(upbeat music) - Good evening and welcome to "Generation Rising."

I'm Anaridis Rodriguez.

Tonight, we are unpacking a new critically acclaimed work by scholar and Brown Professor, Tricia Rose.

Described as a bold exploration of systemic racism, "Metaracism" challenges us to rethink our understanding of systemic oppression and envision a path toward true equity.

And joining us is the author herself, Tricia Rose.

Tricia, welcome.

- Thank you for having me.

- Thank you for being here with us.

- My pleasure.

- This is the fourth book you've authored.

What led you to write "Metaracism?"

- Yeah, well, it's interesting, because people associate me with popular culture and gender and feminism, and what's really underneath all of this work is present in "Metaracism."

And that is those lived conditions that particularly African Americans face and what creative solutions they come up with, or creative solutions we need to continue to come up with to create equity, to create health, to create opportunity, and to create an environment in society where hopefully, most of us, if not all of us, can thrive.

So, how I got to this specific book had to do with this sense in the classroom.

You know, I've been teaching for a long, long time.

And over the past 10 to 15 years, I was beginning to notice that students of all backgrounds were truly operating as if everything was a meritocracy in America.

And they believed that everybody had equal access, that we didn't need any kinds of affirmative action, and we didn't need what we would now call DEI, which is being attacked.

We didn't need any kind of way to address any kind of societal racism, because it was gone.

And over the years, it would be a, you know, maybe 10% would say that 15, 20, 30, all races, ethnicities, wealth categories, these weren't just some groups of kids.

And so I began to say, "Well, why do you think "we have such disparate outcomes?"

They were like, "What disparate outcomes?"

I was like, "Oh, oh, okay."

So this effort to the winning of the story on the everyday nightly news and among pundits and among political figures and government figures to say that racism ended with the civil rights movement success.

We passed laws that demand equality, so then we're all set.

That had really won the day.

And yet, there was so much evidence to the contrary.

And that's what got me to thinking, oh, I need to be able to explain this.

I can't just say, "It's everywhere.

"It's in banking.

It's in policing."

'Cause people say, "Well, those things are just examples, "and they're just incidences on an individual basis.

"Why are you generalizing?

There are good people."

Of course there are good people, and so on and so forth.

So that's what got me really starting, that these incredibly talented students at Brown University had gone to either excellent schools or somehow had read an awful lot and yet, believed this profound fiction.

And I thought, this is not good.

They need to know that this is not the truth.

And so I started, the next step was what are the stories we tell?

How do we hide it so effectively?

And then I just got on a hunt.

Once I did that, I was on a hunt.

- So this was born out of your experience at Brown University.

You've been a long-time professor there of Africana studies, and these conversations you say started in your classroom.

- Yes, indeed.

So, long before we started talking about quote, unquote, "structural racism" during the 2016 election, a decade earlier, I'd begun to see this idea that America had answered the problem of societal racism by creating anti-discrimination law, the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act, where discrimination was rendered illegal.

That had somehow become the evidence of the ending of racial discrimination as a society-wide phenomenon.

So my students, educated at some of the best schools in the country, were completely unaware of what were profound, unlevel playing fields, profound impact from policy and practice to create tremendous inequality, and they just had no sense of how all of those things fit together.

So over the years, they would say things like, "Why do we need Affirmative Action?

"Didn't we end the need for that with these laws?

"Why do we need other kinds of DEI things?

"What's the point?"

Now, they just think if there's a big disparity, it must just be the Black people, the women, or the other people of color are not smart enough, or they weren't dedicated enough or disciplined enough.

And that just became the dominant story.

The more I dug in, in the classroom, the more I realized this has to be addressed.

And so sometimes I would do it in a kind of real live moment.

So in a very big lecture hall, a class that was on hip hop, I said, "So, how many of you have smoked weed?"

This was before it was legal, okay, so let's get clear.

This is a while ago now, maybe nine years ago.

And I said, "Well, how many of you smoke pot?"

They're all titling, (giggling) you know, and so they almost all raised their hands.

And I said, "Okay, how many of you "have been stopped by the police?"

in the classroom of almost 90% White students?

Nobody raised their hands, except for some Black kids who were not participating.

They were just like, "I'm not even raising my hands about this."

And I said, "Okay, so if I were to bring in police "with drug dogs right now, what would happen to you?"

And they were stunned, because just the idea that they could be searched in public for no reason while they're in their own classroom, that dogs would sniff out the little residue of weed in their bag and that they could actually go to jail.

It just never occurred to them.

So I tried to explain to them that that's the blind spot of a certain kind of, not just privilege in the abstract, but the way in which surveillance and the absence of surveillance for Whites produces a freedom in movement and keeps them away from the harm that the regular treatment that is afforded to mostly Black and Brown kids would reveal and put them at risk for.

So I tried to level it in their lived experience.

But the problem is so much bigger than that.

It's not just some kids in the classroom.

And that's when I began to push up into the more bigger, societal meta level of the situation.

- Let's talk about that.

So you use storytelling and you use case studies to examine how interconnected all these policies are and how they produce severe, unequal outcomes, racist disparities.

But as you mentioned, privilege may be blinded by that, but our communities, Black families, have had these conversations for generations.

What did your research uncover?

- Whew, boy, how much time do we have?

(Anaridis laughing) No, I'm kidding.

So the first thing I wanna say is that my research was born out of asking a very different initial question than many people ask.

Many people who study race and disparity are asking what they think is a colorblind question.

Let's just see what the numbers are, and then we have to figure out why they're that way.

But what I wanted to know was what are these policies?

What are their intended purposes?

What do they say they're for?

So say there's something like broken windows policing, which is a theory that says, "If I police very heavily on small infractions, "like a broken window, "then it will prevent more serious crime."

But it really doesn't.

That was proven.

But more importantly, what it means is that you can further punish individuals on the street for dropping a wrapper, for small things and create a very hostile environment where people are being punitively treated over and over.

So I would say, okay, let's look at what the law says it's for, stop and frisk, stand your ground, broken windows, and I said, "What does it say it's for "and then who do they use it on, "and how does that actually create a racial effect?"

Because the language doesn't say anything about race.

The policies very rarely do.

So what happens is they get exercised in a way that create discriminatory outcomes.

Now, what tends to happen is people, in the way we tell stories about racism in this country, people think racism is just a personal attitude, a belief.

If you ask 'em, "Is Trump a racist?"

It's a big question.

"Is America racist?"

And Nikki Haley made this claim, Tim Scott and others, "America is not racist."

- America is not a racist country.

- In much of the Democratic Party, it's now fashionable to say that America is racist.

That is a lie.

- So people take that personally.

If you say, "America's racist," you're meaning the people individually, and that's intentionally hiding how systemic racism works in this era.

In this era, you can have neighbors and friends who socialize across race, who have their kids going to schools some of the time that have mixed racial environments.

But the fundamental reality of that interconnection is a highly unequal relationship, where the outcomes of their experiences in schools, in incarceration, in racial profiling, in policing, in housing, in wealth and lending discrimination is so profound that it cannot be accounted for on a one-by-one basis.

So what we shouldn't be asking is, "Hey, are you a racist?"

But, "How is society advantaging or disadvantaging you "based on your race?"

- I wanna get to how do we, as people who want to make a change, work in a world where perpetually, there are folks who are in denial that this exists.

But before we get there, can we talk about how all of these systems are connected, how we're over disciplined in schools, how we're discriminated in housing, how we're overpoliced and that impacts criminal justice?

When I was a reporter in Massachusetts, I discovered that there were 82 superior court justices, and only two were African American.

That has an impact on the outcomes of the people who come before their bench, right?

- Right, absolutely.

So first let's start, let's do a little term distinction.

'Cause we use these terms wildly.

We just say racism.

We draw no distinctions.

There are many layers of different kinds of racism.

There's personal, interpersonal, personal meaning I hold bigoted beliefs about a group of people, usually of color in this case, (coughs) and I just hold them personally.

Then there's interpersonal.

That means I hold these beliefs and I treat you in a way that reflects these beliefs, because you can have beliefs and never do anything harmful with them, stay silent about it.

Then there's unconscious bias.

Society produces all these kinds of values of association of African Americans with criminality, the hypersexuality of Latinas, the so-and-so, these are stereotypes and beliefs that people think are attached to those groups of people, and they don't even know they have those beliefs until they're given a test that shows them that their reaction is so quick, it's based on a set of underlying unconscious biases.

Then there's structural racism, which is not exactly the same thing as systemic.

Structural racism is a racism that says that it's built in to one or more parts of a given society or community.

So you can have structural racism, say you have banking and lending discrimination.

Say you went from not lending to Black and Brown people to lending at rates that are much higher interest rates based on their zip code, which helps if they're segregated to know who you're impacting, and you say, "Okay, there's lending discrimination," but the schools could be technically fine, and the hospitals could have equal services, and there could be the same level of access to good neighborhoods or whatever, you see what I mean?

So you have circumstances in a structural sense that mean it's built in, that it's not individual, it's not personal, but it's not necessarily happening in multiple places at once in a way that's creating a group, a bigger problem.

So structure does not have to be systemic.

Systemic is the uber category.

It's the meta of it.

And what that is, is to say that you have discriminatory outcomes that are significant in major areas of society, and that the connections between those areas produce a collective effect that is not just add schools, to prisons, to hospitals.

It's not a one plus one plus one equals three.

It's the way they interact that actually creates effects that are much greater.

So metaracism is a racism that systemic racism causes.

That's true if you're talking about climate change.

Systemic climate behavior has an effect that is greater than any one action.

- Yeah, how do you even think to reverse that?

How can people work to reverse that?

Is that too much to ask?

- No, look, I actually feel the other way.

So tell me what you think of this.

I'm gonna give you a upbeat moment here in what looks like the land of despair.

But I will say that, before I give you my hopeful moment, that I worry about how uncomfortable people immediately get when it comes to solving the truth of racism.

It's like everybody wants it to be a couple of bad apples.

Well, we already know that's not true for all kinds of huge social issues, and yet, we don't recoil from it the way we do around race.

And I just wanna encourage the audience to sit with that and to say that our disposition is part of the problem.

It's not just that the problem is horrible and not likely to be 100% fixed anytime soon.

It's that we have this weight that we carry around, which I think is attached to guilt and exhaustion and fatigue, and we just want to have a fantasy.

We're not comfortable as much as we used to be with difficult truths.

And I just wanna encourage people, we're not gonna solve any of this, climate change, war, Middle Eastern conflict, none of this is gonna happen like if somebody wakes up and had a happy day.

It's gonna be a lot of hard work, so I just wanna put that on the table.

But here's what I love about systems thinking.

If it was just a structural situation, and it was a lot of places, but they weren't connected, it'd be pretty difficult to undo each one.

But if you have a system, and we know that every system has leverage points, points that produce more strength and more power and more influence on the system, then finding those leverage points and reversing them are going to have a disproportionately positive effect.

So if we say, "We're not going to fund public schools "with property taxes.

"It just favors wealthy districts.

"It helps people choose to actually segregate wealthy "from others, Whites from others.

"It creates a intergenerational advantage "that is conferrable over time.

"We're not gonna do it."

Now, there will be some fights.

This will not be easy.

But that just shows you the investment.

But that's a leverage point that we could use in the opposite way.

Can you imagine if what poor kids and working class kids of color needed to do well is provided at the same rate as everybody else?

Education would be much more of an engine, like people assume it already is.

And so, that's the kind of leverage point focus that systems helps us identify.

And that means we have to be more intensive about how we look at policies and look at practices.

Like, why is racial profiling so impactful?

Well, because it allows the police to do what they want.

They have so much discretion.

That underlying expansion of discretion is why there's so much normalization of this.

There's ways to leverage that.

So for example, the cop who killed that Black woman who was just recently shot in the head, in the face, for not putting down a pot of water that she was already cooking with, fast enough.

He already had two DUIs.

There's no national database for cops who have an issue.

They should never work in law enforcement again anywhere in the country.

That doesn't seem excessive to me if they've been considered dangerous in some way or excessive.

Just think about that.

Think if we could automatically stop all of those rogue cops every time they got something on their record that would just invalidate and disqualify them from any other job, you see?

So there are linchpins, there are moments of leverage that if we focus on them, and we're honest about the effect they're having, we can have a pretty big impact.

It's not gonna solve the whole thing right away, but frankly, nothing will.

We have to do it either one thing at a time or two or three things at a time that work around a particular nexus, allows us to focus, unlock that space, create positive space in its place.

- Is that your hope for this book, that it just opens up a conversation and gets people to do the work?

- Yeah, I mean, the first thing I want is I want people to understand what systemic racism is, because systems thinking is a powerful tool.

So the first thing I want them to do is really understand it, so that they can activate for it.

Most of the language has been so vague that nobody could figure out, and it gets manipulated.

That's why it gets manipulated into, "You're a racist."

I don't know, maybe, maybe not, but let's talk about the problem.

It's even what's happening with Kamala.

Everybody wants to talk about her racial identity.

That's not the question.

The question is what's her racial policy?

(laughs) That's the question.

But they have us focused on her personal story.

It's just like what we do with all these other cases that are actual cases in the news.

So what I would just desperately love is for the book to help people see, hey, these things are coordinated, having this huge impact.

So when people say it's the system, they really are referring to something rather impactful.

They're not just making stuff up, claiming they're a victim, because that's really what happens a lot.

Second thing is that we should be able to come across race and gender and class and try to problem solve.

We have a housing crisis of enormous proportions.

Why?

We don't ask why in the media, when we tell that story, we say, "We need affordable housing."

Everyone's like, "I don't want a bunch of alcoholics "and drug addicts in my neighborhood."

Well, let's move back in the story a bit, so that we can learn to understand, well how did people end up so vulnerable, and why is your neighborhood only single-family houses, and who made those decisions, and what are the impacts?

And so, by giving us a systemic framework, it allows us to connect to one another in trying to solve solutions.

Everybody's not gonna get into this, but it puts us on a level playing field in conversation.

I don't have to be worried about calling you a racist.

You don't have to get me, no name calling.

This is like the air we breathe, and that's just what it is.

So let's see if we can make it cleaner, more just, full of more compassion, more understanding and some change.

So those are my big hopes.

I know it's a little lofty.

I'll give you that.

- Well, you're leading the way, and you're actually doing it.

And I appreciate you so much for coming on and sharing your insight and your expertise with us.

It's been a fascinating conversation.

You took us to school today, Tricia.

(Tricia laughs) You took us us to school.

- Well, that's where I live, and your show takes people to school every time, so I'm really grateful for being here.

Thanks for having me.

- Thank you for being here.

We have run out of time.

I would like to thank tonight's guest, Tricia Rose.

You can watch this episode and all our past episodes anytime at watch.ripbs.org.

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