wants to be implicated in this horrible violence. And really, human beings, and this is part of a Buddhist teaching, and it's just a basic truth of life, as mammals, we are geared to suffer with other people if they are suffering. We have to build up walls and defenses not to. And so one of the things that's happened to white people historically, and part of how we're socialized, is to have these incredible defenses in place, so that our hearts are not breaking.

It's denying people the truth at an educational level and many other levels. It's also over intellectualizing, so we're not so attached to our emotions and our heart. And that's something, you know, there's a colleague of mine who's Korean who can relate that to different social hierarchies in a different social setting. And that in general, when you have a social hierarchy, the farther up you, the hierarchy you go,

and this would be true, not just around race, but around class as well. So folks who are upper class folks, who are more well to do, or upper limit mobile, will also be true of them, regardless of their color, as opposed to working class folks. But at any rate, there tends to be more and more of a disconnection between the mind and the heart and the body.

You get more and more intellectual, you get more rigid, and you just, you have to be because a society that has a violent hierarchy is dehumanizing to every single person that's involved. And if you're higher up, part of the way is fast to humanizing to use, you have to shut down part of your natural mammalian way of connecting and feeling. It's part of our socialization. It's part of how white people are socialized to obtain a particular status quo. And when you look at the history of how whiteness was created, that status quo is not in our interest. I mean, there mean, there's a way of it's interested, nobody's interest, right?

But materially speaking, it only serves the interest of the people at the very highest economic point in the society, which now after 40 years of neoliberalism and no antitrust activity at all that the wealth gap is so huge, it is so stark that there's really just a handful of people that are economically benefiting from this situation. And here in the United States, in our own particular way,

we're all suffering from these really harsh economic circumstances, and then now we're seeing, the folks who in the context of this pandemic are essential workers, are the lowest paid, and the least valued. They can't get their basic safety requirements met. Even though they are keeping our whole society running, we see this economic ladder that is very harsh.

And we see the people at the bottom of that ladder overwhelmingly more folks of color. But it's not just folks of color. This is an economic system that's in place, and racism plays a role inside of that economic system. So we do have to humanize ourselves, and we also have to see what's going on structurally, and find ways of connecting with one another to address that on a collective level.

And so the flip side of this is that, of the harshness of like an anti-racism space or kind of a woke culture, is that it actually keeps us from connecting with people. And we need, in order to change society, we need to be able to connect with people that maybe we have a lot of differences with, you know? Like we're gonna need to connect,

not try to police how people talk, not try to make sure everybody's doing it, quote, unquote, the right way. We actually need to be building coalitions and looking for what we have in common so that we can take action on common needs. Okay, you said so much in there that I wanna talk about. So let me just start with a basic question.

It's not gonna pick up on the last thing you said about wokeness, which I do want to get to. And you also talked about the economy, the social and economic hierarchy you talked about, how whiteness, the history of whiteness, which I think we should also dive into and how it's not even that good for most white people, and upon a bunch of levels, including emotionally and structurally. But I think a more basic question before we get into all of those things is, why is it, I keep hearing in the limited amount of work I've done around, mostly around sort of using meditation to better understand our biases and to wake up internally and externally.

A thing that I keep hearing from black leaders and teachers on this is white people should spend time talking to white people about this. That's a really key ingredient toward moving toward a solution. So can you explain why you believe that to be the case? Yeah, well, there's a number of different reasons. You've already articulated one very important reason is that there's a number of different reasons and you've already articulated one very important reason is that there's a lot of education that needs to be done and Sometimes there's folks the color who want to be involved in that like there are

I mean, there's a beautiful story that was made into a movie of a deep friendship between Ann at water in Durham, North Carolina she was a a black woman who was a community organizer and her friendship with CPLis, who was a white man who was part of the clan. And she didn't mind educating him. She wanted to educate him. It was a joy for her. I mean, it wasn't that she was educating him as much as that they came into a relationship where they saw the needs that their respective communities had and the need to work together.

And there was a huge learning curve for CPLS as a member of the clan because he was in the clan. But when he saw that he was being manipulated by the higher, who was working poor working class, and he saw he was being manipulated and members of the clan were being manipulated to kind of keep the economic order of the city intact. Then it wasn't so hard for him to make that leap.

But in terms of why it's important for white people to talk to other white people, I mean, that's a lot of what this project is about, right? There is a space where white folks can come together. Most of our online courses are a caucus, meaning that they're specifically designed for one identity factor. So we have a course that's really just for people who are white. And I will, to be precise, I would say people who are socially classified as white. Because of course race is not a thing.

It's not a biological thing. It's a socially made up thing. We all live with a social classification in a racist apartheid, say, basically. So we have courses sometimes that are just for people who are classified as white because we can then unpack things together with one another without a variety of things happening. A lot of times white folks won't really open up. They'll feel self-conscious around folks of color. They'll also perform sometimes around folks of color. They want to look good. Very naturally, I'm not even as a criticism, I mean, I noticed myself doing it. I want to be the good white person, I want to do it all right, say it all. And then they also don't want to hurt

the person of color. And what can happen then is that you just, the conversation becomes stilted. And you're not able to really have an honest conversation. The other thing is, you know, sometimes I really think about it in terms of gender. Sometimes it's easier for us to think about some of these things if we were dealing with masculine and feminine, you know, dynamics in society,

in the ways that men are socialized, versus ways that women are socialized. And then obviously right now, we've got folks really bringing to the fore that the gender binary itself is constrictive. It's not completely how humanity expresses itself, but at any rate, there's work that men need to do around how they're socialized.

And I don't really know what it is. They need to know what women's experiences are in order to do that work, but they also need to take some time to reflect on what their experience is, how they have been socialized, which is inside of their experience that I'm not a part of because I wasn't socialized like that. I see it from the outside, they're experiencing it personally. And so I think there's, it's like a dance to be done.

We want to be informed by people who have a different social identity than our own, so that we know that we're doing good work, and we also want to be able to have that time and space to reflect on our own experience and understand how we get out of the negative socialization that we've experienced, how we develop something else. That is another reason, it's a different kind of reason, but it's interrelated as to why it's important for why people to talk to.

The other thing is like, there are people there and our networks. So in terms of social influence, you can influence the people that you have relationships with. And so our family members, you know, the folks are neighbors, the folks that we're in relationship with through civic organizations, churches, or what have you. They're the folks that we have relationships with. That is our sphere of influence. Some people more than others,

some people live in a more segregated world than others. That's just, that's been historically created. But that's kind of just common, you know, basic communication and community organizing. And is, is that we, we have a lot of influence inside of our own communities. And so we should use it. So what does the work look like?

So if I stand up for your course and I start doing this work, white people talking to other white people about race, what's on the agenda, what's on the curriculum? Oh, sure. One thing we're gonna do this summer, which is a little different than what we've done before, but it's in response to what's going on nationally,

is have a study and support group. So there's a little bit of study and there's a lot of time for also just hearing from people. We'll have a couple facilitators that work with White O'Wake that can help people process and ask questions and just be with what's going on right now, wherever they are with it. They have questions about why it's happening, they have questions about what really is happening, how they're supposed to be in relationship to it,

what they can do, we can also be supportive of folks, white folks who are taking action, and who could use a supportive group of other white folks who are experiencing it in that way. And then we can do a little bit of basic study around the construction of whiteness, some of the history there, and some of the current dynamics and that relationship between race and economic dynamics. So the course is, you know, there's one we have coming up again on the fall that is called

Roots Deeper Than Whiteness, and I've developed it with colleague, David Dean, who also has an essay of the same name. And in that course, we're looking at developing a rootedness so that we can take action for social change, and looking at how we can be rooted in three different ways that goes against our socialization as white people. One of them is just emotionally having emotional resilience and being able to engage around topics of race without shutting down or going on the defense or something like that. Another one is understanding more of who we are in terms of our own family history

and developing a more rooted sense of our identity in that regard. We all belong to groups of people who were at some point colonized and manipulated to somebody else's ends and understanding that story and placing ourselves in that larger story is deeply grounding and it's very helpful. And then we also want people to be rooted

in a strong political and economic analysis so that we know why we're doing what we're doing, we know what's effective. In terms of the, so that would be like the content of that course, which is our kind of foundations. That'd be like a foundation's level course for White O'Wake. And in terms of how we approach a session, we always start with a grounding practice.

And then usually we'll have a couple main topics per session. We tend to have two facilitators. Sometimes we have guest speakers. And so we'll present on a topic and then give folks a chance to have a small group discussion. We use a Zoom platform and send them off into a little breakout room. And so they'll have a small group discussion

and then come back and share with the group. But we'll mix it up with different types of activities, as I had mentioned before. Sometimes we might have a guided meditation. And then I should also mention that we do have a new course coming up at the very end of the summer beginning of the fall that is specifically for men. It's a white men's course. So, what are the biggest challenges for white people going into this work?

You've talked about the danger of shutting down, the danger of receding into guilt and shame, getting angry, getting defensive, there's this term out there, white fragility. What are the, I assume there are many of these, but what are the biggest emotional intellectual challenges that white people encounter in doing this work? Well, of course, that would be a personal question for, you know, each person will experience that differently. And I don't want to assume that I can speak for everyone. But in terms of the work I've done and what I see, I think that with the folks that come

to us, who obviously the work I do is different than someone who's like doing a diversity and inclusion training in a workplace where people have to be there, whether they want to be there or not. That's not the circumstances of the work that I do. I'm working with people who are already concerned and are looking for opportunities to learn. So within that group of people, among folks like that, I think that probably some of the hardest things would be feeling really discouraged, feeling like they're not sure what to do. I think it's also, it can be very difficult for white people to trust themselves and feel that they have something to offer. There's the sense

that you were socialized so poorly. You can't really trust that if you go out and do something, it's going to be okay or even helpful and not hurtful. I also think that there's a lot of grief that people don't have space for. Sometimes they are actively told not to cry, where I understand where that comes from, this idea of not manipulating other people, the classic like the white woman is crying to take the attention away from the racist thing that she just did. I understand where that comes from, but it is extremely harmful if you go back to the

earlier part of our conversation, part of what happens with white people, part of what allows us to keep the status quo in place is being disconnected to our hearts around all this. We have got to have safe, supported places to grieve and to feel our own rage and our own anger around what's happening. Sometimes people are very shut down because they don't feel, they don't like have a place for that. They might have other folks in their lives who are in denial or who don't really understand what's happening, or they're in a more activist oriented space that's task-focused.

People are engaging in tasks. Or they're in a space that's actively telling them, you shouldn't cry. I've had people come into a white caucus online workshop just why people and why facilitators literally saying, we shouldn't cry, we can't cry, we can't cry about this. I'm like, I hope you do cry, you know? How are you as a human begin going to process?

I don't know how anyone can process something like watching George Floyd be brutally, slowly murdered like that without ex, that's heart-rending, that's traumatizing. And so we all have to have spaces to process that at a real human level. The other thing that is really challenging for white people is something that comes from outside. And that is this very unforgiving, woke culture that makes it hard to engage. It makes it hard to go out and engage. And people often when they come to us, they're so thankful to have a space where we're engaging around solidarity,

the things that we have in common, the common needs that we're gonna need to work together in order to address, that we have a critique of capitalism and the economy, and that we respect our participants. We don't degrade them in any way because they're white. And I think that if people have that kind of experience, they can go into the world and sort through the confusion. I mean, there's just, it's confusing to even figure out

what to do because of the way our society is structured is to repress anything that goes against the profit motive and the control of what's now really a full on all garkey. And it's also confusing because it's hard to navigate activist spaces. It's its own culture. It has its own language. It's often not very forgiving.

So I want people coming, I want to put what I want people to experience in our work is a sense of being centered in their own political analysis, their own theory of change, how they think social change could work, and how they're going to plug in. And if they have set somebody, they how they're going to plug in. And if they have set somebody, they don't have to take it personally.

They can be sensitive. They have the capacity and the understanding to know where that upset is coming from, and they can be sensitive to that. And hopefully respond in a way that de-escalates the situation, which often means listening and validating, right? That's like basic, good human practice with one another. But they don't, they're not able to be thrown off course as folks who want to participate in social change.

And sometimes people can get shut down and thrown off course by these outside forces that come at them inside of activist spaces, which is unfortunate, but very understandable, given the society that we're in, that that would have developed. More of my conversation with Eleanor after this. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable.

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alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Yeah, it's interesting this debate around wokeness or political correctness. I won't claim to understand all of the nuances or even the full sort of broad contours of the debate, but to the extent that I do understand it, I get that really being,

well, I've heard this phrase before, predatory listening, where you're just listening for the screw up so that you can jump all over it. Yeah, that happens. So I get how, I mean, I've been in situations like that where I just freeze, you know, because I know I feel like anything I say, I'm gonna get- They can, I will be held against you. Yes, yes, it can.

It will be held against you. Yeah, it absolutely is true. And yet, I get also that, you know, language is important and the way- Absolutely. Talk, you know, and so, so many ideas that can be harmful can just be embedded right in our language. And you know, you and I are Jen Xers, look back at the movies of John Hughes, where the way he portrays Asian people and, you know, it's unbelievable. We thought that was funny in the 80s.

It's so important that these things have begun to change and that we have more awareness. Absolutely. How do we balance those two things? Yeah. I have a few thoughts. At the most immediate level is our culture doesn't have, it has a hard time with dialectics would be the term, but it has a hard time with both and. That's just, we have a hard time with that.

Our culture is very black and white thinking. It's good or it's bad. with that like our culture is very kind of black and white thinking It's good or it's bad. It is this or it is that and so we have a hard time with nuance We have a hard time holding things that have to enter our contradictions So it's very easy to we also I mean there's it's People are essentialized so you know often it's like the thing you said then becomes who you are. And you know, Twitter in particular, social media in general, but Twitter in particular encourages us to make things personal and attack people.

So we are very influenced by these, by these different forces at work. But what I think is that people do best when a group of people comes together, we are able to be our best when we have shared external goals. We are working on those goals together. We see how everyone is contributing to achieving them. We care about each other and we have one another's back.

In that context, you can then begin to, first of all, if you're in a context where you're working with people who are in a different social categorization than you, you just start to learn who they are. Some of the nonsense falls away when you're confronted with a real person instead of a media stereotype. It's going to be hard to make fun of Asian people when you're close to Asian people. I mean, some of that happens naturally in that regard.

But there's different ways of educating ourselves both outside of any kind of collective experience. That's what something like White O'Wake is designed for to help people understand more of the history of how things have developed, which then allows us to unpack stereotypes and no longer have influence over us, like the way Amy Cooper's hysteria at a black man confronting her in the park.

I mean, people say she's making it up. I think she was genuinely afraid, because she'd internalized that black men are scary. Well, when you understand how that stereotype developed and why it developed, and then you learn how society really is structured, that black men and black people in general, it's the opposite of them being the scariest. Actually, they're in the most danger all the time. And you start to have this realistic perspective, then some of these stereotypes can fall away and not have this effect over you.

But it's absolutely important that people use all kinds of media and relationships and interactions to change the harmful language and stereotypes that have been conveyed. The more we understand where they come from, it can be easier to unpack them. If you understand the history, like if you know the history of the menstrual shows, then all of a sudden this idea that black people are violent and lazy, you're like, oh my God,

they used to literally, that was like propaganda. They went through the menstrual show. It's easier to unpack those things, but in terms of being able to come together, people need shared goals. There's one other thing I'll say on this, which is that part of the reason why we have this type of brittle culture

in our activist spaces is because of neoliberalism. It is because of the, and all the way back to like, you know, McCarthyism and that particular red scare and like the way that any kind of socialist or communist, any kind of collective approach to society, like that we should be democratically in charge of meeting our needs and we should be, like collective needs should be prioritized and met, has been just brutally destroyed. And this huge propaganda campaign against it.

And then in terms of neoliberalism, the ability for workers to collectively bargain through and develop unions has just been gutted. So the basis of our ability to work together on tangible social projects, our hands have been tied for many generations, to the point that sometimes all we have is fighting about language and kind of posturing

as opposed to getting together, empowering ourselves through the power that we have in society, which the ultimate power that people have in society is our labor, our work. Because this whole capitalist thing will crumble if people stop working. So there's a lot of power, but it requires masses of people working together, which can't happen if we're bickering with one another.

But it also can't happen if we're bickering with one another. But it also can't happen with we are violent to one another ourselves. You know, if white people are aggressive and violent towards folks of color, if men are aggressive and violent towards women, if we, if different groups are constantly belittling and harming other people, physically or psychologically, emotionally, we can't get together when that's happening either. So it's all important. It's all of the above, really. It's complicated and it takes a lot of work and effort and heart.

But so we've got some unhealthy things in the woke culture, but we also are a lot more awake, right? So we do have more awareness. So both of those things are good. So I think one thing that would be really useful to do is that we're going to put a list of resources in the show notes for people who want to learn more about this. And I really do encourage people to learn more about this. I'm saying that to myself too.

But to do a little bit of a history of whiteness, if you could, just one of the fascinating things, and this is not a new observation, I'm stealing this from other people that a lot of white people, myself included until very recently, didn't think of ourselves as being part of a race. Right. Ironically, the white people who do have that, many of the white people who have woken up to that, are carrying teaky torches and charlots of them. They think of white people as a race.

But the rest of white people generally think of people with different pigmentation as being part of a race, but we're like the generic people. Yes. And yet whiteness is the dominant culture. And as is often said, it's the water in which we swim and therefore we're not aware of it. So it would be interesting, I think, for you to comment on and correct any of what I've just said. And then also just describe how we got into this situation in the first

place called. Right. Well, one thing I would encourage people to check out Jacqueline Battleora, check out her work. She's written a book called Birth of a White Nation. She breaks down the origins of whiteness, really globally, like when white and in legal terms, when did white become a thing with a legal designation and laws that could be associated with it, white and black, but when did white become a thing? And it was in the early 13 colonies. It was here. Whiteness is homegrown, white supremacy, you know, I mean, it's integrally tied into obviously European imperialism. That's, it's a product of that. It's a product of European imperialism and colonialism. But legally speaking, the legalities of the white supremacist apartheid state that was defined here

as part of the 13 colonies in the late 1600s. And the need for that was because you had a very small number of elites who owned land and everybody else worked for them under brutal conditions and enslaved Africans and the indentured servants from Europe during that time period, their circumstances were actually very similar and they intermingled, they were close to one another. At any rate, you know, Bacon's Rebellion is the one that gets highlighted the most. And actually it was the turning point to creating a legal designation of white and to actually changing the material and legal circumstances between those white laborers and those African laborers. But the threat of being overthrown by the people that they oppressed, by the people who

did their work for them, the threat to the elites was very real. Things could have gone a really different way, honestly. I mean, you had, at times, there were thousands of enslaved Africans and just a handful of planter class. I mean, it's very hard to keep people down like that. So the way that they were able to do it is developing white supremacy in a very codified legal setting in which white people got a leg up,

and the bottom got dropped out from underneath African people. So perpetual bondage with no hope of escape for Africans could no longer hold half guns, white people could have guns, and then white folks were given the jobs of policing and slaved Africans who would be now in perpetual slavery. There's a lot more depth than nuance to that that you can learn from Dr. Battleora, but so I think understanding that as the baseline

for whiteness being constructed is very important. And then when you go through the history of the country, people were very aware of race. White people knew they were white, then you black people were black. You had the civil war, you had all of this. And then you had the recreation basically of slavery with tenant farming. Reconstruction was this brief moment when once again things could have changed, but they didn't, the society and the powerholders

found a way to really keep the old order in place, just without it being technically slavery. And then you have the Jim Crow South, and then you have the Civil Rights movement coming in and being that incredible powerful force that it was to change those segregation laws. During that time period, things changed in terms of the dominant understanding of race. There's a moment after the civil rights era when all of a sudden there's more self-consciousness about race, there's more self-consciousness about racism, all of a sudden

as a society and dominant society, you're like, oh, racism is bad. I don't want to be a racist. Race shouldn't exist. The good way to be is colorblind. So I'm going to do the good thing. I'm going to be colorblind. And around that time is when we see the Republican Party develop the Southern strategy where they no longer could they say overtly racist things, but then we developed dog whistle politics. They said the race of things, but they used different language. And then when we were coming up, it was Ronald Reagan and the welfare queens and the super predators.

And we knew he was talking about black people, but didn't have to say black people. And so there's this sort of like change in our national consciousness where colorblind is the accepted norm and it's sort of like a polite society thing, but you can still be racist, but you talk about the urban people, you know, or whatever, those like all these like code words. And so my sense of it is up until Ferguson, we were in that space. Up until about the time that Black Lives Matter came on the national scene and we had, and there was this constant breakthrough. I mean, the Rodney King riots, that was a breakthrough moment,

but it still didn't change that dominant narrative of being colorblind. But all of a sudden, we've got Black Lives Matter, we've got like, you know, a lot more general awareness of police violence against Black people. What I've seen in my own work is that what you're talking about is what I use to always do. I would start my workshops back before Ferguson.

I would start my workshops with, you know, race is a thing. It's not biologically real. It's socially constructive, but race is a thing. And an racially categorized society, everyone has a race and your race is white and you belong to that group. And, you know, that used to be, it used to be my starting point. That's not really my starting point anymore because we have so much more, it's a lot harder to keep the colorblind attitude in our society now because we had Ferguson, we had Black Lives Matter, then we had Donald Trump being overtly racist and we have white nationalist in the White House House and you know have Charlottesville so it's become less that way but it's true that one of the

ways of asserting dominance is just assuming that it's the norm. We see this in terms of gender like one really terrible and sad example is in terms of male and female it's still this way although it it's gotten better, but in the medical world, the quote unquote norm is the male body. And the female body, half of the species, is the aberration somehow. And then a lot of attention doesn't get given to female health needs.

They're specific to women, or maybe they're treated, and certain things are treated from the lens of how men's bodies should be treated, and it's harder to get that kind of care for women. We've come a long ways, because second way, feminism and everything else, but that's an example of what you were talking about is that if the norm is white, then it's hard to find makeup with your pigmentation. If you're not white, it's hard to find the hair care products.

That has changed, but it's still that's part of that baseline that you're talking about. Let me ask a language question, because we had an interesting chat earlier about wokeness and political correctness, and it's not all bad, but it's not all good. And we want to make people, when I didn't use these words, but I got the sense from you that you want to kind of bring people along rather than, you know, get in their face right away and force them to shut down. A discussion I've been having for a while with a friend and meditation teacher, I know, Seven A. Solacea is around the term white supremacy.

Because in anti-racist circles, the term white supremacy is different from the way it's used in the broader culture. The broader culture, if you want to call somebody a white supremacist, again, you're talking Charlottesville and Tiki torches. But in the anti-racist world, white supremacy just means the fact that white is the dominant culture. Well, I don't know exactly what it means, but what I take it to mean is that whiteness is the dominant culture, and that brings with it a lot of negative consequences and is opposed on other people in really harmful ways. I wonder, and again, this is just an issue of language,

I wonder how helpful it is to call that white supremacy given that it has very specific meanings in the minds of many white people. Yeah, I hear you. This is a conversation that I used to have more of. Honestly, I think any time we're communicating, and this is just true in general. You should always consider your audience. You should consider who you're communicating to.

One organization I would encourage people to check out as an example of powerful organizing consider your audience. You should consider who you're communicating to. You know, one organization I would encourage people to check out as an example of powerful organizing in a rural environment is down home North Carolina. You can check out some different materials they have. You can look at their report from the first year where they explain what they did. They did a they started with a listening project. They went into this, quote, unquote, red county in Western North Carolina that had helped elect Trump. Most of the people, of course, didn't vote. So most of the people didn't vote at all, but the people who did vote more than voted for Trump so we consider it to be like Trump

four-old or like a red county, red rural county. They just went in and started talking to people and listening to people. It's not a predominantly white area.old or like a red county, red rural county, they just went in and started talking to people, and listening to people. It's not a predominantly white area. It's predominantly a working class area. There's a lot of folks, there's black folks, there's white folks, but they had the same concerns. They had the same needs. And their needs were healthcare, and a living wage,

and other things, but those would be the two primary needs housing But one thing they do in their materials is they talk about the language that was most effective in talking to people And so things like you know talking about how rich people are getting away with this that or the other was a lot easier to relate to than I don't know talking about capitalism capitalism or the elites or whatever, the capitalist class. And you know, so you just, you meet people where they are. I think my, what I would encourage people to do is meet folks where they are and use the language that makes sense to them to talk about basic things that we actually are

all experiencing and we all know are happening. In terms of white supremacy, I mean, if you're gonna study anti-racism, if you're gonna study the structure of society, then I think white supremacy is a useful term and it's not that hard if you are committed to studying the structure of society and economy and all this complicated stuff at this more nuanced level

because you feel like you want to. I think it's not that hard to understand the difference between talking about white supremacy as a system. It's really an ideology is what it is that has, that is put in place systematically. And then looking at the relationship between white supremacy and capitalism, capitalism is an economic system, and white supremacy allows it to flourish. It's the central divide and control strategy that has gone hand in hand with capitalism since the moment that it was really born as a global phenomenon. But at any rate, we often, at the beginning of our online courses, we often use this resource called What Is White Supremacy.

And a little bit of Martinez is the author of that. But so, white supremacy is a helpful term because it's talking about something that is systemic and then a white nationalist is a person. I think it's a little easier now because what we see on the media, we do see things are out in the open in a way that they weren't before. Like it wasn't, it wasn't really said white supremacists

were marching in Charlottesville, we usually use the term white nationalist. I think that has become more common and that's probably a little bit easier. I agree with you on all counts that it is important to be people where they are. And, you know, if you're looking, it is the term of art if you're looking at societal and cultural and economic structures.

So you talked, you've talked a lot about the economy and capitalism. And picking, and in the spirit of meeting people where they are, one question that's come to my mind on behalf of conjuring people listening to this who may be centrist or a little bit rightist center or whatever, or even not anywhere on the spectrum who might say, yeah, capitalism has problems, but do I need to buy this fundamental critique of capitalism in order to just be less of a racist and be a better

white person and be part of the solution rather than part of the problem? Yeah, I mean, I guess. It depends on what you want to do. If you just want to be more of a sensitive person and less overtly racist than no, but if you want racism to stop, then you're going to have to understand how it works. And it's not really, this is what I'm describing is not ideological. It's more social science. You know, it's like, this is just the way that it is. And it's just, it just is. You know, it's really helpful to understand that early history and to see that racism, that white was created as a legal designation in order to keep a large group of laboring people

under the thumb, under the heel of the small number of economic elites. I buy what you're saying about the fact that white supremacy was baked into many of the Decisions that were made and the founding of this country. I don't think that'd be hard to argue against But are you saying that same ideology or intellectual framework is at play now among The titans of the so Emma F a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. I'm a white supremacist. No.

You know, I don't know. You are someone who is invested in the economic system that has given you that privilege. That's who you are. That's all. But racism serves the same function now that it did before. We could definitely, it was so just raw in the Trump campaign. It's like, look, I mean, on the one hand, Trump did run

on some economically populist stuff. He said we need to bring manufacturing jobs back. Think about somebody's said it, right? Because the Democratic Party, he's supposed to be on the side of the working people, had steadily been giving, you know, manufacturing just to other continents and it had impoverished and destroyed like, you know, the heartland or whatever, the rust belt. So all of this has been happening in the context of like free trade and all these things,

the Trans-Pacific Partner, all of that stuff. But the other thing Trump did though, the main thing Trump did, and it's a kid too. It's a powerful strategy. Is he's like, you have problems? It's those immigrants, you know? There are a bunch of rapists and murders. We got to build a wall. It's those immigrants.

It's just this very simplistic, skate-goating technique. It was used during the middle ages against Jewish people. They were like the money changers, they're like the middle people, and you say, hey, don't blame us, the elites, who are rich, who are actually, you can't have a society with rich people and poor people without looking at it if you back up.

Those rich people found a way of taking the wealth that everyone should have been sharing. We should all share in the wealth of this world. We should all have access to the natural environment in a sustainable way to get our needs met. So, some people have a lot and other people don't have the basic things they need. Then the people that have a lot found a way of extracting it and hoarding it and keeping what was, these are common goods that everyone should have. But those people, if you see they did that, generally, I mean, always, there's less of them. There's fewer of them. If the masses get really pissed off, they can take over. So what you have to do is find a scapegoat.

You have to point them at somebody else. And that's what racism does. And we could definitely see that in the Trump campaign. You know, don't get mad at the rich people. Get mad at those immigrants. Get mad at those black people. Get mad at all these other people. They're the people to blame. Yeah, it definitely still happens now. So let's just close on something a little bit more meditative and emotional. Sure. Generally, I get a lot of,

but I pushed you to talk about politics, but generally I get a lot of, so I'm not blaming you, but I get a lot of pushback from our audience when I get through political here. Sure. We'll see how this goes down. But so let's close on the area where we generally dwell here. So we'll see how this goes down. But so let's close on an area where we generally dwell here.

I know among so many white people I know and I just seeing it online that there is really a deep wellspring of desire to play a positive and constructive role going forward. The work though, as you've described it, is hard. And I'd love to hear you pitch the benefits. Why it is worth doing this work? Oh, absolutely. So it's a way of recovering your own humanity. There's elements of our own humanity that have been damaged in our personal life and in our collective family history. And it's a way of recovering that and of being more fully human. It's, you know, if you live in a brutal society, it's pretty hard to look around and see what's going on and be real. Stay real about it.

Not shut down or go into denial. But if you want to be fully human, if you want to be really integrated and connected to your heart and to your body, to your spirit, or you have a healthy psychology, however you want to look at that, then you're going to have to come to terms with the reality of your circumstances. So that includes for folks who've been socialized as white, for folks who categorize as white, that includes understanding our own socialization, why it is the way it is, why we were ever classified as white to begin with, and what that means now. But it also just means being able to, you know, it takes a lot of energy to damp certain parts of ourselves down, and it means that that energy can be released.

So we're subconsciously creating pain for ourselves by overlooking the deep unfairnesses baked into our system. And by looking at it, looking how we carry it, perpetuate it. We're going to have to go through some hard stuff, but ultimately releasing that feels better and then frees us up to play a constructive role. Yeah, I would say that that's true. There's not just looking at how we're complicit. There's also looking at how it harms us. Looking at having a vision of collective liberation

and a harmonious society that places the value of caring for ourselves and caring for one another and caring for the earth first, knowing that you want that and you can connect in a holistic way to other people who want that and work on bringing that about, that's a very generative thing to have in your life. Are there questions that I should have asked here that I didn't ask or are there places that you wanted to go that I didn't guide you? Oh, well, one thing that I thought might be folks might

want and maybe you've already done some of this, but you know, I did make some notes for myself about how people can tap in more immediately or just things that might be helpful within this context. Yeah, go for it. So one of the most immediate things people can do if they have money to share is simply donate to a bail fund. There's been like maybe 4,000 people who've been arrested nationwide. So I'd notice that if you type in bail fund for protesters, there's

someone has compiled a list that has it by state, but there's a couple national projects. There's the bail project, and then there's the bail fund network. But if you have some money, you know, and you want to just immediately be of use in this acute situation, that that is a helpful thing to do. You can also check with groups that are committed to anti-racist or racial justice organizing. You can look for things that showing up for racial justice might have ways to tap in in your local area. That's specifically like white people organizing around racial justice.

And of course, Black Lives Matter or movement for Black Lives. You can get on the mailing list of some of these national organizations, and it can help you think about best practices as a protester or specific things you can do in your area. I also noticed that Color of Change has a list of really strong demands, which is one of the things that is not so strong right now, is like, what are now is like what are these protesters, what are the constructive demands that protesters can make that

if these demands were filled we can get out of this terrible policing situation that we're in. And then I noticed also you know there's a really nice interview with Keenga Yamada Taylor on democracy now. So when it comes to, I was thinking I have a couple of things that might be helpful in terms of putting in context what's happening right now with this acute anti-black racism expressed through police violence and then this acute, over the top, more violence, a repression of really anyone who's protesting,

but obviously it's worse among black folks and black protesters. So the resources that would maybe help bridge some of the topics that we've talked about and some of the things going on right now. And this particular interview is about defending the police. Ankeh Yange Yama-da-Tailor, one thing that stood out to me is understanding that with neoliberalism, we've been through like 40 years or more of really gutting the public sector and that the police are being used as kind of a last resort policy strategy when people don't have what they need and don't have what they need

and don't have what they need we don't fund things like the hospitals and the schools and all of these things that people need but we will fund the police because the police are there to keep you in line when you're unhappy about your needs not being that and I think that being able to see the connection between what's happening with the coronavirus and what's happening with our economy And then what's happening with the racism and the police brutality. All of this is happening at once and it's complicated, but I think it can be really helpful to have a little bit of guidance and how we see how these things fit together. And that can be helpful as people,

you know, if people wanna make a response or go out on the street, they understand why they're there. They're inside of an acute situation with a lot of heightened emotion and activity, and it's, you know, it can be helpful to understand how these things fit together when you're in that situation. Thank you very much for coming on.

Really appreciate it. Absolutely. Yes, thank you so much for inviting me. Big thanks to Eleanor Hancock, really appreciate her time. Big thanks as well to the team who work so hard to put this show together. Samuel Johns, our lead producer, our sound designers, Matt Boynton, and Anya Shesheek of Ultraviolet Audio.

Maria Wartel is our production coordinator. We get a ton of extremely valuable input from our TPH colleagues, such as Jan Poient, Ben Rubin, Natobe, Liz Levin. Also, big thank you to my ABC comrades, Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohan. We'll see you on Wednesday for another episode. It's Ming-Yur Rinpoche on Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members.

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