Today, Explained - Too little, too latte?

Episode Date: April 23, 2018

On May 29th, Starbucks will shut 8,000 locations and lose millions of dollars to provide racial bias training for employees. The training comes after the arrest of two black men, who were waiting in the store for a business meeting, prompted nationwide outrage. Alexis McGill Johnson runs trainings for Perception Institute. She schools Sean Rameswaram in how they work, how our brains are biased, and whether people can break these biases down. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, Luke. Luke Vanderplug. Yeah, that's me. You're a superlative producer at Today Explained. Oh, stop it. One of three superlative producers at Today Explained. We've got a lot of them. Do you know anything about ZipRecruiter? No, nothing whatsoever. Never used it. Don't really even know what it does.

I know it's like a podcast punchline. I know. Everybody gets ZipRecruiter ads. Guess what? What? We've got ZipRecruiter ads. Guess what? What? We've got ZipRecruiter ads. Whoa! We're like a real podcast now. We should figure out what it is.

We should. ZipRecruiter.com slash explained. It's going to be a little harder to get a cup of coffee in America on May 29th because 8,000 Starbucks locations will be closing for racial bias training. Some people say Starbucks will lose over $10 million on May 29th, and they're willing to do it to avoid something like this happening again. Employees at this Philadelphia Starbucks had asked two men to leave their location before this viral video was shot, according to police. The men refused to do so.

The employees called officers. People found this video shocking. Two black men being arrested at a Starbucks for not buying anything while they sat and waited for a third guy. But a lot of people of color were not surprised because when you're a person of color, you deal with racism on the regular. Oh, you mean like when I am the boss and we go into a meeting and someone talks to my junior associate as if she's the boss and she's the lead negotiator in any conversation. Yeah, just about every day. Okay, so this happened to you like yesterday, it sounds like. Yeah, maybe like an hour ago. Alexis McGill-Johnson is the director of Perception Institute. Her organization leads workshops on racial sensitivity,

and today, she's leading one for just me. I'm Sean Ramos-Verm. This is Today Explained. So, Sean, welcome to Our Brains on Race. Oh, thanks for having me, Alexis. It's so exciting. I just want to tell you a little bit about what we're going to do today. Because, you know, race is not just a social construct, as many of us have learned. It's also a physiological construct. We know that when we hook people up to MRIs and heart rate monitors and respiratory monitors, and we flash images of black males right now, you can actually chart the anxiety growing in our bodies.

Our heart rates increase, our respiratory rate increases, the part of our brain called the amygdala that registers anxiety enlarges, not because we believe ourselves to be horrible racist people or horribly biased, but because we've just been primed to have this response. So the first thing I want to do, Sean, is just ask you, why are you here? What's your role? Well, I'm a person of color who has experienced racial bias, but I know that that doesn't exclude me from being someone who needs racial bias training because I'm sure somewhere deep within me is the same bias

that everyone has. Well, it sounds like you're already open to the concept, so that's great. And what do you think makes these conversations around race so hard? There's a real resistance, I think, sometimes. Agreed. I remember this one time. I remember this one time. This is just anecdotal, but my friends listened to a lot of rock music when we were in high school but i was really into hip-hop and i think kanye west helped bridge this gap between us where people who weren't into rap really liked kanye west and we were listening to kanye west while driving down to san diego in my minivan

and there was a line about we're trying to buy back our 40 acres. And one of my friends in the van was just like, oh, come on. And, you know, we were like 18, 19. And I was like, I was just bummed because like when I heard Kanye say that, I was like inspired and like moved. And my friend who like, who are we kidding, didn't have any black friends was like, what are you talking about, Kanye? And I don't think he would say that now, but then he just didn't know, you know? He'd just been raised in like a white environment around white people.

And like, it seemed ludicrous to him that a black person thought he was still owed something for slavery. Oh my God. Well, at least he actually knew what the 40 acres stood for. I'm not even sure that, you know, that some of our generations now

actually do know that 40 acres and a mule were, you know, what was, was promised in reparations at some point. Right. So like, wow, that's a, I give kudos to your friend for that at least. But what would you say to my friend in that situation? In that particular moment, it would have depended. Is this, you know, is this a friend that I value? Is this a friend that I have like candid relationships, candid conversations with? And if, you know, all of those things are true, and there's also what you may feel is a pattern of saying these kinds of things, I would go in and I would say something. Yeah, yeah. I just think so many people lack the empathy or the understanding or the education of these issues. And I don't know. I don't know much about racial bias workshops or training, but I would hope that it could be a place where you could learn more about why certain people see this country in a completely different way. So that's exactly what we want to get into today, Sean. What we want to do is actually

explore that paradox that you just named, which is that most people believe themselves to be incredibly fair people. When you look at public opinion polls, you know, going back several decades, 85%, upwards of 85% of most Americans believe themselves to be fair and egalitarian. They believe in equality of races. And yet, when you look at the disparities in this country, whether you look at income, if you look at education, if you look at policing, if you look at health care provision, virtually any index that you look at with regards to race, you're going to see a significant level of disparity. So how can it be that we have these values of fairness and we believe we're practicing fairness and yet the outcomes can be so seemingly unfair?

That's exactly what we want to explore today. What I'm going to do is actually take you through an exercise with your brain that will help you have that experience. And then we're going to layer on race. So a good implicit bias educational workshop will do a couple things. It will both teach you how your brain operates just broadly and how an unconscious network works. And then it will also layer on how issues of race show up consistently with respect to bias. So those who may be skeptics or may believe personally that they don't have bias can see how bias actually aggregates throughout society. So the first thing that we'll do is I will give you just a way to experience your unconscious network.

This would be in a group setting. You can imagine 30 people around you. I will ask you first to tell me the name of the radius of a wheel. Oh, I know, a spoke. Like a spoke? A spoke. Wonderful, Sean. Okay, got it. You got the first one. Okay, your brain is already working.

I feel it. Okay. Great. Okay, go. So I'm just going to throw out a few things, and I want you to roll with me, okay? So the radius of a wheel is called a? A spoke. I tell you something funny.

It's a? A joke. I don't drink Pepsi. I like? Diet Coke. Coke? The white part of an egg is called a? a joke. I don't drink Pepsi. I like Coke. The white powder of an egg is called a yolk. Egg white?

It is called an egg white, but what did you want to say? I knew this was coming, so I wanted to say yolk. But I'm on mic. I didn't want to record myself getting it wrong. But of course people say yolk, right? People say yolk. Everyone says yolk. Of course everyone says yolk. And they say it loudly because it's fun and it's interactive and no one wants to get it wrong with each other. But what your brain is doing in that moment, right, is it's building a pattern of recognition and it's anticipating what the

next answer is going to be. My tension was so high because I was like afraid that you were going to get me to say like some sort of like racial pejorative term that I was like, I will not say whatever she wants me to say, but I'm sorry, I should have played along and said, yoke, yoke, yoke. That is totally valuable too, right? Because that's actually the second piece of what I was going to say is that a good bias training should both teach you how your unconscious network works independent of race so that you're not caught up in, oh my God, I'm worried, I'm worried about seeming racist, but that you are just really having that experience. So when you layer on race, you can see how quickly an automatic association with respect to a particular group can happen, oftentimes without your conscious, you know, awareness or control, right? That's like really hard to override. But the second part of what's so important about an implicit bias workshop is that it also weaves in the concept of racial anxiety. This idea that we are actually afraid to confirm

that we may, you know, that the person we're having a cross-racial interaction with may see us as racist. And so we do a lot to, you know, in that dance. And if we're people of color, as we are, we're always, you know, a little bit vigilant trying to see, okay, wait a minute, is a little bit of hostility coming towards me? Could that be discrimination? Or at worst, is it some kind of invalidation that my ideas aren't being seen and evaluated in the same way through a lens of race? And so that anxiety that you had, that you felt like you were going to get tripped up, is the kind of racial anxiety. It's literally your brain going into fight or flight mode that is incredibly tricky and scary to navigate. And that's really the challenge of what a good workshop should do. It should really create

that experience for you to recognize what it feels like to be in that moment so that you can build a muscle when you have that moment. Okay, so now I feel like I get how my brain works, but what happens when you layer on race in these situations? What do you say to someone who watches that Starbucks video and doesn't see like the racial component of what's going on? When Starbucks apologized on Twitter, one person wrote back, what restaurants do the commenters here go to where you can sit at a table and use the restroom and not buy anything? You're all lying. Restaurant, gas station, Starbucks, you have to pay to pee. Stop lying.

It makes bad things happen. I think she's missing something. I think they have a policy that they are allowed to enforce arbitrarily. Right. have a policy that they are allowed to enforce arbitrarily, right? And so I have been to many a Starbucks, many a McDonald's, many a, you know, I have a five and an eight year old and when they need to pee, I find a place to pee. And sometimes I don't have time to stop and get a cup of coffee before I do that. And so, you know, we all navigate, you know, our basic biological urges on a daily basis if we are out and about.

And we expect like a common courtesy, a common decency of particularly community leading organizations to help us do that. Right. And so if Starbucks is a corporation that says, you know, we are here for the community and that's a core value for us, you know, they allow for that. Well, Alexis, I for one really appreciated this workshop. Thank you so much.

Well, thank you so much for coming, Sean. So do these types of racial sensitivity trainings work? Do they actually accomplish anything? That's after the break. This is Today Explained. All right, look, Vanderplug, are you there yet? Should we go to ZipRecruiter.com slash explained? Yeah, I'm ready to go.

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intern? It's the American way. Okay, let's do it. All right. Alexis, you've done these trainings for a long time. Do you believe they change anything? Will this workshop Starbucks is doing where it's going to close 8,000 stores on May 29th do something? Do you believe in it? I believe in the folks that they have brought on to have this conversation.

I believe in Cheryl and Eiffel, who is the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. I believe in Bryan Stevenson, who is the head of the Equal Justice Initiative. I think they have committed their lives to really understanding and litigating conversations around racial discrimination. And so at their core, they will have a good grounding that they can offer. I think we have to be realistic that you cannot reduce bias in a matter of, you know, four to eight hours. But I think the real work has to be in the national corporation setting some clear policies, some clear protocols, and some clear criteria about when to engage particular groups like the police, when to enforce policies, and when not. Because when it's allowed to be done arbitrarily, that's kind of akin to letting your automatic brain operate without restriction.

A whole lot of researchers at a whole lot of universities have looked at these trainings and say, you know, they're mostly inconclusive. One researcher at the University of Virginia said diversity trainings are filled with good intentions and poor evidence. And another study of racial bias in hiring that was done at Harvard found that things haven't gotten better since the late 80s. So why hasn't there been more progress when like clearly a lot of companies and corporations are using these kinds of trainings? At Perception, when we started this work, we actually did a lit review on diversity trainings to understand kind of what's been operating in various decades since diversity

training kind of writ large started in the 1960s. And, you know, what we found was that biases kind of implicit bias workshops are the latest iteration of this. But one of the things that we have not done over the past decades is deal with white racial anxiety and racial resentment about the need for bias training, right? Yeah. So people entering into these conversations feel as though the goal of them is to trigger guilt. Yeah. pack racial hierarchy, but in some ways what's happened is that we've not really figured out how whiteness should show up. And so, you know, either it shows up as kind of white racial anxiety, white fragility, or it shows up as white nationalism. So I think that the limitations that we've seen within the BIAS training, and particularly in the hiring, hiring broadly, is that we've done a lot better on recruiting.

We've done a lot better on getting folks in the door in a number of industries. But yet when they are there, we're not spending time investing in them or conferring the same level of respect or sharing our networks or sharing our access. And those are the little things that help someone advance through their career and create opportunity. And so, you know, I hope the work will at best spark a curiosity and an understanding that bias exists and that we all play a role in overriding it. It's taken, you know, generations to build up these schemas, particularly around Black men, of how our brain stereotypes people. And it's going to take, you know, generations for us to de-bias and re-humanize. Alexis McGill-Johnson runs Perception Institute. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained.

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It's a good thing neither of us run this show. That's true. Hey! All right. Happy Monday. To be continued.