7 Anti-Racist Conversations to Deepen Understanding, Create Compassion, and Effect Change
“Those black n****** never leave a tip. They’re so goddamned cheap,” John said.
John was my colleague and what we refer to in Las Vegas as a ‘career server’ because working as a server in a restaurant was his end game. He was a bald, white man with eyeglasses and a penchant for saying racist remarks about black people right in front of me. He’s also what I think of when I imagine a bigot.
What John didn’t know -- and what he would never know because I never spoke up -- was that my entire family is black. While I appear as an ambiguous Asian-American female, I am 25% black and all of the close and extended family members that I grew up with are also black.
For years, I’ve wrestled with my black identity, especially since I was already seen as different growing up in a predominantly conservative, white town in the midwest. I don’t look black, so am I allowed to say that I am black? People who are 1/16th indigenous get to claim that they too are indigenous, so do the same rules apply to me? What does it mean to be black? Do my extended black family members accept me even though I don’t look like them? Am I more Asian than I am black just because that’s the way I look? Is there enough space for my blackness if people I know think of me as a twinkie - yellow on the outside and white on the inside? Does it even matter?
After George Floyd’s murder became the umpteenth story of a black person experiencing police brutality, many of us are wrestling with big questions about race, our ability to affect change, and the meaning of our own constructed identities.
In the midst of this confusion, what can we do to gain clarity and move forward together?
I don’t have all of the answers. There is so much that I’m still learning about my place within efforts to dismantle oppressive systems, but hearing others talk about big issues from a variety of backgrounds and experiences has always help guide me in forming my own opinions and determining my next steps.
That’s why I’ve put together this list of seven podcast conversations to help approach this multifaceted and complex issue with a new lens.
It’s easy to become defensive and to let our ego get in the way of understanding and truly hearing someone else when talking about racism, but Lama Rod demonstrated what a productive conversation about race and social justice can look like and proves that patience, vulnerability, and an openness to hearing another perspective can transform and heal another human being.
On the flip side, Dan Harris, a white man with a large platform, showed his humanity and his humility by letting us hear in real time what it was like for him to dismantle the thoughts and stories that uphold a white supremacist and patriarchal system. He gets uncomfortable, and he challenges his own beliefs which is ultimately what we all need to start with if we want to see change at both the individual and the systemic level.
They say that until we know where we’ve been, we can’t know where we’re going. That’s why the podcast series that Scene on Radio produced with John Biewen and Chenjerai Kumanyika is so vital right now. In each episode, which is roughly 20-30 minutes, they educate us about the origins of racism, the rise of colonialism, and how those beliefs have brought us to where we are today.
While listening to just the first few episodes, I was shocked by how much I didn’t know or understand about the slave trade and about the insidious ways that people in power used PR and marketing to tell stories that ensured they stayed in power. There is still so much I’m learning, and I’m confident that this podcast series will help me not only see our modern issues from a new, critical perspective but also help me understand how I can uniquely contribute.
Donny Jackson, a social justice poet and author (and a client of ours!), often says in his work, “This isn’t new news.” That sentiment never felt truer to me than when I listened to Code Switch’s episode called A Decade of Watching Black People Die. Many of the stories that are highlighted in that conversation come from 2015 after the murders of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and Philando Castile.
The truth is that I didn’t know many of the names that they listed, and I hadn’t spent the time to research the stories that they were telling when they happened. As a Taiwanese-Black American woman that has benefited from white privilege, I call that out because I know that shame and guilt are not useful emotions right now. For non-minority people who are uncomfortable confronting their own biases, it can be easy to get stuck in those feelings but this episode can help you understand that the most useful thing we can do right now to be allies is to educate ourselves and to speak up, especially when it’s inconvenient to do so.
Kara Loewentheil -- another client of ours -- believes that we won’t see change on a systemic level until we see change at an individual level. That belief is clear in her recent episode on how we can use thought work, a methodology that uses neuroplasticity to retrain the brain from how it’s been socially conditioned, to unlearn the ways that we are complicit to racism. In terms of next steps for how we can make a difference, her approach is the most personal that I’ve seen so far. It not only asks us to challenge our beliefs but then offers us a roadmap for how we can go about changing them.
In this episode of Flaunt Your Fire, India Jackson reminds business owners that how they show up in this moment is a representation of their values and that vanity metrics, like the number of followers that you have, shouldn’t play a role in whether or not you decide to speak up. She paints the picture clearly. You’re either anti-racist or you’re racist, and we’re going to assume you’re racist if you stay silent.
In it, she speaks to business owners who are scared that they’ll drive potential or current customers away by being too political. India reminds us that people are going to unfollow us if we say we support Black Lives Matter or if we say nothing at all, so it’s up to us to decide to use our platforms to make a difference or to maintain the status quo. It was a kick in the butt for me to be more vocal, more visible, and more openly anti-racist than ever before.
The Stoop is everything I needed when I was a teenager because it offers a multifaceted perspective of what it means to identify as a black person. From stories about being the first black woman in broadcasting to the complexities of interracial relationships, Leila Day and Hana Baba create an open dialogue for all voices in the black community to be heard and learned from.
Similar to the reasons I love The Stoop, Self-Evident -- a show about the Asian-American experience -- helps me process the complexities of being many different things and coming from multiple backgrounds.
It teaches me how to talk about intersectionality and the stories included in each episode give me comfort.