The New Yorker Radio Hour - Getting White People to Talk About Racism

Episode Date: June 12, 2020

George Floyd’s killing has prompted a national outcry and a wide reassessment of the ways in which racist systems are intrinsic to America. The anti-racism trainer Suzanne Plihcik argues that racism occurs even in the absence of people who seem like racists: “We are set up for it to happen,” she tells Dorothy Wickenden, and changing those systems will require sustained white action. Plus, the political reporter Eric Lach follows a congressional Democratic primary race to learn how the coronavirus pandemic has changed modern campaigning. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Over the last week, we've seen some remarkable headlines about cities and states promising real action on police violence and racial justice, promises that would have seemed impossible just a few weeks ago. At George Floyd's funeral in Houston, the Reverend Al Sharpton said that he was encouraged by how white people have responded with demands for change. Floyd could have been anybody. But then the reaction was not anything.

Because somewhere I read in the Bible, their guard said he would pour out his spirit among all flesh. And that's why when I heard them talking about, they never thought they'd see young whites marching like they marching now. All over the world, I've seen grandchildren of slave masters, tearing down slave master's statue over in England

and put it in the river. I'll pour out my spirit among all flesh. I've seen whites walking past curfews saying black lives matter, no justice, no peace. I'll pour out my spirit among all flesh. It may be that the shock and horror of Floyd's death before our eyes, on video, has finally shaken millions of white people from years of drift and complacency. For a long time, Suzanne Plissick has been talking to white people

about the reality of entrenched racism. She's a trainer with the Racial Equity Institute and a co-founder of that group. Suzanne Plissick spoke with the New Yorkers, Dorothy Wickenden. So I want to put our cards on the table right away and point out that you're a white woman from the south, and I'm a white woman from the north, and that will inform our discussion. How did you become engaged with this kind of work? It's very difficult to really capture what all the touch points were, but to be a little white and linear, I can tell you essentially, I've found, early in my life, a real sadness for people who were hurt, who were harmed, who were living in poverty. After the birth of my children, that came into sharper focus. And as they

enter school, it came into still sharper focus. As I saw the contrast between what was available to my children and what was not available to children of color often, not always, often. So it seemed to me at that time that the way we dealt with the child who came to school in flip-flops in January was to provide shoes. And it seemed to me at the time that provision of needs was very, very important. And it is important. It's not unimportant. But as you do that, you soon realize that you have done nothing to prevent those needs from

occurring again. So I move from that very charity approach into policy needs to be changed. We have got to do something in a larger way. to get at the root causes. Of course, you don't do that very long before you realize that even when policy changes, that there is something in our culture, a narrative that continues to pull back those successes that you have. And I had the great gift of coming to a training that explained to me, this one was front by the People's Institute at the time, that that thing was racism.

And then we decided to form the racial equity institution. Institute and to do the work of bringing an analysis to people that would make them more effective in the work they do. Many companies offer diversity training. But those sessions have almost no effect, if any, on how white Americans go about their lives. So maybe you could talk a little bit about what makes the tactics and mission of the Racial Equity Institute different.

Yeah. We don't do diversity training. we don't do prejudice reduction. All those things have their values, I'm sure. But even if you were able to make people more sensitive and reduce prejudice and bigotry and racial prejudice, you then send them out into a world that is operating from a structure that promotes the supremacy of white people, that ensures that whatever you do is going to disproportionately advantage white people, even when that's not your intent.

And that division is just, it continues to work well because we don't understand it. We don't understand where it's coming from. And we continue to put it in the context of mean-spirited, racially charged people and statements and acts. Those things are bad. They're incredibly bad and wrong. But it's important to understand that racism happens, and this is the biggest lesson of my life, without my intent, that we are set up for it to happen.

And so I have to understand that I benefit from that, whether I want to as a white person or not. I have to further understand it doesn't make me a bad immoral person. It makes me a beneficiary of a system set up hundreds of years ago to benefit people who have come to be called white. Can you give us an example of how a well-meaning organization you've worked with determined to pursue racial diversity and all of the best values has been taken aback by what you have to tell them? Well, I think most of them are taken aback. But we recall some years ago to a public-private partnership, a school actually that had been created to be a multicultural school. They had all the very best intents.

They, however, were having a very difficult time recruiting and retaining students and faculty of color. So the night before we did our training, the core of the school, All White, took us out to dinner, and they began to tell us all the things they had done to become multicultural. And it was a long list. they would bring in one of their favorite things was to have what we call the international day you know to bring in people from many cultures and and have them share their culture and their cultural ways and they you know they would they brought in everybody in addition to that they did many things that they thought would be appealing to people of color they would do

spoken word they would do stepping they do you name it they did it and our very wise director, Dina Hayes Green, said to them at the end of this litany, so what did you do for white people? And their jaw dropped. Because you see, the culture that was keeping them from attracting and retaining students and faculty of color was the one culture they had not examined. It's white culture. It's our way of being in the world, our set of values. And the end of the end of the invitation they issued is very much like the invitation we as white people have issued since the civil rights act, which is come be like us. Don't bring your ways of being. Don't bring your ways of knowing. Come be like us. So how should groups like that go about what they're doing? That's a huge

project. It involves changing the deepest preconceptions that everyone has about him and her. We believe it starts with an understanding of how we got here. Then we need an understanding of how white organizational culture operates, how it is different from more relational cultures. We need an understanding that we are, in fact, as white people, not wrong and bad, but operating out of a culture that we impose on other people. It's okay to have your culture. It's okay to be who you are in the world based on your history, it's not okay to impose your way of being on everybody else and to make laws and build structures and build institutions based on that. And that's hard.

That's hard. But that study, that understanding's got to be the first step. You know, so much of this problem, I think, derives from Americans' ignorance of our actual history as it played out. You argue that the origins of the concept of whiteness, which is an artificial concept, stretches back hundreds of years. The story of John Punch really brings this home. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. Well, John Punch was an African indentured servant. He was not kidnapped and enslaved, although it's a pretty fine line. This was early in the 1600s. John Punch was an African

an indentured servant who ran away with an Dutchman and a Scotsman. They ran away together, but they got caught. The Dutchman and Scotsman are sentenced to four additional years of servitude, one to the master to whom they were already indentured and three to the colony. But John Punch is sentenced to perpetual servitude. Now, that was done, not because he was the leader or had some special part, although I'm sure there were all kinds of explanations in the time, but to ensure the allegiance of the white indentured servants

to the white people at the top. It was important to ensure that people of color who were either indentured servants or kidnapped and enslaved, and white people who were largely indentured servants, did not come together and challenge the system oppressing them. Your allegiance now is not to the black African you've been running away with. It is to the people who gave you this little thing. And we have done that as white people knowingly and unknowingly for the subsequent 300 years.

It's just extraordinary. So the protests following the killing of George Floyd do seem to have had some clear effect. Yes. It looks to me like this could be an inflection point. Does it look that way to you? It absolutely does. I mean, the question is sustaining the momentum, showing up, not just for the protests, but when the protests are over, showing up again the next day and the next and the next for all the things that we need to continue to fight for.

We are, or what we teach is that the things that we face in this world, the injustice that we face in this world, organizing is essentially the answer. that we need to learn to organize outside of institutions and inside of institutions, that building a base of power to challenge power at those grassroots levels, and then beyond that is what we need to be doing. I mean, it is the work. And that means you've got to show up again the next day. So there is a tendency after incidents of racially motivated violence in white culture.

And you can see it right now playing out. in the media to ask people of color for their insights about racism. But scholars and activists, and even some of our recent presidential candidates have been pointing out what you're pointing out, that systemic racism is really a white problem. So what role do conversations among white communities or conversations between white people like you and I are having, play and confronting and addressing the problem of systemic racism? Well, I think that they can play a very big role. I, the potential, I would say, say is absolutely there. I have been somewhat heartened by the number of statements that companies and

organizations and individuals have come out with condemning these recent acts of brutal, unconscionable violence. So to speak out against such things is always an important thing to do. We had a mentor years ago who said if you can get three white people with no people of color present to speak out against racism. You've done revolutionary work. I didn't believe it until I tried. But that speaking is important. And to stop at that will be the tragedy compounding the tragedy. I mean, one of the things that should be respectfully and compassionately ask of all of these statements, all of these speakers, is where have you been? There have been opportunities every day to speak out against, to stand against institutional racism.

Where have you been in the racial health disparities, horror, the achievement gap, the disparities in the justice system? We've got to ask ourselves, where have we been as this problem, this institutional structural problem, continue to take stronger and stronger hold of our country. Suzanne Plissick is a co-founder of the Racial Equity Institute, and she spoke with Dorothy Wicenden, our executive editor and the host of The New Yorkers podcast, Politics and More. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Good evening and welcome to the New York Congressional District 17 Democratic primary candidates for him. Can you hear me? There we go. There you go. Can you wind up that microphone? Sorry. Okay.

You're good. With everything that is going on in the world, it's a very tough time to run for office. A presidential nominee can always get some airtime, but what about all the down-ballot candidates whose names you can't quite recall? How are they supposed to run for office in the middle of a pandemic? Think about it. You can't go door-to-door-door shaking hands. The county fair is probably canceled.

And you really shouldn't be kissing any babies. And by the way, good luck fundraising. And now you're stuck debating your opponents on Zoom. I don't know that my voice is going in and out. Can you repeat the question? I was so busy looking for my own and you brought them. You're good. You're good.

No, I'm not moving it. I think someone else is. No worry. I will try to maybe be. position my computer a little closer to our Wi-Fi. Maybe that will help. Okay, so let's get back to the question. Would anybody like a rebuttal? The New Yorker's Eric Latch has been taking a close look at the primary election in one congressional district, the 17th District of New York. And he's looking to see how the candidates are adapting

to seemingly impossible conditions. I started following the Democratic primary race in New York 17th Congressional District. That's the suburbs north of the city. And this was a race that was in full swing when the pandemic hit. The primary day is June 23rd. It's an open race with many candidates running and no clear favor. One of the first people in district I called up was Barrett Seaman. How are you doing?

Seaman is a former Time Magazine correspondent and editor. He covered the Reagan White House in the 1980s. and he now writes about politics for a local newspaper in the 17th district named the Hudson Independent. You know, all of the traditional measures that we use to, you know, winnow out, you know, large fields like we have up here. They're not all gone, but they're just about all gone. Like what? Well, the ability to hold a town meeting and draw an audience and have people like you and me go and see how many people actually show up. I mean, the inability to hold a public meeting has an enormous impact on elections.

So even before the pandemic hit, the race in the 17th could charitably be described as a clown car. More than a dozen people either launched campaigns or expressed interest in running in the 17th. But as the campaign winds down here, we're down to a field of seven. The district has been represented in Congress since the late 80s by Nita Loe. and it's a reliably democratic area. So the Democratic primary race essentially is the election. The winner on June 23rd is all but assured to be the next representative of the 17th in Congress. When the pandemic hit and New York State went into lockdown, so did the race in the 17th.

And functionally what that meant is that the kinds of events that make up the bulk of campaigning in a congressional race, town halls, meet and greets, fundraisers, debates, they all migrated onto video platforms like Zoom and Facebook Live. David Carlucci is the state senator from Rockland County, which is the west side of the 17th district. He has a reputation as a consummate retail politician, but in the last few months, he's had to go from shaking hands and meeting people to essentially creating programming. But one of the things I'm doing regularly now is I do a Facebook. live, like a town hall. Yeah.

Every week, I do two of them a week. And I have special guests on. Like actually today, at 4 o'clock, I have the head of the Humane Society here in the Hudson Valley. And, yeah, she's going to be talking about the pets and what's going on with the adoptions and all that. I know the last time I visited the Humane Society, Hudson Valley Humane Society, you had so many different animals there. What are some of the unique animals that you have there now?

So we have this little bunny who's looking for adoption. You know, for me, I'm kind of learning on that space, you know, to see, hey, you know, okay, we got some likes here, or I have this many views. And today we just adopted a Malukin cockatoo. She only has one leg. But she was adopted and she actually went to live near Buffalo, New York. You know, and seeing, oh, okay, you know, I had this guest on. and people really reacted well to that. And then sometimes I'll have a guest on, and I think they're great.

And we have a dynamic conversation, and there's only like 20 people watching. There was no textbook for lockdown campaigning. And the transition to online happened so fast and was so new that it left several of the candidates in the race, you know, vulnerable to people who wanted to mess with them. Evelyn Farcas is the former Department of Defense official who's running. and during a Zoom event she held in April, she got Zoom bombed, which is when people take over a Zoom event and do horrible, gross things on the screen.

The irony was that we were talking about disinformation. And we had been talking for a while and we had noticed a couple of weird things, like a Trump face, and then somebody typed in an offensive word, and then we... In the chat. Yeah, in the chat, exactly.

And then in the windows, the squares, you know, on the Zoom box, we see somebody, this young man, seemed to be putting his hand in the elastic of his trousers. And so we tossed the person out and that was that. I also heard subsequently, I didn't notice it, that there was some adult porn being shown in a window. I'm not sure it was that window or another one. So having the open system, we realized right away, oh, we need to upgrade. So we upgraded and then immediately our problem disappeared because we had control. Zoom bombing can be horrible. Two days after Farkas experienced her Zoom bombing, another candidate of the race, Mondair Jones,

who's running on a kind of Bernie Sanders Medicare for All, forgiving student debt platform, who would be the first black gay man in Congress, had his own event hijacked. This time by a participant who used the app's screen share function to display child pornography to everybody who was logged on. The campaign managed to kick that person out and reported the incident to the FBI and felt compelled to tell the people who had attended that a therapist had volunteered to host a separate Zoom call

for anybody who needed to talk about what they had seen. Zoom is a new platform with new challenges. Some of the candidates in the race have turned to slightly older ways to reach voters. Alison Fine, who's the former board chair of Nairal, has also written a number of books about online organizing. In some ways, she's been the candidate in the race who's dived most enthusiastically into the new reality. She announced early on that she was dismissing her field team and making her campaign all digital, including and up to the old-fashioned email newsletter. And I'll tell you something about that morning email. when I first did it, I had somebody say to me, no, no, no, you'd make him look pretty, right?

And I sat down and I thought, you know what, Eric, no. I actually want this to look like I'm sitting at a Smith-Garona typewriter. Yeah. And I stripped it down to its essence, being empathetic to what's going on. to being at times funny and to getting people real useful information. And in a crisis, it works, you know? One of the things about this election is that it seems like a difficult moment to get people to engage.

I mean, this is a district that hasn't had to think about a congressional race in three decades, and it's a particularly distracted moment right now. There's no question that people are in pain and they're worried and they're distracted. So we're not going to be able to break through all of that noise. But, you know, all the metrics of engagement are going up online. And I'm starting to get constituent calls. I'm not in office, right? People calling you up.

Yeah. So last Monday, a young Latina woman called me up, and she said she personally has been getting food and essential supplies to undocumented people and families in the river town because they were immediately cut off. And she called me up and she said, I heard that you help people solve problems. Can you help me? And so I got her connected to a local nonprofit called Neighbors Link

to at least give her some fundraising infrastructure for what she's doing and connect with their volunteers. Fine has made that 5,000-person newsletter of the centerpiece of her campaign. Barrett Seaman, the local reporter, isn't totally sold on this approach. He's looking for evidence. that it's going to move the needle on election day.

I mean, she's sending out these very practical, useful, intelligent emails. You know, two or three times a week we get these things. You know, they're pretty good stuff and the useful information. But so what if the same 5,000 people are seeing it, nobody else? And this is a question in many kinds of races these days. It's like a following is not necessarily a constituency, right? Are those 5,000 people who get that newsletter? Are those voters?

You know, are those voters in the district? Exactly, yeah. It's exactly right. It's that you don't know that those 5,000 people are going to vote for you come June 23rd. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just that they're receiving your emails. What's going to give candidates the edge in this race? It's an unprecedented situation, no question.

But money is still money. Adam Schleifer is the heir to a local pharmaceutical fortune. And thanks in large part to his and his family's money, he's been able to blanket the district with television ads for the past few months. While our essential workers and healthcare heroes risk their lives, Trump let us down by ignoring science and giving us toxic advice. I learned how to lead working for Governor Cuomo as a consumer protection. There are two candidates in the race who currently holds state-level office in New York,

and that sets them apart from the field. One of them is David Carlucci, the state senator. So I think given this crisis that we're in, in a way it's been on the political side somewhat, what beneficial because I can really prove my worth. And, you know, my phone in the Senate has been ringing off the hook. And can you give some examples of what that's meant? Well, well, you mean like what type of cases?

Yeah, yeah. Well, the number one is overwhelmingly is helping people with the unemployment insurance claims. We have gotten literally like thousands of inquiries about that. So I'm not, you know, obviously I'm not at, I can't ask people for their vote. I'm working in that capacity. But it does just help prove the worth. And I've realized that as a senator, as a state senator, at least, people don't seek me out when things are going great. They come find me when stuff has hit the fan. The challenge of campaigning in a pandemic is how to connect with people at a time of social distancing.

It's how to engage people at a time of maximum distraction. And it's how to talk about the issues during a crisis. In the 17th, with just days to go before election day, nobody can say which way this election is going to turn. They've all sort of got a shot here. And the challenge that they're facing, if COVID-19 stays with us over the summer and through the fall, is going to be faced by candidates and races across the country. So they're going in the blind. They're just sort of like a bunch of people with blindfolds on wandering through a room, wondering when they're going to hit a wall, and not knowing where the wall is. And the same is true for both the candidates and the voters. We don't have the normal hooks to hang things on that we expect in making decisions about elections.

Barrett Seaman writes for the Hudson Independent, and he spoke with the New Yorkers Eric Latch. The primary in New York State is coming up. on June 23rd. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. You can subscribe to the podcast of the show, and you can always find us at new yorkeradio.org.

Thanks so much for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by

Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Calli Leah, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. With additional help from Kylie Warner. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.