- Racism is often described as an individual feeling, but today's guest explains that racism is better understood as the result of a system built over generations and even centuries, and perpetuated by the stories we tell about it today.

She's Dr. Tricia Rose, this week, on "Story in the Public Square."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Dr. Tricia Rose, the chancellor's professor of Africana Studies and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University.

She's also the author of an important new book, "Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives-And How We Break Free."

Tricia, thank you so much for being with us today.

- It's my pleasure, thank you for having me.

- We've had you on the show a couple of times, once pre-pandemic, once in the middle of the pandemic.

- That's right.

- And so it's great to be with you in person again now.

- Post-pandemic- - Post-pandemic, amen- - We hope, we hope.

- amen.

(Wayne and Tricia laughing) - Imagine that.

- Right.

- This is a tremendous book.

- Thank you.

- And I finished reading it and I mentioned to you that my immediate reaction was, "This is important."

Why'd you write it?

- Yeah, well, the main motivations were the realization that students were coming into my classrooms more and more as time moved on, with less and less understanding about how racism works in society's institutions as a whole.

They had a belief that I think was well reinforced by mass media and by curriculums that racism was just a personal attitude, right?

You're a racist, you have personal negative beliefs about another group of people.

And that's not what drives most of the discrimination and most of the significant disadvantages.

So we had a schism, right?

People would say, "Is this individual a racist?"

or, "What did he or she say that was racist?"

But then people would put up all these disparities, right?

Say, the wealth gap is 10 to one, and infant mortality rate is significant, right?

The schools are funded differently, their performance in schools, dropout rates.

And it's almost as if personal beliefs are driving these gaps.

And if it's not that, then it must be the people's behavior.

So there was this sense of a gap in understanding how to connect why these outcomes could be so profoundly disparate across race, between, say, Black and white, and at the same time, think that all that we have in terms of discrimination is just personal behavior.

So I wanted to really interrogate that with the hopes of having a much more productive and informed conversation, and hopefully change.

- Well, hopefully, we have that kind of conversation here today.

So we've talked to you before about structural racism, there's systemic racism, and you introduced me to the concept of metaracism.

- Oh yeah, yeah.

(laughing) - As just a matter of definition before we begin in this conversation, can you walk us through?

- Brilliant, thank you for asking that upfront, 'cause I'm sure people will be like, "What the heck is that?"

(everybody laughing) - Well, they have to read the book.

(Jim laughing) - Yeah, well, no, even before that, it might seem like a lot, I could fully empathize with that.

So systemic and structural are mostly used interchangeably in everyday life, in mass media, among activists, among politicians, there's not a real sense that there's a distinction.

And some people will describe what I would call systemic racism, but actually call it structural.

So there really is not much in the way of a kind of an agreement.

So that's when I dove into systems theory, and we had a little conversation about that.

And you realize that while we say, "Systemic," we don't mean systems theory requirements.

And so therefore, systems and structures can be the same thing.

But I'm really clear about how they're different.

So a structure, which is what I used to call it, until I dove into this for almost a decade, a structure is when any sort of discrimination, in this case, say, racial discrimination, is built in to the operations of some aspects of an institution or society.

So when you say, "Structural racism," you don't automatically mean that it is interactive in the way systems are.

So structure could say it's built in, it doesn't have to be everywhere, it doesn't have the qualities of systems.

And now the four critical things that you have to have for a system to be a system is, first of all, identifiable elements.

So in the case of society, you have to have institutions and governments, policies, you have to have things you can identify, any elements or parts.

The second thing is those parts have to interconnect in impact.

And they have to be related to one another, that those interconnections are relevant.

So if you have a structure that is not a system, you don't have to have interconnections.

You could have one institution that's just a mess, and the other parts of society don't have to be, you see?

When you have a system, you are making a fundamental argument that what happens in housing discrimination is connected to what's happening in criminal justice and discriminatory sentencing, and that it's connected to schools and it's connected to health and it's connected to the wealth gap you see.

And the critical piece is that systems thinkers, when they say, "Your interconnections are important," they say they produce metaeffects.

And meta effects are effects that the interconnections produce that are more powerful and impactful than any one part of the system could achieve on its own.

So what you're describing is this kind of powerful link, this leverage point that makes a greater, in this case, negative impact than we can begin to describe, unless we're using a systems framework.

Now, that means we have to ask different questions, which is what I did.

But that was a very important insight for me, that these things are connected, that they're not just individual acts by people and they're not just random, renegade, individual racists running an institution, but that the system is designed to produce these outcomes.

- So that approach, that kind of analysis allows different insights into what is really going on.

- Exactly.

- Just give us an overview of the kinds of insights- - Sure.

- that you glean.

- Yeah, no, it was huge.

- We're gonna get into some of them further in this discussion that you do in the book, give us an overview.

- Sure, sure, so I was looking for structures first, right?

'Cause I didn't even really understand that the distinction between the two was so significant.

This is about, like I said, almost 10 years ago, which is a tragedy.

But at that point, I started thinking, "Okay, let's look for policies that are discriminatory.

That's what everyone looks for."

But then I realized do things like broken windows policing, things like stand your ground, right, which extended the castle doctrine.

the sort of practices of racially discriminatory fines and fees with policing, and racial profiling.

And I said, "Okay, none of these policies say anything about race."

This is post-civil rights era, right?

We have abandoned the language of explicit racial discrimination.

So what you hear is things like, "A citizen can stand their ground," right?

Remember the Trayvon Martin case?

- Right, yeah, of course.

- We could use that as an example, right?

And say, well, would he have been able to make a claim for stand your ground if he had shot George Zimmerman, right?

Stand your ground, but when you look at the statistics, stand your ground is almost never allowed to be successfully used to defend a Black person shooting a white person.

They're something like five times more likely to be able to go home free if you're white shooting a Black person.

And then it goes down from there, Black on Black, doesn't matter.

Anytime a white person's in danger, stand your ground, from a non-white person, but especially a Black person, you find that they are much more likely to be freed, and the Black person cannot use stand your ground with the same effect.

Now, why does that matter?

That means that without any racial marker in the policy, the outcomes are profoundly distinct.

So that it becomes a disadvantage that African Americans cannot avail themselves.

Why?

Because racial profiling is a norm, it's not an exception.

So that people believe that they're afraid of Black people, and that that's legitimate.

"We should be afraid of Black people," is the underlying logic, "We have no reason to be afraid of white people."

That's not true (laughing) for African Americans, they're like, "We're kinda scared of them."

(laughing) There's good reason to be afraid, but it doesn't register in the law, do you see?

So there are all of these examples.

And then there's more that's more complex, but we'll get into it later.

But I'm hoping that gives you a sense- - It does.

- that policy doesn't say anything about race, but they know that it will have a racial effect, 'cause I'm telling you, it wouldn't have been an important policy if it had did the reverse.

- So in researching this book, you reviewed hundreds of policies and laws to reveal that, I'm gonna quote here, "The vast majority involves some combination of containment, extraction and punishment of Black people."

- Yeah, that was-- - Tell us what that means.

And again, we could do a whole show on those terms.

- I know, I know.

- But they may be new terms to some people in our audience.

- Absolutely, absolutely.

So let me back up one little step 'cause I think it will help (finger snapping) crystallize for people.

- Yeah, sure.

- So when I went and looked at all these policies, about 75 to 100 of them, in health, things like access to local hospitals, quality care, questions of treatment.

For example, Black people have been taken off the kidney lists by people and brought down lower for reasons nobody understands.

So I started thinking, "Okay, is it all about individual policies?

And if so, how can I figure out the interconnections, right?"

So it's at that point I realized that things like disparate sentencing, right?

We know Black people have been sentenced longer for the same crimes.

We know that they're also policed more, so they're more likely to be identified as criminals because they're constantly being surveilled and policed.

- Yeah, of course.

- And now, then I realize that this policy means that when you've been convicted of a felony, you are not eligible for any number of public services.

So you can't live in public housing, you can't avail yourself of, say, other kinds of housing support or any other, food stamps, so basically say, permanently, you are a persona non grata, which of course flies in the face of the point of sentencing.

You're supposed to be a citizen when you get out.

But what happens is, because there's such a high poverty rate among African Americans, much higher than white, something like, children, 38% of them are gonna be poor if they're Black, only 5% if they're white.

So you have a disproportionate number of families in subsidized housing who are African American, that when their children have been policed at this level, and then they cannot come back and live at home in any kind of subsidized housing, they largely end up homeless.

And that is one of the reasons why Black people make up 38% to 40% of the homeless when they make up only 13% of the population.

So you're seeing this interconnection, which who would make that interconnection, right, that these things are unnecessary?

You don't need that housing rejection in order to punish someone, they've already gotten outta jail.

But what it does is it connects the housing to the homelessness, to this sort of permanent criminalization, which we're seeing now.

People are upset there are all these homeless people.

And then they're also more vulnerable to mental health issues, 'cause living on the street is extremely stressful.

- You make a very important point here, which is when you're released from prison, in the manner you're describing, it's not only the individual released who is punished- - That's right, the family.

- it's the family.

- Exactly.

- It's children, it could be older people, it could be parents- - That's right, right.

- it's the family - Now you magnify that-- - So it's a much broader effect.

- Much broader effect.

So why I am starting there is because I didn't realize these interconnections until I dug deep into each policy, and asked this question.

First one is, what does the policy say it's for?

Second big question is, what actually happens?

- Well- - And so when you start seeing the what happens, then the second stage is containment, extraction, punishment.

- Your explanation of the way the GI Bill after World War II so favored white veterans, as opposed to Black and non-white veterans, was absolutely staggering to me.

We could spend an entire episode talking about that, too, but I wanna get to some of the other specific pieces that you talk about.

- Sure, no, of course, yeah.

- One of my key takeaways from the book is that you describe systemic racism as racism hiding in plain sight.

I don't know if we wanna talk about that in the abstract or if we wanna get into a specific case.

Maybe we go a little bit deeper on Trayvon Martin.

But how is it that the systemic element of racism makes it possible for us to not see what's really happening?

- Yeah, systems are very powerful because they organize society in such a way that the outcomes appear natural, even when the outcomes are the opposite of what the purpose of the system says.

So we say we're a democratic system, we say we're an egalitarian society.

You ask most people, whites 80% would say we're either racially equal or about to be.

And so those numbers are pretty high.

And yet here we have all of these institutional ways that significant discrimination is going on.

So because it's part of the norm, it requires that people reject everything they know about how society's organized, or at least be curiously critical in order to get at the truth of what's happening, right?

And so that's one of the reasons why it can hide in plain sight.

And one of the reasons, say, the Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd moment was so resonant was because there had been a series of cases of murdered, beaten and other forms of violence against a very visible group of people over 10 years approximately.

Pretty much starts with Trayvon Martin, at this sort of highly visible, recorded documentation of just gunning people down without even a conversation.

And that opened up the door about, "Well, how could that be?

What makes that happen?

How many renegade bad cops are there?"

(laughing) 'Cause it was all over the country.

That opened the door.

And that's one of the things that I think made it very powerful.

But it wasn't systemic fully because it didn't make the connections between policing and schools.

For example, punishment in schools if you're African American and you do some infraction that's either suspendable or any other kind of punishment, the numbers of the degree to which it matters whether you're white or Black, male or female, is profound.

Something like in Boston in 2012, you were like 52 times more likely to be expelled for actions if you were a Black male than if you were a white male student.

(Jim sighing) - Wow.

- So you're looking at pushing kids out as a normal consequence of the practice of a punishment policy that appears race neutral.

- Well, and all of these dynamic, they manifest themselves in the particular case of Trayvon Martin.

You write pretty unequivocally that this was not a chance encounter.

This wasn't just dumb luck that Trayvon Martin and the man who killed him happened to be in the same spot.

This was the product of a system from disciplinary functions in schools, through the economic realities of real estate outside of Orlando.

Could you walk us and our audience through that a little bit?

- Yeah, this was a challenge with the book, 'cause I thought, "I don't want a theory book on systems, I want people to feel what it means to live in a world that produces all these, seemingly, these powerful obstacles that are invisible, both to you, as an African American, and to the people around you.

Trayvon and his parents didn't have a systems analysis, they just know what it means to deal with it, right?

The outcome.

So what I started noticing was that people would say things like, and "People Magazine" that was very vivid on this, saying, "It was a chance encounter.

If Trayvon had been 10 more minutes getting Skittles, he maybe wouldn't have run into George Zimmerman," or, "If he hadn't gone out that night," or, "If he hadn't gotten suspended from school in Dade County."

And I started looking into that, and others had done this, too, but not in this systemic way, sort of saying, "Well, why was he suspended?"

And a lot of media stories were saying that he was suspended because he's a bad kid, right?

He was actually a very good student and he was an invested student, but he had been charged with infractions by the school.

He was charged with punishment for infractions that were not in the guidebook for infractions.

So they basically hyper-punished him from the top so that when he got to the third big punishment, he was able to be suspended for a long period of time.

But the first one isn't even punishable, which was truancy, right?

And so basically they created a hyper-punishment system, which was already in place in general, to put him in harm's way in particular, he wouldn't have been at his dad's house at all, right?

And so that punishment system that's happening in Dade County, which is also happening locally (laughing) in the schools in Southern Florida, were not gonna make any difference, they're happening everywhere.

And so then what I do is build out, "Well, here's why it's not luck.

It's in fact a system that puts people in these positions and then says they're random and individual."

There was also real estate changes, there's too many details for our time here, but it's a way of saying, "Look, people come into these chance encounters, not with a preexisting individual racist, but with a system that's driving them into a conflict-based interaction and creates harm for some and advantages for others, as they weave their way through.

So, for example, he used stand your ground, George Zimmerman, even though in the case they said it wasn't applicable.

The jury said on CNN to Anderson Cooper, I think, one of the jury members said, "We were pretty sure we were using stand your ground.

It was said every day in the court."

So they were using the idea that Zimmerman was afraid of Trayvon, the Black kid in a hoodie, and he had a reason to be afraid of him.

And therefore, even though we're not legally supposed to use it here, it's gonna work on us unconsciously.

That's why I asked at the outset of our show, could Trayvon have (laughing) shot him, turned around and said, "This man's following me, he's got a gun"?

I would shoot him, if I was scared, and dark at night, and I carried a gun, which I don't, you know what I mean?

But so all of that comes together and you're like, "This isn't chance, this is kind of a very big likelihood that this happens."

And it's happening now, it doesn't change, just because Zimmerman is gone.

- You mentioned CNN and people and many other media outlets, of course, covered Trayvon Martin.

- [Tricia] Of course.

- Why did so many not, quote-unquote, "Dig deeper," to find some of the larger issues at play here?

And this is true still of coverage of events.

- [Jim] Yeah, it's just not limited to the Trayvon Martin case.

- No, it's not limited to that case 12 years ago.

- Any numbers things, right.

So here- - Why?

What's going on here?

- the first reason is not about race, for me.

The first reason is that media in our country is about storytelling.

And we want storytelling with a character.

We want a vivid story with an extreme easy situation.

That's the way we define, not this fantastic show.

- Bless you.

(laughing) - (laughing) Thank you.

- I'm just giving us an exception here, (laughing) a footnote.

(laughing) - We appreciate it.

- But the typical, right, is that people want a quick, "Who's good?

Who's bad?

What happened?"

They want a highly emotional moment, and they want something that is clear, simple, and has a villain.

- And that's true for social media, too, which is how a lot of people consume their news.

- It could be on anything, right?

It could be on any number of things.

No point in even listing.

But when you deal with the racial context, there is a very significant anxiety among some in the political spectrum.

Most of them are more conservative than not, but they're not only, so I would say most of the spectrum has participants in it that believe that if we focus on racism as a system, then the country will be responsible.

And that responsibility will change the entire political dynamic about pretending that we're a colorblind society.

That any kind of effort to redress discrimination is actually going to create more discrimination, which is what they're saying now.

But if we prove, which I think there's ample evidence, that society generates racial inequality and sustains it and increases it, without having signs on the bathrooms, without having laws that require racism, it produces systemic discrimination.

But that's what the whole DEI attack is about right now, that it's reverse racism, that it's actually disadvantaging whites because it doesn't favor them, basically.

(laughing) So that's what's at stake.

When you say, "Why?"

It's because it would change the entire formula of what we think of as actionable in a context of society.

- So this is 2024, it's a presidential election year.

- I know.

- And I think about the context of this book against that backdrop.

And from the hyperventilation about critical race theory a couple of years ago, to the recent attack on the AP course on African American studies, could you position your book against that backdrop?

- Yeah, sure.

- What's the dialogue it's having with that environment?

- Well, (laughing) tragically, the book's been only out, it's a poor little baby now.

(Jim and Wayne laughing) It's been out for about maybe six weeks, or not even.

Yeah, maybe six weeks.

So it's not interacting yet as much as I'd like it to with the mainstream-- - Well, we're gonna hopefully do something about that here.

Yeah, yeah.

- Let's do it, let's do it.

I mean, I think why it's so important is because what I'm saying is that we have to reconsider how we think about race and racism in America.

And I actually believe that my argument invites every group of people, white, brown, yellow, green, purple, into the conversation, because I'm not blaming individuals.

I'm not saying, "You're gonna have an advantage compared to me or compared to another African American," but you're not going around promoting that.

Maybe you are, but maybe you're not, you see what I mean?

So you can be an ally, we can talk systems and work together as we were doing before the show started.

But they want the narrow box of racism is when someone harms you, personally and individually, intentionally, because that box is this big, compared to the box of mass incarceration and its racial effects, the way-- - Well, it lets people off the hook.

- Not only does it let everybody else off the hook, we can say, what?

"The three, we're not racist, that one horrible person who called so-and-so a name, they're racist."

Well, no, wait a minute, that's an individual value problem, but there's a whole set of factors.

So for me, when the AP curriculum gets challenged by Florida, and they were targeting specifically any language that related to a critical race analysis and anything with systems, they erased 19, I think it was, expressions of systems in the curriculum.

Now, I hear that was revised, so there's been a battle.

But the fact that they want that out means they don't even want creative thinking about how to solve this problem as a society-wide issue because they don't want it to be understood as a society-wide issue.

- We've got about two minutes left.

- Oh, that's a shame.

- But the book ends.

(everybody laughing) - We say that to ourselves often.

- I know, you must be frustrated by that.

- The book ends with some thoughts about how we actually can move beyond this.

- Right, so for me, what's happened is, remember I started this conversation with my students in class growing more and more unaware of racism as a practice, as a societal organization.

And really, I decided that, when I realized, "Hey, what am I gonna tell people what they should do with this problem?"

I realized that if I give advice about, "Go to your school board meeting, protest, write new something or another," that's very small.

It's big and important to do, but it's not the overall picture.

So I started thinking, "You know what?

We need a paradigm shift," because a paradigm shift means we're not gonna look for just individual crime, we're gonna figure out what's really going on.

What is the bigger picture?

Let's examine the local, and then bring it up a notch, bring it up a notch, and look and see, "Well, wait a minute, there's these bigger things going on."

And we can do that together.

I really feel strongly that when many people who are white see this, they'll realize that they're not personally responsible for this in the way that this individual claim of racism is.

So for me, the end was, "Hey, we have to think differently about this, we have to think collectively, but we also have to be honest and we have to do some hard work."

It's not gonna be looking for one racist, that's not gonna change what we have created.

- Well, that's hugely important work, and we're so grateful to you for spending some time with us now.

So, Tricia Rose, the book is "Metaacism."

Thank you so much.

That's all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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