Lies about Black People: How to Combat Racist Stereotypes and Why It Matters 1633888789, 9781633888784

Table of contents :
Cover
LIES ABOUTBLACK PEOPLE
Copyright
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter One A Word on My Words
Chapter Two Racism Is the Real “Big Lie”!
Chapter Three Why We Must Fight Lies about Black People
Chapter Four You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
Chapter Five Your Racial Vocabulary
Chapter Six Lies the Media Told Us
Chapter Seven Do Black People Feel Pain?
Chapter Eight Aren’t Black People More Likely to Be Criminals?
Chapter Nine Black People Just Can’t Afford to Live Here!
Chapter Ten Black People Are Just Bad with Money!
Chapter Eleven Black People Can’t Swim
Chapter Twelve The White-Privilege Card
Chapter Thirteen The Lies behind White Lives Matter and All Lives Matter
Chapter Fourteen Critical Race Theory and Disinformation
Chapter Fifteen Black Intelligence
Chapter Sixteen Anti-Blackness Is Global
Chapter Seventeen Be a LEADer!
Chapter Eighteen Is Your Organization Antiracist?
Chapter Nineteen Does Your Organization Need a Diversity Dictionary?
Chapter Twenty Beyond Performative Celebrations of the Black Experience
Chapter Twenty-one Increasing Black Representation in Your Organizations
Chapter Twenty-two Elevating Black Students
Chapter Twenty-three Let’s Go UPstander!
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Notes

Citation preview

LIES ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE How to Combat Racist Stereotypes and Why It Matters

OMEKONGO DIBINGA

An imprint of Globe Pequot, the trade division of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Blvd., Ste. 200 Lanham, MD 20706 www.rowman.com Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK Copyright © 2023 by Omekongo Dibinga All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dibinga, Omékongo, author. Title: Lies about Black people : how to combat racist stereotypes and why it matters / Omekongo Dibinga. Description: Lanham, MD : Prometheus, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “In this honest and welcoming book, diversity and inclusion expert, professor, and award-winning speaker Dr. Omekongo Dibinga argues that we must embark on a massive undertaking to re-educate ourselves on the stereotypes that have proven harmful, and too often deadly, to the Black community”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022054658 (print) | LCCN 2022054659 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633888784 (cloth) | ISBN 9781633888791 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Social conditions—1975– | Anti-racism— United States. | Stereotypes (Social psychology)—United States. | Racism— United States. | United States—Race relations—21st century. Classification: LCC E185.615 .D535 2023 (print) | LCC E185.615 (ebook) | DDC 305.896/073—dc23/eng/20230104 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054658 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054659 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

CONTENTS

Foreword: “I’m Going to Live the Life I Sing about in My Song” Michael Eric Dyson v Introduction: The Love That Hate Produced ix 1 A Word on My Words 2 Racism Is the Real “Big Lie”! 3 Why We Must Fight Lies about Black People 4 You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know 5 Your Racial Vocabulary 6 Lies the Media Told Us 7 Do Black People Feel Pain? 8 Aren’t Black People More Likely to Be Criminals? 9 Black People Just Can’t Afford to Live Here! 10 Black People Are Just Bad with Money! 11 Black People Can’t Swim: The Great Double Entendre 12 The White-Privilege Card 13 The Lies behind White Lives Matter and All Lives Matter 14 Critical Race Theory and Disinformation 15 Black Intelligence: Real or Artificial? 16 Anti-Blackness Is Global 17 Be a LEADer! 18 Is Your Organization Antiracist? 19 Does Your Organization Need a Diversity Dictionary? 20 Beyond Performative Celebrations of the Black Experience 21 Increasing Black Representation in Your Organizations 22 Elevating Black Students: Becoming a More Culturally

1 7 13 24 39 48 57 62 76 84 96 105 118 129 142 149 154 165 170 176 179

Competent Teacher 23 Let’s Go UPstander!

183 188

Glossary Acknowledgments Notes

193 195 197



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FOREWORD “I’m Going to Live the Life I Sing about in My Song” MICHAEL ERIC DYSON

From the moment I met him, Omekongo Dibinga and the folk he sprang from gleefully trampled the garden variety of Black stereotypes. His late father, the Reverend Doctor Dibinga Wa Said, a scholar and pastor, earned both a doctorate in theology from Harvard and a PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne. He could speak, read, and write English, French, Kiswahili, Lingala, and Tshiluba and could read and write German, Spanish, Latin, and hieroglyphics. Omekongo’s mother, Dr. Ngolela W. Kabongo, earned a doctorate from Harvard with a prescient dissertation that became the book Ethico-Embryonic Theories of Abortion and Development in Africa. Omekongo embraced their zeal for higher learning and polished off a PhD from the University of Maryland. So much for Black folk having little interest in education. He did this while watching over his energetic brood with his gifted and lovely wife, Kendra, even as he remained tight with several equally impressive siblings. So much for the pathology of the Black family. And he delved into hip-hop even as he experimented with spoken word and expanded the lyrical circumference of conscious rap while deepening his appreciation of Jay-Z. So much for woke artists having little flavor and even less knowledge of the messy world that inspires hard-core lyrics. All the while, he flashed his megakilowatt smile as he labored as a TA in my courses on hip-hop—really, he was more T than A, more teacher than assistant. He willed his handsome chocolate face and gaggle of thinly knitted braids into a charismatic weapon against the easy cynicism and effortless mean-mugging that stampedes pockets of urban culture. So much for older Black folk being the sworn enemies of the young. Few thinkers are more ideally situated to take on the venomous rush of lies that invade the dominion of truth and seek to dethrone the facts of Blackness. When those lies assume the form of stereotypes, they gain even more sinister

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force because they rely on half-truth. In fact, Black folk often face a trilogy of types when combatting cultural misinformation and asserting their truth: stereotypes, archetypes, and antitypes. Stereotypes are lazy perceptions of the truth, truth that is slanted in distorted prisms of culture and race. Archetypes are Black attempts to set the record straight, but sometimes such efforts veer into rigid constructions of Black identity. Antitypes create bigger space for a nuanced, sophisticated, complex Black identity that considers irreverent and subversive elements—if they reflect genuine modes of Black expression. Lies about Black People points out the stereotypes that choke Black culture, embraces the archetypes that cherish Black identity, and acknowledges the antitypes in which reside richer and more complicated Black worldviews. Dibinga brilliantly identifies stereotypes—for instance, Black folk can’t swim, Black folk rely too heavily on welfare—and then demolishes them with the facts: Jim Crow kept Black folk out of pools and recreational spaces, and social policy was crafted to sack the Black father and stigmatize the Black mother. Dibinga reveals how the universe of reading and interpreting Blackness seems to work by a physics of race governed by a simple but sorry law: For every complex and nuanced Black action, there is an opposite and equally forceful stereotypical reaction. Black culture has rarely been given the space to exist on its own terms, to thrive and prosper according to its own lights, to rotate on the axis of Black self-determination without nettlesome interference from outside forces. Black identity is held in place by the gravity of a beautiful and demanding Blackness that respects the many-colored nature of who we are and what we have been and done—and do—as a people. Lies about Black People exposes racist stereotypes, combats unexamined racist beliefs, and offers intelligent reflections on the sublime character of Black culture and identity. We need this book now more than ever, as resurgent racism is channeled through an anti-Blackness that grows bolder by the day: That is, it doesn’t mind being exposed because it takes reckless comfort in the belief that it is the only truth we need to know while doubling down on its sick conviction that it is right about race. Omekongo Dibinga’s family tree traces back to Congo—so much for the notion that those of recent African descent are out for themselves and want as little as possible to do with American-born Blacks. He is deeply committed to righting the wrongs of history in this lucid and eloquent book. It couldn’t be timelier, as anti-Blackness rises and the fear of a Black world and Black influence increases. Read this book, and learn how to fight back against the lethal ignorance that clouds the American mind. Read this book and learn how to become a devoted antiracist and to make arguments to defeat the enemies of truth, justice, and equality.

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Besides being a thinker and scholar, Dibinga is also a gifted poet and riveting performer. His considerable talent suggests another great performer, Mahalia Jackson, who sang, “I’m going to live the life I sing about in my song.” In short, I want to close the distance between the uplifting lyrics I perform and the way I act and behave in daily life. Omekongo Dibinga long ago closed the space between word and deed—between the high-minded ideals he soulfully expresses in his spoken-word artistry and his hip-hop music and living up to the noble aspirations that characterize his fine work at its best. I have known Omekongo Dibinga for more than a decade, and I can say, without hesitation, that he is one of the smartest, most committed, most engaging scholars I have ever encountered. He is also a man of luminous character and unimpeachable integrity, a fact that shines through on each page. In Lies about Black People, he enlarges his classroom and opens the doors of learning to the masses who will read this marvelous book. I was proud to call Omekongo Dibinga my mentee and friend. I am now proud to call him my teacher and inspiration. I am convinced that after reading this book, you will feel the same way.

INTRODUCTION The Love That Hate Produced

This is a story about love But it’s not about that Valentine’s Day love Or that motherly love It ain’t even about that Philly brotherly love No This is a story about the love that hate produced It’s a story about Africa and all of her children Still loving themselves After centuries of systemic injustice It’s a story about tragic, trans-Atlantic treason And Berlin boundaries being drawn Across ethnic lines with no rhyme or reason It’s a story about enslaved Africans beating the odds And nations conquering other nations And changing their monotheistic gods By creating missionary positions, To screw Africans in missionary positions, In order to religiously rape them of their own religion It’s a story of Europeans using “civil lies” To try to “civil-ize” the creators of civilization And a story of Klan rallies and White families Gathering on a sweltering Sunday afternoon Around half past five For a friendly game of “Blacks being burned alive” at the stake And living for over 400 years as enemies of the state It’s a story about Langston Hughes Through poetry shaping the Blues And stereotypical images Of Black men on the news



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It’s a story about Jesse Owens Humiliating Hitler And then being humiliated upon his homecoming Where he was still treated like a 2nd-class citizen It’s a story about Kings Losing their crowns on Tennessee balconies And Malcolm’s slaying For pointing out White fallacies It’s a story about Joanne Going from America’s daughter To persona non grata Under the name of Assata It’s a story about Congolese genocide In the name of coltan, diamonds, and gold And about southern Sudanese slaves Still being sold in this new millennium It’s a story about Garrett Morgan Creating the gas mask That would save the lives of millions of firefighters Who would then turn their hoses on our people Igniting an international fight for civil rights! This is about that production process! Manufacturing love In fascist factories And capitalist corporations It’s a story about Queen Mothers giving Moore meaning And life to the movement And Muhammad’s messages to the Black man And marches on Washington It’s a story about Reverend Bernice Picking up her father’s crown And Malcolm’s children preventing his legacy From being sold on the download It’s a story about Marian Anderson Shining on the Washington Monument stairs After years of contempt from her peers It’s a story about Tuskegee Airmen Being humiliated and discriminated against But never flying their planes into the World Trade Center Because our people are too forgiving In the face of ingrates Who don’t appreciate our good-natured-ness It’s a story about Ali Standing strong in protest of Vietnam

INTROD UCTION

Introduction

And Sam Cooke’s swearing to the death That a “Change Gon’ Come” As Major League Baseball welcomed Jackie Robinson Though Fritz Pollard’s family still looks for recognition In the should-be-shamed NFL Hall of Fame Nevertheless, It’s a story about Serena and Venus Williams Picking up Althea Gibson’s greatness and Arthur’s ashes And winning at Wimbledon And Tiger’s making all competition retreat into the Woods It’s about those conscious brothers and sisters in professional sports Who have taken it upon themselves To take care of their ’hoods And hip-hop artists protesting To keep our education system from becoming no good It’s a story of brothers dying On the front lines of Korea, Vietnam, and Kuwait So that the world could see The first Black secretary of state It’s a story about the nation’s defense Being placed in the hands of a sister And about Lauryn’s climb up her Hill to humility And a government trying in futility To break our attempts at unity It’s a story of a people Becoming Black and proud And not being afraid to say if loud Can you hear it? It’s the sound of all the love and hugs Being exchanged at the millions of marches And our people committing themselves to health And not the golden arches It’s a story about a people Reclaiming its African identity Like rollin’ on from Roland to Askia And international protests to try to free Mumia This is a story about love In the face of a system that hates us But can’t live without us But most importantly It’s a story about God’s chosen people Rising up from the dust This is a story About love!

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This book is a love letter to truth seekers. This book is dedicated to everyone who at some point in their lives realized that what they were told about Black people was just not accurate. It is for those who want to know not only what lies they were told about Black people but also why those lies were told and why those lies continue to be told. This book is dedicated to you, whether you are a seasoned student of history or this is your first day of class. The world we live in today has been built on lies. The neighborhoods we live in have been built on lies. The economic disparities we experience have been built on lies. The inability for so many to marry whomever they loved of a different “race” has been built on lies. The only ways to counter lies are with truth—and love. I add love as part of the counter to lies out of respect and admiration for all the people and stories I mention in my poem. I based the title of my poem from the 1959 five-part television documentary The Hate That Hate Produced. It was produced by Mike Wallace and Louis Lomax. The documentary focuses primarily on the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X. Wallace starts out the series with the following words: While city officials, state agencies, White liberals, and sober-minded Negroes stand idly by, a group of Negro dissenters is taking to street-corner step ladders, church pulpits, sports arenas, and ballroom platforms across the United States, to preach a gospel of hate that would set off a federal investigation if it were preached by Southern Whites.1

This documentary aired at the height of the American civil rights movement, which started in the 1940s, as Black soldiers returned from World War II and the fight for Black freedom intensified. The response from much of (not all) White America was to increase its level of hate toward Black people. Through all the lynchings, the fire hoses, the segregation, the firebombs, the assassinations, and more, Black people have responded to the hate with love. It is love for this country that led Black people to fight in every war. It is love for this country that has led Black people to create invention after invention to improve the lives of Americans, even though they were often not credited for them, like Nathan “Nearest” Green, an enslaved man who created the original formula for the Jack Daniel’s whiskey. It is love for America that led Black athletes to represent America proudly in the Olympics, like Jesse Owens and Muhammad Ali, and still face dehumanizing racism upon their return. It is love for this country that led many Black people, even through language that may have espoused hate, to root themselves in the love of making America as good as its promise—for everyone. Through information, personal interviews, and activities, this book will help you, including Black readers, to fall in love, rediscover your love, or reinforce your love of and for Black people. As a poet and rapper, I present poetry

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throughout the book to explain some of the text from a poetic lens of love. It is through love that we are going to create Dr. King’s beloved community. The interviews conducted and shared in this book are extremely diverse because I wanted to depict the idea that we are all victims of the lies told about Black people, but we can all be victors in learning and sharing the truth about Black people. It is through love that we are going to see that there is only one race— the human race—and that these lies have kept us intentionally divided. Lies about Black people have created a zero-sum game mentality, but truth and love will allow us to stop fighting for pieces of a small pie and come together to make a bigger pie for us all to enjoy. May this book aid us all in finally being able to create a narrative about the love that love will produce! To be clear, this book is designed for activists. It is designed for UPstanders— people who want to make a difference in society in any way they can. I intentionally capitalize the UP in UPstander to add emphasis to the need for all of us to stand up. This book is designed for any reader who wants to deepen their knowledge of the lies that helped racialize America. It is designed for you, the suburban parent who found yourself saying “Black Lives Matter” last summer but now who wants to know what that looks like beyond the chant. You want to know why the slogan became necessary in the first place. It is designed for you, the banker who started to see that there was something wrong in the racialized ways your bank was issuing loans. It is designed for you, the journalist who is questioning why so many negative stories about Black people make it to the news despite all the good that is happening in the Black community. It is designed for you, the teacher or professor who is looking for new ways to stimulate the minds of your students around America’s racialized history. It is designed for you, the Black child who, before Olympic-medal-winning champion Simone Manuel, thought that swimming was not for Black people. It is designed for anyone who wants to look at America with a deeper critical lens now that you have scratched the surface on courageous conversations about race. This book argues that we must embark on a massive undertaking to reeducate ourselves on the stereotypes that have proven harmful and too often deadly to the Black community. Black people are continually the number 1 target for hate crimes. Violence declines when we are humanized, when we are openly and honestly exposed to each other and have a chance to challenge and break down our stereotypes. Professionally, stereotypes about Black intelligence are what led to companies like Facebook being sued for not hiring Black people because, despite their qualifications, they were not a good “culture fit” for the company.2 And while many may think these problems are rooted in the past, it was in this new millennium that my daughter in kindergarten was told by a classmate that he can’t play with Brown people. If these biases are not challenged now, then the cycle will continue for years to come.

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This book is written in hopes that my three children and yours can grow up in a world where they can be judged by what Dr. King said: the content of their character and not the color of their skin. This book is written so that all our children can engage the world but not feel the burden of inheriting a fight to end racism like I inherited from my parents, who were literally beaten and, in the case of my father, tortured by being stretched in four directions and almost assassinated in his pursuit of freedom. I write this book in hopes that the buck stops with my generation so that future generations can fight for justice because it’s the right thing to do and not because their lives literally depend on it. I never knew what it was like to just say “I want to be a doctor” or “I want to be a dancer” when I grow up. When you are born in the fight for justice, your career options are limited. I want the world’s children and future generations to live in their limitless potential, and this book is part of that mission. Somebody lied to us about Black people. I’m not just talking to White people. I am talking about all of us. Even the most knowledgeable person on the history of Black people in the world has been lied to about Black people at some point. The lies told about Black people are what have led many on a path to become more knowledgeable about Black people, which has led them to this book. Our education system made a conscious decision to twist or outright disregard the positive contributions of Black people to society. Regardless of the reasons that our collective knowledge of Black people is not strong, this book is going to help you build your knowledge about Black people. This book is not a history book. Through personal anecdotes and anecdotes of others, historical inquiry, and an analysis of modern-day events and their historical context and implications, this book will break down some of the most powerful lies told about Black people. Each chapter and interview is designed to debunk lies about Black people. All lies told are bad! There are no “good lies” told about any group, like all Asians are good at math or all White people are rich. Lies are told about people to make one group look superior and another one look inferior, period. They are used to subjugate some and elevate others. We cannot help what we learn, but we are responsible to “unlearn” what we were taught and learn not new lies but simply the truth. Lastly, I am writing this book because it is needed now. This book will take you to the next level of courageous conversations if you are new to this arena of activism or if you are looking for a refresher. The activities presented in this book will allow you to start taking action while you read this book. This book incorporates interviews from everyday people living in America so you can see how pervasive racism has been and still is in the United States. You can either read the interviews as you finish a chapter or read all the interviews together after you finish the book. The goal in sharing these interviews is to get you to see that you are not alone and to understand that we are all on a journey

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in becoming antiracist, proequity, and proequality. Are you ready to learn? Are you ready to unlearn? Are you ready to do the work? Are you ready to be an UPstander and not a bystander? Well let’s go!

Activity: The Lies You Were Told Are you part of the solution or part of the problem? As I repeat multiple times in this book, there is no middle ground. Your silence is compliance! You are either part of the solution or part of the problem. Where do you—lie—on this issue? Right now, I want you to write down any lies you were told about Black people growing up. No matter what your race is, even (and maybe especially) if you are Black yourself, I can guarantee you were lied to about Black people. Some of the lies I was told about Black people include stereotypes that Black people are better at athletics than intelligence, Black people are terrible with money, and Black people are more prone to be violent than other groups. This space is for you. Be honest. Be open. Be vulnerable. These are the first steps on your antiracist journey! I was taught that Black people are ______________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________.

CHAPTER ONE

A WORD ON MY WORDS

I do not have it all figured out. I am a work in progress as it relates to figuring

out the terms to best refer to different groups in a way that is empowering. I speak more in-depth in another chapter about our racialized vocabulary, but I want you to understand how I chose to use words in this book. I put a glossary at the end of the book so that we are on the same page with the terms in this book. As I explain later, coming to common definitions up front is crucial for courageous conversations. You can indeed refer to the glossary for more complete definitions of words, but I want to explain my word choice in this book. I do not use the term minority to refer to Black and Brown people unless I am quoting someone. The reason for this is that my parents taught me that I am part of a global majority, so I never limited myself to the United States. I always knew that much of the world was closer to my complexion than the complexion of White people, so the term minority never made sense to me. I no longer use the term people of color. In my work over the past few decades in the field of diversity, equity, and inclusion, I have always done my best to make sure that the language I use is respectful of all communities with whom I work. Now I do not throw out words just to please people. For the most part, I do my research and combine my knowledge with how people feel they want to be identified. For years, I have used the term people of color in my writings, presentations, and speeches, but over the past few years, I have grown uncomfortable with the term, primarily because my experience as a Black person in America gets lost in that expression. Add the word minority to the conversation, and one can hopefully see how the Black experience is being forgotten for the sake of overall diversity and inclusion. Across multiple industries, we see people of color and minorities used in literature. Companies often speak of how their numbers have increased in terms of “minority” representation, but the numbers rarely match for African Americans and Black people overall. For example, when some companies state



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that they have increased hiring of “minorities,” that could mean anyone from White women to Asian-born Indians and everyone in between. This was indeed the case with affirmative action, where research has shown that most people who benefitted from it are White women.1 More on that later. To be clear, I believe that all traditionally underrepresented groups in company spaces should have opportunities to have their numbers increased. What happens unfortunately too often is that after those numbers are met, there is no longer a need to reach out to the Black community. Relating back to people of color, all challenges affecting what I would call non-White people are not the same. For example, the many cases of police shootings of unarmed people are primarily an issue facing the Black community.2 It is not a “people of color” issue. The preschool-to-prison pipeline is primarily a problem affecting Black students. After comedian Shane Gillis was hired then fired from Saturday Night Live over his racist comments toward Asians, I read one tweet by an Asian activist who wrote, “[C]hink is like the n-word for people of color.”3 History lesson: “People of color” are not called nigga or nigger. Black people are. So today, when I hear people of color, it sounds too universal, and I feel lost in it. I do not besmirch people for using the term; I just know how it makes me feel. I am a Black person before I am a person of color. Furthermore, using that term places White people at the center, like a white piece of paper and then everyone else is colored in. Historically, White people were not the first to walk this earth. Black people were the first known humans, so people of color also may reinforce a White ethnocentric, maybe even a White supremacist, idea. If we are going to be serious about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then we must be sure that we are being inclusive of all groups and their experiences. Truth be told, some companies get away with touting an increase in their Black representation by hiring non–African American Black people, such as people from the Caribbean, the African continent, Europe, and elsewhere. This is also a discussion happening in our colleges and universities4 and even in Hollywood, as we have seen in recent years with the movies Harriet, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, and Judas and the Black Messiah, where the lead actors are Black but not African American. Personally, I am fine with an overall increase in Black representation in film, but if the intention is that African Americans come with too much “baggage” to employ, as African American director Lee Daniels told Black British actor David Oyelowo when he cast him to play Dr. King in the movie Selma, then the real issue may be the stereotypes and lies that employers have about African Americans that also need to be challenged.5 So throughout this book, if there is a need to speak about all people who are not White, I will use the term non-White because it holds less power and history than people of color, which is just too close to colored people for my

A Word on M y Words

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liking. Other terms I avoid are disability, third world, and developing country. I am looking for new language and words that help us create communities where everyone can feel celebrated, not tolerated, and I find these terms disempowering. Lastly as it relates to political terms, I do not use terms like prolife and the Right to refer to the Republican Party because the Republican Party of today is not “the Right.” It is the wrong. Prolife puts those who are against abortion in a “higher than thou” space that they do not deserve, particularly because many in the “prolife” movement do not care much for lives after birth. Furthermore, given that the conservative Supreme Court removed a constitutional right when it overturned Roe v. Wade in the summer of 2022, I do not see much respect given to the lives of pregnant women. We cannot use language that connotes righteousness of a particular group when their actions and policies represent the exact opposite; therefore, I refer to these groups as conservatives, Republicans, or antiabortion activists where needed. We all have work to do, and we must deal with the fluidity of change. I still use the terms Latino and Latina as opposed to Latinx, for example. I do not do this because old habits die hard but rather because I encounter more people within the Latino community who prefer the former terms to Latinx and view Latinx as a term being placed on them with no discussion with them. At the same time, however, I know that there are many within the Latinx community who prefer this term because they see it as gender neutral and it does not center men. My point is that we must stay on this journey of working together to figure out what makes the most sense and making changes as needed, and not just due to some form of political correctness. In recent months, for example, I have been working to eliminate referring to groups as guys. I had two female conference participants at two different conferences tell me the term is problematic because guys is used primarily for men, as in guys and gals. I received their feedback, but one thing I explained to them is that I started using guys because I found saying ladies and gentlemen to be offensive to people who identified as nonbinary. In my attempt to respect one group, I was unintentionally disrespecting another. One of the women challenged me publicly as I spoke. I accepted her critique, but not more than two minutes later, I said guys again. I caught myself and then asked if it is OK for everyone if I used the term family instead, and they agreed. Given that family may also be problematic to some, I have settled on folks. While some might argue that this is too much or too confusing, I just believe, and I hope you believe, that if we are serious about creating communities where everyone can be their complete selves, then we should start with checking our language. We are all a work in progress! As a reminder, I have included a glossary of select definitions of words like racism toward the end of this book. I use basic dictionary definitions because

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in order to engage in courageous conversations, we need to oftentimes strip conversations down to their most basic levels. Furthermore, we must understand that we must start with the same points of departure if we are to arrive at the same destination. If I asked you who the greatest basketball player is or the greatest athlete in your preferred sport, a name quickly comes to mind. If we are discussing basketball, maybe you are quick to think of Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, or LeBron James. Once the criteria are set, however, the answer becomes obvious, and there is no need for endless barbershop or ­sports-broadcast talk. If, for example, the greatest player is based on the man who won the most NBA championships, then it is the late, great Bill Russell because he won 11. Most rebounds? Wilt Chamberlain with 23,924. Agree to set criteria, and your discussions and debates will be more productive. Do the work needed to come to common ground on simple words because if I am talking to you about individual racism and you are responding back to me talking about systemic racism (both defined later in this book), then we will argue in circles with no resolution. Come to common ground on definitions, and you are one step closer to finding common ground in these uncommon times!

Activity: The Lies You Were Told Our first activity asked you to write about lies you were told. In this section, spend some time reflecting on the deeper question of why you believe you were told those lies.

MY ANTIRACIST JOURNEY: KARMA LEKSHE TSOMO

Karma Lekshe Tsomo is a seventy-eight-year-old Caucasian female professor. Growing up, she was told that Black people were different from “normal” people. She refers to this reference as “subtle but unmistakable.” Growing up in Kentucky during segregation, racism “was in the air,” but even as a young child, she could see “that something was terribly wrong when [she] saw the deep sadness in the faces of Black people on the street.” It was only later that she would realize the extent of the “structural injustices that perpetuate racism, that explain why no Black people lived in any of the White neighborhoods we lived in.” For Karma, the biggest consequences of the lies she was told about Black people were the overall ignorance of Black people’s lives, such as “missed cultural enrichment, [and] missed friendships.” When she was a child, she recalls asking her grandmother why there were no Black people in her church in Louisville. Her grandmother simply replied, “They have their own churches, Honey. They like it that way.” As she got a little older, her father “claimed that he treated all the engineers he supervised equally but that Black people did smell different.” These examples of what some call everyday racism helped Karma to understand the hypocrisy all around her. She realized that the phrase all God’s children only “seemed to include White people.” The experience of what she called “racial hypocrisy” helped Karma to “begin to see through religious, economic, gender, and other forms of hypocrisy.” Sadly but not surprisingly, Karma does indeed see the lies she was told persisting today. She holds that in order to challenge the systemic scale of racism, there must be systemic education “not only in the schools but in all companies, schools, organizations, and institutions [and that] economic justice urgently needs to be addressed to correct the glaring economic disparities that plague society.” Karma believes that the Black Lives Matter movement has helped to improve some of the racist issues America has faced. She fears the racial situation in America today is getting “worse and worse” for the poor and disenfranchised, but the “most insidious and dangerous thing is voter disenfranchisement, which stacks the political and economic systems against minorities.” What I find so inspiring about Karma’s story as it relates to racism is that she was born during World War II and grew up in the South. Systemic racism and Jim Crow were in full swing in America during these times, and she was able to remove the racist blinders that were placed in front of her. She lived through the era of intense voter disenfranchisement, such as the house burnings and assassinations



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of voting and civil rights advocates like Medgar Evers and Viola Liuzzo and the beatings of activists like Fannie Lou Hamer. Since her childhood, however, she was able to see that something just was not right with what she was taught about Black people. She sees history repeating itself today if we do not learn the valuable lessons she shared: that lies about Black people hurt not only Black people but also the entire country.

CHAPTER TWO

RACISM IS THE REAL “BIG LIE”!

What do you know about me? What do you know about you? What will you do when you find out the truth? What will you do? They say, “When you know better, you do better” This should be true But too many times we stay silent Not understanding that silence is compliance Some even say that White silence equals Black violence But right now, you have a chance to unlearn You have a chance to advance your knowledge, but only if you yearn If you yearn for the truth, you will find some of it here And if you’re confused on what to do, we will make it clear!

What if I told you that I could point to an actual date and person to prove where modern-day racism started? Turns out I can actually do that. I want to take you back to 1453 and a man in Portugal named Gomes de Zurara. According to historian Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, Zurara served as Prince Henry’s first biographer and was commissioned by King Afonso V to write a biography about his uncle. Prince Henry sponsored voyages that started the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In 1453, Zurara published The Chronicle of the Discovery of the Conquest of Guinea. In this book, Zurara wrote that some of the enslaved people Prince Henry captured in 1444 were “White enough, fair to look upon, and well proportioned,” while others were “like mulattoes” or “as Black as Ethiops, and so ugly.” Kendi writes, “Despite their different skin colors and languages and ethnic groups, Zurara blended them into one single group of people, worthy of enslavement.”1

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Although Zurara did not create the modern races directly, he provided the groups that would fit into the categories we know as Black, White, and mixed, and thus a “racial hierarchy” was created. Kendi elaborates, Gomes de Zurara grouped all those peoples from Africa into a single race for that very reason: to create hierarchy, the first racist idea. Race making is an essential ingredient in the making of racist ideas, the crust that holds the pie. Once a race has been created, it must be filled in—and Zurara filled it with negative qualities that would justify Prince Henry’s evangelical mission to the world. This Black race of people was lost, living “like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings,” Zurara wrote. “They had no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in a bestial sloth.”2

And with Zurara’s writings, the foundation for the idea of modern races was created. You would be hard-pressed to go back into history before the 1450s and find the descriptions of race that we use today. Prior to this time, human beings were primarily affiliated with their ethnic or religious identities. Individuals were described simply by how they looked, such as having bronze feet and woolly hair, as the Bible refers to Jesus in Revelations 1:14–15.3 As Duke University’s audio director John Biewen said in a TEDx talk, racism did not start with a misunderstanding. It started with a lie. He said that it is a story people decided to tell and that this “tool of Whiteness” is still “doing the job” it was invented to do today—to set up and perpetuate systems to keep us divided. It did not start with anything related to deficiencies based on color.4 The system of race we use today was set up in the mid-1400s to justify the enslavement of African people. The lie of racial hierarchies was created to allow the Portuguese to go before the Vatican and justify slavery, not for their real economic reasons, but to save Black African savages. This is what leads Kendi to state emphatically that self-interest, particularly of an economic and political nature, is the driving force of racism, not hate. Kendi states, “If the fundamental problem is ignorance and hate, then your solutions are going to be focused on education, and love and persuasion.”5 Kendi holds that it is the self-interest that drives the racist policies that then in turn benefit the self-interest. The self-interest runs so deep, according to Kendi, that when policies are challenged because they produce inequalities, racist ideas spring up to justify those policies, and hate flows freely from there. For Kendi, therefore, the economic self-interest led to the need for slavery as opposed to the hate of Black people in general. When it came to slavery in the United States and its continual justification, Kendi also boils it down to self-interest:

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I’m enslaving people because I want to make money. Abolitionists are resisting me, so I’m going to convince Americans that these people should be enslaved because they’re black, and then people will start believing those ideas: that these people are so barbaric, that they need to be enslaved, or that they are so childlike that they need to be enslaved.6

Have you ever looked at American racism through this type of lens? Can you see the self-interest that lies behind today’s debates over critical race theory and White-replacement theory (both of which are discussed later) and other race-based protests we are experiencing today? American racism is not solely based on hate, though hate crimes are the most obvious indicator of racism. Our racism is based on the self-interest of keeping White communities White, on keeping access to government resources White, on keeping access to the best education White, on keeping access to the best land White, and so on. The list is endless. In addition to self-interest, I would add fear. The founder of the Black News Network and legendary journalist Roland Martin describes White fear as the “unwillingness to share power and resources and allow for the redefinition of America’s morals, values, and principles.” Martin continues, “White fear is perpetuated by White Americans who are resistant to allowing America to live up to the promises of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”7 The fear of competition from Black athletes kept American sports segregated. The fear of the stereotype of Black male sexual prowess forced laws keeping Black men and White women separated, although since our arrival in America and for more time that we have been here than have not, White men have had access to Black women’s bodies. The fear of leveling the playing field kept Black people from attending the best schools or even schools equal to their White counterparts. The story of too many riots and massacres of Black communities in America started with some form of alleged or real (often small) interaction between a Black man and a White woman, as you will see with Black Wall Street and other examples later. The system of racism as we know it is less than six hundred years old. It was started at a particular time, and with your efforts and dedication, it can end at a particular time. We must be willing to do the work. We must be willing to break out of our comfort zones. We must be able to work beyond our own self-interests or, better yet, readjust our ideas of what our self-interests are. As a parent, for example, it is in my self-interest that my children do not become the victims of a hate crime. Because I know that people commit acts of hate out of ignorance and jealousy, I want every community to learn the full picture of our American history in a way that makes them have sympathy or empathy for each other. As a White parent, for example, it should be in your interest to want your child to know as much about the American experience as possible, so

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they are not embarrassed or even angry when they grow up and are exposed to diverse cultures and experiences, which I have seen all too often, as well. And the ways in which terror can strike literally anywhere in the United States today (supermarkets, schools, mosques, synagogues, graduations, sporting events, funerals, etc.), it should be in everyone’s self-interests to work toward building a community where everyone can believe they belong.

Activity: What Are We So Afraid Of? Write down any stereotypes you heard about Black people that you later learned were based on fear.

MY ANTIRACIST JOURNEY: MARI STASKY

Mari Stasky is a vet tech and student. She identifies as a forty-three-year-old White female. Mari shared several lies she was told growing up, including that Black people are dirty, they are criminals, and they didn’t know how to swim, which is why she said she never saw them at the beach. She realized later it was because she lived in an all-White community that she did not see Black people at the pool. She was primarily taught these lies by her mother and her family. Mari did not start to learn that she was taught lies until around her freshman year in high school, when she befriended a Black girl whose family moved into town. Unfortunately, the family did not stay long because her town was a sundown town. A brief word on sundown towns: A sundown town or a “sunset town” or a “gray town” is a town where it is not safe for Black people to be present when the sun goes down. Author James W. Loewen writes that towns are often called sundown towns “owing to the signs that many of them formerly sported at their corporate limits—signs that usually said ‘Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in _______________.’” He writes that in Illinois, for example, “Anna-Jonesboro had such signs on Highway 127 as recently as the 1970s.” In 2001, he walked into a store in Anna, Illinois, and asked the clerk if the sign on the door, “ANNA,” meant “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed.” She said yes—in 2001.8 A viral TikTok video in 2021 by hiker Marco William in Devil’s Bathtub, Virginia, highlights the fact that sundown towns still exist today.9 One thing I intentionally did not ask Mari was where she grew up because her experience was/is Anywhere, America, depending on the time. Members of her town deny that it was a sundown town, but the fact remains that across America, local governments actively engaged with local White families to keep their towns White. Similar to Black Wall Street, where government policy did not work, violence did the work, and vice versa. This was not just in the South. This was America and still is on many levels. Mari’s story is a true cautionary tale if we choose to listen. For Mari, the continued denial of opportunities to interact with non-White people kept the lies going. Her adoptive mother was born in 1920 and was steeped in racist ideas. Exposure to other groups “shattered” the ideas her mother taught her. The fear she had of establishing friendships with non-White people has been replaced by a passion for “undoing the dumb racism” in her life and “being actively aware of it.” Like my other interviewees, Mari believes that the lies she experienced are perpetrated today. She believes that one of the main actions that need to be taken



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is increasing more exposure of White people to non-White people, especially in schools. She is calling for more non-White teachers and students to be part of the school life in majority-White schools. For Mari and many other people, exposure was the real difference in helping her challenge the lies she was told about Black people. What has helped you on your journey? If you’re just starting your journey, then what is helping you so far? Keep going!

CHAPTER THREE

WHY WE MUST FIGHT LIES ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE

Being Black in America is like being constantly connected to a lie detector. You are constantly asked or even demanded to prove that you are truly qualified to work at your job, go to school where you do, and live where you live: • “You want to be president of the United States? Show us your college transcript.” • “You want to be a Supreme Court justice? Show us your LSAT scores.” • “You want to be a doctor? Didn’t you only get into med school because of affirmative action?” • “You want to be an NFL team owner? Show us . . .” (Well, we’re still waiting on that one.) As Black people, despite our qualifications, we are too often placed in a position to have to prove people wrong or prove that we are not lying about who we are. We are too often presumed guilty before presumed innocent. We are too often assumed to be underqualified rather than qualified or, dare I even say, overqualified. The assumption is made first that we are not worthy of our positions. Whenever there is a conversation about a role a Black person is going to assume, there is always the qualifier that she must be “qualified,” although that term is rarely used for White males, if ever. What is it about the very sight of our skin that makes so many people (including many Black people) believe that we are inherently incapable of achievement? What is it about our complexion that leads to so much rejection? What makes so many others believe we are not worthy of what we have earned? The most shining recent example of the constant questioning of Black qualifications comes in the form of the 2022 nomination and subsequent



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confirmation of Judge Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court of the United States. Judge Jackson was the first Black female to ever be nominated to the highest court in the land in the 236-year history of the Supreme Court. The court has had 116 judges in its history, including Jackson. Of those 116 judges, several were appointed with no judicial experience at all, such as John Marshall, Roger B. Taney, Salmon P. Chase, Morrison Waite, and Melville Fuller. Furthermore, only half of the judges appointed in the twentieth century were actual judges prior to their appointment.1 More than half of the Supreme Court justices in history, sixty-four to be precise, never obtained a law degree.2 Judge Jackson was hailed by many as one of the most, if not the most, qualified nominee to the Supreme Court, represented by her attaining the highest rating from the American Bar Association, yet she was still treated as if her experience was a lie. She was treated like her qualifications were not real or did not matter.3 Jackson has two degrees from Harvard, including her law degree; graduated magna cum laude from undergraduate school; was an editor on the Harvard Law Review; and served as a judge for almost a decade prior to her Supreme Court nomination.4 Who else is more qualified? When it comes to being Black in America, the qualifications do not matter for many White people. I was listening to legendary comedian Chris Rock speak about his upbringing and how his parents instilled the ideals of hard work in his mind. He repeated something that most Black people have been told by their parents: You have to work twice as hard as White people. While I had also heard that phrase since I was a child, he added a part that I never heard before and it shook me to the core. He said that we have to work twice as hard to get half as much as White people. Judge Jackson was talked about by her detractors as if she was a random person off the street who just decided to be a judge one day. She was not only called a radical left-wing activist but also a pedophile sympathizer for cases she was assigned as a public defender.5 In the end, Judge Jackson fortunately did not work twice as hard to receive only half of a judgeship, but rest assured, her decisions will be critiqued with twice as much vigor from her detractors, if her confirmation process provides any evidence. Some of the racist actions toward Jackson included Fox’s top show host, Tucker Carlson, asking that Biden provide a copy of her LSAT scores, even though LSAT scores relate to law school admission, not to becoming a judge. He also asserted that her nomination was part of Biden’s process of turning America into Rwanda and the chaos that occurred there with the Rwandan genocide of 1994.6 Compared to Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Jackson’s résumé shines even brighter. NYU School of Law professor Melissa Murray noted that Barrett

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did not have the same credentials [as Jackson,] but she was celebrated for not being Ivy League because it made her relatable. . . . For years we’ve been told that for Black women to be considered for positions in the upper echelons, they’d have to be twice as good. . . . Now people like [Lindsey] Graham are saying we’d prefer that you graduated from Trump University Law School.7

You do not have to stretch your imagination to think about what the response would be in the media if Jackson’s and Barrett’s résumés were switched. Murray also noted that, as Black lawyers, “We’ve all been called to present our LSAT scores at some point.”8 Murray’s comments show how the accepted qualifications switch historically depending on the race in question. Compare the low levels of expectations of Trump versus Obama or Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene versus Marcus Flowers or Raphael Warnock versus Herschel Walker. Wait! Did I just say that? I get to this later, but in way too many instances, White Republicans will put the least-qualified Black men forward to compete against a Black Democrat and almost deputize them in Whiteness until they are of no longer use to them (think Obama versus Alan Keyes in 2004). They will also quickly choose a Black face to represent a White perspective on television, such as Candace Owens, Diamond and Silk, Jesse Lee Peterson, and Paris Dennard. This is also not new. As Malcolm X stated decades ago, “Whenever a black man stands up and says something that white people don’t like then the first thing that man does is run around to try and find somebody to say something to offset what has just been said.”9 Because the rules keep changing for Black people, we still must be twice as good, but in order to be Black and condemn Black people, conservative news outlets only need their Black commentators to be half as smart, if that. One activity I have come to enjoy over the years is a good social media debate. I enjoy engaging in intellectual conversations with people of opposing viewpoints. As long as the discussions are respectful, I can talk to people for days on end. Most attempts at conversation, however, do not last more than three replies. Why? Because within the first two to three reactions to my posts by some commentators, my credentials are immediately challenged or dismissed altogether: “They call you a doctor?” “How did you get a PhD?” “They gave you a blue check?” Oftentimes, we as Black people dismiss these stories because we are so used to it, as was the case with Jackson and Black lawyers. We may even laugh

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at it, but sometimes, these situations can have dire consequences. In October 2016, Dr. Tamika Scott was denied the opportunity to aid an unresponsive passenger on Delta flight 945 because the flight attendant did not believe Dr. Scott was indeed a physician.10 As she witnessed the emergency and started to spring into action, the flight attendant said to her (according to Scott’s Facebook post), “oh no sweetie put [your] hand down, we are looking for actual physicians or nurses or some type of medical personnel, we don’t have time to talk to you.”11 Scott was trying to save a man’s life, and she was asked for her credentials. A little later, however, a White man approached and said he was a doctor, and the flight attendant let him attend to the passenger, although he showed no credentials, according to Scott. Some White people may dismiss instances like this and say, “I have been discriminated against, too,” but this is about a systemic problem and systemic consequences. This is about the fact that Dr. Scott started her Facebook post by stating, “I’m sure many of my fellow young, corporate America working women of color can all understand my frustration when I say I’m sick of being disrespected.”12 The fact that the post received 151,000 likes; 35,000 comments; and 45,000 shares speaks to the frustration Black people feel on a regular basis. Furthermore, the flight attendant later apologized and offered Dr. Scott frequent-flyer miles, leading Dr. Scott to write, “I don’t want skymiles in exchange for blatant discrimination.”13 Beyond the blatant and racist treatment of Dr. Scott, the fact of the matter is that this denial of medical care affects everyone on the plane and the airlines after the fact. As Dr. Pamela Wible wrote in the Washington Post, Obstructing medical care is never in the best interest of the patient—or the airline. The difference between life and death is sometimes measured in seconds. Not only can one skilled physician aboard an aircraft save a passenger’s life, but her quick action may also save the airline more than $100,000 in a flight diversion and ensure that hundreds of passengers arrive to their destinations on time.14

Wible asks a sarcastic but powerful question: “What does a doctor on a plane look like?”15 The deeper question I ask is, How much longer will racism and racist ideas hamper human progress? How many medical breakthroughs could have been discovered earlier if Black people were allowed into medical schools in America in the late 1700s instead of the late 1800s? How many Olympic medals could have been won for the United States if Black people were not historically either barred from certain sports, like swimming, or provided with significantly fewer opportunities to master the sport in question? How many more wars could have been won sooner if Black soldiers were given the chance

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to be fully integrated into the military prior to 1948? I can fill in the blanks with any field, from medicine and sports to agriculture and finance. Racism is so deep in the core of American history that White America has too often cut off its nose to spite its face rather than confront it head on. Part of the challenge is that many in White America are comfortable with sliding scales of suffering. I love sports. I am not a diehard sports fanatic, but I am always sure to represent my Boston teams. Actually, it’s pretty much the Boston Celtics because as you can clearly tell by my name, I am from Boston (smile), and because there is a no more storied franchise in the history of sports (it’s OK to admit it even if you’re not a Celtics fan) than the Boston Celtics. A few years ago, when the Celtics were not doing so well, I found myself making the same statement repeatedly: “Well as long as the Lakers lose, it’s all good.” The Los Angeles Lakers have been rivals of the Celtics for more than fifty years. Have you ever done this? Have you ever made it acceptable for your favorite team to lose, as long as your rival loses, too? That is how many in White America have been when it comes to accepting racism and racist policies. President Lyndon B. Johnson said to the young journalist Bill Moyer in the 1960s, “If you can convince the lowest White man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”16 The statement was his response to poor White Americans who did not support his antipoverty agenda, even though it was in their best interests. This statement had held true before his tenure as president of the United States and still holds true today. Poor post– American Civil War White Americans gave up partnering with formerly enslaved Black people in their efforts to rebuild the South for a chance, through the promises of Jim Crow’s America, to be a part of the White landowning class. The “Southern strategy” was a targeted racist program for decades that White politicians used to justify denying necessary services to White people, as long as Black people suffered more, as Republican strategist and former Republican National Committee chair Lee Atwater stated in 1981: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than Whites. . . . “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”17

This notion manifests itself today in White people who are willing to lose the many benefits of Obamacare because a Black man delivered it to them.18

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It is evident in opponents of President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” proposed legislation because some Whites do not want to see Black and Brown people receive better services. And, like Atwater’s comments about using terms like forced busing instead of Nigger, nigger, nigger, the new coded terminology today includes words like urban, critical race theory, and woke. Even legislative attempts to severely hamper or even block voting rights for Black and Brown communities have been cloaked under the veil of “state’s rights.” How many White jobs could have been saved during the Great Recession between 2007 and 2009 if the United States made a concerted effort to end or greatly reduce Black unemployment, which consistently is twice as high as White unemployment? How many White lives could have been saved during the opioid epidemic of the last decade if we had treated the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, which affected primarily Black and Brown communities, like an issue of addiction instead of criminalization? If crack was not criminalized, the United States would have had the health infrastructure in place to tackle the opioid epidemic decades later. Too many lives were lost as the United States played catch-up with its treatment facilities or lack thereof for opioid addiction.19 When the COVID pandemic began in the late winter and early spring of 2020, there was a wartime sense of unity as the country expressed a “We’re all in this together” mantra. Even a self-declared20 racist president Donald Trump declared the pandemic a national emergency on March 13, 2020; promised to devote more resources to aid struggling communities during the pandemic; and garnered bipartisan praise for his declaration.21 This declaration was made, however, after intentionally downplaying how deadly COVID was,22 so the declaration was seen as a positive step forward. Something changed, though, as the summer of 2020 approached. As Trump’s response to COVID began facing criticism due to the inept nature of his administration’s response, a question started to arise in social media, academic, and journalistic spaces: What is the racial makeup of COVID-related deaths?23 As this data became available, it became clear that Black Americans in particular suffered the most at the beginning of the pandemic in terms of deaths.24 Once it became clear that Black, Brown, and Native American communities suffered more than White people, the “We’re all in this together” mentality vanished and was replaced with such chants as “Free Michigan” as protesters there and in other states protested at state capitols for the government to end their quarantine, mask, and later vaccine mandates.25 These protests included a failed attempt to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020.26 In essence, the United States witnessed the Southern Strategy happening in real time as it related to the COVID pandemic. Presidential advisor and sonin-law to former president Trump Jared Kushner suggested that Trump not have

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a national plan to fight COVID because Democratic, or blue, states would suffer more from COVID than Republican, or red, states.27 This is related to the notion that more non-White people are Democrats and live in blue states and therefore will suffer more. Moreover, once the vaccines arrived, there was an economic and racial disparity in how they were distributed, which also hurt Black people more than White people and which was indeed connected to structural racism by the National Center for Biotechnology Information.28 I live in Southeast Washington, DC. Southeast, and more specifically ward 8, is the most underserved community in DC. One day during the early days of COVID-vaccine distribution, I walked into our neighborhood Giant supermarket and noticed an exceptionally large number of White people in the store. I noticed this over the course of the week. I could not figure out why they were appearing until I realized that they were all concentrated by the pharmacy. I realized that they were there for the COVID vaccine. The problem was that there were more White people in the line for the vaccine than Black people in line who lived in the neighborhood. I started texting my friends and family in other inner-city neighborhoods across the country to see if they were experiencing the same phenomenon, and they were. The issue playing out in real time was that White people with better internet access and transportation resources were getting news of COVID-vaccine availability before Black people living in their own poorer communities without heavy internet and transportation access were. According to the National Academy of Sciences, Racial disparities in vaccination persist despite the increased availability of vaccines. . . . Analyzing vaccination data from [April 19, 2021], when nearly half of the US adult population was at least partially vaccinated, we find associations between racial disparities in COVID-19 vaccination and median income (negative), disparity in high school education (positive), and vote share for the Republican party in the 2020 presidential election (negative), while vaccine hesitancy is not related to disparities.29

What this means in short is that you were less likely to get access to COVID vaccines if you were poorer and less educated, and this is why so many Black and Brown communities did not have immediate vaccine access. While association with the Republican Party also led to less vaccine accessibility, this was primarily due to Republican leaders creating disinformation, denouncing vaccine mandates, and denouncing the vaccine itself.30 Moreover, former president Trump actually stated that it was White people who were being forced to the back of the line for the vaccine, which only added more hostility and anger by many Whites toward non-White people.31 Coupled with his blaming Asian people for COVID by using racist terms like Kung flu and China virus, it became clear that

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his administration used racist lies to keep the country divided. In a world based on racial lies, actions like these are why hate crimes against individuals hit a sixteen-year high under the Trump administration in 2018, with Black people being the number 1 target, followed by Jewish people.32 Hate crimes against Asians increased by nearly 150 percent between 2019 and 2020 as the COVID pandemic intensified and many of us in America needed a scapegoat.33 So even with a global pandemic, where we were all cursed with the ability to possibly breathe death onto the person standing within six feet of us, the opportunity for America to vaccinate our way out of this pandemic took on a racial dynamic. Atwater’s mindset of “Blacks get hurt worse than Whites” played out on full display during the pandemic and vaccine distribution. As appalling as this story may seem, it is in line with America’s racialized history, as this book elaborates on in greater detail. Referring to former president Johnson’s statement on White self-interest, when you use lies to play on people’s fears, almost any action can be justified against the soon-to-be-targeted group. Genocides historically do not start with the slaying of hundreds and then thousands of people on some random day. Genocide starts with the lies told in print or animated cartoons to children. It continues in the jokes told on the playground about the soon-to-be-slaughtered people that never get challenged by adults. It continues in the curriculum, where certain groups are labeled as having been “enemies of the people” or “enemies of freedom.” These lies told at a young age experience a revival when we are older and maybe go through an unemployment spell or just do not believe our life is going the way it should. Then we remember “those people.” Then our socalled leaders escalate the rhetoric, as those cartoons are now articles in newspapers, television news segments, and podcasts. Even our religious leaders may get in on the action. Terms like roaches, vermin, illegals, rodents, and rapists become commonplace in society. The final stage before the slaughter comes with cries like “They’re raping our women,” “They’re taking our jobs,” and “They’re replacing us.” Before we know it, we have Germany, Armenia, the United States, Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Cambodia, and more. I visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda in August 2018, and there were several aspects of the visit that I will never forget because they are instructive for learning how to unlearn hate, intolerance, and ignorance and build antiracism. The first lesson I learned at the memorial is that even though the genocide happened in 1994, they are still finding bodies today. The second soulshaking experience was seeing pictures of children dressed in their Sunday’sbest clothing with beautiful smiles on their faces. Next to these pictures was a card stating how they were killed: bludgeoned; shot; and, in one case that stuck in my mind, head smashed against a wall. What lies could have been told about these children to justify these actions?

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The third memory that was seared into my mind was walking through a room where they showed all the political cartoons and news segments that targeted Tutsis as being worthy of execution. Multimedia was being used to sow seeds of slaughter. The indoctrination was real. Neighbors began targeting neighbors. The memory that is probably the most instructive for this book and for America was a woman giving her testimony of surviving the genocide. She said that one day she was paying the school fees of her neighbor’s child, and the next day, that child was “hunting” her. Hunting. Literally as I was wrote this section—these very paragraphs—CNN reported that ten Black people were hunted down and slaughtered at Tops Supermarket in Buffalo, New York, by an eighteen-year-old White supremacist. Payton Gendron drove three and a half hours from Conklin, New York, to Buffalo to blow a hole through the heart of a thriving Black community. Gendron was dressed in full tactical armor and live-streamed the massacre on social media. According to his manifesto, he targeted that community because “it has the highest Black population percentage” by zip code nearest to his home. Why did he do it? According to his manifesto, it was due to White-replacement theory— the age-old idea that White people are being replaced by non-White people.34 This theory was used by a shooter at a Jewish synagogue massacre that killed eleven people in Pittsburgh in 201835 and by a shooter at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 that left twenty-two primarily Latino people dead.36 For the Black community, it also harkened back to Dylan Roof, who prayed with Black congregants before slaughtering nine of them in June 2015 at Mother Emmanuel Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina. Gendron claimed that his radicalization process began during the COVID pandemic while online. One can only assume that in an era where you can pick your own news and receive what you want to hear 24/7, the lies he would hear about Black people and other groups were on full display for him to digest, from news hosts like Fox’s Tucker Carlson to former president Donald Trump, as well as other politicians in the Republican Party. As the United States approached the 2022 midterm elections, this rhetoric only intensified, noted best by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who stated at a Trump rally in Nevada in early October, Joe Biden’s 5 million illegal aliens are on the verge of replacing you, replacing your jobs and replacing your kids in school, and coming from all over the world, they’re also replacing your culture. And that’s not great for America.37

These remarks were delivered just three days after Greene called President Biden “Hitler” and showed a doctored video with Biden sporting a Hitler-styled mustache, with swastikas and Hitler’s voice playing in the background. Her

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comments represent White-replacement theory, and Greene is not the only US member of Congress espousing these views. While modern-day American racial terrorism may not be sanctioned by the US government as in the case of Rwanda or Nazi Germany, we are seeing a mini-Rwanda and a mini–Nazi Germany in America. Think about Trayvon Martin, Ahmaud Arbery, and too many Black people being hunted and slain. Think about elderly Asian people hunted to such an extent that a multiracial community of UPstanders took up patrols to accompany them on America’s streets.38 Think of Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, being hunted down and having his skull fractured because he is a Democrat. Think of laws being passed across the country allowing neighbors to hunt women who receive abortions and the doctors, friends, and family members who help them and how an abortion ban can become federal law if Republicans take the House, the Senate, and the presidency in 2024. The Rwandan genocide happened over a period of one hundred days. The events described here have been occurring over the last few years. Although the American government is currently not targeting certain populations for slaughter, we have recently had a president in Donald Trump who wanted to use the military to shoot peaceful American Black Lives Matter protesters.39 The point is that if we do not challenge lies, if we do not challenge hate, then it is only a matter of time before we descend into another Rwanda. Given the history of Black people in America, challenging the lies told historically and currently relating to Black people is a necessary step in the active work needed to combat the hate we are seeing today. We must work to understand the destructive nature that lies about groups of people play in our society before it gets to these extremes because they play out every day.

Activity: Your Bookshelf Write down the names of the top five books that taught you about the positive contributions of Black people to the United States. Write one sentence about what you learned and why you believe the results to be what they are. If you are not able to get to five, that’s OK!

MY ANTIRACIST JOURNEY: JACQUELINE HONDA

Jacqueline Honda is a sixty-year-old retiree who defines herself as a White. She grew up in the South, where people were “very racist.” She was told Black people were dangerous, unintelligent, and dirty. She was primarily taught these lies by her grandparents and her school, but the lies were debunked when she started to have Black friends who became her best friends. It was easy for Jacqueline to have Black friends because she said she is Jewish and was not liked at school, just like the Black students. Jacqueline recalls a time when she moved to Long Beach, California, and a Black neighbor helped her move in. She asked why he never looked her in the eye, and he told her that growing up in the South, he was told to never look White people in the eye. Experiences like these are the reasons Jacqueline says she has just always felt more comfortable around Black people. She believes racism in America will end but gradually because every generation becomes less racist over time.



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CHAPTER FOUR

YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW

For at least fifteen years, I have played something called the Name Game at the end of my DEI trainings and workshops. It’s a very simple game that you may have played some version of. I ask the audience to name popular living Black males in different professions. I start with ten popular Black male athletes. The participants complete the assignment in less than one minute. I then move on to ten popular Black male musicians, and once again, the assignment is completed in under one minute. I then move on to eight popular Black male actors. I had to shorten it down to eight because the two immediate first answers without fail are Denzel Washington and Idris Elba, so I figured I’d cut to the chase! This part of the activity takes about thirty seconds to complete. Something interesting but not surprising occurs when I share my last three categories. The last three categories are ten popular Black male authors, ten popular Black male educators, and ten popular Black male doctors or scientists. Remember, they all must be living. The audience struggles with the authors, but I would say about 80 percent of the time we get to ten; however, authors like James Baldwin and Richard Wright, who are long since passed, get mentioned. When we get to educators, several of the authors get brought up again, like Dr. Ibram Kendi because he fits both categories. Some audience members flatter me by adding me to the list, but I often wonder if it is indeed a compliment or a grasp at straws to complete the list! We rarely get to ten without serious repeating from the authors’ section. To date, no group has ever named ten living, popular Black male medical doctors and scientists. I remind them up front that Dr. Dre does not count, so no one embarrasses themselves there. Someone will ask, “What about those three doctors who made a pact to finish school together?” I remind them that “those three doctors” aren’t their names. Their names are Drs. Sampson Davis, Rameck Hunt, and George Jenkins. 24

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I have conducted this exercise in front of hundreds of audiences. Some were mostly White, some were mostly Black, and some were mixed. Most of these audiences were people with undergraduate, graduate, doctoral, and postdoctoral degrees, and no audience ever won. I tell my audiences in short that we can’t teach what we don’t know, and we can’t lead where we don’t go. I tell them that there is a reason that we know more famous Black entertainers than we do scholars and doctors, even though there are more Black doctors and lawyers than there are in professional sports. Before I go deeper into why this happens, I need to reply to a common retort I get to this exercise. In many instances, a White participant will raise his hand and say something to the effect of “I can’t name many White people in these fields, too.” Some state this to make a thoughtful point, while some just want to derail the activity. What I tell them is that historically, given their majority status, White people did not have to be able to know the names for the last three categories because the default assumption is that the person is White. I ask those responders if they had to know the name of every US senator to know that the Senate is mostly White? Do they need to know the names of the authors of most books assigned to their children in school to know that they are mostly White? Do they need to know the names of the owners of their banks or the airline pilot or doctor they will most likely see to know they are probably White? Do they need to know the names of every US president to know that all but one was White? This is how structural racism works. When you come from the dominant cultural group, there is a subconscious comfort that society is controlled by people who look like you. All my life, I have experienced racism as a Black man in America, but I am still a man. As a man, I can rest comfortably knowing that most leaders at the political and corporate levels have been men. If I were a woman, I would need to do more in-depth research to find other women leaders at these high levels, especially on the corporate side. When you are not part of the dominant culture, you often grasp at straws for any form of representation for motivation, be it a Black mayor, senator, or Supreme Court justice, but the question that must be asked is, Why does it have to be this way? One challenge that we often are not aware of is just how early this process starts. In 2009, my oldest child was three years old. She was a very happy and energetic child and jumped into life like she was ready to take on the world. I will be honest; as much as I consider myself to be knowledgeable on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, I made a mistake on how early I would have to start teaching my child to be proud of who she is as a Black person. I thought that seeing a strong Black father and a strong Black mother and spending time

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with her extended family when we visited Boston would be enough. I thought we would maybe have to start going in on Black culture and history when she was closer to seven or eight years old. One day I realized just how wrong I was. I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. One day as we were playing, I called her “Princess.” She immediately said, “I am not a princess.” I was floored and started to really reflect on why she would say she was not a princess at three years old. As I reflected, I started thinking about all the television shows and movies we watched with her, which is why the year 2009 will be significant later. I realized that we had watched all the Disney movies, like The Little Mermaid, Snow White, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, and Sleeping Beauty. We did not mess with Pocahontas; I wasn’t that off. I realized that even though we had African art in our home and paintings of Black people, our cartoon world only really depicted White people outside of Dora the Explorer, a Latina cartoon character. Furthermore, I realized that these movies featured not just White princesses but White princesses with names that reminded us of just how beautiful they are: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Beauty and the Beast. These names spoke to the highest forms of purity (Snow White) and told you from the outset that this is what beauty is. Belle is the name of the princess in Beauty and the Beast. It means beautiful in French. How could my daughter think she was a beautiful princess when she only saw White princesses? I not only became fixated on making sure my daughter started to see more Black cartoon images, but I also checked the toddler clothing we purchased. Literally all the diapers I bought had images of White princesses on them. I— don’t judge me—even started buying diapers meant for boys because they only had automobiles on them from the movie Cars. Kendra was not having it. I finally found some diapers at CVS that had a Black child and a White child on them—but my daughter would not wear them. Did she think the Black child was ugly? My anxiety continued to grow. Professionally, I was nervous that my entire career would be ruined if someone came up to her and asked her to do the “doll test.” What if she picked all White dolls over Black ones? You may think I am joking, but I am not! Kendra and I started reaching out to our networks for more information on Black dolls and toys. President Obama’s 2008 election did help make Black dolls more prominent, so that helped a little. We also started talking to her about her ancestry and the beauty of Congo, where my parents are from, and Grenada, where Kendra comes from. I spoke to her about how my mother is indeed descended from Luba royalty, and she really loved learning this. In short order, she would go to our jobs and say, “I’m a princess. My mom is a queen. Are you a queen?” or, “Are you a king?” Our reprogramming was working, and then, on December 11, 2009, we got a major boost.

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Disney’s The Princess and the Frog was released in theaters. The movie featured Disney’s first Black princess, Tiana, voiced by Anika Noni Rose. Disney heavily invested in merchandising, as well. We went all in! Underwear, socks, T-shirts, sheets, pillowcases, blankets, towels, and more. Whatever was produced, we purchased! One night, as I walked by her room at bedtime, I saw her just looking at the pillowcase image of this Black princess, and I cracked a smile, which was partially happy and partially sad. I was happy because our reprogramming had worked in very short order. I was sad because I did not realize how early we had to start programming our children. If you do not make the active choice to raise culturally conscious children, they will indeed be indoctrinated by this Eurocentric media system that has taught so many Black children to hate themselves over the years. Kendra and I were not alone. Across the country, Black families joined in on the Princess and the Frog mania. One thing I noticed was that before that movie, many school-aged Black parents were purchasing Dora the Explorer paraphernalia. It was as if we were grasping for any form of cultural representation to escape the proliferation of images of White beauty projected on us without even knowing, and again, this is 2009. I could not imagine what Black parents had to do to reinforce positive images for Black children in 1969, 1939, and before. Having said that, we must acknowledge that this is still a challenge in 2023. In the fall of 2022, Disney released the trailer for the live-action version of The Little Mermaid. The movie stars Halle Bailey of the singing duo (and sisters) Chloe x Halle. Bailey is a Black woman. Almost twenty years after my own experience, I am elated and saddened at the same time to see the videos of young Black girls so ecstatic to see a Black mermaid. Videos posted of the trailer for the movie show young Black and Brown girls (and some boys) saying “She looks like me!” “She’s Brown!” “She’s Black! Oh my gosh!” “Yes! A Black mermaid! Let’s go!” One little girl even cried in one video (though she denied it). So even in the 2020s, our children are still searching for positive representation of themselves in the media, and as expected, the movie is still angering millions who want the purest images of beauty reserved for White people. Just the announcement of the Little Mermaid being Black sent waves of anger and frustration through many in the White community. Comments on the YouTube trailer had to be shut off after it registered more than 1.5 million dislikes and negative comments.1 A #notmyariel2 hashtag has been prominent since her casting was announced in 2019, in addition to at least one online petition demanding that Ariel not be a Black woman, which also received thousands of signatures. One statement that was part of the petition stated, “If you want a Black princess, let’s do Princess and The Frog. . . . I’m sure Halle would be great in it. But Ariel is White, red headed, and blue eyed.”3 Now a classic

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Disney movie is part of the fake antiwoke, anti–critical race theory activism because too many White people cannot stand the fact that a Black mermaid will grace the big screen. Podcaster Matt Walsh captured the racism and the ignorance regarding the backlash: Can we also just mention that, from a scientific perspective, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have someone with darker skin who lives deep in the ocean. I mean, if anything, not only should “The Little Mermaid” be pale, she should, actually, be translucent. If you look at deep sea creatures, they’re, like, translucent. They have no, kind of, pigmentation whatsoever. And they’re just, like, these horrifying—they look like skeletons floating around in the ocean. That’s what “The Little Mermaid” should look like. She should be totally pale and skeletal where you can see her skull through her face. And that would actually be a version of “The Little Mermaid” that I would watch.4

The fact that I cannot find a single quotation from Walsh complaining about the Little Mermaid not being translucent when the original version was the only movie out is not the point. The main point is that this is a work of fiction. Mermaids. Are. Not. Real. You cannot apply scientific standards to fiction, but fictitious images are part of the main and early indoctrination into White supremacy. As a comic book fan, I remember the backlash when the HBO series announced that in its show Titans, released in 2018, the character of Starfire would be played by Senegalese American actor Anna Diop. There was similar backlash to her casting that we see with The Little Mermaid. Some comments include, “She is too fat and too dark for Starfire,” and “Starfire is not African.”5 Here is a problem with the backlash—Starfire is an alien from the planet Tamaran. She is orange. Yes. Orange. Her White costar Minka Kelly was an UPstander and partner for Diop when she posted on Instagram, While the abhorrent racism in this country seems to be going nowhere anytime soon (#NiaWilson), the dignity, strength and couth my friend continues to exemplify in the face of it humbles and inspires me. That so many racist cowards would take the time to attack her instagram so that she has to shut off comments after having already shut down her entire account once before over this bullshit makes me feel rage. . . . I know she is and will be ok. . . . I cannot begin to fathom the courage it requires everyday just to exist as a Black woman in this country (#ChikesiaClemons). . . . I bow to you, Anna. . . . You are a queen and all the people who matter know it. #IStandWithAnnaDiop.

These adults (and indoctrinated young people) who are mad at Diop, Bailey, and others, like Moses Ingram and John Boyega in Star Wars and Ismael Cruz

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Cordova in Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, were the children who grew up watching White purity in Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons. Their grandparents grew up on the original Tarzan and Lone Ranger shows, as well as Bugs Bunny and other cartoons. In the 2022 prequel to Games of Thrones, which is entitled House of the Dragon, the character of Lord Corlys Velaryon was cast by Steve Toussaint, who told Men’s Health, “They are happy with a dragon flying. They’re happy with white hair and violet-colored eyes, but a rich Black guy? That’s beyond the pale.”6 In addition to the hypocrisy of a Black woman playing a fictional character, there has been no noticeable backlash to White people playing real-life people throughout history. Joseph Fiennes played Michael Jackson. Richard Gere played David. Russell Crowe played Noah. Christian Bale played Moses. The movie Gods of Egypt had a majority-White cast. Laurence Olivier played Othello in 1965. Richard Barthelmess played Cheng Huan. Angelina Jolie played Cleopatra and Mariane Pearl. Walter Long was listed in Birth of a Nation as a “renegade negro.” John Wayne played Genghis Khan. Fred Astaire played Bill Robinson in 1936 (though some say it was a tribute to Robinson). Yul Brynner played Ramses II. Jeffrey Hunter, Willem Dafoe, Jim Caviezel, and Max von Sydow (among many others) played Jesus. Elizabeth Taylor also played Cleopatra.7 Do I need to continue? In her Washington Post article “98 Times a White Actor Played Someone Who Wasn’t White,” Meredith Simons also points to the extensive list of White people who have played non-White fiction characters. The list is lengthy, but it is important to share because they span the creation of the movie industry to today: Ben Affleck, Fred Astaire, Antonio Banderas, Marlon Brando, Justin Chatwin, Glenn Close, Jennifer Connelly, Sean Connery, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tony Curtis, Mackenzie Davis, Johnny Depp, Robert Donner, Joel Edgerton, Douglas Fairbanks, Mel Ferrer, Robert Forster, Joel Gray, Alec Guinness, Jake Gyllenhaal, Rex Harrison, Josh Hartnett, Ira Hamilton Hayes, Katharine Hepburn, Charlton Heston, Anthony Hopkins, Rock Hudson, Linda Hunt, Scarlett Johansson, Al Jolson, Jennifer Jones, Ben Kingsley, Burt Lancaster, Christopher Lee, Eugene Levy, William Mapother, Rooney Mara, Max Minghella, Alfred Molina, Carey Mulligan, Mike Myers, Patricia Neal, Warner Oland, Al Pacino, Jacob Pitts, Elvis Presley, Vanessa Redgrave, Mickey Rooney (bucktoothed and yellow-faced, by the way), Winona Ryder, Rob Schneider, Peter Sellers, Kevin Spacey, Fisher Stevens, Emma Stone, Meryl Streep, Mark Strong, Jim Sturgess, Mena Suvari, Tilda Swinton, Analeigh Tipton, John Turturro, Rudolph Valentino, Maria Valverde, Casper Van Dien, Emma Watson, Sigourney Weaver, Orson Welles, Esther Williams, Ray Winstone, and Natalie Wood.8

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Simons also speaks of legendary actor Lena Horne, a mixed-race woman, who could not play a mixed-race woman in a 1951 movie because of fear of backlash from seeing a White man be intimate with a mixed-race woman, so they chose Ava Gardner. I do not see any recorded incidents of White backlash to these roles, but one Black mermaid, and their world is flipped upside down. This is part of the cultural conditioning that Joe Madison speaks about. I asked legendary White antiracist activist and educator Jane Elliott about this hypocrisy and cultural conditioning, and she put it quite simply: “We are determined not to admit the truth and not to see the truth.”9 To this end, White people historically have not had an issue with seeing themselves on the big screen, even if they are not playing themselves. In this twenty-first century, it is still slim pickings to find Black leads on the big screen, even with the string of fall 2022 hit movies featuring Black stars, namely The Woman King, Black Adam, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The search for positive images of Black people is, in my opinion, one of the reasons the Nigerian government in 2022 passed a ban on the use of foreign models in all advertisements and voiceover work.10 While they stated the ban is on anyone foreign, which includes other Africans and Black people who are not Nigerian, the default result is that Nigerian children will not see images of Whiteness as the epitome of beauty broadcast to them by their government. In the United States, it has pretty much been the opposite experience. For more time than not, Black people have either been banned from film and television roles or forced to play subservient or stereotypical roles. In addition to this, some Black characters have been Whitewashed, demonstrated most recently by Joseph Fiennes playing Michael Jackson. Even though movies like The Woman King, Black Adam, and the original Black Panther film have debuted at number 1 in the box office or made more than $1 billion (Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther), Black people are still struggling in this century to find consistent, positive roles to play on the television and the big screen. In my diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings with organizations, I sometimes show a video of Anderson Cooper’s special on race in education.11 He interviews children on their thoughts on five cartoon drawings that range from lighter to dark. It was a modern-day version of the 1940s doll tests by Drs. Mamie and Kenneth Clark, which was instrumental in the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 that desegregated many schools. In one video with a Black boy who said he preferred the picture of the lighter child, Cooper asked the child what was wrong with Black skin, and he said that he does not know why, but his skin just does not “feel right.” In the videos of the young Black children responding to The Little Mermaid, they know that something is wrong with what they are seeing and not seeing on the screen. When they see the positive and powerful imagery, their reactions tell it all.

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The following two examples may help you to better understand this impact of representation on our children. In 1968, Robert F. Kennedy predicted that forty years from 1968, we could have a Black president of the United States.12 People thought he was delusional. Most people I know never thought this country would see a Black president. In Tupac’s 1992 song “Changes” (released in 1998, two years after he was slain), he rapped, “And though it seems heaven-sent, we ain’t ready to see a Black president.” We saw Shirley Chisolm run for president. We saw Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton run for president. We saw Kamala Harris and others run. Though some did think it was possible, no one could imagine the feelings of elation millions of us felt around the world to see a Black man elected president of the United States, forty years exactly after Kennedy’s prediction. There was no way we could really prepare to see a Black woman become the First Lady of the United States. I am getting chills even as I write this. We wanted it, and we tried to envision it, but there was nothing like seeing it. Now our children do not have to say they want to be the first Black president. They now dream of becoming the next one. We came so close to seeing the first woman president of the United States in Hillary Clinton in 2016. Since 1872, when Victoria Claflin Woodhull ran for president, women have fought to attain that high office. I thought 2016 was going to be the year. I proudly took one of my daughters to the voting booth with me. The excitement in the air for so many was palpable. Although the moment has yet to come, we have indeed inched one step closer. From Geraldine Ferraro to Sarah Palin and others dating as far back as 1882 with Marietta Sow, women have fought to also become vice president of the United States. For those of us who longed to see a female vice president, nothing could prepare us for seeing a woman take that oath of office, not to mention a woman of African and Asian ancestry. Do you remember how you felt when you witnessed these moments? Even if you did not vote for or support them, the hope is that you appreciated the moment. I was not a supporter of Sarah Palin when she ran for vice president with the late senator John McCain, but if they won, I would have pointed Palin out to my daughters as an example of what is possible for them as women. I would use Palin to show them how glass ceilings break with small cracks and that maybe one day they could break the presidential glass ceiling. The two examples I share speak to our adult experiences, and I hope it resonates with you. What I hope you will appreciate as we look at the controversy with The Little Mermaid and other examples is that the seeds of representation start at a very young age, and we need to do more to meet the moment to show all our children what is possible for them. And while the story of The Little Mermaid is of most importance for Black girls to see, there is also an important residual impact on Black boys, as well as non-Black children and people in

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general, to see positive representation of Black people. As Glenn Singleton, author of Courageous Conversations about Race, stated at a lecture I attended in Maryland in 2009, part of the backlash to Obama was that millions of White people who never even worked with a Black person now had to prepare overnight to have their country be led by a Black person. With all the young Black girls wearing the Little Mermaid outfits and the Princess Tiana outfits from the early 2000s, I wonder how many non-Black parents, especially White parents, will buy these outfits for their children. I have indeed seen White parents purchase clothing with Black characters like Tiana. It is such a beautiful sight to see. We have been doing the opposite for years. These parents are planting the seeds of equality in their children’s minds at a very young age. If you are a non-Black parent, have you done this before? Why or why not? Would you consider it going forward? Reflecting on our experiences with my daughter, I find myself often thinking that if there was some form of equity in the racial images allowed on television and advertising in America, then we would not have had to reprogram our child at such a young age. In short, intentional order, we were able to get her to see that she is someone of powerful ancestry and just as beautiful and worthy of being a princess as anyone. Of course, I learned around the time she turned six or seven and my second daughter was two years younger that these images of princesses are also problematic because they can make young girls feel dependent on men, provide a false physical sense of beauty for girls in terms of body image, and could “hold them back from experimenting in typical ‘male’ fields such as math and science.”13 I saw a positive shift in their confidence when I turned them on to my passion for comic book characters and women who feared no men and could literally do anything they wanted with their superpowers. The purpose of this story is to highlight the real challenge we have of indoctrination. From the cartoons and toys as children to the history books and television shows we watch as adults, indoctrination of a racial hierarchy is instilled in societies at birth unless it is actually fought. Furthermore, the media we consume has often rewritten the narratives to fit the predetermined racial hierarchy. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan novel of 1912 spawned the 1918 movie that has been reincarnated almost every decade up until the most recent cartoon iteration on Netflix in 2018. Tarzan came to fame during the same decade that Birth of a Nation was released (more on this film later), and he was a proud lyncher of Black men and representative of White supremacy. It was the same decade that White boxer Jim Jeffries came out of retirement to fight Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson to prove that White people were superior; he lost the fight (badly), which led to riots from White people. The Lone Ranger is an American classic series of radio shows, films, and television shows starting in 1933 about a masked ranger who fought outlaws in

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the Wild West. All the shows and movies portray him as White, but The Lone Ranger is based off the life of Bass Reeves, a former enslaved person who became the first Black deputy west of the Mississippi; he was legendary for his marksmanship and even arrested White lawbreakers.14 Could The Lone Ranger have garnered so much acclaim for nearly a century if the original story of the Black man was told in 1933? Of course not because it does not fit the indoctrination narrative that plagued the United States for decades, the indoctrination that started to occur with my daughter and still operates today. (By the way, the sidekick in The Lone Ranger is Native American, and his name is Tonto, which means fool in Spanish, hence adding to the indoctrination of Native Americans in this country as savages.) In the early 2000s, I became very frustrated with the television shows I was watching. I was teaching at the Boston Renaissance Charter School at the time, and an eighth-grade student wrote a paper on media images. Somewhere in the paper, he mentioned how too many of our youth are watching “celebrity strangers.” The term to me meant that we feel like we know the people we watch on television and are therefore heavily influenced by them. While several of the artists I mention in the following poem have made good strides to improve the images of Black people on television, I did not feel that was the case at the time. The poem is entitled “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” which speaks to indoctrination Black youth face and the role parents play in this indoctrination: When I was a child, I was told to never talk to strangers I was told that if someone confronts me who I do not know That I should run in the opposite direction But where did I run to? With parental permission of course, I ran straight to the television Where there are more strangers than you find in the streets Through television, I allowed these strangers to creep into my mind As have countless other young Black males over the years These “celebrity strangers” Disguised as Black men Showed me how to do everything But be a real Black man These illegal Black male aliens From Martin Lawrence to Jamie Foxx And countless others over the years Have proudly dressed as women At some point in their Stepin Fetchit careers

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Proudly serving to destroy the image Of the strong Black male In this young Black mind So as me and my brethren Went from Kyle Barker to Jay-Z We learned to become players And aspiring rhyme-sayers Our luminescent thoughts of revolution Quickly grew dim When we watched repeats of Men on Film with Damon Wayans Our aspirations of liberation Quickly come to an end When we watched Racial profiling skits on Girlfriends Our high hopes for racial equality Quickly fell deeper When we saw Ray J being Arrested on Moesha And why haven’t you realized That our children are becoming more and more violent When they’re sat down in front of famous strangers In order to be kept silent! And if you choose to ignore this fact And stand idly by Then realize you’re serving As an accessory to mental and generational genocide And as far as the sitcom producers care The death of our minds is an acceptable casualty As long as their ratings rise dramatically I know that from now on, Before I see a child Turning on Fox and Warner Brothers, I’m gonna have to warn-a-brother: “The contents you are about to see Are solely intended to convince you That you are not strong And that unity with your Black woman Can only come in a physical, sexual manner These sitcoms are psychological time bombs That when detonated Will send you back to school Dressed with the newest knowledge

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Of how to act a fool And still be considered cool Because all of your peers aspire to be like you too Now if you choose to turn off your TV, You can also turn on your PlayStation And create your own society That centers around a circus of violence Now by your 18th birthday, You may not know how to spell But hell, You’ll know the secret codes To NBA Live, NFL Blitz, and Tekken all too well Now people may say this is not the way But your parents bought you that PlayStation For your 13th birthday SO IT’S ALL OK!” TV glorifies sex, violence, And the destruction of the young Black mind The next time you choose To silence your young Shaka Zulu in the making Sit him down in front of images of Dr. King Or play him speeches by brother Malcolm Give him coloring books That showcase Black greatness And not BET images Of confused Black men Remember, Just because it was a Black-owned station Doesn’t mean its overall goal Is to uplift the nation If our children cannot Turn to our adults to find peace Then our hopes of finding Black manhood And attaining liberation Will forever rest in peace So remember, don’t talk to strangers!

Again, radio show host and activist Joe Madison states that in America we are “culturally conditioned” to believe that White is superior and Black is inferior, and the manifestation of this is that Black people are undervalued, underestimated, and marginalized.15 I would say that we are marginalized to the point of invisibility. Think about the images you have seen of Black people over the

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years on television, as well as in print media. What image did they place in your mind of who Black people were or could be? Did the media you consume teach you about Black politicians or Black prisoners? Did it teach you about Black theologians or Black thugs? Black success or Black subservience? Black inventors or Black iniquity? How about we test what you were taught?

Activity: Famous Living Black Men You’ve had an entire chapter to preview this! You knew this exercise was coming! Now it is your turn. No cheating! If you want a bigger challenge, no repeating of names. If you are feeling brave, do this exercise and substitute Black men with Black women! You are not allowed to do both here. Ready? Let’s go! • Ten living, popular Black male athletes • Ten living, popular Black male musicians • Ten living, popular Black male actors • Ten living, popular Black male doctors or scientists • Ten living, popular Black male authors • Ten living, popular Black male educators

MY ANTIRACIST JOURNEY: SAFIYA SONGHAI

Safiya Songhai is a forty-three-year-old professor of media production and journalism. She defines herself as being of sub-Saharan African, Iroquois, and Lenape ancestry. She states that the “main lie that persists” is that Black people’s skin color is “linked to their intrinsic character (i.e., character correlates to complexion). Black people are more likely to act a certain way than another group of people.” She gives an example of the stereotypes that Black fathers abandon their children and wives, Black people commit more crime, Black women have attitudes, and Black men join gangs. She was taught these stereotypes by her teachers, scientists, the media, White producers of media, and even Black actors themselves. Safiya began to realize she was being lied to at a very young age, around five years old. She always had a healthy opinion about non-White people, and when it came to White people, she found herself connecting more with stories about White underdogs, “like Cosette in Les Misérables.” Her mind was dispelled of any remaining lies by her high school World Cultures teacher, Ms. Washington. Washington showed Safiya that “patterns and behaviors weren’t related to skin color.” She had several teachers who demonstrated the “humanity of people versus color or ethnicity.” They taught her that there was “no correlation between one’s ethnicity and their intrinsic behavior.” Safiya was very blunt about the consequences of lies told about Black people: The biggest consequence of these lies is untimely death. The negative portrayal of Black people leads to having conditions and expectations that are so subpar that they lead to a shorter life. In turn, transgressions against us are met with impunity for the perpetrator. We are meant to live in bad neighborhoods, less pay, lower positions, more work, more crime, poor air quality, poor food quality, poor treatment by courts, law enforcement, medical community, business vendors. Example: A chain department store in a Black neighborhood will always be dirty, with merchandise on the floor and unclean changing rooms, while the same chain store in a White neighborhood will always be clean and tidy. Same with the streets and schools and housing. The Black version doesn’t deserve to have quality conditions. It is the Jim Crow era persisting into the modern day.

Safiya believes that overall, “racism wastes our time. Instead of having us deal with human issues, it makes us have to continuously dispel the belief that Black people are deserving of lesser treatment.” She says, “It’s like using a rocket



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scientist’s intelligence to disprove the existence of Santa Claus on the North Pole. It is a waste of such talent to focus his ability on such an obvious absurdity as Santa Claus.” She says these lies about Black people have led to many issues, such as “no love, no income, limited work opportunities, broken families, abandonment, unrealized potential, betrayal, infighting, wanton disrespect. No children. Constant disrespect by Black men toward Black women. Disrespect of Black people from other parts of the diaspora toward each other. Divide and conquer.” Safiya believes that nothing short of a pan-African revolutionary mind-set will save Black people.

CHAPTER FIVE

YOUR RACIAL VOCABULARY

What makes me BIPOC? Is it my locks? The way I talk? The way I rock my socks? What makes you White? Is it because you’re always right? Is it the privileges assigned as a birthright? What makes you Asian bro? Is it your Seoul? What does a Korean have in common with a Pakistani yo? And why did we (thankfully) stop using “Oriental”? What makes you Latino . . . or is it Latinx? Who decided which term was the best? Are you Native American or are you Indian? Maybe it just depends on the city I’m in Are you a “Jew” or are you “Jew-ish”? Is it about your collective history or because people assume you’re all rich? I looked at my dark pants and I definitely don’t look like that So who decided that with my brown skin that I’m Black? Seems pretty whack When you call someone a term, is it because you mean it? Or is it because you don’t want to offend and it’s convenient? At the end of the day, descriptors we use matter And are often based on racist stereotypes, that we must shatter!

Everyone fails the test from the prior chapter! As I stated, I have conducted this test for at least fifteen years. I have conducted this test in front of all Black educators; all White educators; and hundreds of platforms with multicultural educators, professors, leaders of companies, and more. No one has ever passed this



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exam, so yes, I set it up for failure, but it’s OK. Here’s a fun fact: I have never passed this test either. Why? The reason is not because there are not great Black people who hold PhDs, like Gloria Ladson-Billings, Ian Smith, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Dr. Brittney Cooper, but because society has not created a system where Black PhD holders are as famous as Black athletes. There are more Black male medical doctors in America alone than Black men in the NBA, but society does not want us to know that. You cannot name 10 popular living Black male doctors because to date, there are none in the media. There are thousands of Black male doctors and Black female doctors, but we have not made them and their stories famous like we do our Black male athletes and musicians, and the same is the case for Black women. As I write often in this book, you cannot teach what you do not know, and you cannot lead where you do not go. It is easy to say that you are committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion and countering the lies you were taught about Black people, but if you still have a limited view of what Black people can do and be, then you will remain part of the problem. This was a small test, but based on your answers, it is indicative of the work you need to do to build your knowledge and the work society must do to change the narrative of who should be Black and famous. Unlearning takes effort and time. Through acknowledging your own biases, committing to reading and watching new material, engaging in conversations with new people, and confronting narratives of misinformation and disinformation, you can unlearn what you have been taught. Most importantly, unlearning takes a commitment, and your reading this book shows commitment to this work. For example, I am reminded of how the world was fawning over the fact that the United States now has its first “person of color” (and female) vice president. While this incredible news spread like wildfire, it was not true. Charles Curtis was Native American and served as vice president under President Herbert Hoover. Vice President Harris is the first vice president of Black and Asian descent but not the first vice president who is a “person of color.” Why were most of us not taught this? We were not taught this because our educational system prioritized the contributions of White people to society and either minimized or outright denied the contributions of non-White people but especially Black people. As Malcolm X said, if we’re taught that a group of people never did anything, then it’s easy to think they can never do anything. Earlier, I wrote about how just the language we use, like “people of color,” can be problematic and that we need to do a deeper dive into understanding whether the descriptions we use for people are still appropriate, if they ever were. I start by speaking about the term BIPOC.

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“DO YOU SEE THAT GUY ON THE TV? THAT’S A NIGGER.” I was floored. It was the fall of 2017, and I was teaching my course Intercultural Communication at American University. The course explores dynamics of power between dominant and marginalized groups. We were talking about labels, and one of the White students raised his hand and told the class that as a very young child, his uncle said this statement to him as they were watching television. He said it was the first description he heard used to describe Black people, and it stuck with him for a while until he realized his uncle was racist and the term was inappropriate and offensive. One of my first thoughts when hearing this was how many of us hear terms like this used to describe other groups, and we have no idea if they may be inappropriate, ignorant, or downright racist. Furthermore, beyond terms like this that are outright slurs, how do we know that any term we use to describe anyone is appropriate at best and offensive at worst? Enter the term BIPOC. One of the best things about being a diversity, equity, and inclusion facilitator is that people often send me content unsolicited. So I was reading an article in the summer of 2020 about a topic I cannot recall, and I came across the word BIPOC. My first thought is that it meant “BIsexual People Of Color.” I mean, why not? As I continued reading, that descriptor just did not fit the text I was reading, so I looked it up. Lo and behold, it turned out the term meant “Black Indigenous People of Color” or “Black and Indigenous People of Color.” I was furious! I was furious because I thought, “Here we go again with another inappropriate term to describe Black people. Here we go again just lumping us in with any random group because it’s convenient.” This term was particularly upsetting to me because it was created within the last ten years or so out of nowhere and now it has replaced Black and African American as a descriptor in schools, workspaces, and daily lexicon in general, and many people seem to not know, not care, or both. According to the New York Times, the term first started appearing in social media circles in 2013.1 It started to gain more prominence in 2020 in the wake of protests over the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and others. Since then, the term has sprung up everywhere. Organizations, such as the BIPOC Project, are centered on a mission to “build authentic and lasting solidarity among Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), in order to undo Native invisibility, anti-Blackness, dismantle White supremacy and advance racial justice.” They also state that they use the term BIPOC to “highlight the unique relationship to Whiteness that Indigenous and Black (African Americans) people have, which shapes the experiences of and relationship to White supremacy for all people of color within a U.S. context.”2

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While I respect their mission and the sentiments of others who identify with this word, this term should no longer be adopted into our regular vocabulary for four reasons. Moreover, I propose that we scrutinize all racialized terminology in a way similar to what I do in this chapter with BIPOC—be it White, Black, Latino, Latinx, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI), Indian, and more.

THE TERM BIPOC IS LIKE A DOUBLE NEGATIVE (OR DOUBLE POSITIVE, IF YOU PREFER) If Black people are “people of color” and Indigenous or Native American people are “people of color,” then the term itself is repetitive. The term people of color was first used in the United States as early as 1807 in legislative terms to describe enslaved individuals, along with the terms Negro and mulatto. People of color (colour back then) was also used to describe mixed-race people in Haiti in the late eighteenth century. The Baltimore Afro-American in 1912 reported that even across states, the term people of color has had different meanings, specifically one who is descended from a Negro to the third generation, inclusive, though one ancestor in each generation may have been White. According to the law of Alabama one is “a person of color” who has had any Negro blood in his ancestry for five generations. . . . In Arkansas “persons of color” include all who have a visible and distinct admixture of African blood. . . . Thus it would seem that a Negro in one state is not always a Negro in another.3

As NPR reports, just the term color alone can be confusing because it can be a noun, adjective, or (transitive or intransitive) verb. While I can continue down this historical path, the point is clear. The term people of color itself was never appropriate hundreds of years ago and does not have relevance today, and it did not originally include Native Americans, yet it lives on through terms like BIPOC.

BLACK AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLE DO NOT HAVE THAT MUCH IN COMMON While the term BIPOC exists to express solidarity, it groups together a group of people whose histories could not be more different. The experiences of Native Americans are like no other and are an extremely understudied aspect

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of American history. Native American history is often told from the perspective of the people who arrived on the boats, not from the perspective of people who were already on the soil, whereas Black people were brought to this country by force through the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Both Black people and Native Americans have experienced great oppression, but their stories are also complicated by the fact that some Native Americans were also owners of enslaved Black people.4 Then of course, we can talk about the Buffalo soldiers, Black soldiers who killed Native Americans in the 1800s.5 So what do these two groups really have in common to merit an entirely new racial category all their own? Cue reason 3 to stop using BIPOC: Whiteness.

UNITING AROUND WHITENESS IS NOT THE WAY TO GO Black people and Native Americans have experienced severe forms of oppression at the hands of White colonizers and enslavers. Many Native Americans were also enslaved by colonizers. There are indeed countless examples of Native Americans and Black people working toward unity, demonstrated in the twentieth century by the fight for equality and Black- and Brown-empowerment movements. The point here is that historically, most Native American and Black solidarity has been demonstrated in response to White oppression. Is this reason enough to combine these groups in such a generic fashion? We cannot build movements based on opposition to another group because real solidarity does not fully exist if it can only exist when there is a common enemy.

WHY DO WHITE PEOPLE JUST GET TO BE WHITE? BIPOC is just another term added to the ever-growing list of terms used to describe non-White people. Throughout all of this, White people still get to be called White. Not only is this annoying because last time I checked, white is a color too, but also because the more terms we come up with to describe everyone else, the more White people are viewed as the original people and everyone else is “colored” into that White narrative of originality. Putting White people basically at the center of creation is not historically accurate. The more time we spend coming up with new terms to describe non-White groups, the more we strengthen the narrative of White Eurocentric dominance in America and beyond.

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BEYOND BIPOC While I do not have the right to challenge how any one individual chooses to identify with a culture or identity, I do have an obligation to speak to the challenges that exist on a collective level when we continually create new terms for people who ultimately do not have that much in common, as we have done with the term people of color and BIPOC. Are COVID-related hate crimes primarily a “people of color” issue or an issue primarily facing our AAPI family in America? Are the shootings of unarmed people really a “people of color” issue or primarily a Black issue? Are rapes of Native American women on reservations by non–Native Americans who go to the reservation to assault these women and then escape back to the mainland so they won’t be prosecuted a “people of color” issue? To group these issues together is to dilute the real experiences of each group. I argue for us to be intellectually energetic and respectful enough to treat each group with the respect they deserve in the same way we do White people. Both White people and Native Americans owned slaves, but no one has come up with the term WIPOC to express solidarity. Let us tell the story of Native Americans, Black people, and all cultural or racial groups with the individual respect they deserve. This is crucial in your commitment to create communities where everyone is celebrated and not tolerated. You owe it to yourself to check your racialized vocabulary. Do you use BIPOC? People of color? African American? Minority (even though Black and Brown people are part of the global majority)? Why did you choose the terms you use? Who taught it to you? Are the terms you use still appropriate? Were they ever? Is it time to take a second look at your terminology, or are you going to stick with what’s convenient, even if you may be minimizing the experiences of an entire group of people? There is no better time (other than yesterday) to review your racialized vocabulary! At the end of the semester, the same student whose uncle told him Black people were “niggers” submitted his final paper to me. He told me that on the first day of class, he asked himself, “Why did I get the angry Black male professor?” and he said this was before I uttered a word. He said the class experience made him realize that he indeed was racist. He realized that what he was taught as a child stayed with him on some level, even though he did not use racial slurs to describe Black people. His life as it relates to Black people was minimized, and so he accepted narratives he was given over time. He did not feel he had to do the work necessary to understand and respect Black culture until he was forced to in my course. When we create random terms like BIPOC without historical

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context, we are creating a new “flavor of the month.” We are not allowing for deeper understandings of Black people or any other group. If we want to challenge lies about Black people like the lies this student was taught, then we must challenge the very language we use to describe Black people.

Activity: How Do You Describe Other People? Write down the names of five different groups of people, and find out what the origins of those names are: for example, BIPOC, people of color, Latino, Latina, Arab, White, Indian, Native American, Black, and so on. Do you believe these terms are still appropriate today? Were they ever? Why or why not?

MY ANTIRACIST JOURNEY: DR. RICHARD BOOTH

Dr. Richard Booth is a forty-seven-year-old Black Jamaican therapist, consultant, and trainer. He has engaged in this line of work for almost twenty years. He has lived in the United States since his childhood. He recounts “many” lies that were told to him, including that Black people were “less than and that difficulties we faced were based on individual lacking in us and our people and not a result of historical trauma and systematic and purposeful oppression and marginalization.” It was “society as a whole, including other Black people,” who taught him these lies. Richard realized he was lied to at a young age, but he laments that “it has taken a lifetime to decipher the insidious and often hidden and ingrained nature of the lies [because] they are built and reinforced across multiple systems in society.” Richard believes that the biggest consequence of these lies is that Black people “feel less than and act accordingly, and others feel we are inferior and act accordingly.” With this mentality in mind, Richard holds that it is “easy to do inhumane things such as policy when you think who you are doing it to is subhuman or not deserving of human decency.” Richard was not short on examples of his experiences with stereotypes. He often has people believe he is not a doctor because he is Black and has had his research questioned for its originality because he is Black. These types of experiences led to Richard and his friends “always feeling behind [and] not prepared for our life trajectories, and we were traumatized through multiple interactions across our lifespans.” He states firmly that this oppressive system is “still in place and continues to traumatize us, and we have achieved less than our potential and have less access to knowledge and resources, which hinders what we can leave our offspring.” For society to change, Richard proposes a very holistic approach: We need the people who passively benefit to work with other marginalized communities to foster justice and equality. We need changes in who are voted in on a local level and up in order to change laws and policies and procedures. We need to have active involvement in controlling the narratives and images of Blacks. We also need to be honest and realistic about past, present, and future instances, not letting things get derailed, co-opted, or brushed over. Lastly, we need to focus on mental health and healing, and increasing training on parenting, having successful relationships, and financial planning, political systems, and literacy.

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Without these actions, Richard is not optimistic about the future of America. Many people believe there is less work to be done today, but in reality, the systems of oppression are getting stronger. Successful Black people are seen as exceptions and not the norm, but the way the successful are lauded in America leads to America “diminishing the realities of the marginalized society.”

CHAPTER SIX

LIES THE MEDIA TOLD US

There was a favorite fast-food place I enjoyed eating at while in high school in Boston. It was called Yours Takeout. It was in the heart of Grove Hall, a thriving Black business mecca at the intersection of where the towns of Dorchester and Roxbury meet. In fact, the mall in that area is called the Grove Hall Mecca Mall. Everything from African clothing to food could be found in this area, and the majority of businesses are Black-owned. The Nation of Islam (NOI) was a driving force behind the redevelopment of this area. In fact, Muhammad’s Mosque #11 sits prominently at the center of it. That mosque took the former space of a funeral parlor and helped build a thriving Black community. I also loved this area because it was within walking distance from my home on Howland Street, which was two streets over from where Malcolm X lived with his sister Ella Little-Collins during his Boston days. Yours Takeout was owned by the NOI. One day while I was ordering my regular steak and cheese sub, called the “salaam bomb” (I can still smell and taste it now, though I have not consumed beef in decades), a customer was complaining about his order and threatened to never support the business again. A member of the NOI was standing in the corner of the restaurant, and he said something I never forgot. He said that we can find a dead cockroach in a McDonald’s hamburger and continue to patronize McDonald’s, but a Black business can make one mistake, and we’ll never shop there again. This man’s comments really got me thinking about all the times I heard people say to my parents in some manner or other, “If you want it right, you better go White.” They were told this for everything, from getting house contractors to choosing schools for their children. I did not fully understand it until I got a little older and had to make serious decisions about whom to invest my money in for home projects, car purchases, choice of medical professionals, and more. I learned over time that the lack of trust that many Black people hold

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toward each other stems from the fact that we fed into the lies that we were indeed told to each other about Black people literally over centuries. Nikesha Elise Williams is an Emmy Award–winning news producer and author of the 2015 multi-award-winning novel Four Women. She wrote in an op-ed about how she “bought into the worst stereotypes about Black business owners,” even after she became one herself. She writes that it takes actual work to recondition ourselves to not feed into the stereotypes and lies we have about ourselves. She spoke about the anxiety she had at her “first Black event” as a vendor at a cultural festival: “This is my first Black event,” I said to the woman in the space next to me. Anxiety laced my voice as I spoke this uncomfortable truth out loud. I am Black, she is Black, and we were commiserating as Black vendors at a cultural festival. Both of us were frustrated by the lack of organization during the load-in, which was supposed to begin at 7 am and didn’t get going until an hour later. . . . I compared this experience with how a weekly arts festival is run on another side of town. I thought, This is why I don’t do Black events.1

Nikesha then engaged in a series of self-interrogatory questions: “That’s when I caught myself. My subconscious quickly clapped back at my own prejudiced, harmful internal dialogue: Aren’t these the people you’re trying to reach? Aren’t these the people you write for? Didn’t you grow up attending and supporting events like this?” Her realization of the stereotypes she held against her own people made her feel “convicted” and wondering if she had been “conditioned to expect less than excellence when dealing with [her] own people, race, and culture. Because . . . those events on the other side of town, though they might have had more experience in organization, they were just as hectic, chaotic, and stressful” as the event she was at in the moment.2 Williams reminds us that the notion that enslaved people were “lazy, intellectually inferior, and so child-like that they would not be able to manage freedom on their own—even though they built the infrastructure that made this country,” still exists today “despite the fact that the plantations on which many of them labored were run like major corporations.” She states that “these false generalizations and caricatures have been force-fed to American people—Black and White—and to people around the world. Through cartoons, movies, figurines, racism, and systemic oppression, I believe there has been a deliberate and sinister movement to condition people to believe the worst about Black business owners and employees.”3 I expand her statement about believing the worst about Black business owners and employees to Black people, period.

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According to the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University in Michigan, During slavery the dominant caricatures of Blacks—Mammy, Coon, Tom, and picaninny—portrayed them as childlike, ignorant, docile, groveling, and generally harmless. These portrayals were pragmatic and instrumental. Proponents of slavery created and promoted images of Blacks that justified slavery and soothed White consciences. If slaves were childlike, for example, then a paternalistic institution where masters acted as quasi-parents to their slaves was humane, even morally right.4

The largest disseminator of stereotypes of Black people being shiftless, lazy, untrustworthy, and incapable of doing anything on their own was America’s growing and ever-expanding entertainment industry, starting with the minstrel shows of the 1830s. Of course, there have always existed multiple forms of entertainment in America that included racist depictions of Black people, but the 1830s started the country on a particular journey of Black stereotypes that still manifests today, thanks to people like Thomas Rice. During the early 1830s, Thomas Dartmouth Rice, also known as “Daddy” Rice, was a little-known, New York–born actor living in Louisville, Kentucky. Before one of his shows at the London Stage, he decided to dress in ragged clothes and painted his face and hands black. He danced to a song called “Jim Crow.” Some of the lyrics are Turn about and wheel about, and do just so And every time I turn about I Jump Jim Crow.5

Rice’s mockery of Black vernacular English and Black dance during this time would lay the groundwork for the industry of Black cultural appropriation, which is discussed later. The routine was a smashing hit. According to journalist Ken Emerson, Rice’s minstrel shows started to spread across the country, the “same way that rock and roll did more than a hundred years later. In the same way that Elvis Presley electrified the world in the 1950s, so did Daddy Rice when he did ‘Jump Jim Crow’ on the London Stage.”6 Before we come to rock and roll, however, it is worth noting that the minstrel shows accelerated an entire memorabilia industry of stereotyped Black products, from dishware and furniture to clothing and toys. As America continued into the twentieth century, the film and animation industries picked up, allowing for more images of shiftless, lazy, and untrustworthy Black people to proliferate. D. W. Griffith’s aforementioned 1915 film The Birth of a Nation was America’s first blockbuster film. The film, described by Griffith in the opening as a “historical presentation of the Civil War and Reconstruction Period [not] meant to reflect on any race or people of today,” portrays Black people (played

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by White people in Black face) as foolish, incapable of running government, and sexual predators of White women. The film became so popular that it was played at the White House by President Woodrow Wilson, who called it “history written in lightning.”7 As Dick Lehr, author of The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America’s Civil War, writes, Griffith “portrayed the emancipated slaves as heathens, as unworthy of being free, as uncivilized, as primarily concerned with passing laws so they could marry white women and prey on them.”8 NPR refers to the movie as three hours of “racist propaganda,” starting with the end of the Civil War and ending with the White man fighting to save the country from Black rule. The film reveals yet again America’s contradiction: It was created by the son of a Confederate soldier who warped American history into the narrative of those who betrayed this country, yet it simultaneously became the foundation of what we call Hollywood today. It is taught in film schools today because of its groundbreaking cinematography. Lehr calls it the Avatar or Star Wars of 1915. He writes that given that this is the racist root of Hollywood, “it shouldn’t be a surprise when . . . there have been discussions about the lack of people of color being nominated for the Oscars. In my mind, this is very much a branch that grew out of the tree that was Birth of a Nation.”9 The Birth of a Nation was later banned in some cities and edited in others after protests from activists like William Monroe Trotter and the fledgling NAACP (birthed in 1909, so still getting its wings up at the time), but the damage had already been done, particularly in the growing popularity of the Ku Klux Klan, which used the film as a recruiting tool for decades after its release, including by noted modern-day Klansman David Duke.10 While the film and others like it appealed to adults across the country, the burgeoning cartoon industry would serve to indoctrinate children into racist foot soldiers while teaching generations of Black children that they were also lazy, shiftless, and not trustworthy. In 1968, the same year that Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Warner Brothers decided to ban eleven films deemed extremely racist. Some of the titles included Uncle Tom’s Bungalow (1937), Jungle Jitters (1938), Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943), and Goldilocks and the Jivin’ Bears (1944).11 Interestingly, these cartoons were created by United Artists, a digital production company founded in 1919 (four years after the release of The Birth of a Nation), by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and—wait for it—D. W. Griffith. Disney was also part of the racist cartoon propaganda machine, best demonstrated in its early days with the 1941 film Dumbo, which features, among other stereotypes, a crow by the name of Jim Crow.12 The racist imagery of pretty much every non-White racial group was prominent in the

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Looney Tunes/Warner Brothers cartoons, such as Bugs Bunny, who did everything from dressing in blackface and squinting his eyes to represent the Asian stereotype, to shooting Native Americans as he counts off, “1 little, 2 little, 3 little Injuns,” and pretending to be a slave to avoid being beaten by his “massa” Yosemite Sam. Between the late 1920s and 1940s, the American film industry laid the groundwork to forever immortalize racist stereotypes in what would become American classics. In Old Kentucky (1927) introduced the world to Stepin Fetchit, played by Lincoln Perry, whose role as a docile, lazy, and shiftless Black man made him America’s first Black movie star.13 Amos and Andy was a radio minstrel show created by Charles Correll and Freeman Godsen, both sons of the Confederacy, in 1928.14 Gone with the Wind brought us the servant Mammy, played by Hattie McDaniel. McDaniel became the first Black person to win an Oscar for her role (Best Supporting Actress), although she could not sit at the same table as the other award nominees because of Jim Crow segregation laws. Disney’s Song of the South (1946) brought us the “magical Negro” character of Uncle Remus. But America’s film industry was not only engaged in the proliferation of stereotypes and lies about Black people. Asians, Native Americans, Jewish people, and Latinos were also heavily stereotyped. These minstrel shows, films, and cartoons coincided with periods of incredible Black resistance, including the enslaved Nat Turner’s rebellion of 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia, that left more than fifty White people slain (the same year Thomas Rice performed his minstrel show for the first time). The protests from Black soldiers returning home from World War II occurred in the 1940s, as these movies grew in stature. But these images do not only live in the first half of the twentieth century. These characters morphed over the years in J. J. Evans (played by Jimmy Walker) in the 1970s sitcom Good Times, Jaleel White as Steve Urkel in the 1990s sitcom Family Matters, Bruh-man, played by Reginald Ballard on the sitcom Martin, and Jar Jar Binks from the Star Wars movies and television shows, played mostly by Ahmed Best. Binks had nearly a twenty-year run, starting from his first portrayal in 1999. The media told the story of the Black man, who was either lazy, shiftless, or a Black-buck figure who wanted to rape and savage White women. What is so contradictory is that both the lazy/shiftless and the brute/buck mind-sets were used to justify the enslavement of Black men (the justifications for the enslavement of Black women is discussed later): Black men were lazy and shiftless; therefore, forced labor would give them discipline. Or Black men were so strong but so savage that they needed the institution of slavery to keep them in their place. The Black-buck stereotype laid the foundation for the “I feared for my life” narrative that so many police

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officers and others have used to justify shooting unarmed Black men (also discussed later in this book). The Black-buck image was “conjured by the minds of enslavers and auctioneers to promote the strength, breeding ability, and agility of muscular young black men.”15 The Black buck has also been referred to as the Mandingo stereotype: While under the violence of enslavement, a physically powerful black man could be subdued and brutally forced into labor. Emancipation brought with it fears that these men would exact sexual revenge against white men through their daughters, as depicted in the film “Birth of a Nation” (1915). The reinforcement of the stereotype of the Mandingo as animalistic and brutish, gave legal authority to white mobs and militias who tortured and killed black men for the safety of the public.16

The stereotypes about Black women that developed in the early days of their presence in America are still prevalent today. These stereotypes were used to justify the control of Black women and Black women’s bodies. Black women were portrayed in American media as either the mammy, the jezebel, or the Sapphire (derived from the character of Sapphire Stevens from the 1950s’ Amos and Andy). In short, the Sapphire is considered “emasculating, loud, aggressive, angry, stubborn, and unfeminine”; the jezebel is considered “hypersexualized, seductive and exploiter of men’s weaknesses;” and the mammy is considered “self-sacrificing, nurturing, loving, asexual.”17 For the mammy character, think of Viola Davis from The Help or Hattie McDaniel from Gone with the Wind. For the Sapphire, or sassy type, think of Ernestine Wade, who played Sapphire Stevens on Amos and Andy, or Pam from Martin, played by Tichina Arnold. For the jezebel stereotype, think of Pam Grier from Foxy Brown or Lela Rochon from Harlem Nights or Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball. According to Tom Buck, the senior pastor at the First Baptist Church in Lindale, Texas, the term jezebel also applies to Vice President Kamala Harris. Upon Harris’s inauguration in 2021, Buck tweeted, “I can’t imagine any truly God-fearing Israelite who would’ve wanted their daughters to view Jezebel as an inspirational role model because she was a woman in power.”18 Hollywood’s fascination with these stereotypes is manifested today in the Black Oscar winners for Best Actor or Actress and Best Supporting Actor or Actress, who have played some version of the brute (Denzel Washington in Training Day, Forest Whitaker in Last King of Scotland); the mammy (Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind, Viola Davis in The Help); the jezebel (Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball); or the Sapphire (Mo’nique in Precious). Three 6 Mafia became the first rappers to win an Oscar for their song “It’s Hard Out There for a Pimp” from the movie Hustle and Flow. Also, movies that depict some aspect

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of the slave experience also tend to do well in terms of Oscar-worthy reception. Think Glory (1989), 12 Years a Slave (2013), and Harriet (2019). Could it be because these films feature several of these stereotypes in one film? The main reason it is necessary to review this history is because it speaks to how Black people in America have been typecast not only into roles in television and film but also into the psyche of America. These images and notions have been ingrained in the psyche of Black America, as well. In too many instances, these images have caused Black people to look at each other with skepticism at best and hatred at worst. It is the reason we are intentionally vocal about the need to support Black businesses, schools, film projects, authors, and more: We were taught to not trust each other. Although the Willie Lynch letter that spoke on the process of how to make a slave was a fake document,19 the spirit of the letter has indeed played out as it relates to pitting Black people against each other based on age, complexion, and more throughout our American experience, as Nikesha Williams’s experience speaks to at the beginning of this chapter. We as Black people have had to make intentional, conscious efforts to break the psychological sabotage placed in our minds in large part by the American media. I was schooled on the need to support Black businesses at a very young age, so I was committed to making sure that the comment made by the brother at Yours Takeout was not going to apply to me. A few weeks later, however, the restaurant closed. I still wonder why, but do I really need to?

MY ANTIRACIST JOURNEY: DR. MICHAEL ROBINSON

Dr. Michael Robinson is a forty-seven-year-old Black American science educator from Massachusetts. He has worked in education for nearly twenty years. He was taught that “Black quarterbacks were incapable of memorizing plays” and that “Blacks were athletically gifted and intellectually inferior” primarily through school, the media, and “people of color who internalized racism.” Michael grew up in what he called a “Black Panther home.” His grandfather knew and marched with Dr. King. Growing up in this backdrop allowed him to grow up “with imagery and messages that countered the narrative to defame African people.” Moreover, he became “connected with several adult activists and academics who honed a message of critical thinking and Black pride.” Michael elaborates on the consequences of the stereotypes he experienced growing up: Internalized racism decimated figures from my childhood. The message of selfhatred manifest in stabbings and shootings, poor behaviors in school that resulted in suspensions and impaired learning. This hurt the quality of the adults, limited the scope and quality of mates, led to an unraveling of the conservative aspects of the culture that carried us out of slavery, through Jim Crow, and allowed it to flutter into the mess that resulted after the war on drugs.

Michael speaks about friends he grew up with who told him they thought Black people were stupid and that Black people could not amount to much outside of athletics. He sees some of them who “survived into adulthood,” and many of them are formerly incarcerated. Some of them told him they wished they had more positive Black images in their lives. He holds that the “lies became a minefield that to this day I still have to navigate in order to avoid the explosions. For my family, the impact has been far greater. To use the analogy above, they’ve blown themselves up many times.” Michael is the first person in his family to graduate high school, as well as attain a four-year degree. His family considered him arrogant for seeking a higher station in life. Today, they apologize to him. They tell him that they “wish they had the self-esteem and the drive in order to go and do the things that they secretly wanted to.” The stereotypes and lies his community experienced led them to have



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low self-esteem, which discouraged them from living their best lives. To change the issues Michael raised, which he believes still exist today, Michael thinks that education is the number 1 driver of needed change. Rather than rely on an overtaxed school system, I wish we had a very deep, thorough, reliable system to embed positive ideals and reteach them within the respective communities and therefore the households. We’d also need mechanisms in order to support them and maintain this positive Black identity that would result from it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

DO BLACK PEOPLE FEEL PAIN?

The dehumanization of Black people discussed in the prior chapter has led

to a belief that Black people are so subhuman that we do not even feel pain. Legendary ESPN sports journalist and commentator Stephen A. Smith, the New Yorker’s Ian Crouch, the iconic sneaker company Nike, and many other individuals and organizations of note have referred to tennis star Serena Williams as not only the greatest female tennis player of all time and not only the greatest tennis player of all time but also the greatest athlete of all time, male or female. No other woman in history has ever been placed in a discussion of being the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) alongside names like Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, and LeBron James. Depending on the criteria, even if she is not number 1, she can easily check the box for top five. Despite her twenty-three Grand Slam titles, including winning a title while pregnant, Serena Williams almost died after childbirth, but not because of extenuating nontreatable circumstances. She almost died simply because she was a Black woman whom her doctors did not want to listen to. After delivering her daughter, Olympia, by C-section in September 2017, Williams began experiencing blood clots. She was off of her daily anticoagulant regimen due to a separate surgery, so she “immediately assumed she was having another pulmonary embolism.” The key word from this quotation is another because it means Williams has experienced this before. She told the nearest nurse that she “needed a CT scan with contrast and IV heparin (a blood thinner) right away,” but the nurse told her it was Williams’s pain medication making her confused. Williams persisted, but the doctors decided to do an ultrasound of her legs instead. Eventually, the CT scan was done, and the blood clots in her lungs were found. If they did not “listen to Dr. Williams!” as she exclaimed in her Vogue interview, she would have died.1 In 2022, Oprah Winfrey released a documentary series entitled the Color of Care that looks at health disparities in the health-care system based on race.



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It was inspired by the death of Gary Fowler, a Black man who died on his couch after being rejected by hospital emergency rooms three times during the COVID pandemic when he presented himself with symptoms. Winfrey stated that though her fame has provided her better access, she still has fallen victim to not being taken as seriously because she is Black. One doctor misdiagnosed a thyroid issue that was causing her to have heart palpitations. The first few doctors just prescribed her medicine without even conducting a blood test. Though she can get the best-quality care in an expedited way, her docuseries that exposed America’s racialized health inequity during the pandemic should be a teachable moment for all. What Williams’s and Winfrey’s experiences reveal is that America has a problem seeing and responding to the pain of Black people. Too many Americans experience what is called the “racial empathy gap,” which is the idea that people of all backgrounds, including Black people, don’t experience the same level of empathy seeing a Black person experience pain as they experience when they see a White person experience pain. In a study conducted at the University of Milano-Bicocca, researchers showed Black and White people video clips of needles and erasers touching someone’s skin. Both Black and White people, “when [they] saw white people receiving a painful stimulus, . . . responded more dramatically than they did for black people.”2 A PLOS One study shows that people, “including medical personnel, assume a priori that Blacks feel less pain than do Whites.”3 Furthermore, the study shows that people experienced more pain seeing people of higher social status experiencing pain than those of lower status. The researchers of the study concluded that “people assume that, relative to whites, blacks feel less pain because they have faced more hardship.”4 The disturbing paradox that the racial empathy gap creates is that because “Blacks are already hardened by racism, people believe Black people are less sensitive to pain. Because they are believed to be less sensitive to pain, Black people are forced to endure more pain.”5 What does this racial empathy gap look like in real life? It looks like Black and Latino people receiving inadequate pain medication compared to White people. It looks like a Black man dying on his couch from COVID after being rejected from three hospital emergency rooms. It looks like non-White people with recurrent or metastatic cancer being less likely to have adequate analgesia.6 It looks like an opioid prescription for pain being three times more likely to be prescribed for White visitors to the emergency room than for Black people. It looks like Black women receiving less epidural medication during labor than White women. It looks like Dr. Susan Moore, a Black medical doctor suffering from COVID, asserting in a December 2020 viral Facebook post that her doctors treated her like a “drug addict” as she advocated for more medication in the

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hospital before she died and that she would have been treated differently if she was White.7 And yes, it looks like the greatest tennis player, and arguably the greatest athlete of all time, almost dying after childbirth because doctors did not believe what her own body has told her for decades. But the racial empathy gap does not only pertain to pain medication. The racial empathy gap manifests itself in jury sentencing, prison time served, and even in suspension and expulsion rates of Black students compared to White students. As Slate states, What is a prank for a White student is often treated as a zero-tolerance offense by a minority student. Minority students are more likely to receive an out-ofschool suspension, even if they have a disability, more likely to be referred by their schools to law enforcement, more likely to be arrested, more likely to be tried in adult court, and more likely to receive a harsh sentence8

because Black children are more likely to be seen as adults than White children. This is what the Center on Poverty and Inequality refers to as “adultification.”9 Adultification looks like the White eighteen-year-old killer of ten people in Buffalo in May 2022 being called a “teenager” by the Associated Press but calling Michael Brown, who was also eighteen years old when he was shot in the head multiple times by Officer Darren Wilson and left in the street of Ferguson, Missouri, for at least four hours, a “man.”10 It looks like Tamir Rice, slain at twelve years old while carrying a toy gun, being called by many a “young man” in 2014, while at the same time calling seventeen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2017, a “boy” or a “teenager.” Adultification plus the racial empathy gap looks like people accepting the fact that it takes more force to subdue an unarmed Black person, like Michael Brown, than a mass murderer, like Dylan Roof and the Buffalo shooter, Peyton Conklin, who are armed to the teeth but miraculously are arrested without incident. When Officer Wilson was on trial for the killing of Michael Brown, he spoke about how large Brown was. He talked about how he felt like a child holding on to legendary wrestler Hulk Hogan, who stands at 6'7". Using the five words that many people, including nonofficers like George Zimmerman use to kill Black people—I feared for my life—Wilson continued to dehumanize Michael Brown: He’s obviously bigger than I was and stronger, and I’ve already taken two to the face and I didn’t think I would, the third one could be fatal if he hit me right. . . . He looked up at me, and had the most intense, aggressive face. The only way I can describe it—it looks like a demon. That’s how angry he looked.11

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What was lost in this narrative to many is that Darren Wilson was actually taller than Michael Brown, standing at 6'4" to Michael Brown’s 6'3". Wilson’s narrative in 2014 led to no charges being brought against him. When George Zimmerman killed seventeen-year-old would-be airline pilot Trayvon Martin in 2012, the pretrial ritual of prosecuting the Black victim instead of the perpetrator in the public eye immediately ensued. One tactic people supporting Zimmerman used was circulating a picture of then thirty-fiveyear-old rapper The Game and saying that he was Trayvon Martin. I’ll never forget one comment I read: “If a guy looking like that approached me, I would have shot him too.” Adultification and the racial empathy gap aid in justifying Black death, and that has been the case since we were stolen from Africa centuries ago.

MY ANTIRACIST JOURNEY: PATRICK GALVIN

Patrick Galvin is a fifty-eight-year-old White male business owner of twenty-one years. He was primarily taught by his White friends at school that “Black people are the best athletes but they’re not very good students [and] Black people are more dangerous than White people.” His parents were the biggest part of teaching him the truth about Black people, and they also taught him that there are more racists in this world than he knew. Patrick has a fifteen-year-old Chinese daughter, whom he adopted at twenty-one months, and he fears for the racism she will experience, as well. Patrick believes that the youth will save us. He is “hopeful that younger people have more exposure to people of other races, which will cause racism to diminish.”



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CHAPTER EIGHT

AREN’T BLACK PEOPLE MORE LIKELY TO BE CRIMINALS?

“He must have done something.”

“Why won’t they pull their pants up?”

“Why didn’t she just comply?” “That’s what happens when you resist arrest.” “That’s what happens when fathers are not in the home.” “It’s rap music.”

“What about Black-on-Black crime?” “Look at the streets of Chicago.”

These phrases are some of the common lines used to explain away the dispro-

portionate acts of violence directed primarily at unarmed Black people, as well as the disproportionate rates of incarceration for Black people. Every excuse possible is provided to place the onus on Black people for every action that leads to an incident of violence with the police and others. Philando Castile killed as he is reaching for his gun permit? He should not have reached. John Crawford killed walking through Wal-Mart with a fake weapon from the store in an open-carry state? He should not have picked up a gun on display and walked around with it. Sandra Bland found dead in her jail cell after being pulled over, manhandled, and arrested for an alleged traffic violation? She should not have talked back to the officer. George Floyd murdered after having a knee on his neck for more than nine minutes? He should not have produced a counterfeit bill, even if he may not have known it was not real. I could fill this entire chapter with incidents like this, but the main question that needs to be asked is simple: Why is it that so many of us are quick to blame

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Black people for the most heinous acts in police interactions? In nearly every instance of an unarmed shooting by police, the decedent is the one with the least amount of power in the situation; they have no guns, no tasers, no batons, and usually are alone versus one or more officers. Despite this reality, what makes so many of us quick to blame these Black people for their own demise? Could it be our own ingrained racist ideas about Black deviance and Black people not feeling pain? Notice here that I am not saying only White people blame Black people slain by the police; many of us in the Black community have unfortunately blamed Black unarmed people for being killed by the police, as well. Given that the same excuses are rarely provided to justify non-Black people being killed by police, and given that many White people are not killed by the police for actively challenging and even attacking police (throwing tickets in their faces, dragging police in their getaway cars during arrest attempts, attacking police with a chainsaw, etc.), I can only look to racism and racist ideas as the reason unarmed Black people are not only disproportionately slain by police officers but also disproportionately blamed for being killed. Part of the reason for this disproportionality is the lie and stereotype that Black people are more prone to commit crimes. The idea that Black people are more likely to be criminals is vocalized in the media by those who hold this racist idea, but the idea is often demonstrated without the media having to utter a single word, particularly with mugshots. The American mainstream news media has a troubling history of showing bias in the mugshots they post. For example, on March 23, 2015, the Gazette and ABC affiliate KCRG both published articles about two Black men and two White men who were involved in burglaries. The mugshots of the Black men were posted, but the two White men were shown in suits and ties from the roster of their college wrestling team. The stories were written from the same newsroom. After outrage grew on social media, the mugshots of the White college students were also published. The news outlets stated they posted the best pictures they had available at the time, but many were not interested in that excuse. The biases in how mugshots are posted are the reason that the San Francisco Police Department announced in 2020 that they would no longer release mugshots unless there was an immediate threat to the community because they “reinforce racial bias.” As San Francisco police chief William Scott stated, This policy emerges from compelling research suggesting that the widespread publication of police booking photos in the news and on social media creates an illusory correlation for viewers that fosters racial bias and vastly overstates the propensity of Black and brown men to engage in criminal behavior.1

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Many news outlets across the country have followed or are following suit, as well as national news outlets like USA Today and Gannett. These outlets also began removing mugshot galleries from their websites because they reinforce images of especially Black men being more involved in criminal activities. Importantly, mugshots are taken and circulated before a trial occurs, so it works against the idea of “innocent until proven guilty.” Furthermore, in too many instances, there is more news coverage of Black suspects than White suspects, even if Black people do not represent the majority of arrests and crimes committed. Mic reports, “Black suspects were, on average, arrested in 49% of New York’s assault cases between 2010 and 2013, but they represented roughly 73% of news reports about assaults during the last five months of 2014,” and this was also the case in other cities, like Los Angeles and Pittsburgh.2 Unfortunately but not surprisingly, you do not have to be Black and arrested for your image to paint you as a potential criminal, regardless of your station in life. What do Barack Obama, Raphael Warnock, Stacy Abrams, Jaime Harrison, Lori Lightfoot, and Mandela Barnes all have in common? Yes, they are all Black politicians from the Democratic Party, but what they also have in common is that they are the most recent examples of Black people who have had their images darkened in media advertisements. Why? According to a Stanford University study, the darkening of skin triggers the “part of the brain associated with fear” in Whites and even minor darkness manipulation is “sufficient to activate the most negative stereotypes about Blacks.”3 In the case of Obama, not only was his image darkened, but also the McCain campaign made McCain appear lighter over the course of the campaign. While not a political candidate, the most publicized example of both the circulation of mugshots and the darkening of Black faces was the 1994 mugshot of former football star and actor O. J. Simpson. While Newsweek published the original mugshot, Time magazine digitally altered the image and made Simpson look more menacing. The magazines were released on the same day, so the difference in the images could not be disputed. Time apologized, pulled the issue from the shelves, and issued a new version with an undarkened version of Simpson’s photo. The use of media in this way does indeed instill fear in the minds of non-Black people, which in the political world can sway non-Black voters from voting for Black candidates. Outside the political world, these practices lead to more calls for criminalizing Black people and often treating them as enemies of the state worthy of incarceration or even death. On October 23, 1989, lawyer Carol Stuart was murdered in Boston, Massachusetts, on her way home from child-birthing class with her husband, Charles Stuart. She was seven months pregnant. I was thirteen years old and

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lived a few blocks away from the Mission Hill neighborhood where she was slain. Stuart said a Black man shot him and shot and killed his wife. She died in the hospital, and her baby died seventeen days later after his premature birth. Her death was the birth of a reign of terror for Black men in Boston, under the direction of Mayor Raymond Flynn, who called for a manhunt for the killer and added more than one hundred officers to police Black neighborhoods. Curfews were also set up. Black people were stopped and searched on sight under stop-and-frisk practices. In addition to basic searches, many Black men were strip-searched on street corners. One man, Frederick Johnson, said he saw approximately thirty handcuffed men stripped naked and lying on the street. He told the Washington Post, “The scene reminded me of how they shackled slaves into ship galleys, one on top of the other. . . . They were treated like animals.” Boston city councilor Bruce Bolling referred to what was happening during that time as a warzone and that the “only question now is what is the body count.”4 While no Black person was murdered by the police in the search for Carol Stuart’s killer (that we know of), there was indeed a mental body count in our community, which turned out to be all for naught because Charles Stuart lied. Charles Stuart worked with his brother to concoct a plan to kill his wife for the insurance money and then blame a Black man for it. All it took in 1989 were the words of a White man to lead a Black community to be terrorized because, just as in decades past, White people are too often given the benefit of the doubt, whereas Black people receive the deficit of the doubt. And once Charles Stuart was found to be a liar and murderer himself, he jumped off the Tobin Bridge to his death, but not before his attempt at insurance fraud unleashed terror on a Black community who remembers this period to this day. Two of my older brothers recounted the terror all too well and revealed stories to me that I did not even know until I wrote this book. I changed the names of the friends they provided in their stories. One brother, Kamanampata (or Pata for short), was seventeen at the time of the Stuart shooting. Now fifty years old, he recounted that turbulent time: I got harassed quite a few times coming home after curfew. Once I told the cops I was coming from my job at the law firm. They let me go when I gave them the name and address. . . . I remember seeing [Black men] pushed up against walls and having their pants down every time I took the number 44 bus. John’s big brother Joe even made the cover of the Boston Herald with his hands up on the wall. On a much smaller note, that’s when I remember starting to hear a symphony of doors locking any and every time I walked down the street right by Mission Hill, where the Stuart murder happened. Police were everywhere. It was like living in occupied Europe with the Nazis checking our papers.

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My brother Kabongo was nineteen at the time and had even more traumatizing experiences than Pata: I remember one time they snatched me and Big Mike up at the corner store. They held us for like a half-hour then took all our stuff out of our pockets and threw them on the street. Then there was the time they snatched us up by the Trotter School. Told us we fit the description of a robbery. Classic right? Ray told them we were coming from the movies and showed the ticket stubs. Latino cop was hot from the jump and punched Ray in the face. I came around the car and got a gun put to my face. His partner whacked me over the head, and they beat us both down. I was in the hospital for two days. It was open season on Black boys during the Stuart case, even though all of us knew no Black person would carjack a person with kids in the fuckin’ car.

Kabongo shared these messages with me via text and said that just recounting this made him cry. It triggered other memories of being a student at Salem State in Massachusetts and being beaten and arrested because he refused to show them his ID. Instead of waiting in a jail, they sent him to a prison—the Middleton House of Correction—for three days. What I remember about this time is my father receiving a phone call from Kabongo. All my dad heard was something to the effect of “they’re gonna kill me,” which led my dad, my siblings, and Kabongo’s girlfriend to go on a son hunt to find out where Kabongo was. While in custody, he thought that whenever they opened his cell door, he was going to be raped or beaten, but his cellmate told the police that Kabongo was a college kid and did not belong in a prison cell. Kabongo revealed that he has been in therapy for years to process these traumatic experiences. Yet another example of the trauma Black people experience in our relationship with the police is the 1994 Susan Smith case in South Carolina. Smith killed her sons Michael and Alexander by drowning them in their car. She blamed a Black man for kidnapping them and pleaded for nine days on local and national television for help in finding them. You never know the trauma a person or community has until suppressed memories surface, and with too many Black people, the trauma is based on lies about Black people being more prone to be criminals and therefore more worthy of needing to be controlled or killed, similar to the days of slavery. Kabongo and Pata are upstanding citizens, employed in the worlds of finance and education, respectively, and between the two of them, they are fathers of four incredible children. In America, Black people succeed despite the barriers put up against us, like police misconduct, brutality, and murder, but it does not mean that we are not hurting or even broken inside from the consequences of the lies told about us.

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The Charles Stuart and Susan Smith cases inspired me to write the following poem entitled “Progress; or, Excuse Me. Do You Have the Time?” because I found myself questioning exactly what point of time we are living in, with curfews, profiling, and terrorizing Black communities: I’m walking I look at a White man He’s scared of me If I stand outside at 2 a.m., With 5 or 6 of my friends, I’m breaking some law I’m walking My eyes fall upon a beautiful mansion The only Black people inside and out Are mowing the lawn, Or preparing dinner, Or rocking someone else’s baby to sleep I look at the paper An attack by Klansmen left 2 brothers dead I look at the pictures in a well-known magazine And all the Blacks inside, Look like clowns or thieves America hates me A White woman kills her babies, And the nation blames me A White man kills his wife, And the nation is on a manhunt for me Do they want to lynch me? I want to tap that White woman on the shoulder And ask her for the time But she might cry, “Help! He’s trying to rape me!” Now tell me, Is this the 18th, 19th, 20th, or 21st century?

The experience of American racism, particularly anti-Black American racism, seems timeless on many levels. The ideas in this poem are reflected in former police officer Darren Wilson telling Michael Brown to get out of the street before shooting him multiple times in in Ferguson. The attack “by Klansmen leaving

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2 brothers dead” represents groups like the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers, and other groups who are responsible today for a “total of 56% of race-based hate crimes being motivated by anti-Black bias.”5 The #whileblack social media campaign speaks to the manifestation of racism in the modern day, such as #walkingwhileblack, #sleepingwhileblack, #birdwatchingwhileblack, #bankingwhileblack, #drivingwhileblack, #running whileblack, #golfingwhileblack, #movingintoyourhousewhileblack, #airbnbing whileblack, #sellinggirlscoutcookieswhileblack, #drinkingwhileblack, #eating whileblack, #wateringyourneighborsflowerswhileblack, and many, many more. These hashtags developed from living-while-black experiences that led to harassment by police and average, mostly White people on the streets. Karen and Ken are specific terms for White people who disturb Black people for just living their daily lives, which appears in the last stanza of the poem. Too many of these interactions have led to real violence against Black people, including their deaths, such as the 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia by three White men who chased and slaughtered him as he was #joggingwhile black. The Arbery family fought for months just to get an arrest of the three murderers because officials did not believe that Arbery’s life mattered. What stories about Black people and crime have you bought into? Did you think Arbery’s killing was justified and that he must have done something or that these non–police officers simply feared for their lives? Do you believe that Black people are just more likely to engage in crime? Do you believe that Black people use and sell more drugs and are therefore deserving of the incarceration rates we experience in America today and in years past? Regardless of what you believe, have you ever asked why? In my course Cultural Appropriation or Appreciation at American University, I showed a documentary about legendary singer, entrepreneur, and activist Sam Cooke, The Two Killings of Sam Cooke. The film is about how Sam Cooke was a force in music and rivaled Elvis Presley on the charts. Cooke was slain shortly after finding out his business “partner” Alan Klein stole his company and music rights. To date, the Cooke family does not benefit fully from Cooke’s music. One student was so angry after the film because she had never heard of Sam Cooke. I told the class that if we do not understand what has occurred to create the conditions of ownership of masters, profits, and more in music today, then we will simply assume that what we see is just how it is, and then we normalize it and act accordingly. The same is true with how we view the relationship between Black people, the police, crime, and incarceration. Without a full knowledge of the intentional targeting of Black people in the penal system, we just assume that this is normal and Black people are just more prone to be criminals. One of the ways Republicans were able to take some of the attention away from striking down Roe v. Wade was to focus on false narratives about crime.

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When I say false narratives, I refer to a narrative that blames crime primarily on people who are either Black or undocumented immigrants. Governor Ron DeSantis made sure he had camera crews ready to record the arrests for voter fraud of formerly incarcerated people who were given voter registration forms by his own government. In Florida, these people were ineligible to vote because they committed violent crimes and should have never had their rights restored, but many of these same people voted in 2020 with no problems. At least one charge has been dismissed by a judge, and more are sure to follow.6 Even though these arrests were staged and recorded, there were no publicized recordings of the Villages community in Orlando, where MAGA Republicans were arrested for intentionally committing voter fraud.7 The arrests of these convicted felons also have the expected effect of intimidating other Black people to vote, even if they do not have the same criminal record. One of the greatest examples of Republicans exploiting the stereotype of Black people as criminals is the Willie Horton ad of the 1988 presidential campaign. In order to paint Democratic presidential candidate and Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis as soft on crime, the campaign of Republican nominee George Bush Sr. created an advertisement of Horton, a convicted felon who raped a woman while on a weekend furlough pass. The ad was spearheaded by Republican National Committee chair Lee Atwater and changed the course of the election. This ad forced Democrats after the election to portray themselves as tough on crime, as well, and both parties played off racial stereotypes. This was best demonstrated with President Bill Clinton, who left his 1992 presidential campaign to attend the death-row execution of a mentally ill Black man, Ricky Ray Rector, while he was governor of Arkansas. He also accused rapper and activist Sister Souljah of being just as bad as the Ku Klux Klan when she sarcastically suggested that Black people kill White people instead of killing Black people in reaction to the news regularly discussing Black-on-Black crime. Black-on-Black crime has also been used to further the stereotype that Black people are more likely to be involved in crime and therefore are more worthy of incarceration and even execution, but Black-on-Black crime is a myth. Do Black people kill Black people? Of course, but do White people kill White people? Of course. Do you ever hear anyone use the term White-on-White crime? What about Asian-on-Asian crime, Native American–on–Native American crime, or Latino-on-Latino crime? These groups kill each other for one simple reason: proximity. Crime is more likely to be committed by the people you live nearest to. Republicans are quick to talk about crime in Chicago, which really started as a dig against President Obama’s hometown, but they will not speak about the fact that the top states for violent crime have Republican governors: Alaska, New Mexico, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, South Carolina, South Dakota, Arizona, and Michigan.8

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Because Black people have always been viewed as more likely to be criminals, the immediate remedy has been incarceration. According to the Sentencing Project, • Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of White Americans. • Nationally, 1 in 81 Black adults per 100,000 in the United States is serving time in state prison. Wisconsin leads the nation in Black imprisonment rates; one of every thirty-six Black Wisconsinites is in prison. • In twelve states, more than half the prison population is Black: Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. • Seven states maintain a Black-White disparity larger than nine to one: California, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Wisconsin.9 The lies we hold about Black people make us all too comfortable with these statistics. These lies also make some of us very comfortable to not understand that the system of incarceration in America is directly connected to slavery. We were all taught that slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, but the great filmmaker Ava DuVernay reminded us in her documentary 13th that slavery, or forced labor, is still allowed in incarceration. The Thirteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1865, states, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” This wording has been written about since the amendment was passed, but it has not been mainstream knowledge until recently, with DuVernay’s documentary and the work of scholars like Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. You may read this and still think that I am just talking about things in the past, but we must understand that the past is too often a prologue. I am a news junkie and have followed issues of the 2022 midterms for hours on end. It is part of my job as a media personality. One story that did not surface until less than a month before the midterms is that slavery was on the ballot in at least five states—in 2022! The states’ initiatives in Vermont, Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, and Tennessee are focused on “whether to close loopholes that led to the proliferation of a different form of slavery—forced labor by people convicted of certain crimes.”10 There are twenty states that still used the language of the Thirteenth Amendment to justify their treatment of incarcerated individuals. Colorado was the first state—in 2018—to remove language that

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connected prisoners to the Thirteenth-Amendment exception. ABC reports that even though Vermont was the first state to ban slavery in 1777, the Thirteenth Amendment loophole has still operated there on some level, as well. Why are we so ignorant of this history? At the end of the day, the fact that the prison industrial complex is disproportionately composed of Black people has been part of the problem. Another challenge is that so many industries in the United States have profited from prison labor. Indeed, it is very common that the same companies that have food contracts with universities have contracts with prisons, for example. On the flipside, we can see, if we care to look deeply enough, how products made by prisoners for little to no pay make their way across the country, including military equipment, office furniture, 3D modeling, and workers at call centers. The “benefits” of keeping people incarcerated was best summed up in 2017 by Louisiana sheriff Steve Prator of Caddo Parish, who made a case for keeping people incarcerated after a program was announced to reduce the population of the Caddo Correctional Facility in Shreveport, Louisiana. Prator referred to prisons as a necessary evil to keep the doors open. . . . The ones that you can work, that’s the ones that can pick up trash, the work release programs. . . . In addition to the bad ones, and I call these bad, in addition to them, they’re releasing some good ones that we use every day to wash cars, to change oil in our cars, to cook in the kitchens, to do all that where we save money.11

I have spent a good amount of time working in America’s detention centers, jails, and prisons. It has always broken my heart to see the empty eyes of people America has thrown away, especially the incarcerated youth I have seen. I have seen the consequences of a nation that builds more jails and prisons than colleges, and it is despicable. And while it is true that Black people are not the only people incarcerated, the idea that more Black people commit crime in general is what has helped with the proliferation of prisons, ever since the lawand-order narrative began to gain popularity with politicians during the Nixon administration.12 After visiting a prison in California and speaking in the early 2000s, I was moved to write the following poem, which appears on my second album Signs of the Time. If we really want to combat the stereotypes and lies about Black people, we must be intentional about calling out the institutions that have built much of their success and longevity on the backs of Black people. From slavery and convict leasing to sharecropping and the prison industrial complex, the United States has had a continual system of exploiting Black labor, and this should be a problem for all of us:

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BIG BID’NE$$ 13 When I was a child, A news reporter once said that “Crime doesn’t pay!” But there must have been a disruption in the airwaves Or maybe I changed the channel too soon In a rush to watch my morning cartoons Something must have happened that day Because now that I’m older I realize that I didn’t hear him say the rest of his sentence Because he must have said, he had to have said: “Crime doesn’t pay, those who are incarcerated” Because the pri$on industrial complex Is a multibillion-dollar business The entire system takes victims And invests them in pri$ons Where they accrue millions In the interest of politicians and corporations Government organizations like The American Legislative Exchange Council Trade legislation for covert compensation From conglomerate groups in 3-piece pur-suits To get me to spend more time for pettier crime So they can get more loot As they creep into every aspect of American industry Companies like Sodexho and Marriott, Takin’ profits off the top from cafeteria college services All while earning a double income from inmates Who eat from that same Sodexo plate So you could be getting your bachelor’s degree Or your master’s degree, Or your PhD, Or serving 25–30, But you’re eating from that same dirty system But read closer because it’s only the beginnin’ You can now buy furniture Manufactured by pri$oners Because pri$on labor is so diversified That inmates don’t only make license plates anymore

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CEOs are so hyped up on big bucks That they’re getting ill Waitin’ on crime bills To overfill the penitentiaries they build On the backs of taxpayers! Private pri$on concentration camps Are creeping up in Boston, Austin, Oakland, and DC Waitin’ for brothers and sisters like you and me To enter that new “Door of no return” Called the US judicial system Federal and private buses on highway transit, Simulating trans-Atlantic slave voyages with overpacked cargo While the government places embargos on family visitation Saying that all inmates are threats to mankind When 70% of those locked up Haven’t even committed violent crimes Is it not time for a change Or time to change the way we serve time? Isn’t it time for pri$oners To no longer be paid a developing country’s wage For labor that yields billions in profits For corporate killers of colored America? Isn’t it time for banks To stop claiming that they build community ties When they secretly devise schemes To lend and repossess people of color’s American dreams All while helping pri$ons survive with hefty loans To better accommodate those evicted, then convicted? Now I ain’t sayin’ that no one belongs behind bars Or that violent criminals shouldn’t suffer To the fullest extent of the law But I think it’s also a crime to have NASDAQ stocks rise As pri$on construction hits all-time highs And standardized test scores hit all-time lows Since incarceration takes precedence over educational woes Because I’m sure you didn’t know that 90% of those locked up Have no high school diploma or GED But they must be getting some form of education Because judges keep throwing the book at ’em!

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See there’s something wrong When a society seeks to incarcerate before it educates When inmates can’t vote But their mass incarceration rates win elections for senators Kind of makes almost everyone locked up a political pri$oner In the eyes of sinister civil servants In cahoots with corporate criminals all cashing in on crime Now who the hell’s gonna prosecute that? Well we’ve already started to act By laying these corporate cops on their billionaire backs And we may not have millions of dollars But we have millions of misguided minds misinformed About the pri$on system So we’re gonna teach the world about pri$on proliferation At the expense of education and violence-prevention programs Because it’s time to tell the government That they can no longer have fun Incarcerating our daughters and sons Because day by day and one by one We’re going to make sure that crime really doesn’t pay Anyone!

MY ANTIRACIST JOURNEY: ANGELA SY

Angela Sy is a fifty-four-year-old Asian female professor and researcher. She has worked in this profession for twenty-six years. Growing up, she was told that Black people didn’t like school and were not smart. She was also told that Black people were violent and promiscuous. She mostly learned these stereotypes from her parents first and then her friends. She started to realize she was being lied to around seven or eight years old. The stories she was told just “always felt wrong” to her. She believes that she indeed held implicit bias, but it was not until later that she learned what implicit bias was. One of her big problems growing up was being told she was “acting Black” if she demonstrated a behavior that her friends associated with Black people. Angela’s experiences growing up inspired her to “work very hard to not be racist . . . and learn about racism against Blacks any way [she] can” through learning history and reading more. Angela believes that more advocacy and consciousness raising is needed, and more education is needed, especially as it relates to understanding the “critical role” Black people have played in the past and present development of America.



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CHAPTER NINE

BLACK PEOPLE JUST CAN’T AFFORD TO LIVE HERE!

Since our abduction from the African continent, White America has always

needed a structure in place to justify the policing of Black bodies. We were enslaved under the disingenuous notion that we were unsaved and knew not the one true God. At every juncture, we fought to be free, but in order to keep us enslaved (or, later, incarcerated), stories and new tactics of oppression would have to be continually devised to keep us in our place. Keeping us in our place also meant keeping us away from White people beyond our subservient roles. From the overseer to the officer, this has been the American way, and there is nothing that has proven to be more of a galvanizing force for White people to believe that Black people need to be controlled and separate than through the notion that Black men are violent bucks who will rape White women. As Jamelle Bouie, the New York Times opinion columnist and former chief political correspondent, wrote, the fear of Black men raping White women has been at the heart of race-based violence and race-based policies, including housing: Make any list of anti-Black terrorism in the United States, and you’ll also have a list of attacks justified by the specter of Black rape. The Tulsa race riot of 1921—when White Oklahomans burned and bombed a prosperous Black section of the city—began after a Black teenager was accused of attacking, and perhaps raping, a White girl in an elevator. The Rosewood massacre of 1923, in Florida, was also sparked by an accusation of rape. And most famously, 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered after allegedly making sexual advances on a local White woman.1

Furthermore, Bouie holds that the idea of rape in the physical sense also connotes something more metaphoric: Black men and Black people overall will

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dominate everything if the Black man is allowed to dominate the White woman. He cites Senator Benjamin Tillman, who in 1900 stated on the Senate floor, “We of the South have never recognized the right of the Negro to govern white men, and we never will. . . . We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.”2 Bouie makes a very valid point about the absurd fear of the rape of White women by Black men: If this were the case, then rape on a massive scale would have occurred during the Civil War, when many White men left their wives at home to do battle, but that never occurred. The idea, however, was enough to ensure that every group, from White preachers and politicians to White teachers and other common White people, would do everything possible to keep Black and White people separate. The fears of sexual interaction, competition, and eventual domination are what have driven White people to mix and match policy and violence to keep Black people in their place, as was the case with Black Wall Street, which was first burned down violently to remove Black people; when that did not work, the government used housing and commercial real estate policies (more on Black Wall Street later). When it comes to violence versus policy, in many instances, it has been the chicken or the egg. For every example of Black communities destroyed through violence, I can cite housing policies designed to keep Black people out of White neighborhoods. The Supreme Court outlawed housing discrimination in 1915. The ruling simply led to housing covenants where Whites worked together to keep Black families out of their communities. When the laws did not work, White people resorted to playing loud music, blocking access to homes, rock and Molotov-cocktail hurling, cross burnings, and outright murder. While William and Daisy Myers were not murdered for integrating Levittown, their story is indeed representative of the lengths White people went to prevent housing integration when the laws were no longer on their side. Levittowns were suburban living communities first established in Long Island in 1947 by William Levitt. Clause 25 of the Levittown policy stated that their homes could not “be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race.”3 The clause was removed in 1948 by another Supreme Court decision on housing, which declared that such policies were unenforceable and “contrary to public policy.”4 This court decision occurred after the Federal Housing Association (FHA) was created in 1934 as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to help White Americans improve their socioeconomic conditions. (Farmers and domestic workers were left out of the New Deal, and many of those roles were held by Black people.)

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The FHA, a precursor to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), kept discrimination in housing on the books, so for decades, these segregated communities worked in lockstep with the federal government, who, under the FHA, provided funds for the construction of public housing and also wrote policies to prevent Black people from partaking in the housing market in White neighborhoods. After World War II, non-White veterans were denied opportunities to advance under the GI Bill (officially known as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act), which provided a series of benefits for White veterans to get a leg up upon their return from the war. The GI Bill “established hospitals, made low-interest mortgages available and granted stipends covering tuition and expenses for veterans attending college or trade schools. From 1944 to 1949, nearly 9 million veterans received close to $4 billion from the bill’s unemployment compensation program.”5 The program has experienced various iterations after 1956. William Myers was a World War II veteran, but he had this small problem that prevented him from partaking in the program, along with his wife, Daisy Myers: He was Black. The Myers indeed held respectable positions as an army veteran and a teacher. They were only able to purchase their home because it was sold to them privately. The Levittown group would not sell to Black people. When they moved into 43 Deepgreen Lane in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in August 1947, they experienced hostility from the beginning. As the Bucks County Courier reported, Small groups of agitated Levittowners are already gathering in front of the Myers home. Throughout the evening, the crowd continues to grow. By midnight, more than 200 shouting men, women, and children cluster on the Myers’ front lawn. A group of teens throw rocks through the Myers’ front picture window, and 15 Bristol Township police officers are dispatched to the scene. . . . By 12:30 a.m., two adults and three teens have been arrested. Now, with the violence increasing, the sheriff wires the Pennsylvania State Police asking for immediate assistance. His request states, “. . . the citizens of Levittown are out of control.”

Neighbors also flew a Confederate flag near the Myers’ home. Much of what they and other housing-integration pioneers experienced is depicted in the 2020 HBO series Lovecraft Country, which is based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Matt Ruff. One experience not captured in the series was Daisy Myers’s story of their neighbor walking his black-and-white dog near their property line. He called his dog Nigger, so whenever he walked by their house, she, Bill, and their children would hear “Come on, Nigger. Nice Nigger. Come on Nigger.”

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Myers, and so many others, were everyday Americans, who happened to be Black. We see stories about Malcom X’s and Dr. King’s homes being firebombed, and some of us assume that these instances only occurred to national figures and civil rights leaders like them. If it was up to the Myers and so many others, they would probably wish we never heard of them. They simply wanted a better life for their children, in a neighborhood better than the one they came from. Emmett Till was just visiting his family down south. James Meredith just wanted to get a better education when he became the first Black person to integrate the University of Mississippi in 1962. The Little Rock Nine, whom Daisy Myers said she identified with, as they were dealing with integrating schools as the Myers were integrating housing, just wanted to get a better high school education in 1957. Ruby Bridges, at age six, also just wanted a better education in 1960. The only reason we know their names and (some of) their stories is because of the terrible levels of ignorance, hate, and violence they experienced for simply believing America could be as good as its promise. In many of these instances, there were White UPstanders and partners who fought the racism of their peers directly and indirectly. Daisy Myers spoke about how her Levittown experience brought out the best of Levittown as well as the worst. She spoke of groups like the American Jewish Congress, the William Penn Center, and the Quakers, who set up 24/7 citizen patrols. White families offered to babysit the Myers’s children and even helped to clean up their damaged home. Barbara Henry was the White teacher who taught Ruby Bridges alone in class like it was a full class for an entire year when no White students would sit with Bridges and other White teachers quit their jobs to avoid teaching Black children. Viola Liuzzo was the thirty-nine-year-old California-born White housewife and mother of five who was shot in the head by the KKK in Alabama in 1965 for helping Black people get the right to vote. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were two young White men slaughtered alongside James Cheney in 1964. There have always been White UPstanders who have fought for racial equality. The problem is that there just have not been enough of them. What the Myers story highlights is that there is no corner of American life where race and racism has not been part of the equation. A Jewish colleague of mine told me that when she bought her home in the 1980s, the deed said that the house was not to be sold to a Jewish or Black person. She was so happy in stating how she “got” them because the sellers did not know she was Jewish. How many Jewish, Black, and other non-White people never even ventured out of the racial hierarchy that was set for them to do something greater for themselves, their children, or their communities? I guess it would depend on who is considered to be non-White and White. Before the Irish and Italians in America were reluctantly accepted into Whiteness, for example, they also experienced forms of discrimination, though, to be clear, not to the same extent or length of

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time as Black people (the Italian and Irish journey to Whiteness is explained in a later chapter). I close this chapter looking at how the racism and discrimination in housing plays out today. Johns Hopkins University professors Nathan Connolly and Shani Mott decided to refinance their home in a predominantly White neighborhood in Maryland in 2022. Like many who sell their homes, they had to go through the process of obtaining an appraisal and chose the company Loan Depot to initiate the process. Loan Depot chose 20/20 Valuations to conduct the appraisal. Their valuation of the home came in at $472,000, $75,000 lower than the “conservative” estimate that Loan Depot initially provided. In protest, Connolly and Mott decided to go with another lender, and the valuation came in at $750,000, more than a quarter-million dollars higher than 20/20 Valuations’ estimate. What accounted for such a massive discrepancy? According to Connolly and Mott, the difference was the decision to “whitewash” their home, the process of removing anything from a home to make it look like it’s a White person’s home. Many Black people, like Connolly and Mott, even go as far as to have a White person stand in as the owner of the house. CNN reports on another example, Tenisha Tate-Austin and her husband, whose home was valued at more than a half-million dollars higher once they whitewashed their home. Instances like this violate the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, but it still happens every day in the United States. Indeed, while the United States saw the highest rate of home ownership in 2020 (65.5 percent), Black home ownership actually fell to 43.4 percent, which is lower than it was in 2010. The 2020 decline in Black home ownership came at the same time that White home ownership hit 72.1 percent, Hispanic ownership hit 50 percent, and Asian home ownership hit 61.7 percent.6 The racism in housing-appraisal discrimination is part of the larger problem of racism in home ownership. We are all taught that owning a home is key to putting families on the path to creating generational wealth, but too many of us are not taught about all the aspects of discrimination that go into Black people not being able to own a home or owning a home that is not valued the same as their White counterparts’ homes. In addition to outright segregation and private covenants like Levittown, Black people have also experienced discrimination in the form of access to loans. Through redlining, many Black people have been targeted for predatory loans that were impossible to repay. When Black people have been able to overcome all the discrimination and racism to purchase a home and build equity, they often are denied the opportunity to get market value for their homes and pass that wealth on to their families. What does it mean when Black people have to remove their very existence to get fair value for their homes? What is so despicable about our wedding

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pictures or photos of our children? What is so obscene about posters of Rosa Parks or the Obamas that we must hide them in order to get closer to fully accessing the American dream? Given that almost 90 percent of appraisers are White, can Black people ever get a fair shot at the American dream? And what racist ideas do some appraisers have that lead to Black homes being immediately devalued? Are our hardwood floors not as hard? Are our carpets not as plush? Do our stoves not cook at the same level of heat? Is the ice from our freezer not as cold as our White neighbors’ ice? For Conolly and Mott, their home was in the White neighborhood of Homeland but was valuated as if it was in a neighboring Black community. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Marcia Fudge says that her house is, in her opinion, bigger and nicer than her White neighbors’ houses but was valued at $25,000 less than her White neighbors’ because it lies on the “Black” side of town. Her neighbors’ home is literally two doors away. Issues like this is what led the Biden administration to create the Interagency Task Force on Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity (PAVE) in June 2021, which marked the centennial of the Tulsa race riot. From the moment Black people were granted the right to own property, there has been a constant, multifaceted approach to prevent them from participating in all aspects of the American dream, including home ownership. It should not be lost on any of us that, despite all the activism, legislation, and policy changes, the home-ownership gap between White and Black people is wider today than it was in 1968, when it “was still legal to deny someone a home based solely on the color of their skin,” according to Fudge.7 To bring this full circle, within a decade of the Myers’s fight to integrate Levittown in the late 1950s, the housing-ownership gap between Black and White people was lower than it is today. These stories are why racism matters and must be confronted. These stories are why it will take more than two hundred years for Black people to reach the same level of wealth that White people currently enjoy. Too many times in the United States, we look at the conditions of different communities, and we accept the conditions as we see them. We think, “It just is what it is,” and move on. We blame the people who live in poorer communities, where their homes (if they are fortunate enough to own them) are undervalued, for not working hard enough. Conversely, we lavish praise on those able to live in nicer homes in beautiful neighborhoods. We arrogantly and ignorantly draw these conclusions with no thought about the way we fund schools based on property taxes, so kids in wealthier neighborhoods get schools superior to the schools in poorer neighborhoods. Although neither group of children did anything to deserve the schools they attend, their destiny is greatly determined by their zip codes. We fail to consider that these neighborhoods were created through policies of the federal government and private banks, and where the institutions failed,

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so-called upstanding local White citizens stepped in to enforce the status quo through violence. We praise Black people for being able to escape the “’hood” and have nothing but disdain for those left behind, if we even remember them. Jay-Z is praised for becoming hip-hop’s first billionaire. His rags-to-riches story is the best modern-day example of the 1800s Horatio Alger Jr. novels that feature young people emerging from impoverished backgrounds to reach middle-class success. But while we praise Jay-Z for his success, we fail to ask what became of the other children from his upbringing. I interviewed Jay-Z’s sixth-grade teacher Renee Lowden, whom Jay-Z credits for inspiring his love of writing. Lowden spoke of the omnipresent violence in their school and in the poorer communities of Brooklyn during the crack epidemic. Several times, she witnessed violence or its consequences inside and outside of school. Jay-Z and his fellow classmates observed fights outside the school on every corner. Inside the school, there were at least four fights a day, and the top three issues the students had to deal with daily were “drugs, drugs, and drugs.” While Lowden is proud of Jay-Z, she became emotional when I asked what became of some of her other students. Some students managed to survive the turbulent environment of their Brooklyn community, but others were not so fortunate. One student killed a Macy’s deliveryman, and another student was murdered, which almost brought her to tears during our interview. She remembers holding him in her arms. Indeed, a few of her students were dead from violence. This story led Jay-Z to say in his book Decoded that America has disposed of too many of its people. He describes America as a “graveyard,” and he explains that he “knew some of the bodies it buried.”8 I hope this chapter explains why and how too many of these children were set up to be buried before they were even born, and much of that has to do with the United States’ extensive experience of racism in housing.

Activity: The Communities You Live In Write down your reflections on the community or communities you grew up in. Reflect on who lived there, who did not live there, and why that may have been the case. You can also choose to write about where you live now.

MY ANTIRACIST JOURNEY: LAURIE DREW

Laurie Drew is a fifty-six-year-old White female instructional designer. The lies she discussed centered around the Black Panthers. The media taught her that the Black Panthers were a dangerous threat to America, and it wasn’t until she was in her fifties that she learned about all the work the Black Panthers were doing in communities across the country. She realized that the lies she was told were designed to sell a particular narrative from the government to the American public. Indeed, it was then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who stated that the breakfast programs and other social services the Panthers offered were more dangerous than the guns they carried because the programs were winning the hearts and minds of the people.9 Because of the lies she was told, Drew missed out on opportunities to really support a “worthwhile” organization doing “important work.” She also developed a general fear of groups of Black people and “didn’t understand their anger.” Drew holds that these lies about Black people and specifically Black organizations being violent overall made her and many White people “unnecessarily afraid [to have] conversations we should have been having and would have had! It pitted us against them which is detrimental.” The would have part of her statement is truly telling because I believe that under the right settings, we can all be willing to learn from each other. However, too often in America, learning about each other is seen as some form of zero-sum game instead of a win-win opportunity. Her experience with race in America has not made her optimistic: “I admit I’m discouraged. The whole conservative movement is depressing. I thought we were further along. . . . We need to decide what the future of race is in America and make it so.”



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CHAPTER TEN

BLACK PEOPLE ARE JUST BAD WITH MONEY!

The Brookings Institution went to great lengths to explain why there is a great

wealth gap between Black and White America. They hold that the “effects of accumulated inequality and discrimination, as well as differences in power and opportunity [can] be traced back to this nation’s inception.”1 Mehrsa Baradaran also goes to great lengths to break down the created wealth disparity in her book The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap.2 Unfortunately, too many believe that the economic challenges facing the Black community come down to Black people not being good with money or not knowing how to handle money. Some also cite affirmative action as an opportunity that was given to Black people to get a leg up in society and even the playing field. Lastly, they believe that the welfare system was created to aid only poor Black people. What they fail to realize is that they are wrong on all bases. History matters. In 1974, Linda Taylor was a forty-seven-year-old Black woman living in Chicago. She was indicted on thirty-one counts of “involving her alleged receipt of illegal welfare benefits, medical assistance, food stamps, and Social Security and Veteran’s benefits.”3 While the average American may not know who Taylor was, many will know her by the nickname she was given in a Rochester, New York, newspaper: the welfare queen. Though Ronald Reagan never used the term as part of his political ascension in the 1970s and 1980s, he singled out Taylor specifically without saying her name on the campaign trail in January 1976: “In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record. She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. . . . In fact, . . . her tax-free cash income alone has been running at $150,000 a year.”4 You can actually hear the audience gasp if you listen to the recording. Taylor became the poster child from that moment for the antiwelfare sentiment that has

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been widely embraced by the Republican Party for decades. Her extreme case of exploiting the welfare system and her dubbing as the welfare queen was juxtaposed with the Willie Horton ad years later. Like Taylor, all Black women were feeding off a system of government handouts, and like Horton, all Black men were a threat to the system because of their propensity for violence and potential for raping White women if they got too close. Politically, both stigmas were used to make Democrats appear to be the party that was soft on crime and too eager to provide set-asides and other assistance for the poor. Importantly, Reagan never mentioned Taylor’s race, but there are two main issues that her story highlights. The first is that the story is built on a lie. Reagan stated that Taylor made more than $150,000 a year; in reality, it was less than $10,000, and more was spent on her trials and convictions. The second issue is how too many so-called leaders seek to condemn the individuals who struggle within America’s racist, sexist, and predatory capitalist system rather than condemn the conditions themselves. Rather than pay attention to the fact that Taylor was shunned from her family in the 1920s and 1930s because she was of mixed race; rather than aiding her in schools that treated her so negatively because she was half-Black; rather than look at the fact that she was a teenage mother at fourteen and charged with her first crime of disorderly conduct at seventeen; rather than look at the sexism that prevented her from attaining gainful employment; and rather than look at the fact that she suffered from mental illness, as reported by multiple psychiatrists between 1978 and 1994, Taylor was propped in front of the nation as a mooch and parasite on America’s generosity, and she needed to be punished, along with any other Black woman like her. Rather than aid those who defrauded the system, as was the case prior to the story of Linda Taylor, these individuals were treated as criminals, and crime-syndicate-style crackdowns were implemented on people who took advantage of social-welfare programs, like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The racialization highlights yet another problem with lies about Black people, according to Bryce Covert of the New Republic: While Reagan never used Taylor’s name, nor even directly racialized her, he didn’t need to. The “woman from Chicago” who wore furs and drove a Cadillac while receiving government checks was clearly black to his white supporters. And while the AFDC’s caseload never became majority black—60 percent of AFDC families were nonblack—the face of poverty in popular media had become black, allowing Taylor to represent a group toward which white Americans were growing resentful. Without articulating explicit racial animus, Reagan conveyed a story that spoke to people’s racist ideas about public benefits and lazy black people.5

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Similar to the affirmative-action stereotype, the belief that Black people are gaming the system even when it is not true leads politicians to work to destroy families in need rather than aid them. After Reagan’s successful presidential bid, Congress cut $25 billion in programs aiding poor people, and more than 400,000 households were cut off from AFDC. As Covert writes, “in 1974, 12 percent of the country lived in poverty, surviving on a little over $5,000 a year for a family of four. Such a family could expect just $3,456 a year from AFDC to supplement its meager income, an amount that went without an update for years while inflation soared.”6 One chilling line from Covert’s article is that the “biggest problem with the program was not that people were cheating the system with elaborate, Taylor-style schemes, but that the system was cheating them.”7 For example, the Associated Press reported that in 1970, thirty-nine states were “illegally” denying poor people their well-deserved benefits: If there was an epidemic of fraud, it was almost certainly more prevalent among white-collar people such as doctors bilking Medicaid or civil servants who collected both salaries and benefits. A 1978 federal report found that just 1 percent of the annual budget of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was lost to “unlawful, willful misrepresentation (fraud) or excessive services and program violations (abuse).”8

Those who denounced Taylor were also selective in their condemnation. There was credible evidence that Taylor murdered her roommate and also kidnapped children, but she was never placed on trial for those more serious crimes. Scapegoating her as a woman who pimped the system was the only narrative needed. As Josh Levin writes in his book The Queen: The Forgotten Life behind an American Myth, “She was the fall guy for everyone who’d lost his job, or had a hefty tax bill, or was angry about his lot in life and the direction of his country. . . . She was someone it felt good to punish.”9 Looking at the case of Linda Taylor, you might say that it was old news, but I ask you to look at the parallels between Taylor’s story and how President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better and COVID-relief programs during the pandemic were viewed by many. It is a reminder of how this stereotype about the welfare queen would go on to affect all those in America who are poor regardless of their race. Biden’s policies to help families emerge from the pandemic were labeled “socialist” and “communist” by Republican senators like Florida’s Marco Rubio. Some, like Democratic senator Joe Manchin, expressed concern that money from Biden’s expanded child tax credit would be spent on drugs. West Virginia is more than 93 percent White. Never forget that any “war on poverty” declared in America is usually a war against impoverished people.

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For example, clients of lobbyists connected to the Trump administration received more than $10 billion in COVID-targeted assistance through Trump’s CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act. Furthermore, approximately $273 million was granted to more than one hundred companies owned or operated by major donors to the Trump campaign, and “unnecessary blanket ethics waivers [were] applied to potential administration conflicts of interest.”10 Furthermore, Trump’s administration created the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to be administered by the Small Business Administration to, well, help small businesses. Forbes magazine reported, however, that most of the $525 billion issued went to larger corporations, many of whom (twenty-five of them) had ties to Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner and received more than $4 million in loans each. While most small businesses that received PPP assistance received $150,000 or less, the parents of then White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnaney received more than $2 million for their roofing business. The Trump administration attempted to hide this information, and media outlets had to sue to obtain these records. Other prominent figures who received PPP money and did not pay it back include NFL great Tom Brady, who received almost $1 million for his TB12 health and wellness company,11 and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who received $183,504 in loan forgiveness.12 We know the adage, When America catches a cold, Black America catches the flu. Black businesses declined by 40 percent between February and April 2020, which was the largest drop of any ethnic group, and this was barely three months into the pandemic. Black businesses already suffered in maintaining business due to a lack of access to capital: In 2016, White people had a wealth estimate of $171,000, compared to just $17,100 for Black people, according to Forbes magazine.13 Given the lies told about how poorly Black people handle money, some would easily place the blame on Black people. Historically, however, there has been a systemic pattern of disrupting Black wealth creation, demonstrated most egregiously by the destruction of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s “Black Wall Street” in 1921. The Tulsa massacre “left dozens dead and 10,000 homeless after more than 1,400 homes and businesses were burned and discriminatory policy in both housing and lending have all impeded the growth of Black wealth.”14 Viola Fletcher, at 108, is the oldest remaining survivor of the Tulsa massacre. She was just seven years old when the massacre occurred. In 2021, she stated before Congress, On May 31, of ’21, I went to bed in my family’s home in Greenwood. . . . The neighborhood I fell asleep in that night was rich, not just in terms of wealth, but in culture . . . and heritage. My family had a beautiful home. We had great neighbors. I had friends to play with. I felt safe. I had everything a child could need. I had a bright future. . . . Within a few hours . . . all of that was gone.15

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Fletcher became a welder for ships during World War II and later a housekeeper. She was able to gain some form of financial independence by the time she retired at age eighty-five. She stated that she still sees the violence from 1921 in her mind, one hundred years later. Her 102-year-old brother Hughes “Uncle Red” Van Ellis fought in World War II and also testified, along with the third last survivor, Lessie Benningfield Randle. Fletcher still lives in fear that what happened in Greenwood could still happen today, and given America’s current racial climate, she is not wrong. The only thing worse than the memories of a massacre and the loss of potential wealth is waiting for more than a century for their government to officially recognize their suffering. As Ellis so eloquently pleaded, “Please do not let me leave this earth without justice, like all the other massacre survivors.”16 No White person was ever arrested or charged for the razing of a community; the slaughter of hundreds of innocent souls, including Black soldiers who fought in World War I; and the placing of thousands of Black survivors into internment camps, where they remained until White people came to vouch for them. In May 2022, Fletcher, Randle, and Ellis received a $1 million donation from a New York–based nonprofit organization, Business for Good, founded by Ed and Lisa Mitzen. The Mitzens were frustrated that survivors have never received any financial compensation for their suffering, even though the 2001 Race Riot Commission in Oklahoma suggested that some form of reparations be paid. Ed Mitzen stated that financial compensation “should not be this hard. . . . In some ways, it felt like certain people were trying to run the clock out. We felt like it shouldn’t be this hard to get some sense of relief for what they went through.”17 While this gift to these survivors was honorable, I often feel like without the Tulsa Massacre denying them the opportunity to build wealth, maybe Fletcher, Randle, and Ellis or their descendants could be the ones doling out $1 million to families or organizations. According to the Brookings Institution, allowing the Tulsa massacre to be referred to as a “riot” made it possible for insurance companies to deny any claims brought forward by Greenwood residents (except for a White gun-shop owner who filed a claim for his guns that were taken out of his shop). The district also “did not receive any restitution or rebuilding money from the local, state, or federal government.”18 It’s as if the government was in on the plan by White residents in Tulsa to ensure that the “old Niggertown [never] be allowed in Tulsa again.”19 The government was indeed a powerful accomplice because Black Tulsans rebuilt Black Wall Street in the 1940s, but it was systematically destroyed in the 1960s and 1970s by “urban renewal” programs, including a “mix of policies that included eminent domain, rezoning, and highway construction [that] led to displacement and plunging property values, while racist redlining policies prevented the injection of new capital into the community.”20

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The highway-construction aspect of this plan is what led US transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg to state that racism was literally built into the infrastructure of America. Greenwood has not even been added to America’s list of historic sites, which also prevents it from receiving special tax status. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology estimates that in today’s dollars, more than $200 million of wealth was lost during the Tulsa massacre.21 But there were many Greenwood events across America after the Civil War ended. Duke University economist William Darity Jr. estimates that there were upward of one hundred similar race riots or massacres between the end of the Civil War and the 1940s, and they occurred in every region of the country, not just the South. At the end of the Civil War, Union general William Sherman declared via Special Field Order 15 that formerly enslaved people were to receive 400,000 acres of land as well as mules and that “no white person whatsoever, unless military officers and soldiers detained for duty, will be permitted to reside.” This is where “40 acres and a mule” is derived. The problem is that this promise never came to fruition because President Andrew Johnson reversed it. I could spend this entire book writing about the seemingly endless stories of race riots in America, but many books have been written to this end by such authors as Scott Ellsworth, Hannibal Johnson, Colbert Franklin (who survived the Tulsa massacre), and Jewel Parker Rhodes. Instead, I invite you to recognize that despite centuries of enslavement, despite the broken promise of land reparations, and despite the race riots and massacres that decimated many Black communities, many Black communities were able to embark on a path to building generational wealth. Where the riots and massacres failed in killing (at worst) and relocating (at best) Black people, programs of urban renewal completed the homicide of Black wealth creation. Many of these massacres ensued after a Black person interacted with a White person, including the reported accidental bump of a White woman in America, as was the case in Greenwood when nineteen-year-old African American shoe shiner Dick Rowland bumped into a White elevator operator, seventeen-year-old Sarah Page, on that elevator and she screamed. Page refused to press charges against Rowland, but it did not matter. Someone else who merely heard the scream reported it, and the rest is history. Terrorist riots like Greenwood occurred in Black communities across America, such as Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873; Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898; Atlanta, Georgia, in 1906; Elaine, Arkansas, in 1919; and Rosewood, Florida, in 1923. Wilmington was especially significant because not only did White terrorists fight to destroy Black economic success, but they also committed a successful insurrection to overthrow the Black-led Wilmington government, including ousting the mayor. These terrorist insurrectionists in Wilmington would go on to announce a “White declaration of independence” to concretize their rule.

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These riots were all deliberate attempts to prevent the creation of Black wealth, but the ultimate wealth-prevention system for Black people of course would be the 246 years of American slavery that provided free, forced labor for the creation of wealth for White America. This prolonged system of oppression is the main reason that the Institute of Policy Studies reported that without serious interventions, it could take approximately 228 years for Black families to attain the equivalent amount of wealth that White people have today—not that Black wealth could be equal to White wealth in two-hundred-plus years. In roughly the same amount of time that Black people were enslaved, they can enjoy the same level of wealth that White people do today; so in 2244, Black people could be as wealthy as White people in the 2020s. The Latino community is expected to catch up by 2097. But where will White wealth be in the 2240s? Why is the story of Black wealth in America important? Just imagine your life right now. If you come from a middle- or upper-class family and the process of wealth creation started with your grandparents, then imagine where you would be today if the ancestors responsible for your wealth trajectory were slaughtered or simply had their business and land taken from them. Furthermore, imagine that the government would not only ignore this tragedy but also actively work through its own massive reach to keep you disenfranchised. Or maybe the path toward creating wealth started with you. Imagine what would happen to your family if you were unexpectedly removed from the picture or your house and business was destroyed, maybe even given to another family to manage. How would you feel? How long would it take you to catch up to the people who not only didn’t suffer but also received government assistance toward that end? Now imagine that happened to your entire neighborhood one hundred times over. Where would you be today? Where would your community be today? When these questions are not considered and analyzed historically, we tend to look at the wealth in White spaces and assume that these individuals, schools, organizations, and corporations just used that old Protestant work ethic and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. I am a proud graduate of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, one of the top undergraduate programs for international affairs in the country. In 1838, to prevent the university from closing its doors, Georgetown sold 272 of their enslaved Black people to a vicious plantation in Louisiana for what would be approximately $3 million today. Georgetown’s current endowment is approaching $2 billion due to its ability to tout prominent alumni like former US president Bill Clinton. But where would Georgetown be without that sale and the enslaved labor prior to the sale that built the university? In some way, shape, or form, most, if not all, of the prestigious universities constructed during slavery benefitted from slavery. Be it Brown, Harvard, Yale, or Columbia, these institutions benefitted prominently from the enslavement

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of Black people. In 2020, Georgetown University student UPstanders voted to add a mere $27.20 to their semesterly tuition to raise money to benefit the descendants of those 272 enslaved people who were sold. Shepard Thomas, a Georgetown student and descendant of enslaved Black people, put it bluntly, “The school wouldn’t be here without them.”22 Author Craig Steven Wilder wrote that the “academy never stood apart from American slavery—in fact, it stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage.”23 In addition to schools benefitting from the sale of their enslaved people or even using enslaved labor, many university presidents and professors owned Black people, including the first ten presidents of Columbia University and the first nine presidents of Princeton University. The legendary abolitionist Sojourner Truth was owned by the first president of Rutgers University. Schools also benefitted from the tuition dollars of families who enslaved people. Our financial institutions also benefitted from slavery. In 2015, JP Morgan Chase apologized for using enslaved people as collateral on loans made to plantation owners in the South in the early 1800s and for taking ownership of enslaved Black people if plantation owners defaulted on loans. The bank established a $5 million education fund to aid Black students in Louisiana. Cases have also been brought against other banks and companies to expose their connection to slavery, such as CSX Corporation, Lloyd’s of London, FleetBoston, RJ Reynolds Tobacco, Lehman Brothers, and Brown and Williamson.24 Extremely deplorable is that it has only been since the 2000s that some schools, organizations, and corporations have made a concerted effort to acknowledge how they were actively engaged in America’s original sin and to correct that wrong. Brown University, for example, issued a report in 2003 detailing their involvement in slavery, a full 140 years after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Every industry in America in some way benefitted from the centuries-long exploitation and subjugation of Black people and spoke nothing about it for more than a century. Add to that the fact that the US government issued an apology for slavery via the House of Representatives in only 2008. The apology came with no form of remuneration, similar to what happened to Japanese Americans who received $20,000 each in compensation for being placed in internment camps in World War II. And even though $20,000 was not nearly enough for the suffering they endured, the gesture matters, especially when enslaved people were denied the land they were promised. Some who tell us to stop complaining about this history of racial injustice often cite affirmative action as the cure-all for Black people. The term affirmative action was made popular in 1961 by then president John F. Kennedy, who wrote that federal contractors should take “affirmative action to ensure that applicants are treated equally without regard to race, color, religion, sex,

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or national origin.”25 Over the next few decades, executive orders and acts like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 included language prohibiting discrimination and calling for companies to incorporate more diversity. In the late sixties and early seventies, women were incorporated into language surrounding antidiscrimination efforts. This incorporation would prove significant because to date, the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action have been White women, though lies about Black people have us believing that affirmative action was created for Black people only. This lie is also the reason White women have been one of the main groups fighting to end affirmative action, such as Abigail Fisher, who filed a lawsuit in 2008 against the University of Texas, Austin, though she was not qualified for admission, and Barbara Grutter, who challenged University of Michigan Law School in 2003 after being denied admission. In every industry that did not allow women to work prior to affirmative action, White women experienced incredible gains. For example, the first woman to be hired as a commercial airline pilot was Helen Richey. Richey was hired by Central Airlines in 1934, but due to an intense campaign of sexism mounted against her, she never flew and resigned in 1935.26 The next female commercial pilot was not hired until 1973, more than a decade after affirmative action policies started. By 1995, six million women, most of whom were White, had jobs that they would not have attained if it was not for affirmative action. Women also made greater gains in employment at companies that did business with the federal government, and most of those women were White, as well. In short, affirmative action has not been the cure-all for racial discrimination that its opponents make it out to be. Acknowledging that White women have benefitted the most would require a certain level of racial honesty that has not been present to date. Black people in America specifically deserve full consideration for reparations and other forms of remuneration for the suffering they endured, similar to (but I would argue even greater than) what has been done for other groups in the United States historically. Many of us are not sitting and waiting for that, however. We are fighting every day to carve out a better tomorrow for our children, despite the twin fists of violence and government policies that have struck us down and set us backward. In tennis, there is the forced error, when your opponent puts you in a position to make you make an error. It is not just something that happens on your own. An unforced error is a mistake a player makes on her own. There are more forced errors in tennis than unforced errors, but the unforced errors are recorded more. This makes me think of the Black experience in America: We are constantly placed in situations that set us back through no fault of our own, and then we are blamed for being set back. We are told to get over it and move on, while other communities still reap the benefits of government policies and actions—particularly wealthy White people.

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I remember watching a television show with Kendra, and the bartender told a famous visitor that their money was no good there. She remarked that it was interesting how people who do not need assistance always seem to get assistance. It made me think of the sports stadiums across America that are built with taxpayer money, even though the owners of the teams are billionaires and can pay for the stadiums themselves. It made me think of how, during the Obama administration, banks were considered too big to fail and were bailed out with no preconditions of needing to return funds provided to them as we emerged from the Great Recession of the 2000s. It made me think of multibillionaire Warren Buffett, who pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. It made me think of how the tax cuts provided under the Trump administration were permanent for the wealthy and temporary for everyone else. There were companies and wealthy individuals who benefitted more from COVID PPP relief programs than poorer people. It reminded me of Dr. King, who stated that in America we have capitalism for the poor and socialism for the wealthy. Those who are Black and poor are constantly marginalized and victimized, and those who are financially successful rarely get the credit they deserve for swimming against an incredible tide of racism, violence, and government policy actively pushing them backward. In Jay-Z’s song “Legacy,” he talks about how the financial success he has enjoyed basically brought his family to level 0. This chapter shows how Black people in America have fought for centuries just to get to 0, and between the racial violence and intentional government interventions in our American saga, our progress has often been one step forward and two steps (pushed) backward. Unfortunately, if this history is not known or taught, then the stereotype of Black people just being lazy and irresponsible with money persists, and the story of Linda Taylor is magnified a million times over. It was the great writer and activist James Baldwin who said that if you don’t know what went on before you, you cannot fully understand what’s happening around you. While Linda Taylor did indeed exploit the welfare system, the more important story is how the American political system used public policy and state-sanctioned violence to exploit non-White people. I teach several courses on hip-hop at American University. On the first day of class, I talk about the backlash hip-hop often gets in the media for violent and misogynistic lyrics. While I also take issue with many of the lyrics present in rap music, I ask myself this question, which I also pose to my students: Is it more important to condemn the rappers or the conditions that created the rappers? In that spirit I ask, is it more valid to condemn the conditions of those Black people at the bottom of the economic ladder or the conditions that placed them there? Hip-hop was born out of America’s rabid conditions of unemployment, lack of adequate school funding, police misconduct and brutality, drug

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infestation, and more. Jay-Z, who was testing on citywide exams as a senior in high school when he was in the sixth grade, doesn’t drop out of high school to sell drugs if his Brooklyn neighborhood has adequate schools and a strong community to support him. Like many rappers, Linda Taylor’s story is an invitation to learn America’s true history of hustling, exploiting, and marginalizing Black and Brown communities, even to the point of burning our communities to the ground.

Activity: What Is Affirmative Action Really? Without doing any research, write down everything you knew about affirmative action, and then write down what you have learned about it. Reflect on the differences in pre- and postknowledge.

MY ANTIRACIST JOURNEY: SERENA

Serena is a thirty-seven-year-old Asian American cis-womxn. She is also an educator doing deep work in the field of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Some of the stereotypes she was told include that “Black womxn are welfare queens, Black men are super athletes, Black people are more likely to be poor than any other group, [and] Black neighborhoods are unsafe (for White people).” She wasn’t “explicitly taught or told these messages; they were the dominant stereotypical tropes perpetuated by anti-Blackness and as a transracial adoptee raised in an all-White family in predominantly White communities.” She didn’t have the personal relationships or experiences to counter these problematic narratives, and these lies were taught to her by “society (media, news, movies) and socialization in predominantly White communities (neighborhoods, schools, family).” Serena realized she was being lied to when she went to college and graduate school and was exposed to non-White people, as well as non-White professors. Serena said that these stereotypes caused her to miss out on relationships due to her fear and “stereotypical judgments.” She shared an example of how lies about Black people played out in her life. Her family was reliant on welfare, and she recalls going to the county administration building for their food stamps and welfare checks. Most of the people whom she saw were Black, which confirmed the “welfare queen” stereotype in her mind, but as a child she didn’t know about the “labyrinth of social, political, economic, and educational inequities” facing Black people. Serena’s story is yet another example of how, without real education, the most negative stereotypes about groups will seep into our heads and remain there. How many of us have been cut off by an Asian driver and thought about the stereotype that Asians can’t drive? How many of us have seen someone we think is Arab on a plane and looked twice at that person post-9/11? How many of us have seen a Latino person in America and assumed they weren’t from here but from some other country? How many of us have seen a Native American person and assumed they grew up on a poor reservation? How many of us have seen a White person and assumed first that they were perpetrators of racism in America instead of working to eliminate racism? Serena believes that the lies she was told led to “disconnection and distrust” between communities, and she is frustrated that the lies persist today. To counter these lies, Serena knows, as an educator, that more educational and policy reforms are needed. She finds hope and optimism in the young people she sees today. I do, as well.



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CHAPTER ELEVEN

BLACK PEOPLE CAN’T SWIM The Great Double Entendre

In 2016, Simone Manuel, also known as “Swimone,” became the first Black woman to win an individual Olympic gold medal for swimming. The reason this was celebrated at a higher level within the Black community was due to the history of Black people being denied the opportunity to swim in local pools. Legendary entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. took a dip in a Whites-only pool in 1954. Shortly after, the manager drained the pool. The lie about Black inferiority did not state that Black people can’t swim in the sense that they don’t know how to, even though there are many Black people who have not learned to swim. The lie stated that Black people can’t swim alongside White people because of American racism. And with this fear, of course, would come policies to keep Black and White people separate in community spaces. As Heather McGhee writes in The Sum of Us, the 1920s–1950s saw an expansion of public-pool development in the United States.1 City officials saw these pools as a way to bring people together, but this did not include Black people. In 1953, a Black boy drowned in Baltimore’s dangerous Patapsco River “because none of the city’s seven public pools allowed interracial swimming.”2 This led to a legal battle by the NAACP to integrate pools, a fight they won in 1956. Rather than this victory leading to real integration of pools in Baltimore (and across the country), “White children stopped going to the pools that Black children could easily access, and White adults informally policed (through intimidation and violence) the public pools in White neighborhoods.”3 Across America, McGhee cites examples of the great lengths White people went to in order to ensure that the money Black people also paid in tax dollars for public facilities could not be accessed by Black people. Two glaring examples are the Fairground Park pool in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Oak Park pool 96

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in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1949, five thousand White people assembled with “bats, clubs, bricks, and knives” and attacked any Black person who tried to use the pool. After it was integrated officially in 1950, only 10,000 swims were logged, down from 313,000 the year before. She states, “Racial hatred led to St. Louis draining one of the most prized public pools in the world.”4 In Alabama, when a federal court announced desegregation of the pool, the council decided to drain the pool rather than share it. McGhee reminds us that this meant White people could not use it, as well: “Uncomprehending White children cried as the city contractors poured cement into the pool, paved it over, and seeded it with grass. . . . To defy desegregation, Montgomery would go on to close every single public park and padlock the doors of the community center.”5 When the public park system reopened a decade later, the pool was never rebuilt. In 1971, the Supreme Court upheld segregation of public pools in Palmer v. Thompson. McGhee speaks to the consequences of desegregation judgments: Millions of White Americans who once swam in public for free began to pay rather than swim for free with Black people; desegregation in the mid-fifties coincided with a surge in backyard pools and members-only swim clubs. In Washington, D.C., for example, 125 new private swim clubs were opened in less than a decade following pool desegregation in 1953. . . . Entire communities lost out on the benefits of public life and civic engagement once understood to be the key to making American democracy real. . . . The impulse to exclude now manifests in a subtler fashion, more often reflected in a pool of resources than a literal one.6

My sisters run a youth center focused on teaching dance, the OrigiNation Dance and Theater Company. Every year, there are four main performances for students aged five to seventeen to showcase their talents. For almost thirty years, these have been great community events in Boston. For a good decade, my mother would attend every show with her best friend, Mimi. Mimi was one of the most unassuming people I ever met. She always had the biggest smile and really enjoyed seeing these young people express their talent. She also made it a point to tell me how much she enjoyed my poetry. To my great shame, I did not know the story of Mimi Jones until after she died in 2020. Mimi was born Mamie Nell Ford in Albany, Georgia. In 1964, she participated in a protest to integrate a swimming pool at the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida. When she and several other protesters jumped in the pool, the manager poured acid into the pool. Jones said in 2017, “All of a sudden, the water in front of my face started to bubble up like a volcanic eruption. . . . I could barely breathe. It was entering my nose and my eyes.” The

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picture of this incident went viral, and less than “24 hours later, the civil rights bill, introduced a year before that had been stalled in the US Senate, would win approval, leading directly to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964,” according to documentarian Clennon King.7 For years in Boston, a dear friend of my family was a direct living connection to protests of Americans literally swimming against the tide of discrimination in our pools, and I had no idea. When it comes to America’s history of racism, we take what is in front of us and accept it as normal, and that is how ignorance and hate prevail. Rest in peace, Mrs. Jones! The private school experience is yet another example of how everyday racism manifests itself, and I explain part of this through the story of public and private pools and real estate. Placing our three children in private schools has truly exposed us to a different side of society that Kendra and I had not experienced. Since our children started attending private schools in the mid-2000s, their classmates have included the children of President Obama and President Trump’s top advisers, members of Congress, news figures, diplomats, ambassadors, and top-level CEOs of various industries. The invitations for playdates and birthday parties allowed us the opportunity to step into a world that the average Black person living in an inner city like we do would never experience, not because they were not smart enough to, but simply because they were not granted access for reasons that started decades ago with the segregation of public swimming pools and other public facilities in America. In June 2022, my second child graduated from middle school. Part of the festivities included a private reception for students and family members at the Columbia Country Club, a prestigious club in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Members include President Barack Obama, who joined in 2017, and ESPN’s Tony Kornheiser and Mike Wilbon. About a decade earlier, my oldest child was invited to this same club for a classmate’s birthday party. In all my years attending school and living in the DC area, I never knew about this club. I never knew the immense wealth and resources that lay hidden behind the trees as I drove on Connecticut Avenue at least three times a week. As exclusive as this club is today, this work has caused me to think more about the exclusion that the club may have been built on. Was this club created as part of a way to exclude Black people from sharing in public resources, like swimming pools, with White people? Did White membership increase after various civil rights decisions were passed, like Brown v. Board of Education, to challenge the practice of integration? What opportunities at networking were lost on potential multimillion-dollar deals because people from my community were possibly denied entry to this club?

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The land this club was built on was owned by a racist, Francis G. Newlands, who built another prestigious club in Maryland—the Chevy Chase Club. Newlands was a Nevada Senator who once called for the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted voting rights to African American men. Newlands also purchased part of the historic Rock Creek Park, in part to use it as a border to keep Black people from moving in on his territory in the late 1800s. In 1909, the same year the NAACP was founded and the same year the Columbia Club purchased its current location, Newlands successfully reacquired land sold to Black families in order to keep the area White. He wanted to ensure that the area of Chevy Chase was an “exclusive enclave that easily priced out non-Whites, the newly immigrated and the working class,” which is why Black people and Jewish people were not allowed to rent in this area, according to the Washington Post.8 Discriminatory policies like these existed across the country until the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, but the law did not stop former President Trump from being sued by the Nixon administration in 1973 for housing discrimination. The Chevy Chase Club held its discriminatory policies until 1976. While some claim this is just how it was back then, Commissioner Gary Thompson stated in 2014, “I don’t think Newlands gets a pass because of the times. He helped create the times.”9 Today, the club includes two Supreme Court justices as their members: Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts Jr. In 2017, the initiation fee to join was $92,000, and annual dues were more than $9,000. While this was not the club that we were invited to, I find myself wondering if the history is similar, given that the club has existed for more than one hundred years and at the very least benefitted from the same discriminatory policies that existed in the United States. I find myself wondering about other ways in which swimming pools were part of the maintenance of racism to this day. It is funny how this works because every day we are reminded exactly of how this works, even if we do not know it. My son Yenga was invited a week after my daughter’s graduation to a swimming playdate with his friends. He was seven years old at the time. The pool is in a very exclusive part of Bethesda, Maryland, bordering on part of Chevy Chase. I asked the playdate coordinator (I’ll call her Susan) about the pool because I was looking at swimming lessons for Yenga. Susan informed me that the pool is a “neighborhood pool” and that there is a waiting list to become a part of it but only if you live within a “certain boundary” to join. Is Susan racist? Knowing her like I do, I would say absolutely not. I am going to assume that the people who run the neighborhood pool center are not racist, and neither are most of the people who attend the facility. I later learned that there are private pool club leagues all across the area who compete against each other. Had

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I not taken my son to this pool, I would have never known, and I have lived in the area (DC, Maryland, and Virginia) for more than twenty years. Of course, these leagues exist across the country, but without access, you would never know, either. I bring this story up to show how covert racism can affect the communities we live in. The challenge, however, is that we cannot look at racism as only the negative actions that happen to a marginalized community. If you live in an all-White, well-to-do neighborhood, then you are most likely a victim or beneficiary of racism, as well, depending on how you look at it. The actions that led to the development of that country club in Chevy Chase are part of the exclusionary practices that linger to this day. Racial neighborhood demographics are the most obvious sign of America’s racist legacy in the present. Now you may be wondering why I stated that living in a wealthy White neighborhood or just an all-White neighborhood can still make you a victim of racism. While it is true that you may benefit from better public facilities and better public schools if you live in this type of community, you are also deprived of the beautiful diversity that America has to offer. There are indeed levels of being a victim of racism. Too many White students I have taught over the years at the university level lament the fact that they had to come to college to experience diversity. Many had never had a non-White teacher, never read books from non-White authors, never experienced plays beyond The Nutcracker–type shows, and never had serious friendships with people who were not White. I have been teaching at the university level for more than a decade and I frequently am told by students that I am the first Black teacher/professor they ever had. This is what I mean when I say that living an isolated life can make one a victim of racism, especially when that isolation was legislated historically. Without deeper investigation, Susan and I would not question why this pool is so exclusive to people within a certain radius. We would not question why trains do not go to certain areas of DC, like Georgetown, or why certain private schools do not offer transportation, so you can never enroll your child if you do not own a car. We would not question why there are no areas of the impoverished ward 8, where I live in DC, that are limited to people of a certain radius outside of our underperforming public schools. Even some of the more prestigious charter schools situated in inner-city neighborhoods are overpopulated by White students who do not live in those neighborhoods because they have the resources to travel and get a near-private-school education for free. Indeed, as discussed later, many of our private schools have racist roots, given that many were created after the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 to integrate schools. Too often in America, we see racism manifest itself daily and just think, “That’s how it is,” and we never question if it is by design. To not question is

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to assume that those who suffer more blatantly from racism in America just get what they deserve because they did not pull themselves up by their bootstraps, even if they did not have boots or—in the case of communities like Black Wall Street in Oklahoma—had their boots, homes, businesses, and their livelihoods taken and burned to the ground along with their slain family members. Our job must be to question everything so we can understand how deeply racism has penetrated our society. In July 2022, sixteen-year-old Corion Evans was hanging out with his friends at a party in Moss Point, Mississippi. When we interviewed him on Roland Martin Unfiltered, he said he and his friends picked the afterparty location because it was an area where they wouldn’t be bothered by police. As he and his friends left the party, he saw a car plunge into the Pascagoula River. Smith said he sprang into action and saved four people from drowning including—wait for it—a police officer. In a world where so many of us are quick to pull out our phones and record other people’s suffering for our social media aggrandizement, Evans said, “I can’t let none of these folks die. . . . I can’t just sit here and watch them drown.”10 There is much to unpack here. The first aspect to consider is the fact that Evans and his friends went to an area where they specifically thought they would be able to avoid being bothered by the police. I do not know the race of the three girls Evans saved; the police officer was White. When it comes to the police, our issue has always been about Black versus blue. Despite the animosity that has existed between Black people and the police, Black people in general just want to work with the police at best and be left alone at worst. Black people have fought in every war, even though they were not granted the same liberties as their fellow White soldiers. They fought not just for their freedom but also to show our common humanity. Evans saved that police officer in that same spirit. As NBA basketball coach Doc Rivers said in his frustration over the August 2020 shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, “It’s amazing why we keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back.”11 Evans’s heroics were an extension of that spirit of common humanity, of finding common ground. The fact that he went to a location to avoid the police but ended up saving a police officer speaks to the complexity of being Black in America. The second aspect to think about is that Evans said that he has been swimming since he was three years old in his grandmother’s swimming pool. What if Evans had no access to a swimming pool? What if, demographically, he did not live in an area where a swimming pool was readily accessible? The CDC reports that annually, nearly four thousand people drown in America each year. It is an issue that affects every community, though Black people die from drowning at 1.5 times the rate of White people, and the rate is 7.6 times higher for Black

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children than for White children in the ten- to fourteen-year age range. My point is this: There are four people walking around today who are not part of those incredibly tragic statistics because a young Black man learned how to swim. When Black people are able to advance, we all advance. When we are held back, we all suffer.

Activity: Your Racist Ideas about Black People Write down the moment you realized that any relatives in your family were racist or held racist ideas and what that felt like. Then write down one stereotype you once held about Black people and how that stereotype changed, if at all. If the stereotype has not changed, explain why.

MY ANTIRACIST JOURNEY: LISA PRINCE

Lisa Prince is a strategic consultant and ideas educator. She describes herself as a forty-four-year-old White female, born and raised in Ireland in the late seventies and eighties. During that time, there were “no people of color” in her community, save for her Aunt Hansrannie, her Uncle Pat’s wife. She said they called her the “chocolate lady” because of her skin color. She recalls three main lies she was told about Black people (or darker people in the case of her aunt): (1) Her aunt’s skin really was chocolate and tasted like it; (2) Black people couldn’t swim because their ankles were too thick; and (3) all Black babies were starving on the African continent due to famine. She primarily learned these lies in her neighborhood and in gossip circles, but she learned the lie about Africans and famine from her parents, who often watched Irish singer Bob Geldof’s work on ending famine in Ethiopia. The only other time she saw Black people on television was The Cosby Show. Prince held these views until she went to college, when she learned that “opportunity/social structures/cultural conditioning shape reality more than biological features.” She started to question whether Black people just really weren’t into swimming culturally or if there was an issue of access to swimming pools in their communities, and this was a “big shift” for her. She eventually realized that Black people could swim “just as well” as White people. Prince laments that she accepted these lies for so long and that she just accepted the fact that the world revolved around White people. She stated that the “silent, complicit ‘othering’ of Black people has just been a constant theme in [her] life and [her] immediate family from England.” As a young professional who wasn’t doing so well economically, she could only afford to live around non-White people in London, and she found it intimidating. She closed our interview by stating, On an intellectual and emotional level, I do not believe in anything that supports racism. But why do our worlds not collide? . . . Exposure to Black history (how it really went down) is crucial to counter these lies. I’m still learning the roots of modern-day suppression in our past. For example, I just got my head around the link between slavery and incarceration, and I studied American history for three years! When we understand how the past shaped today, we are equipped with empathy and insight about what we need to counteract.



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While Prince is happy that her eyes have been opened to these issues, she fears that America is going backward. She really believes that America is “headed for civil war” but hopes that future generations will better understand how racism, classism, and “systems of oppression” work. She hopes this will lead to race being a more fluid issue, like she sees gender. What is so impactful about Prince’s words is the way in which she assumed that what she saw is just the way it is. Her thoughts on why Black people didn’t swim immediately put the onus on Black people rather than on the social structures, and now she understands why this lie is so problematic.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE WHITE-PRIVILEGE CARD

On the early morning of July 7, 2022, around 4:00 a.m., Mimi Israelah was

pulled over for driving erratically in Anchorage, Alaska. She arrived in Alaska from California to attend a Trump rally. When Israelah could not find her driver’s license, she pulled out her “White-privilege card.” The web camera video shows that the officers found the card “hilarious.” The part that is not funny, however, is that Israelah was not issued any form of citation for her reckless driving and was let go scot-free. The ironic part about this is that Israelah is not White but is of Filipina ancestry. What gave her a pass? The card? Did she look White enough? Was it the MAGA hat she was seen wearing in the video? While it is indeed true that officers can cite drivers at their own discretion, the fact of the matter is that the officers involved in this traffic stop were not disciplined until this video was viewed by many on Israelah’s Facebook page before she deleted it. It was after public outcry that an investigation was launched, and the officers were found to have “violated policy” during this traffic stop (it was not specified what policies were violated). While some were quick to pass this off as a joke, there is nothing funny about how Whiteness or White adjacency can be passed off as a temporary cloak of protection, as long as it advances the preservation of Whiteness. In this ultra-MAGA environment that we live in, I do not believe that Israelah would have been given a pass if she did not don that MAGA hat and present this card. Former president Donald Trump ran on his promise to preserve Whiteness, even though Whiteness, like Blackness, is a construct. It is not real, yet it is real in our lives every day. Think about it for a minute. What is White food? What is White dance? What is White clothing? There are no such things. There is, however, Portuguese food, Italian dance, Irish clothing, and so on. What is Black food? What is Black dance? What is Black clothing? The way Black people have been boxed in and stereotyped in society, it is almost impossible to define and describe these categories, but in reality, Grenadian food is different from Kenyan food. Senegalese



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clothing is different from Tanzanian clothing, and Jamaican dance is different from Ethiopian dance. Even within those groups, nuance exists, so it is crucial to not fall into the trap of cultural stereotyping. The lies about Black people cannot be maintained without lies about White people. Does Whiteness really exist without Blackness? How could it? The late, great Muhammad Ali spoke about the differences in how the colors black and white are categorized in America. He asked, Why is devil’s food cake black and angel’s food cake white? Why is it that the cartoons’ prettiest characters were like Snow White and Mary’s little lamb had feet white as snow, but the Ugly Duckling was black and black cats are bad luck? The classic Spike Lee film Malcolm X demonstrates this in the scene when Malcolm (played by Denzel Washington) is incarcerated as Malcolm Little and starts reading the differences between the colors black and white in the dictionary. Outside the economic term of being in the black to suggest profits, most terms that include black are negative: blackmail, blackballed, black magic, black market, black mark, and blacklisted. In reality, why is blackmail looked at with more gravity than a white lie? In a 2022 interview of Jane Elliott on Roland Martin Unfiltered, she stated that we should stop using the words black and white altogether because the terms are loaded with such intentional negativity. The negativity and the lies grow and grow to an extent that many people who are not Black but do not identify as White believe that their condition is acceptable as long as they keep Black people below them, maybe in hopes that they could become White, too? A great example of this is found in the Italian and Irish journeys into Whiteness and the White-adjacent behavior of some of the Latino community. There are two distinctions between the experience of Black people coming to America and other groups. One distinction is that Black people were brought here by force over an extended period of time, and the other is that the other groups were not Black, so some of them would have greater opportunities to become White or White adjacent. Forbes magazine describes White adjacency as “benefits received by a [person of color] because of their proximity to whiteness. Sometimes the benefits received are unbeknownst to the individual on the receiving end and other times, individuals actively seek these benefits through changing their appearance, their mannerisms, their behaviors and even the way that they speak.”1 The journey to Whiteness by the Italian and Irish communities are worthy of deeper study. As Brent Staples writes in the New York Times, “Congress envisioned a White, Protestant and culturally homogeneous America when it declared in 1790 that only ‘free White persons, who have, or shall migrate into the United States’ were eligible to become naturalized citizens.” He continues,

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Racist dogma about Southern Italians found fertile soil in the United States. As the historian Jennifer Guglielmo writes, [they] encountered waves of books, magazines and newspapers that “bombarded Americans with images of Italians as racially suspect.” They were sometimes shut out of schools, movie houses and labor unions, or consigned to church pews set aside for Black people. They were described in the press as “swarthy,” “kinky haired” members of a criminal race and derided in the streets with epithets like “dago,” “guinea”—a term of derision applied to enslaved Africans and their descendants—and more familiarly racist insults like “White nigger” and “nigger wop.”2

Discrimination occurred against Italian immigrants, even though they arrived in America as free individuals, as Staples reminds us. Part of the reluctant acceptance of Italians into Whiteness occurred in the late 1800s, when lynchings of Italian immigrants started to cause tension between the US and Italian governments. The first Columbus Day occurred in 1892 and was supposed to be a one-off designed to quell these tensions. Indeed, the US government under then president Benjamin Harrison embraced an antilynching campaign to protect Italian immigrants—but not his own African American citizens—which accelerated the process of Italians and Italian Americans separating themselves from the similar stories of oppression that kept them closer to the Black community and being assimilated into the story of Whiteness: Harrison’s Columbus Day proclamation in 1892 opened the door for Italian Americans to write themselves into the American origin story, in a fashion that piled myth upon myth. . . . They rewrote history by casting Columbus as “the first immigrant”—even though he never set foot in North America and never immigrated anywhere (except possibly to Spain), and even though the United States did not exist as a nation during his 15th-century voyage. The mythologizing, carried out over many decades, granted Italian-Americans “a formative role in the nation-building narrative.” It also tied Italian-Americans closely to the paternalistic assertion, still heard today, that Columbus “discovered” a continent that was already inhabited by Native Americans.3

Some may think that just because both Italian Americans and Irish Americans are White today, their journey to Whiteness was the same, but it is not true. The Irish journey to Whiteness deserves attention, as well, because their story speaks to the idea of Whiteness as a social construct partially built on anti-Blackness. In How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev writes that his book “asks how the Catholic Irish, an oppressed race in Ireland, became part of an oppressing race in America.” He continues,

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The Irish who emigrated to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were fleeing caste oppression and a system of landlordism that made the material conditions of the Irish peasant comparable to those of the American slave. They came to a society in which color was important in determining social position. It was not a pattern they were familiar with and they bore no responsibility for it; nevertheless, they adapted to it in short order.4

The Irish were part of the immigrants whose status was curtailed in part to prevent more Catholics from arriving in the Protestant United States of America. By the mid-1800s, their assimilation into Whiteness grew in large part because of their enrollment into civil-service positions. As author Thaddeus Russel writes in A Renegade History of the United States, In 1840, at the beginning of the great wave of Irish immigration, there was only a handful of Irish police officers on the force. . . . By the end of the year, Irish made up more than one-quarter of the New York City police, and by the end of the century, more than half the city’s police and more than 75 percent of its firefighters were Irish Americans. In addition, Irish were disproportionately represented among prosecutors, judges and prison guards. Soon, the Irish cop was a stock figure in American culture. Once known as apelike barbarians, the Irish were now able to show themselves as the most selfless and patriotic civil servants.5

Similarly but not to the same degree as Black people, the Irish were viewed as lazy, savage, and subhuman. Through their engagement in the civil service and through building their political influence, the Irish went from social pariah to having twenty-three US presidents of Irish ancestry, from Andrew Jackson to Joe Biden. And, like Italians, as their influence and status grew in the United States, they became part of the system of oppression for Black people in the United States. Growing up in Boston from the 1970s to 1990s, I witnessed much of the tension between the Black community and the communities of Irish and Italian descent firsthand. I lived in the town of Roxbury for much of my childhood. South Boston was primarily an Irish town, and the North End was primarily Italian. From as young as I could remember until the time I went to college in 1995, I never visited South Boston and only drove through the North End. Places like Carson Beach in South Boston experienced race riots in 1975, when Black people attempted to desegregate the beach (as well as schools overall) and were dispersed in part by police on horseback in scenes straight out of the civil rights era. When school desegregation was ordered by an UPstanding judge of Irish descent (Judge Wendell Arthur Garrity Jr.) in 1974 (twenty years after Brown v. Board of Education and nine years after the Massachusetts General Court

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ordered desegregation, by the way), the residents of South Boston protested the most violently and vigorously to prevent integration in their school, South Boston High School. This was part of the racialized society I was born into less than two years later, in 1976. I have had the distinct honor of meeting Jean McGuire on several occasions. McGuire was a school bus attendant on those original buses that brought Black children like fourteen-year-old Regina Williams to South Boston High School. Williams would tell her mother after the first day that she was not going back to that school without a gun. McGuire recalls, I remember riding the buses to protect the kids going up to South Boston High School. . . . And the bricks through the window. Signs hanging out those buildings, “Nigger Go Home.” Pictures of monkeys. The words. The spit. People just felt it was all right to attack children.

As Boston resident Maria Henderson (born in 1950) told WGBH at a Juneteenth celebration on Carson Beach in June 2021, “When I grew up, we didn’t go to South Boston and people from South Boston did not come to Roxbury and Dorchester.”6 Juneteenth celebrates June 19, 1865, the day that the last group of enslaved people in America learned that they were emancipated. She continued, “Now for us to be here just integrated as one happy family, it’s a wonderful thing and a step in the right direction.”7 Note that Henderson said it was a “step,” not a change. As Racine Bell and Stacy Alves, who were at that same celebration, told the Boston Globe, “A White man in a black pickup truck hollered as he drove past: ‘You [n-words] go back to Roxbury!’” Full disclosure: Due to gentrification, Roxbury is not as Black as it used to be, but I digress. While the idea of signs in earlier days saying “no Blacks, no Irish, no dogs” need apply for jobs is disputed, the fact that Irish and Italian immigrants experienced serious discrimination at the onset of their American experience is real, but you would not know that today, given the full assimilation of people of Irish and Italian descent into the American experiment. I could share stories about other groups who became White in America, but the end point is the same: Some immigrants over time began to enjoy the privilege of Whiteness that Black people have never enjoyed, despite having been here longer, having endured more pain and suffering, and having been more welcoming to any group who shared a similar lot, until said group abandoned them for Whiteness. Indeed, every right that Black people have ever gained has never only benefitted Black people. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, also known as the Reconstruction amendments, granted liberties to not just Black people but to all male citizens who were not wealthy, White,

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landowning men; women would benefit from these amendments at much later times, depending on their race. The Thirteenth Amendment banned slavery and involuntary servitude for anyone, not just Black people, with the exception of being punished for a crime, which I mentioned in a prior chapter. The Fourteenth Amendment granted birthright citizenship to everyone, not just Black people. It also stated that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The Fifteenth Amendment granted all men the right to vote, regardless of “color, or previous condition of servitude.” Beyond the amendments that were created to promise equal protection for Black citizens under the law, Black leaders elected to public office in droves during Reconstruction laid the foundation of America’s public school system, which all students have access to today. When Black people gain freedoms historically, everyone has had the opportunity to benefit from them, but in too many instances, when other groups, like Italian Americans, gain more access to the American dream, they have not worked en masse to pull Black people up with them, which is why the prior story of Bill and Daisy Myers is so tragic. The Myers were attempting to live the American dream, and Americans fought them at every juncture. The Myers were not trying to take over America and dominate White people. Black people by and large have fought to only expand freedom for everyone. The narrative that Black people are seeking revenge on White people for what “they” did to Black people is indeed a powerful narrative that riles up many White people to work against their own interests, be it to end Obamacare or to reform our prison industrial complex and the penal code. The fear of a Black takeover is at the core of the continual rise in hate crimes against Black people, who consistently rank as the number 1 target. How the Irish and Italians became White is a story that happens or attempts to happen in too many communities in America: Whiteness is such a coveted goal that many will step on as many Black people as possible to attain it or become White adjacent, including many of our Latino family in the United States. The largest racial-bias case filed to date in California was brought by Black employees—against their Latino coworkers. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Latinos make up 39 percent of the population of California. They do still experience their own forms of discrimination, but in California, the increase in population and influence has had negative consequences for their Black coworkers. One worker, Leon Simmons, said, “When they look you right in the eye and call you the N-word to your face, that’s dehumanizing.”8 Another person who works in a warehouse spoke of a Latina coworker who called him a monkey and waved a banana at him while her female coworkers laughed.

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Hundreds of Black workers have filed suit against the work conditions with Inland Empire warehouses. In interviews, many Black workers spoke of being called “mayate,” which is a Spanish slang term for nigger. In addition to the name calling, Black workers complained of being given the most menial jobs, as well as being targeted for reprisals, including termination, by their White and Latino supervisors when they voiced complaints, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). One EEOC attorney, Anna Park, told the Los Angeles Times that they are “seeing an increase in larger race harassment cases [and] the nature of them has gotten uglier. There’s a more blatant display of hatred with the N-word, with imagery, with nooses. All the violence you’re seeing in the news, it is manifesting in the employment context.” She continues, Two decades ago discrimination was viewed as a Black-White paradigm. . . . The feeling was minorities can’t be discriminating. But it could be Asians discriminating, it could be Latinos discriminating. Regardless of what color you are, you don’t get a free pass. . . . Black workers were subjected to the N-word by co-workers and managers many times per day . . . including “n— bitch,” “lazy ass n— ain’t did no work all day,” and “Look at those n—looking like monkeys, working like slaves like they should be.”9

Millions of dollars have been paid out in settlements rather than going to trial. According to the EEOC, most cases nationwide filed for discrimination are by Black people, but this California case is of particular importance. There is a strong history of Black and Latino people fighting for equality. Of course, tension has also existed in such instances as Black and Latino gangs. What these cases afford us is the opportunity to analyze why this animosity exists with these colleagues toward their Black coworkers in the first place. Why would the discrimination get so despicable that their coworkers would write “Gorillas go back to Africa” on the wall and write it again after it was erased? Similar to the story with the Italians, the answer is the opportunity to move into that magical, mythical neighborhood of Whiteness. Tanya Katerí Hernández is the Archibald R. Murray professor of law at Fordham Law School and author of the book Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality. She writes that there needs to be an “honest discussion” about the racism Black people have experienced from the Latino community: Latino workplace supervisors deny both Afro-Latinos and other Black people access to promotions and wage increases. Additionally, Latino homeowners sometimes turn away Black prospective tenants and home purchasers; Latino

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restaurant workers sometimes block Black customers from entry and refuse to serve them; Latino students sometimes bully and harass Black students; Latino police officers sometimes assault and kill Blacks; and, most heinously, Latinos sometimes join violent White supremacist organizations and harm Blacks.10

Hernández’s last point is demonstrated best by Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys, which is a racist, neofascist, and domestic-terrorist organization that played a leading role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection that sought to overthrow the American government. The Proud Boys are also the group that President Donald Trump told to “stand back and stand by” when then presidential candidate Joe Biden asked him to condemn White supremacy during their September 2020 presidential debate. Tarrio is a Cuban American of African descent. He was arrested in Washington, DC, for tearing down a Black Lives Matter sign from a church. Though Tarrio by physical description alone could not come close to passing for White, he is as racist as they come. Hernández asks and answers a question: “What’s the best way to distance yourself from feeling like you’re part of an oppressed group? It’s to align yourself with those who are part of the oppressors.”11 This mirrors Ignatiev’s comments about the Irish. She holds that the idea of Whiteness is the glue that binds people like Tarrio to their attitudes and actions: “People who today we think of as White people with Italian American or Irish ancestry were, at the turn of the last century, viewed as non-White. Whiteness sort of expanded to include them.”12 Hernández believes that there are many more Latinos who hold views like Tarrio, including Juan Cadavid, who is of Colombian ancestry and was engaged in violent pro-Trump demonstrations in Southern California in 2017; Alex Michael Ramos, who is a Puerto Rican Georgian who assaulted a Black man in the same rally in Charlottesville where Heather Heyer was killed in 2017; and Nick Fuentes, who is a Mexican American “White” nationalist. While these high-profile names are worthy of our attention, the nameless, everyday Latinos whose actions led to the aforementioned lawsuit in California are arguably worth more attention. Comedian Chris Rock had a classic comic one-man show entitled Bigger and Blacker, which aired on HBO in 1999. In one segment, he says to White people, “None of y’all would change places with me, and I’m rich! That’s how good it is to be White. There’s a White one-legged bus driver in here right now that won’t change places with my Black ass. They’re like, ‘Nah, man, I don’t wanna switch. I wanna ride this White thing out [and] see where it takes me.’ When you White, the sky’s the limit. When you Black, the limit’s the sky!” He received thunderous applause from the thousands of mostly Black people in attendance because they knew he was right. Earlier, I asked you to define White food, White dance, and more. Whereas Irish, Italian, and Polish food and dance

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can be defined, there is no set definition for Whiteness. Whiteness is, therefore, an ideal. Whiteness is an aspiration. Whiteness is the ultimate manifestation of the idea that the grass is greener on the other side; therefore, one must do whatever it takes and sacrifice whomever it takes to get there, and too many times, the sacrificial lambs are Black people. Growing up in my neighborhood, I would often hear elders and activists say that Black people have been conditioned to believe that the White man’s ice is colder. We were clearly not the only ones taught that. Some even have called this White-man’s-ice theory a syndrome. If that is indeed true, then it is indeed contagious. In recent years in my talks to teens and young adults across the country, I have started asking them two questions. The first question is if they identify themselves as White. The second question is if they would be willing to give up being identified as White. To date, I have asked this question to several hundred young people nationally. To date, I have received fewer than ten responses that they would give up being White. The majority of the audiences I speak to tend to lean liberal and progressive, but they would still not want to give up the idea of being White. Jane Elliott asked an audience full of White people if they would be happy to be treated the way this country treats Black people and to stand up to show they would accept being treated in that way. To make sure they understood the assignment, she asked again. Not one person in the audience stood up. In reality, it was a different version of what Chris Rock stated. Elliott told the audience that their decision to not stand up means that “you know what’s happening, you know you don’t want it for you. I want to know why you’re so willing to accept it or allow it to happen for others?”13 If you are White and you were in that audience, would you have stood up or stayed seated? What does that say about you? Does that make you an UPstander or a bystander? While I spent time in this section writing about the Latino community and those in that community who seek Whiteness and possess anti-Blackness views, I could spend as much time talking about the pursuit of Whiteness within the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, such as the controversies over eye surgeries that some in the AAPI community believe make them look more White or the adoption of western names to better blend in. I could talk more about their actions to move toward Whiteness and away from anything Black. The point is that the idea of Whiteness and the lies it produces, not only about the beauty of Whiteness, but also about the ugliness of Blackness, are well ingrained not only in America but also globally, and Black people still suffer for it terribly in this new millennium. At the start of this chapter, I spoke about how White people in America were viewed as basically being of Anglo-Saxon Protestant background. Today the US census has an entirely different definition of White: “A person having origins

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in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.” By the way, the census still lists “Negro” as part of the definition of Black: “A person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa. Terms such as ‘Haitian’ or ‘Negro’ can be used in addition to ‘Black’ or ‘African American.’” More on that nonsense later. For Whiteness to be described as it is by the United States now compared to the original definitions and ideas of Whiteness that this country was founded on shows how fluid this racial construct is. In all reality, with this definition, as Roland Martin stated, Ralph Nader can refer to himself as White, even though he is of Lebanese ancestry. Between 2010 and 2020, there was a 316 percent increase in who identified as some form of White in the US census, and this boosted the overall number of White people in the United States, even though the overall number of people who checked “White only” declined, according to NPR.14 It was not until the census of 1960, ninety years after the first census, that people could choose their own race instead of having their race assigned to them based on the gradations of their skin color. For decades, anyone who had White and any percentage of another group’s blood in them could not identify as White. This is where the concept of the “one-drop rule” originated because one drop of non-White blood meant you could not be White. The very first census of 1790 only had three categories: free Whites, other free persons, and slaves. A category of “free colored persons” was added in 1820. Today there are more than sixty-three racial categories to choose from, and now there are many ways to identify as White, and the idea of Whiteness still reigns at the top of the food chain, as was the case in 1790, when “free White” reigned supreme. White as superior has simply been ingrained in our psyche and institutionalized at every juncture, and different communities have exploited this to their gain and to the detriment of Black people for centuries. By the way, what do you check off on the census and why? Even within the stories I have shared in this chapter on Whiteness, there have been partners and UPstanders for Black people, like the previously mentioned Judge Garrity Jr.; Felipe Luciano, of Puerto Rican ancestry, from the Last Poets; German American Father Michael Pfleger; and thousands more, many of whom are cited throughout this book. The goal of this chapter is to highlight how systemic or institutional racism has created an incentive structure that actively works to pull non-Black people away from working together with Black people. It takes intentional, dedicated work from non-Black people to fight this system and be an UPstander with Black people. The Los Angeles City Council controversy from the fall of 2022 is a great example of this. In October 2022, an audio recording of three Latino members of the Los Angeles City Council surfaced. In the recording, Los Angeles City Council president Nury Martinez, councilmembers Gil Cedillo and Kevin de Leon, and Los Angeles County Federation of Labor president Ron Herrera are heard making

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racist comments about their White and Black colleagues, in addition to working on redistricting Los Angeles in a way to empower the Latino community. In the recording, Martinez calls the adopted Black son of White councilmember Mike Bonin a monkey who needed a “beatdown” for jumping around on a float during a Martin Luther King Day parade. Other comments included condemning District Attorney George Gascón because “he’s with the Blacks.” Several other ignorant and racist comments were made, including toward the Oaxacan community in Koreatown in Los Angeles. On Roland Martin’s show on October 10, 2022, I joined the national calls for these members to resign their positions, but not being a local in Los Angeles, I told Roland that I was concerned, in today’s political climate, that the councilmembers’ constituents were going to stick by them no matter what. I was thinking of people like Herschel Walker, who is a walking contradiction on abortion, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose combination of ignorance, nationalism, and racism has garnered her a national platform. When I returned to Roland Martin’s show on October 17, I was happy to have been proven wrong! One of Martin’s guests on the show was Melina Abdullah, cofounder of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter. Abdullah was part of a group of Black protesters who began camping in front of de Leon’s home. De Leon called some of his Latino constituents to confront them. Abdullah said that by the end of their conversation about what they had in common, the Latino Los Angeles residents agreed to stay and come back daily to support Abdullah and the other activists present!15 De Leon’s neighbors allowed the protesters to use their homes to charge their phones. In addition to this show of solidarity, the Oaxacan community also came out to protest the comments of these councilmembers. Councilmember Mike Bonin, the father of the adopted Black son, not only called out all those who participated in the recording in his statement, but he also, through tears, specifically called out anti-Black racism: As the White father of a Black child, you stumble and you, you f— up and you try to do your best to be a parent and an ally, and I get it wrong a lot. I get it right sometimes. I knew that I did not want the story about virulent anti-Black racism to be centered on an angry White dad. . . . These words, they cut, and they stung. I know that I can never really know or comprehend or feel the weight of the daily relentless racism, anti-Black racism that my son is gonna face. But man, I know the fire that you feel when someone tries to destroy Black boy joy. Man. It’s a rage.16

Martinez and Herrera resigned from their positions as protests continued. De Leon and Cedilla faced continued protests from a multicultural coalition of residents of Los Angeles calling for their resignation, not to mention condemnation from leaders endorsed by Martinez, like African American mayoral

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candidate Karen Bass. President Biden also condemned the comments, showing that Democrats can indeed take a stand against racism in their own party, whereas Republicans are silent in the face of all forms of hate speech emanating from former president Donald Trump; other Republican so-called leaders; and members of White-supremacist organizations and militias, like the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers, and the Three Percenters. The example of the protests against these citywide representatives is what UPstanding looks like! There is a scene from the movie Judas and the Black Messiah that rings in my head whenever I think about the multiracial and multicultural coalitions that we need to combat racism. Oscar-winning actor Daniel Kaluuya plays the legendary Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in the movie. In a tense meeting with a group of White people who are also hoisting the Confederate flag, an argument ensues between the Black Panthers and some of the White participants of the group. The White man says his family was poor and that they were not part of the ruling class, but then a Black Panther says the White man’s family was probably still an overseer if not a master. Kaluuya asks simply and quickly, “What if the overseer and the slave banded together and cut the master’s throat?” and concludes his statement by saying that if that had indeed happened, “we may not be in this funky ass ghetto right now.” While the reference is graphic, it speaks to the notion of the power of solidarity. But the fight to maintain Whiteness has too many White people working against their own self-interests and too many non-White people working against their own interests, as well, both to the detriment of Black people.

Activity: Is Whiteness Worth It? Write down your reflections on what being White means to you, whether you are White or not. If you are White, are you willing to give up being White? If you identify as non-White, what are your reflections on Whiteness? Did you ever wish to be White or light enough to pass as White? Have these thoughts changed for you? If so, how? If not, why? Feel free to write about any privilege that you may enjoy because of your background.

MY ANTIRACIST JOURNEY: CATHEY ARMILLAS

Cathey Armillas is a fifty-year-old White Italian American speaker and idea coach. Growing up, she was taught simply that “Black people are not to be trusted.” The “lie didn’t come from any one person; [it] was fed to me by the makeup of the community I grew up in, the actions of people who held leadership positions: my teachers, the police, business owners, neighbors, family members, friends, parents, etc.” She knew she was being lied to but did not fully understand the magnitude of the lie until much later in life. When asked what she feels is the biggest consequence of these lies, she sadly states, “All of the dreams never realized. The impact it has had on so many of my Black sisters and brothers is the ripples of fear, inadequacy, and the ‘stay safe’ mentality.” Cathey recalls her days in junior high. At least three or four times while out walking with her friends (she calls them Mike and Jim), the “police pulled up alongside us and asked us where they were going and what we were doing.” These police encounters only happened when Mike, who is Black, was with them. Once she realized this, she began to no longer be a bystander but an UPstander and challenged the police until they eventually left them alone. The experience taught her what it means to be racially privileged in society. While this happened decades ago, she laments the fact that her one brother and his Taiwanese wife are raising their three children with racist ideas. Cathey has mixed feelings about the effects these racist ideas have had on her life. The lies have helped her in a good way because she is more aware of them, but it has also been “extremely disheartening to not be able to do anything about the actions of others and the systems that have been created.” She believes, however, that the “biggest lie is that we can’t do anything about it.” To change this on a systemic scale, Cathey thinks that what is needed to change society is the “breakdown of the system that keeps implementing and reinforcing lies and halftruths to further promote separation among people and communities. We need to blend communities more and have more exposure to people who don’t think and/ or look like you.” While she is optimistic about the future of race in America, she does believe that it will continue to get worse before it gets better and that White people cannot leave it only to non-White people to fix the issue of racism in America. She believes that “it’s going to take all the communities coming together. The change won’t start in a political space. . . . The ‘people’ have to make the change.”



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THE LIES BEHIND WHITE LIVES MATTER AND ALL LIVES MATTER

On October 3, 2022, music mogul, billionaire, and legendary rapper and producer Kanye West caused quite the controversy when he wore a sweatshirt reading “White Lives Matter” at Paris Fashion Week. He also appeared in a photo with Candace Owens, an African American woman who is a devout apologist for White supremacy, also wearing the shirt, along with fashion model Selah Marley, the daughter of music legend Lauryn Hill and granddaughter of the great Bob Marley. Kanye was subsequently embraced by Republicans, conservatives, and White supremacists (not always mutually exclusive nowadays). He even appeared on White-supremacist-leading propagandist Tucker Carlson’s show, where he was further praised for his “brilliance.” He told Carlson he decided to wear the White Lives Matter shirt simply because “they do.”1 Miraculously, Carlson and others, like the hosts of Fox and Friends, quickly dropped their enthusiastic support after Kanye made several antiSemitic comments later that month, including threatening to go “death con 3” on Jewish people.2 To be clear, Kanye deserves all the backlash he has received for his ­anti-Semitic statements. We cannot be selective about being UPstanders. We must condemn ignorance and hate wherever we see it. Kanye lost all his major endorsements and partnerships with companies like the Gap and Adidas, and he should have lost those deals. The challenge I often raise is, Why Kanye has been allowed to make anti-Black statements with no consequences, such as when he stated that slavery was a choice3 or that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was a fraud? It is the lies we believe about Black people that allowed Kanye to face little to no backlash. Both the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) label the phrase White Lives Matter as hate speech. The ADL states that White Lives Matter is a “White supremacist phrase that originated in early 2015 as a racist response to the Black 118

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Lives Matter movement, which arose to protest against police brutality against African-Americans and garnered considerable publicity in 2014.”4 The SPLC asserts that White Lives Matter is a “neo-Nazi group that is growing into a movement as more and more White supremacist groups take up its slogans and tactics.”5 According to the SPLC, some comments from White Lives Matter cofounder Rebecca Barnette in 2016 alone include • “Do not allow our lands to turn into Haiti. . . . Time to shut the savage beasts down. Shut down Black Lives Matter. . . . It should be apparent to the world . . . Obama is for the n———.” • “Ever hear the term if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and acts like a duck . . . then it’s a n——. This is why I hate n———.” • “And the n——— are too damn stupid to realize Obama is using them to bring in martial law and the men in blue suits.”6 The lies we are told about Black people allow too many to equate the Black Lives Matter and White Lives Matter as one and the same. The retort “all lives matter” is a trigger response from those who do not support BLM. Black Lives Matter was founded in 2013 “to eradicate White supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.”7 However, due to the lies that have been perpetrated throughout history about Black people, particularly the notion that we are prone to be more violent, it is easy to equate Black resistance to oppression with oppression from White people. It is for this reason that a false equivalency is constantly drawn between BLM activists and January 6th insurrectionists. No BLM members have attempted to overthrow the government, but the rhetoric by BLM dissenters would have us thinking otherwise. It is important to note that even though BLM was founded by three powerful Black women, Ayo Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Cullors, the BLM movement has been multicultural and multiracial from the beginning. There have been many instances where White BLM partners and protesters outnumbered Black protesters. Members of the Asian, Latino, and Native American communities have also been greatly involved in BLM, unlike the token representation in White Lives Matter with Candace Owens. The same types of lies were told about the civil rights movement. Though it was started and led by Black people, the civil rights movement was always multicultural with multiracial UPstanders and partners, but that does not help the continuation of the White-supremacist narrative.

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On January 6, 2021, a group of mainly White people stormed the US Capitol and tried not only to block the results of the 2020 election but also to overthrow the government entirely, led by the twice-impeached President Donald Trump. Police officers were killed during this assault on the Capitol, and many others sustained life-altering injuries. This intense act of intentional violence and destruction was not more horrific due to (1) the brave actions of law enforcement officers and (2) the DC law prohibiting firearms from entering the Capitol rotunda, which prevented hundreds, if not thousands, of firearms being brought into the Capitol at Trump’s request (they were not there to hurt him8). But debates immediately ensued about the light response of the government to these White protesters versus the overwhelming law enforcement presence by the government when BLM activists protested at the Lincoln Memorial just six months earlier, on June 2, 2020.9 On that June day, National Guard troops appeared on the steps of the memorial, fully armed, dressed in camouflage, and ready for a riot, whereas the Secret Service and FBI knew that armed protesters were coming to DC and the Capitol at least a week before January 6 and still did nothing to increase a security presence on the day when America was supposed to witness a peaceful transfer of power that the country has endured consistently since the Civil War.10 The January 6th Commission set up by Congress to investigate the events of the day has even insisted that members of the Secret Service were involved in the insurrection, demonstrated in part by the Secret Service’s deletion of all text messages sent on January 5 and 6, 2021.11 When it comes to violence in America, White people largely have been excused for doing the most, while Black people have been largely blamed while doing the least. There were two telling comments that I heard over the last few years on social media. While I have yet to locate the source of one, the words are seared in my mind. The first was from a woman who said that Black people have this magical ability to turn anything, including nothing, into a gun. It was a response to the shooting of twenty-two-year-old father of two Stephon Clark in Sacramento. Clark was slain by police in his grandparents’ backyard on March 18, 2018. He was found to be holding a white iPhone that the police said they thought was a gun. A Black person slain by police while having either nothing or some object that is not a gun in their hands has become all too commonplace in America. The second statement appeared on Twitter, on a poster from activist Taylor Griffin. In a picture of her with her mouth covered by duct tape and wearing handcuffs, her cardboard poster said, “When the color of your skin is seen as a weapon, you will never be seen as unarmed.”12 The two statements are indeed connected. From enslaved Black people being killed for reading the Bible, to a Black man allegedly bumping into a woman that would lead to the razing of Black Wall Street in 1921, to Emmett

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Till’s killing in 1955 for whistling at a White woman, to Clark’s slaying in 2018 for holding a white iPhone, our very skin has made us suspects first and then victims to the most heinous of actions at the hands of the White power structure in America. And sadly, many of these acts perpetrated against us have occurred with no accountability, from the 1669 Casual Killing Act, which stated that a master could not be held accountable for the killing of one of his slaves if the enslaved person happened to die “by the extremity of correction”13 to officers not being charged in cases like Clark’s because the officers “feared for their lives.” Dr. Gary Weaver was not a colleague of mine at American University; he was a role model. By the time I arrived at American University in 2015, he had already taught there for forty years. He passed away in 2017. I was honored to take over for him as a yearly guest lecturer on intercultural communication at the Inter-American Defense College. I used his book Intercultural Relations: Communication, Identity, and Conflict in my course Intercultural Communication for years. In this book, Weaver defines assimilation as the “process whereby individuals or groups of differing ethnic heritage are absorbed into the dominant culture of a society.”14 This is a solid definition, but then Weaver adds something after it. He says that the people who are absorbed into the dominant culture cannot do so without the permission of the dominant culture. For example, a White German can come to the United States, change his accent and name, and be fully assimilated into American society, whereas a Black person whose family has been in the United States for centuries has yet to fully assimilate into American society. The only reason for this is his skin color. I take Weaver’s point one step further. I argue that a White German can come to the United States today and keep their accent and name and still fully assimilate into American society. Our skin color is the continual weapon. In a 1967 interview in Ebenezer Baptist Church, NBC reporter Sander Vanocur asked Dr. King, “What is it about the Negro? . . . I mean every other group that came as an immigrant somehow? Not easily, but somehow got around it. Is it just the fact that Negroes are Black?” Dr. King’s response then resonates now: That’s a part of it, and . . . that grows out of something else. You can’t thingify anything without depersonalizing that something. If you use something as a means to an end, at that moment, you make it a thing, and you depersonalize it. The fact is that the Negro was a slave in this country for 244 years. That act, that was a willful thing that was done. The Negro was brought here in chains, treated in a very inhuman fashion. This led to the thingification of the Negro. So he was not looked upon as a person. He was not looked upon as a human being with the same status and worth as other human beings. And the other thing is that human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually rationalizing that wrong. So slavery was justified, morally, biologically,

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theoretically, scientifically, everything else. And it seems to me that White America must see that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. That is one thing that other immigrant groups haven’t had to face. The other thing is that the color became a stigma. American society made the Negros’ color a stigma, and that can never be overlooked. So, I think these things are absolutely necessary.15

While many racial groups have been thingified to some level, no group has experienced this at the level of Black people for the reasons that Dr. King so eloquently explained. Part of the thingification of Black people is the way we refer to Black people during slavery as slaves, instead of them being enslaved. Enslaved reflects a certain humanity in recognizing that these people had lives and stories before the trans-Atlantic slave trade. For much of this book, I have also used enslaved instead of slave. The fact that Black people were brought here involuntarily for centuries also immediately separates Black people from any other group, yet we are constantly compared to other groups, like Italian, Irish, Asian, and South American immigrants, who have had better opportunities to assimilate into American society compared to Black people. As Dr. King stated, the part of thingifying is lying. As the cliché states, a lie can travel around the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on. On October 6, 2022, off-duty firefighter Anthony “Toni” Santi was shot and killed by a Black woman in Kansas City, Missouri. She shot Santi in the back as he was choking her boyfriend, Ja’Von Taylor, while they were fighting in the parking lot.16 On August 15, 2015, WDBJ (an affiliate of CBS) reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward were slain while filming live in Roanoke, Virginia.17 Having occurred more than seven years apart, what do these two incidents have in common? The first thing is that all three people killed were White. The second thing is that it is impossible, or at least nearly impossible, to find video of the moment they were actually shot. Why? Because they were White, but of course, no news outlet would say that. I have reviewed video after video of news coverage of these shootings. In every video I have watched, the actual moment these three were killed was not aired. The reporters all stated something to the effect of “Out of respect to the family, we won’t share the video” or “We won’t air the most graphic parts” or, as Lester Holt said, “We’re going to be careful about what images we show you tonight.”18 The killing of Santi was filmed by a bystander, and the killing of Parker and Ward was captured by the actual gunman, Vester Flanagan, who formerly reported under the name Bryce Williams at the same station as Parker and Ward. To be clear, I am happy that these networks chose not to show the moments these three were killed, but like many Black people, I found myself asking, why is it that these same networks are so comfortable,

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even damn near giddy, about showing killings of Black people? The answer is thingification. After Williams shot himself, the media did show video of his body being placed into an ambulance, but there were no videos of the bodies of Parker and Ward. How many times have you seen news commercials promoting how they have the video of George Floyd or LaQuan McDonald or Alton Sterling and that it will air live at 6 p.m. on your local or national news network? How many times have videos of Philando Castile aired on your television? I could go on YouTube now and create a playlist of videos of killings of unarmed Black people, where the entire video news streams are shown, often unedited. I cannot do that for White people who are killed. Their dignity is protected. The feelings of the family are protected, as they should be! With Black people, there is no such filter. I have never heard a television broadcast say “out of respect to” the family of Tamir Rice or Stephon Clark or John Crawford, the video will not be shown. Could it be America’s history of lynchings and public displays of lynchings on postcards and advertised in the news has made the visual of Black death so acceptable? Could it be the way in which Black people were decapitated and had their heads displayed on roads to remind Black people not to fight slavery or Jim Crow? Could it be the centuries of seeing Black death as part of what Jon Stewart called America’s “racial wallpaper” after the shooting in Charleston?19 To date, I have never watched the entire video of the murder of George Floyd. Of course, I have seen pictures. Of course, I have turned on the television and saw it airing before I quickly changed the channel, or I have heard his pleas for his life on SiriusXM satellite broadcasts as I drove around town, but I have never watched more than three to five seconds of that video. It was probably because of the 2016 killing of Philando Castile, a thirty-two-year-old Black man in Minneapolis who announced to police he was a registered gun owner, reached for his license, and was shot to death, with his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, next to him in the car and their child in the backseat. There is just too much trauma that arises in me watching these shootings. Some, like the Floyd murder, are simply modern-day lynchings. My mind and my heart just cannot take it anymore, and this is clearly the case for many Black people. As a 2018 study from the Lancet reports, there are serious mental-health effects for the Black community after every police shooting: A police killing of an unarmed African American triggered days of poor mental health for Black people living in that state over the following three months—a significant problem given there are about 1,000 police killings annually on average, with African Americans comprising a disproportionate 25 percent to 30 percent of those. The accumulation of painful days over the course of a year was comparable to the rate experienced by diabetics.20

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One of the fascinating but not entirely surprising findings of the study was that there was no recognizable effect on the mental health of White people in those states where the studies were conducted, according to Dr. David R. Williams, professor of public health, and chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, and one of the lead researchers on the study. He holds that “it is not just what happens in the big things, like discrimination at work or in interactions with the police. But there are day-to-day indignities that chip away at the well-being of populations of color.”21 This is what we would call microaggressions. Williams also is quick to add that Black people specifically have been dealing with two pandemics in the last few years: the COVID pandemic and the pandemic of racial injustice. While there is a COVID vaccine, he reminds us that there is not a vaccine for mental health. His research provides a deeper explanation of why so many of us can no longer watch these videos and some of us had the foresight to never watch them in the first place. The fact that news outlets continue to not only air them but also to promote them speaks to the study’s findings that White people just do not care as much about Black death as we do. It is very easy for people to see Black death and just not care. While many of us speak of how we are shot down like animals, animals are treated better than us when they are hunted and slain. Furthermore, there has often been a more passionate response to the killing of animals than to the killing of Black people. Indeed, two months before Castille was killed, a gorilla named Harambe was killed in the Cincinnati Zoo after a four-year-old boy fell into Harambe’s enclosure and authorities grew more and more concerned about the boy’s safety. I saw more anger and compassion about the killing of Harambe from some White people than compassion for Black people slain in the manners I have discussed in this book. At universities where I was speaking at the time, I saw posters of Harambe hanging from windows. Michelle Gregg, the mother of the boy, faced harassment for Harambe’s killing.22 (I have not been able to find a video of Harambe’s killing after multiple searches, though video of the boy in the enclosure is omnipresent. Incidentally, when I went to YouTube to look up “video of Harambe getting shot,” guess what popped up? Videos of Black people, like Philando Castile and George Floyd being killed. The challenges of thingification and artificial intelligence, which is discussed later, are on real display in real time.) I met Breonna Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, in the summer of 2022. It is truly disgraceful for her and so many of these parents and family members to not only lose their family members so heinously but also to have to fight the lies told about their relatives to justify their deaths. It is disgraceful that they have to spend so much time and money to fight just for their cases to go to trials, which most of them have lost. They deserve better than we have given them in a

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society where the lies told about Black people make too many believe that these beautiful souls were somehow worthy of death. I wrote and recorded the following song, entitled “Breonna Bland Aubrey Floyd.” The title is based on the names of three unarmed Black people who were killed or died mysteriously in police custody, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Sandra Bland, and Ahmaud Arbery, who was slain by three White men, one a former police officer. What is so sad is that I could probably fill three more pages with more verses that pay tribute to Black people who were slain by the police or at the hands of White extremists. A hip-hop verse is usually sixteen bars (or lines), but the last verse here is thirty-two bars because there were just too many names of Black people unnecessarily slain to fit in one song. May they forever rest in peace and power and never be forgotten.

BREONNA BLAND AUBREY FLOYD I’m tired, I’m tired, but also inspired Time to vote folks out of office get these DAs fired Grandmas standing in front of cops to defend their kids Grandpops now the man of the house if they ain’t dead And I ain’t watching no more videos of me getting killed Cause I see myself in every video fam and that’s real And if I don’t see me, I see my whole family My best friends, my students, my community If you don’t see yourself, where’s your humanity? What you gonna do to stop this insanity? If you won’t stand up for you, will you stand for we? Show that Black lives matter, fight for unity? But I’m a tell you this right now, we ain’t waitin for you Cause we gonna fight until all lives really matter, too Because before the next person is murdered, think, too, About making change with the girls and boys in blue Let me also point this out before I continue to rock The McMichaels, Zimmerman, and Roof ain’t cops So when they murder us in church or on the block They represent White supremacy and that whole flock And along with these cops, they represent a system Designed to take a Black man and convict and kill him Aligned to take a Black woman and make her a victim Then put them both on trial to dehumanize them Then put them on TV to verbally brutalize them And never share the stories of these cops and their brethren

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Then they let these killers prep the same story And rarely ever charge them with a felony The justice system doin’ what it was built to do Protect the cops at all costs, no matter what they do But real change is gonna come, man it’s long overdue Because we had something that we never had before . . . you! Jamar Clark, Breonna Taylor, Ousmane Zongo Cameron Hall, Eric Garner, Amadou Diallo Tamir Rice, Sean Bell, Jemel Roberson Eleanor Bumpurs, Walter Scott, Fred Hampton Harith Augustus, E. J. Bradford, Trayvon Martin Lajuana Phillips, Antwon Rose, Rashaun Washington Daniel Simmons, Robert White, Tony Green Clementa Pinckney, Philando, Botham Jean Sandra Bland, Stephon Clark, Alberta Spruill Nathaniel McCoy, Ronell Foster, Travares McGill Yvette Smith and brother Anthony Hill John Crawford, Danroy Henry, Emmett Till Yusef Hawkins, Michael Brown, George Floyd Jerame Reid, Fanta Bility, Rekia Boyd Juan Jones, Miriam Carey, Jordan Edwards Atatiana, Ahmaud Arbery, Medgar Evers Brother Danny Thomas, Linwood Lambert Marcus-David Peters, Diante, Michael Stewart Malissa Williams, sister Claudia González Brother Prince Jones, Anthony Baez Jordan Baker, Henry Glover, Tony Robinson James Brissette, Shem, Tanisha Anderson Shermichael Ezeff, Freddie Gray, Ronald Madison Oscar Grant III, Aiyana Jones, Dondi Johnson Raheim Brown, Victor Steen, Cedric Chatman Timothy Thomas, Aaron Campbell, Tarika Wilson Matthew Ajibade, David Raya, Steven Washington Nehemiah, Orlando, too many dead sons Ramarley Graham, Terence Crutcher, Daniel Simmons Manuel Diaz, Alesia Thomas, Tamon Robinson And to all the Chris Coopers and the coulda beens It could be you or me tomorrow, we must never give in!

MY ANTIRACIST JOURNEY: SCOTT CRABTREE

Scott Crabtree is a fifty-six-year-old White male professional speaker living in Sisters, Oregon. When he was growing up, the most common lie he was told about Black people is that “most Black men were dangerous.” He was primarily taught these stereotypes by mass media. His viewpoints on his stereotypes started to change as he learned more about the prison industrial complex, among other things, through powerful documentaries like Ava DuVernay’s 13th, as well as books like White Fragility. White fragility was popularized by Robin DiAngelo to describe the “defensive reactions so many White people have when our racial worldviews, positions, or advantages are questioned or challenged.” She holds that for “a lot of White people, just suggesting that being White has meaning will trigger a deep, defensive response. And that defensiveness serves to maintain both our comfort and our positions in a racially inequitable society from which we benefit.”23 For most of Crabtree’s life, between his time growing up in Massachusetts and Oregon, he has had very little real-life exposure to Black people. One reason there may not have been many Black people around him is because historically, “White people with power actively and systemically tried to keep Black people out.” Crabtree refers to the idea that, even though Oregon is viewed by many as a liberal state today because of cities like Portland, the state’s history of racism goes as far back as 1844, when the provisional government of Oregon passed its first law excluding Black people from living in the state. The law stated that any Black person trying to settle in Oregon “would be publicly whipped—thirty-nine lashes, repeated every six months—until they left Oregon.” Later that year, the rule changed from being whipped to being required to engage in forced public labor. Oregon also did not support the civil rights amendments to the Constitution (Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments) until it finally granted Black men the right to vote in 1870, and the exclusion clause was not lifted until 1926.24 Crabtree is sure that he held stereotypes of Black men as violent and that he has had to make a deliberate effort to ensure that he was challenging the stereotypes and the biases. He also observed that the “way that law enforcement treats Black men in particular ranges from unfair to deadly,” and this has also led him to do more to challenge his own biases. He believes that racism is so ingrained in America that every day, “someone sees a Black male, and consciously or subconsciously, they fear that person.” Crabtree believed that the election of President Obama brought a level of progress to America, but Trump set us back. What frustrates Crabtree is the fact



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that some people chose to vote for Trump because he was racist. He believes we are on a better trajectory now, but more needs to be done, particularly about the negative perceptions America has of Black men, and he feels that the media has a large role to play in this work. The change Crabtree wants to see is “decades” away, and that saddens him because he feels like the youth will save us as “older racist Americans die.” He talks about what those in his community are doing to be part of the change: I know that many of my White friends (and I) are working through issues. We are reading, donating, voting, and answering our friend’s survey to try to help improve the situation. It feels a bit like water and rock. It looks like the water loses every time, but in the long run, water wins. It can be hard to stay engaged when so much is wrong with the USA and the world right now. But we have overcome so much as a nation. We can and must keep moving forward toward better treatment of all, for everyone’s sake.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CRITICAL RACE THEORY AND DISINFORMATION

If I asked you to tell me what critical race theory (CRT) is without going to

the internet or a dictionary, would you be able to tell me? Would you be able to tell me who the founders are? Would you be able to tell me that it was created in the 1970s by legal scholars led by Derrick Bell? Would the names of other pioneers of critical race theory, like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Alan Freeman, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia Williams, ring a bell? Lastly, if you can admit you were ignorant about what critical race theory is, then why is it that you have formulated an opinion about something you know little to nothing about? The short answer is, we let our (social) media silos educate us on serious issues and form biases without full information, and as we have seen with the fight over our school boards, we act on our ignorance. When we go online to look for affirmation instead of information, ignorance persists. The main goal of critical race theory is to analyze the impact of America’s policies from a racial lens, such as the racial implications of housing policies like Levittown or banks that denied mortgages to Black people. According to the American Bar Association, critical race theory critiques “how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers.”1 Furthermore, critical race theory “recognizes that race intersects with other identities, including sexuality, gender identity, and others,” and it “recognizes that racism is not a bygone relic of the past. Instead, it acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continue to permeate the social fabric of this nation.”2 Although a theory used in law schools, critical race theory has become the catchphrase for anything related to protests for racial injustice. Across America, school boards have become the latest battleground, first on the issue of mask



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mandates in schools. People have threatened one another, even coming to the point of physical violence. In some states, like Florida and New Hampshire, local antimaskers teamed up with White-supremacist groups, like the Proud Boys, to intimidate school board members to allow students and staff to enter schools maskless. While the fight raged on, critical race theory was added to protests at school board meetings. Spearheaded by Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson, protesters have demanded that CRT not be taught in their schools because they think it teaches White children to hate themselves. Republican governors, like Oklahoma’s Kevin Stitt, signed legislation banning its teaching, stating, “We need policies that bring us together, not rip us apart,” and “Not one cent of taxpayer money should be used to define and divide young Oklahomans about their race or sex.”3 In short, as Oklahoma City Public Schools School Board president Paula Lewis stated, the ban is an “outright racist and oppressive piece of legislation.”4 Across America, there have been real consequences of the faux-CRT debate, and it is not only Black students who suffer. In August 2022, a White English teacher at Norman High School resigned after parents protested her providing students with a QR code that would allow them to access free electronic books (e-books) from the Brooklyn Library. Protesters said the teacher, Summer Boismier, was in violation of the aforementioned legislation, known as HB 1775, which says, “The Oklahoma State Board of Education will prohibit any discrimination on the basis of race or sex in the form of bias, stereotyping, scapegoating, classification, or traits, morals, values or characteristics that are based solely on race or sex.”5 In an interview with Fox 25, Boismier stated that she provided students with the QR code due to “unfounded calls from state leadership for widespread censorship. . . . Teachers across the district have been told by administration to either remove or restrict student access to classroom library texts for fear of a potential accreditation downgrade associated with any perceived violations of HB 1775.”6 Oklahoma political leaders and the state board of education did indeed follow up on their accreditation threats when they downgraded the accreditation of Mustang Public Schools and Tulsa Public Schools because they were in violation of HB 1775. Actions like these do not affect only Black students, given that the Mustang Public School District is 77 percent White. More than half of the Tulsa Public Schools is White and Hispanic. Boismier is a White woman. All these students have their future academic and professional careers threatened because their high school diplomas may hold no weight. And this is all due to a fake debate and predicated on a lie that teaching Black history will make White students feel inferior. Despite petitions and protests, the Oklahoma State Board of Education is refusing to hold a hearing to change its accreditation downgrade ruling at the time of this writing.

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The Mustang District was downgraded in part because of a getting-toknow-you activity where people cross a line if they represent a category in question. Race was brought up in a middle school in this district, and now they are not accredited. Tulsa schools received a downgrade after a Memorial High School teacher complained about a training where she supposedly had to watch videos that “specifically shame White people for past offenses in history, and state that all are implicitly racially biased by nature.”7 Also in August 2022, elementary school teacher Michael James resigned from his fifteen years of teaching special education students at O. J. Simms Elementary School in Pensacola, Florida. According to James, a fellow staff member came into his classroom and removed pictures of prominent African Americans from his wall, including images of Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver, and General Colin Powell. On the way out of the classroom, the staff member removed a picture of former president Barack Obama from James’s desk. The staff member told James that the images were not “age appropriate.”8 A situation like this never happened before in James’s career. All James said he wanted to do was post images of people his students could relate to. The Escambia School District stated that they would launch an investigation. Governor Ron DeSantis, who was copied on the resignation email, has issued no response as of the time of this writing. In reality, I would expect Governor DeSantis only to support this decision. Indeed, it was DeSantis who in April 2022 signed HB 7, which has been called the “Stop Woke Act.” As stated on the official website for the state of Florida, the bill is designed to give businesses, employees, children and families tools to stand up against discrimination and woke indoctrination. The bill includes provisions to prevent discriminatory instruction in the workplace and in public schools and defines individual freedoms based on the fundamental truth that all individuals are equal before the law and have inalienable rights. This legislation is the first of its kind in the nation to take on both corporate wokeness and critical race theory in schools in one act.9

The post continues, “No one should be instructed to feel as if they are not equal or shamed because of their race. . . . In Florida, we will not let the farleft woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces. There is no place for indoctrination or discrimination in Florida.”10 The part that is missing, as I share in the last poem of this chapter, is that these legislators and governors have no problem with the indoctrination in American schools that historically have painted most non-White people in a negative light while shining the brightest light possible on White people.

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I am a proud 1995 graduate of Boston Latin School (BLS), the oldest public school in the country. It was founded in 1635 and is older than Harvard University. I spent seven years at BLS because school went from seventh to twelfth grade. Yes, your math counts that as six years, but I repeated my seventh-grade year for a multitude of reasons that are not important now but will be later. What is important for this chapter is that in the entire seven years I spent at Boston Latin School, most students and most teachers were White. I read one book by a Black author, aptly titled Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, which was written in the 1940s (published in 1952) about an educated Black man who struggles to have society see him as a human being. It was how I felt in that school until I started to deeply immerse myself in African culture. Had I not embraced my African culture, I would have been lost in the indoctrination sauce of self-hate that the American public school system has fed to too many non-White people for centuries. For the first few years at BLS, I was not seen as a problem because I followed the expectations set for me. I didn’t feel like the school wanted me there, so I acted out. I didn’t do my schoolwork, and I often spent time in detention. Rapper Akon’s big breakthrough song in 2004, “Locked Up,” talks about the life of the incarcerated. I remixed his song on my mixtape Bootleg 2 with the following lyrics to Akon’s beat: I’m the child left behind, so I rhyme Didn’t pass the test so I dropped out of line Out of sight, into crime just tryin’ to get paid They cared more for my braids than they did for my grades I didn’t quite look the part, plus they didn’t have art No foreign languages, no music, not even Head Start So when the shotgun went off, I didn’t run, I stayed School was just daycare, so I ran and played I acted a fool in school, and I thought I was cool Made a point to act stupid and not follow the rules Until I got held back, and the joke was on me Some other brothers hauled off, to special ed see, Supposed to be case by case, but too many Black males Make up special ed, it’s like a school jail cell They say the first shall be last and that’s true in class Original man at the bottom of the education class So he’s . . . locked up.

The fact that I was not seen the way I should have been at BLS, the fact that the curriculum did not reflect me, and the fact that my father was nearly assassinated because of his political activities overseas led me to lash out and repeat

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my seventh-grade year. Black children suffer most from the educational system in America. We are the most likely to get suspended and expelled (Black boys are expelled at three times the rate of White boys—from preschool), more likely to be labeled “severely emotionally disturbed,” more likely to be placed in special education, less likely to have access to early childhood development, least likely to be placed in honors or advanced-placement classes, and less likely to graduate. Add to the fact that research from such organizations such as the Children’s Defense Fund’s Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline project has found a correlation between children in special education, suspensions, expulsions, and incarceration. Since 2001, I have been traveling the country working with public, private, and charter schools on developing strategies to reach their Black male students. As a high school principal once told me in Montgomery County, Maryland, if you go to any school in America and remove race from a pie chart of discipline, you can automatically figure out who represents the highest rate of discipline and who represents the lowest. While I am sure they may indeed exist, I have yet to visit a school where the order of detentions, suspensions, and expulsions was not highest for Black students, followed by Hispanic students. The Asian and White-descended student rates tended to fluctuate depending on the numbers of Asian students in a school, but it usually is lower than White student rates. The rates for Black students tend to be higher, regardless of whether they are part of the majority of a school population or a nonmajority of the school population, similar to the racial disproportionality rates of incarceration in America. I have not spoken much of Native American student suspension and expulsion rates at the national level because they are not represented in significant numbers in every state and general statistics, which speaks to an entirely different level of oppression and suppression of America’s Indigenous people. But in states like California, Native American students come in second to African Americans in the percentage of suspensions (9.4 percent and 7.4 percent in the 2017–2018 academic school year, respectively), but the expulsion rate for Native American boys is 4.2 times higher than any other group, including Black students. Also, the majority of these suspensions and expulsions occur before Native American students reach the fourth grade, before they can even figure themselves out. The plight of the Native American student in America has been asterisked for far too long, and this field needs more studies. California is a so-called progressive state. If this is the case there, then we should be very concerned with what is taking place across the country with Native American students.

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One underlying issue I have seen in my more than twenty years as an educator is that our nation’s public, private, and charter schools do not in general possess curricula that allow non-White students to see themselves in their best light. For Black students, the curriculum basically starts with slavery, fast forwards to the civil rights movement, and (since 2008) leaps to President Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson. There is no mention of Black life prior to slavery, like great African kingdoms. With slavery, there is no substantive mention about how Black people actively fought for their freedom. Students learn that slavery ended because President Abraham Lincoln was just a compassionate man but do not know that he only granted enslaved Black people their freedom because he needed them in order to win the Civil War. There is no serious mention of Black inventors who created many of the products we use today but could not file patents because they were enslaved, so their masters took their inventions and became rich from them (e.g., Nathan “Nearest” Green and Jack Daniels). There’s no meaningful mention of the role Black people played in America’s wars or contributions to medicine, technology, politics, and more. Of course, however, there is always room for Black entertainers to be celebrated. When Obama won the presidential election in November 2008, many around the world celebrated—not only Black people. It is obvious that everyone did not celebrate, and many would argue that the roots of the MAGA Republican movement began with the Tea Party, which emerged in response to Obama’s ascension. Our schools were not excluded from the division. I walked into a school in Montgomery County, Maryland, to conduct one of my trainings I cocreated with educator Lacey Robinson, “Elevating the Black Male.” Before I could even get to the classroom, the principal told me to “not talk about Obama because teachers are still pissed off.” This was not a one-off event. Across the country, there were negative reactions in schools to his first election and reelection, such as the suspension of South Carolina eighth-grade math teacher Sharon Aceta in 2012, who said Obama’s win meant that all food stamps will be paid for. What is the point? The point is that President Obama’s election had a significant impact on Black students across the country. As Jay-Z said, as soon as Obama was elected, the gangster image became less relevant in the Black community. Indeed, the New York Times reported in January 2009 about the “Obama effect,” found in a Vanderbilt University study, where the performance gap between African American students and White students “all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.”11 The Times continued, “The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped Blacks overcome anxieties about racial stereotypes

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that had been shown, in earlier research, to lower the test-taking proficiency of African-Americans.”12 Across the country, I have heard so much anecdotal evidence about the influence Obama’s election had on students, from their wearing President Obama T-shirts instead of shirts of Black entertainers to Black students standing for the Pledge of Allegiance for the first time ever. As was the case with Vice President Harris and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Black students especially use these examples to fuel them because the schools are not giving them reasons to be inspired. In fact, in too many schools, it’s the opposite and getting worse, with this fake CRT activism, among other things. Over the last few years, textbooks that lie about the brutality of slavery have been published. In 2015, book publisher McGraw-Hill acknowledged that they would revise one of its textbooks after the complaints of Texas mother Roni Dean-Burren drew international attention. The uproar started after her son sent her a picture of passages in the book that refer to enslaved Africans as “immigrants” and “workers.” Other books downplay the role of slavery as the leading cause of the Civil War and cite “state rights.” Yes, it was about states’ rights—the right of the states to keep profiting from slavery. These books are approved by school boards and viewed by school leaders and social studies departments, and they make their way to our classrooms because of a desire to whitewash history. Educators in Texas also attempted in July 2022 to refer to slavery as “involuntary relocation.” Fortunately, that effort failed in large part due to activist outcry. Texas is a leader in the publication of school textbooks, so many school districts follow their lead. George Dawson was the grandson of a former enslaved man, and he learned to read at age ninety-eight. Dawson died in 2001 at the age of 103. His story became so popular for literacy activists that he appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and many other news outlets, and a school was named after him in the Carroll Independent School District (ISD) in Southlake, Texas. His life story was published in the 2000 book Life Is So Good (coauthored with Richard Glaubman), but in late 2022, a “committee of district educators reviewed Dawson’s book to check for, in the words of Superintendent Lane Ledbetter, ‘age and content appropriateness for students.’”13 The committee refuses to call this a book ban but is basically looking to partially ban the book in order to remove parts that do not reflect the “good life.” So a man who attained national acclaim for advocating for people, especially students, learning to read cannot have his book taught in its entirety at the school that bears his name. This is America in the age of fake CRT activism—but it does not have to be. The story of Michael James and others in this chapter cannot be looked at in a vacuum. They must be coupled with, at the very least, this recent history,

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but the faux-CRT activists will have none of it. Across the country, activists, legislators, and educators are actively working to ban books about non-White people, as well as non-White authors in general. This includes cartoon books about Rosa Parks and even international youth activist Malala Yousafzai. Texas lawmaker Matt Krause introduced approximately 850 books he wanted banned, including books by noted author and professor Ta-Nehisi Coates, Paul Ortiz, and Mikki Kendall and even an Amnesty International picture book on human rights. In his October 25, 2021, letter to superintendents, Krause asked for information about any books dealing with sexuality in any way, shape, or form, as well as books or content that “contain material that might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”14 Lists from other protesters include the Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel Maus, a very popular children’s book about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman. Across the country, school board meetings were targeted with anti-CRT parents who brought White-supremacist groups, like the Proud Boys, to their meetings to intimidate school board members. One such meeting occurred in 2021 in Nashua, New Hampshire (so this is not just a red-state or southern-state issue). Private schools are also the targets of faux-CRT activism, and some of it is more subtle. I consulted at a private school in Maryland where a middle school teacher expressed real frustration over his conversation with a parent. At the beginning of the school year, the parent asked him to only teach about the Black “good guys,” like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and not the “bad guys like Malcolm X.” The teacher has felt more constrained over what he can teach over the last few years, when this activism against teaching the full history of nonWhite people started. This same school in 2021–2022 became less aggressive in its approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion in fear of parental backlash. In 2021, I spoke to the National Conference of School Librarians’ annual conference, and the fear and frustration of these librarians was palpable. Many spoke of being in fear of losing their jobs simply by keeping the same diverse books on the shelves that they have always displayed. Some cried. Some said they were leaving the field of education entirely because of the stress they are now under. Like James, many teachers and librarians are leaving their profession at a time when, in a post-COVID-pandemic world, there is a major shortage of teachers and librarians, and this is all happening because leaders, parents, and educators want to teach lies about Black people. Critical race theory has become the catchphrase for anything related to protesting racial injustice, so now in some schools, you can talk about Dr. King’s “dream” but not talk about the nightmare he lived through. You can talk in other school districts about Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in Major

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League Baseball but not discuss the discrimination that made the Negro League necessary in the first place. In Arkansas, you might lose your job if you talk about the racism surrounding the Little Rock Nine, even if you are teaching in the school they desegrated in 1957. The question I find myself asking more frequently is, How far do faux-CRT protesters want to take their fight? I find myself thinking about Hitler. What would removing Hitler from the history books look like? Would our books only write about the actions of then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt without talking about the evil he helped to end and the millions of Jewish and other people liberated? Would we only talk about the heroism of the Greatest Generation and ignore the stories of sexual assault on European women by American soldiers? The list is endless, but the main point is that we ultimately do our students a disservice when we do not teach a complete and intersectional picture of history. We must have an antiracist and proequity system of education that simply tells the truth. I have seen firsthand hundreds of educators across this country who know how to teach our full history without making any students feel guilty or responsible. I believe that any teacher who does indeed try to shame another group for the historical role their ancestors have played in human atrocities and oppression should not be teaching in the first place. Educators must teach students in a way that does not propagate lies about Black people or any other group. In reality, this truth is what many students today want, as well. A recent survey by Axios showed that across the board, college students, including more than half of college Republicans, believe that legislatures should not block the teaching of history in its totality. Moreover, most college students surveyed, including almost half of college Republicans, believe that teaching about institutional racism is necessary. In Pennsylvania, students protested the move by a school board to ban books and videos just featuring nonWhite people, like children’s books on Rosa Parks and Malala, and they won. This generation of students does not want to have history sugarcoated. As an American University professor, I have seen the anger in the eyes of students when they learn about aspects of history that they should have learned in their K–12 experience, such as how the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution did not fully ban slavery or that America had a non-White vice president in the 1930s, decades before Vice President Kamala Harris. We build a better America by raising a better-informed America, and that starts with teaching our full history in schools. Rather than cherry-pick history, we need to teach it all for the sake of our future. I will be very honest: I wish that what these fake activists were protesting was being taught in schools. I wish that the classrooms taught about the full breadth of ancient African kingdoms. I wish they taught about the full brutality of slavery. I wish they taught about Black inventors, scholars, and leaders. I

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wish they taught how America could not be the great nation it is without the (often unpaid) labor of Black people. Teach it all! When I learned my history at a deeper level, I began to excel at Boston Latin School. I became president of the student council and the Afrikan Kultural Society (I changed it to Afrikan Kultural because words in the African languages I have studied generally do not us the letter c for the k sound). I ran for senior class president, and some of the same White students who had no problems when I was acting a fool decided to wear White sheets on their heads in protest of my candidacy. This occurred in the “civilized” northeast coast of the United States—in the 1990s. I wonder if that small history at Boston Latin School could be taught there today in the age of faux-CRT activism. Before I close this chapter, I want to share the story of the Boundary County Library in Idaho. This library was once called the “best small public library in America.”15 In 2022, armed people showed up to library board meetings trying to get more than four hundred books banned that deal with either race or LGBTQ+ issues. The problem is that the library did not have many of the books in question. I repeat, the library did not have the books that these activists were fighting to ban. Director of the library Kimber Glidden resigned due to the threats she received, including armed people showing up in front of her home with “guns on their hips [and] bible tracts in their hands.”16 The library was considered a risky insurance liability because of the activism directed toward it and was closed. The library board meetings had to be moved to a larger facility near the sheriff’s office to accommodate the activists who had been attending, including Val Thompson. Val Thompson is a city council member for Bonners Ferry. In an interview with CNN in September 2022, she was asked why she is against books like Who Was Fredrick Douglass?, a children’s book by White female author April Jones Prince. The book is part of the New York Times best-selling Who HQ series, about prominent individuals of all backgrounds throughout history. Thompson told CNN, “Well I haven’t read Who Was Frederick Douglass?, but I’m assuming that there was something in it that was offensive or made someone feel guilty for being White. I have no idea.”17 In essence, all Thompson could see was a book with a Black man’s face on it, and it was enough for her to believe that the book should not be in that library, which in the real world should not be an issue because the book was not in the library! This is how the fight for the preservation of Whiteness works—remove anything that potentially paints a complete American history at all costs, even if it means showing up armed to libraries, which, once again, is happening across America. I close this chapter with a poem I wrote, “Critical Racist Theory.” I wrote it to speak to the challenges we face today with faux but very dangerous anti-CRT activism across the country:

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I guess we can’t teach why Native Americans shed tears on that trail I guess we can’t teach why Japanese Americans were interned in those camps and jailed I guess we can’t teach why Jews fleeing the Holocaust came to America And were forced to reverse sail I guess we can’t teach about those who had their rights stalled at Stonewall As they cried and wailed Too many in America caught up in ignorance and denial They’d rather have you forget history than learn about its tribulations and trials They’d rather not teach you the history so White folks don’t feel guilty They think White kids will only see themselves as evil and filthy But where were your laws when I was learning about me? When my history books taught that I only came from slavery? When my mathematics classes left out Black contributions? When my science classes left out our contributions to evolution? When my classes talked about America’s hopes and intentions But didn’t lift my hopes by teaching me about Black inventions? You don’t think I felt guilty? Like 3/5 of a man? When y’all taught that I was only civilized when you brought me to this land? —Nubia— But I ain’t gonna be selfish, it ain’t just my history dismissed Cause I can talk about Latino, Asian, Indigenous, and Jewish Cause y’all wanna exclude the Chinese exclusion acts from the books You don’t wanna know about all Latinos labeled as Chicanos . . . and crooks And even though there are White Muslims, that narrative won’t work Cause y’all wanna teach that Muslims are just terrorists who murder and hurt You don’t wanna teach Islamic contributions to science and math You don’t wanna teach about Native American soldiers present and past But maybe at the end of the day we’re all fools Arguing about something that isn’t even taught in schools But to me CRT ain’t critical race theory It’s culturally relevant or culturally responsive teaching . . . hear me? For teachers teaching and reaching for the truth, your efforts, I applaud it For the rest of y’all, if you didn’t want history taught, why did y’all record it? But I digress because my faith in White students is stronger than yours I know they can handle full history and all of its flaws They can learn the evils of some White people ’cause those evils were defeated And when we teach them the history, they’re inspired to never repeat it I know that White kids aged 16–19 can handle 1619 Even White kids in elementary and preteens Because too many students get angry when they find out the truth About America’s complete history that wasn’t taught in their youth America can only be as good as its promise when we teach history in full So let’s support our teachers in teaching the truth in school!

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Activity: What Do You Really Believe? Reflect on stories told about White people and whether you still believe them to be true. Do you believe that White people are just better with money or make better leaders? Do you believe that White people are naturally smarter than every other group? Do you believe that White people are more or less violent than other groups? Whatever it is, write whether your views on these issues have changed and how (even if it was before reading this book).

MY ANTIRACIST JOURNEY: COURTNEY CLARK

Courtney Clark is a forty-two-year-old Black female educator with twenty-two years of experience in the field. Growing up, she was taught that Black people were “less inclined to succeed academically compared to their White counterparts because they were not as motivated and/or capable of achieving at the same level.” She was primarily taught these lies in schools and from other educators. Her collegiate experience exposed her to the truth about the intelligence of Black people. For Courtney, the biggest consequence of the lies she was told is the burden she has carried and the “limitations” she put on her own success. She writes, “I always approached educational experiences very timidly, afraid of failure and constantly thinking I was not good enough for any academic environment.” She always believed she was “given a handout” regarding the schools she had access to. She continues, I always felt that that someone was doing me/my family a favor by allowing me to attend a magnet elementary school, then a magnet high school—even though I had to apply. And even though I always achieved high academic success, I never believed I earned my place. I was directly told that my high school and college placement was part of fulfilling a quota—after being discouraged from applying to high-ranking institutions by teachers and counselors.

Courtney’s experiences are the reason she has stayed involved in education for so long; she wants to show others like her “that they do have the potential and to help remove the stereotypes that surround Black children even today.” By doing this, she is hopeful that her own children “can navigate society without the burden or thought of not being good enough.” She holds that educators “need to continue the work of being intentional about understanding all students they teach, the cultural implications of academic success, and do more to dismantle the stereotypes that surround Black children—explicit teaching for all educators on the history of schooling in America particularly.” Despite the challenges she faced, Courtney is optimistic. She holds that “there’s hope that with each day things get a little better as we move through the impact of our racial reckoning, yet we have a long way to go for real change and to move closer towards racial equality.”



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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

BLACK INTELLIGENCE Real or Artificial?

I once spoke to a group of well-to-do White high school students at a national conference. Despite the fact that I have studied at Harvard, MIT, Morehouse, and Princeton; despite the fact that I had spoken (at that time) in about 20 countries; and despite the fact that I’d been on television in more than 150 countries, one student proudly proclaimed to everyone when I walked in the room, “Hey y’all! We got a pimp in the house!” In my head, I turned around to look for the pimp. They were all looking at me! Despite my vast education and experiences, all these students saw was a pimp, which appears nowhere in my bio. The student saw rapper in my bio and immediately likened me to rappers like Snoop Dogg, who have often adopted the persona of a pimp. Too many in the United States believe that successful Black people are only smart enough to be athletes or entertainers. It is this type of thinking that led to TV host Laura Ingraham telling legendary basketball players LeBron James and Kevin Durant to “shut up and dribble” on her Fox show in 2018.1 For many of us, most of the first ten famous living Black people who come to mind are probably entertainers, as explained earlier. This lie affects so many areas in our community, such as our public school system, where too many Black students are encouraged by teachers and staff to pursue athletics over advanced-placement and honors courses. This mentality funnels its way down to Black students, who often equate academic success with being or acting like a White person. I find myself often thinking about America’s history of great inventors. Growing up in Boston Public Schools, I was taught about inventors like Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Graham Bell. The genius of White America was so ingrained in me that my default belief for inventions was that a White person created it. Toward the end of elementary school and going into middle school, I started to learn more about Black inventors. I wrote earlier 142

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about the way enslaved Black people were not able to receive credit for their inventions because they were not allowed to file patents. However, there were free Black men who filed patents as early as Thomas L. Jennings in 1821, who was the first Black man to file for a patent for a dry-cleaning method. Other Black inventors of the time include Benjamin Banneker, who (among many other creations) made a wooden clock that told accurate time to the second for more than forty years; George Peake, who created a hand mill for grinding corn; and James Forten, who created a device to aid ship sails. Judy Reed was the first Black woman to receive a patent for a dough kneader and roller in 1884. (The next time you knead that dough, thank a Black woman!) As I continued to read outside my school curriculum, I was simply dumbfounded by the inventions credited to Black people. Did you know that a Black woman named Sarah Boone improved the ironing board in 1892 or that Mary Van Brittan Brown cocreated the first home security system in 1966? What about the gas mask or the three-light traffic signal that you (hopefully) stopped at today, both of which have saved the lives of millions of people over the years? You can credit Garrett Morgan for those inventions in 1914 and 1923, respectively. Have any frozen foods been delivered to your home? Thank Frederick McKinley Jones for the refrigerated truck in 1940. Did those elevator doors slide open for you so effortlessly at work today or in your building at home? Thank Alexander Miles, who created the automatic elevator doors in 1887. I could continue with more inventions, from the modern-day microphone, toilet-paper holder, and the golf tee to the Super Soaker water gun, the ice cream scooper, and the technology at the foundation of the cell phone, but hopefully by now you get the point. I have learned so much about Black inventions outside my school curriculum that I am now inclined to think that any invention I see in the United States was created by a Black person before I think of anyone else. In addition to inventions, there are of course great contributions to the worlds of science and medicine from Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, who performed the first successful heart surgery in 1893, to Dr. Kizzmekia S. Corbett, who was a leader in the creation of the COVID-19 vaccine. I don’t know about you, but learning about these stories makes me walk with my head a little higher. It reverses the cultural conditioning Joe Madison spoke of. I look at these inventions and think about these scientific achievements, and I smile knowing that people who look like me made great contributions to this country in addition to our centuries of free physical labor. When I share these stories with my children and other children I speak to, their faces light up with pride. As happy as I am to see their reactions, I also become frustrated because this knowledge should be mainstream, not just to Black Americans, but everyone else in this country, as well.

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It is very easy to insult a people’s intelligence if you have never learned of their intelligence. Whenever I see the twice-impeached former president Trump or Tucker Carlson and their ilk criticize Representative Maxine Waters or MSNBC hosts Joy-Ann Reid and Tiffany Cross, their intelligence is usually among the first lines of attack. Trump was quick to refer to Waters and others as “low IQ.”2 In addition to the racism behind the birther attacks, many Trump acolytes demanded to see Obama’s Harvard transcripts, similar to the demand for Justice Jackson’s LSAT scores. The stereotype of unintelligent Black people is contrasted with the stereotype of Asian Americans being too intelligent. While we still debate Black intelligence past and present, the ideas of anti-Blackness are the foundation for racism in our futuristic space, as well, particularly in the tech industry and artificial intelligence. At a Dragon-con sci-fi convention in an Atlanta Marriott hotel, a Black man named T. J. Fitzpatrick attempted to get soap from the automated soap dispenser. It did not work for him. He asked his friend Larry to test out the dispenser. The soap was dispensed. Larry is White. The video about the “racist soap dispenser” went viral. And while there have been various theories put forth about how this occurred, like increasing sensor and infrared-light sensitivity, this issue exposed a much larger problem of dark skin and technology. According to journalist Max Plenke, stories began to surface about the Xbox Kinect system, which did not recognize the face of dark-skinned gamers; a Black man and White woman exposed a Hewlett-Packard issue where the Black man was not tracked by facial-recognition software; a Google photo auto-labeling system identified two Black people as gorillas; and Flickr’s auto-tagging feature identified Black males as apes and animals. Plenke concludes his article, It remains a mystery why all these pieces of software are having a hard time acknowledging African-Americans as people who play video games or need soap, especially since . . . the pigment differences probably weren’t enough to throw the sensor out of whack. But when it results in computers only being able to identify a certain percentage of the people who use them, it goes beyond just being a viral video and becomes an issue that needs addressing.3

Earlier in 2022, scientists created a program that allowed for robots to scan faces and place labels on them. The robots consistently labeled the blocks with Black people’s faces as criminals. Furthermore, the artificial intelligence algorithm continually labeled Black women and Latinas as homemakers and Black men and Latinos as janitors. The final report, “Robots Enact Malignant Stereotypes,” concludes that “sexist biases baked into artificial intelligence systems can translate into robots that use them to guide their operations.”4 One of the main reasons that these issues continue to occur is because the tech industry

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is overwhelmingly composed of White males; therefore, the idea of conducting sensory tests on darker skin was never a consistent part of their policies and practices. In futuristic television shows and movies like The Jetsons, Minority Report, Robocop, Avengers: Age of Ultron, The Terminator, Star Trek, and Star Wars, artificial intelligence is portrayed as a great equalizer until it’s not and has to be reined in. In many instances in these movies, the AI fails because it becomes increasingly violent and targets the wrong people. Clearly, if artificial intelligence is based on racist ideas and practices, then the AI will simply create a more technologically proficient form of racism. As supply chain management professor Zac Stewart Rogers states, “With coding, a lot of times you just build the new software on top of the old software. . . . So, when you get to the point where robots are doing more . . . and they’re built on top of flawed roots, you could certainly see us running into problems.”5 The “flawed root” is racism. The report speaks about cases of biased AI in crime-prediction programs that mistakenly targeted Black and Latino people for crimes they did not commit. In the case of misidentification of Black men as criminals, scientists state, “The robots should not have responded, because they were not given information to make that judgment, yet Black men were chosen at a 9% higher rate than White men.”6 While some may see this as an extreme issue, the report speaks about how technology bias can manifest itself in more simple ways. Andrew Hundt, a lead researcher on the study, asks us to imagine a “scenario when robots are asked to pull products off the shelves. In many cases, books, children’s toys and food packaging have images of people on them. If robots trained on certain AI were used to pick things, they could skew toward products that feature men or White people more than others.”7 His colleague Vicky Zeng of Johns Hopkins University asserts that at-home robots “could be asked by a kid to fetch a ‘beautiful’ doll and return with a White one.”8 Researchers insist that technology companies must audit the algorithms they use and fix flawed behavior. I would add the companies also need to fix the deep and historic flaw of non-White representation at tech companies. In November 2022, I was honored to speak at the DEI Innovation Summit, convened by Catalyze Tech. Catalyze Tech is composed of major companies with tech platforms, from Netflix, Price Waterhouse Cooper, and Apple, to Spotify, Twitter, and Uber. They issued the ACT Report, which pledges to address systemic racism in the tech industry and make DEI a priority through four major steps: (1) modeling and incentivizing inclusive leadership; (2) operationalizing DEI throughout their businesses; (3) sharing DEI data, metrics, and goals; and (4) transforming pathways into tech for underrepresented staff.9 These UPstanding steps by tech companies address the serious issue of representation. The ACT Report calls for tech industries to deepen their

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commitment to DEI with an approach that is “holistic, collective, and longterm.”10 Though the report acknowledges some progress in DEI, it also holds that “tech companies are too often reduced to poaching each other’s talent from underrepresented groups”11 and calls for a paradigm shift. The shift calls on tech companies to be more inclusive and have a “systemic response to a systemic problem” and early interventions, such as “tackling educational inequity . . . and increasing access to computer science education specifically.”12 What I truly appreciate is the report’s special note to CEOs: “Simply handing this report over to the Chief Diversity Officer (CDO) or DEI team, should they exist, is not enough.”13 They call on leaders to take ownership by (1) engaging with DEI at a personal (not just personnel) level, (2) resourcing DEI, and (3) establishing accountability mechanisms and rewards. I talk about the tech industry and the call to action from Catalyze Tech because the approach needs to be adopted by all types of organizations, from schools and government organizations to corporations and religious institutions. Also, there is a connection to the challenges of artificial intelligence and the faux-CRT activism that must be recognized, as well. Psychologist Susan Linn was very direct in speaking on AI and racism: “That devices feed racist and sexist misinformation to adults is terrible enough. . . . I worry even more about what’s being fed to children, including the very young, who are also exposed to—and influenced by—tech-delivered misinformation about race.”14 She is concerned that as educators are being censored on what they can discuss, as librarians are being intimidated and censored at best or fired at worst for diversifying their bookshelves, and as more books continue to be banned (more than 2,500 to date in thirty-two states), AI is quickly taking the place of educational instruction. Linn states that these “trusted custodians of student learning” are “simultaneously being replaced by profit-driven devices.”15 Linn writes that educational technology is a $35.8 billion industry and that digital assistants are already replacing adult educators in the classroom in various fields. They are, among other things, “teaching academic subjects, reading stories, helping with homework, singing lullabies, and answering all sorts of questions.” She says they are “marketed today as able to act ‘like a friend,’ develop ‘young minds through education,’ ‘be a child’s mentor,’ or both ‘nurture their emotional and interaction skills’ and ‘build healthy relationship skills.’”16 Given that AI has proven to be racist in too many instances, is this really the solution? In a chilling example, Linn asked Amazon’s Echo Dot a simple question: “What are African American girls?” The response? Alexa told Linn, “According to Georgetown.edu, . . . African American girls are the fastest growing segment of the juvenile justice system.” She then asked Alexa, “What are African

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American boys?” Alexa responded, “According to Edweek.org, . . . the majority of the boys are African American, and many are struggling readers/learners.”17 Linn asserts that Black children who hear responses like these will have a seed of inferiority planted in them and that non-Black children will also have a seed of inferiority about Black people planted inside them, and thus the cycle of lies about Black people continues. Who is going to help these children refute these responses, especially because children are often doing their homework without adults present to guide them? Furthermore, if adults who are present believe the same stereotypes because they either have racist ideas themselves or are simply ignorant, then how can the lies ever fully be challenged? Linn explains that Google’s response to an accusation of racism was that Google simply reflects society’s biases. In essence, we are in a chicken-or-egg mode as it relates to bias in AI, so AI is not solving the problem of challenging bias and stereotypes. AI is currently pushing the lies forward. While it is true that educators and librarians can also hold biases toward different groups, the educators and librarians who help students figure out how to find and process information are the best educators for our children. Committed adults in the classroom can aid students in becoming critical thinkers if they are indeed critical thinkers, as well. At my children’s elementary school, they used an inquiry-based form of education, so if my daughter asked what temperature it was outside, the teacher would ask her what she thinks the temperature is and why she thinks it is that temperature. Can AI do that? We are more likely to have teachers do this before AI catches up, but they cannot if they are not allowed in the classroom to even challenge their students, which is why the CRT protests and artificial intelligence issues are connected.

MY ANTIRACIST JOURNEY: MARIA JOY WRIGHT

Maria Wright is a forty-two-year-old White female architect. She has been an architect for almost twenty years. She was never told any lies about Black people by anyone who was important in her life. Her parents had Black friends, and she was exposed to positive Black role models in her neighborhood. Her dad, being a Navy football coach, also exposed her to many social experiences with Black people. Whenever someone uttered lies about Black people, her parents were quick to correct them. Her mom was so adamant about not tolerating ignorance that she would leave the homes of Maria’s aunts and uncles if they made inappropriate comments. Maria was taught that “people that spread lies about Black people were not respectable or they were uneducated or probably both!” Through her answers I found myself thinking, “Where are we with human cloning because we need more parents like that!” but I digress. Many of the lies Wright was told about Black people occurred in public school. She recalls teachers being more “dismissive” toward Black students than toward White students. The first time she witnessed open racism was during Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, when she was in her twenties. The only thing that upset her more than the lies was the way in which people were not shunned for spreading those lies. Despite this, Wright continued into her adulthood believing that racism was on the decline, but she admits she was naïve, given what is happening in society today. Wright has always been intentional about placing herself in diverse experiences. After college, she lived above a bodega on 128th Street in Harlem and “felt more comfortable there than in an upper-class White area.” When she moved to Takoma Park, Maryland, she chose a street to live on because of its racial diversity. She firmly believes that having “Black friends, coaches, and teachers, have made me a much better person than I would be without them in my life.” Because of her relationship with the Black community, she no longer talks to some of her cousins because of the lies they believe and share about Black people. She believes that one way to counter the ignorance we see today is “to start younger with race education. We need to be able to discuss White privilege and critical race theory without people losing their minds over it. We need to vote overtly racist politicians out of every level of government.” Lastly, she thinks we need to “fix all of our institutions that were built on racist ideas.” As I reflected on Maria’s interview, I wondered how open-minded she would have been to Black people if it was not for her parents, so it made me want to speak to her father, whom you will hear from later!

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

ANTI-BLACKNESS IS GLOBAL

You don’t know what you don’t know You can’t lead where you don’t go If you don’t read, you won’t G.R.O.W. I know It can feel hard to work together It can be hard to fight to make our lives better But it’s worth it We have so many hidden commonalities, but we can unearth it If we choose to trust each other before suspicion If we choose to take America’s promise and give it a new rendition We can show the world how to multiply unity where there’s division Where people wanna subtract our culture, you can bring addition We can bring acceptance where there’s derision To lead or to follow, what’s your decision? We need to fight all forms of hate with surgical precision But we can only do that if we really want to heal To be UPstanders and not bystanders kicking down doors of hate with our heels When I accept you and you accept me, I love how that feels So let’s commit to love and learn about one another for real!

The international power of ignorance and anti-Black racism is global. In the

early 2000s, I took a group of Black teenage dancers from Boston to South Africa for a tour I called Empowerment through the Arts, in partnership with the OrigiNation Cultural Arts Center. It was ten full days of learning dance, teaching dance, and learning about South Africa’s tragic history of apartheid. My parents involved us in the fight to end apartheid since we were children. I remember posting up signs in Boston to “Free Mandela” as young as seven years old, as well as learning about great activists like Steve Biko and others. I



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was taught that the fight to end apartheid was my fight, too, as a Black person on this planet. While every day was full of impactful learning experiences, nothing prepared us for the hands-on learning experience we encountered on one rainy Wednesday afternoon. We decided to take a trip to the Apartheid Museum. Despite many prior visits to South Africa, I had never visited the museum. The museum captures the essence of that dreadful and inhumane experience. Unfortunately, my young daughter was in a fussy mood, which led my wife and me to finish our tour a bit early. While waiting on the bus, my sister Muadi came out of the museum nearly in tears and signaled me to get off the bus. What she told me next will hopefully enrage you as much as it enraged me. It speaks not only to lies about Black people told in the United States but also lies told worldwide about the Black experience. While walking through the museum, there is a larger-than-life image of Black men being strip-searched. Muadi noticed several White South African high school female students observing the photo. One of them said to her friends, “Wow, cute butts!” She then proceeded to rub her fingers across the behinds of these men, much to the amusement of her friends. Muadi lost it. She spent the rest of her museum visit “enlightening” the girls about their ignorance, but these girls felt very free to continue with their boorish behavior. They called one of our Black students a dog and made symbols with their fists as if they were going to attack us. Once they got behind their chaperones, they began singing MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This.” I thought I should have a word with the two White female chaperones of these fifteen or so White high school female students. The story only gets “curiouser and curiouser” from there. I politely asked a chaperone if I could talk to her about what had transpired, but she refused to talk to me until she got her girls behind the Black security guards from the museum. Once they were “secure,” she proceeded to tell me that what they did was no big deal and that the girl was just touching the behinds, not trying to stick her finger in the behinds. By this time, my other sisters Musau and Shaumba were out along with one of my best friends Malik, and a massive debate ensued about the teachable moments these chaperones had denied these students. The students in our care also started to leave the museum, and several were in tears. One of them tried to assault one of the White students, and we had to hold her back. It was at that point that all my attempts at diplomacy went out of the window, and I had some choice words for their group. The White students and their chaperones were rushed to their vans (protected by South African employees of the museum) and quickly departed but not before they could feel a small percentage of the Black rage that those men must have felt being strip-searched, just like Black men in Boston during the Charles Stuart case, and having it photographed. These White students were all

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comfortable to thingify the Black men in this picture, and their chaperones condoned it. Would they have done something like this in the Holocaust Museum? I doubt it, but I can assure that if they did, my sisters and I would have challenged them there, too. The ride back to our hotel was the worst part of the trip for the teenagers. Most of us were in tears. Though our high school and college-aged youth were all from Boston, this was their first major experience with racism. No stranger to a Klan mask or two myself, I was also incensed that going into the new millennium, this generation of young people were not fully aware of the fight against racism needed today. In a so-called postracial society, as many stated during this time, when Senator Obama was running for president of the United States, all this talk of the past was no longer necessary. What made those girls so comfortable in the shell of their ignorance? Why is it that, according to my friend and guide, legendary artist and activist Napo Masheane, most older Blacks (twenty and up) exit the museum in frustration, while most Whites she sees leave the museum with smiles and probably wondering what they are having for dinner? Lastly, why is it that most youth of all ages, races, and nationalities leave the museum with a sense of indifference? Quite honestly, until that incident occurred, some of our own students were bored on this trip. Even some young Black South African students came out of the museum as if they were visiting a museum of Greek antiquity, instead of a place representing their own parents’ experience. That has a great deal to do with how they are taught their own history in South African schools, similar to what we experience in the educational system of the United States. Around the world, Black people are still being dehumanized based on lies told about us, and new generations of people are picking up on the hate. Hatred against Black people is on the rise not only in the United States but also in every country where extremism is on the rise or at least tolerated. Racism against Black people also persists in countries where White people are not in power, such as Brazil, where the largest number of Black people live outside of any country after Nigeria, because anti-Black racism persists from their ­lighter-skinned leaders in power. In chapter 1, I establish that modern-day racism was constructed in large part to justify slavery. It would be naïve of us to think that there is any postracial country in the world, especially in a world where misinformation and disinformation about Black people is on the rise. If we do not prepare young Black people especially for the world they are inheriting, they will be in for a rude awakening, just like our youth were in South Africa. Similar to what we witness today with the demonization of Black Lives Matter activists as “terrorists,” we see that antiBlack violence is increasing under the false notion that Black people are and will be violent, so preemptive actions are needed, even if it means murder.

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I worked on campaigns to free Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners throughout southern Africa as a child growing up in the 1980s and 1990s. I also remember during that time that the African National Congress was viewed as a terrorist organization by many American politicians who embraced the racism of the White South African government. As much as we celebrate the late president Nelson Mandela, we should be mindful of the fact that he remained on a “no-fly” list to the United States even after he became president of South Africa. He stayed on the list as president for five years, from 1994 to 1999. Whenever he did appear in the United States, he had to get a “special waiver” to enter, as did all ANC members, even though they were the ruling party in South Africa. So yes, a former Nobel Peace Prize winner and first Black president of South Africa had to obtain special permission to travel freely to the United States because of a racist, decades-old policy of labeling him, the ANC, and other antiapartheid activists as terrorists, although to many of us in America and around the world, they were freedom fighters. Anti-Black racism is global today because it is rooted in examples like the apartheid era in southern Africa. As Marcus Garvey said, if we do not know our history, we are doomed to repeat it.

MY ANTIRACIST JOURNEY: MUADI BIJIMBA DIBINGA

Muadi Dibinga is a fifty-six-year-old Congolese American organizational consultant and life coach. Growing up, society told her that “Black people were lazy and intellectually inferior.” When I asked her specifically who told her this, she said plainly, “American media.” Luckily, she knew this was false based on the teachings of our parents. Because of our upbringing, Muadi states quite emphatically, “I never bought into the lies, so I did not suffer any consequences.” The life coach in Muadi won’t allow her to accept or make any excuses. She knows America’s history of racism more than most but believes fully that her ancestors fought and endured for her to be here, so she revels in their greatness as she walks in her own greatness. She clearly acknowledges, however, that these lies persist today and believes that nothing can be done to change it on a systemic scale and that racism will only shift (not end) when White people become the minority in the United States. To me, if her statement that nothing can be done systemically to change racism is true, then the work to change America can only be conducted on an individual level. That means you. That means me. That means we!



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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

BE A LEADer!

Read this affirmation out loud and with passion! There can only be one me! There was no me before me! There will be no me after me! And since I’m the only me! That the world will see! I will be the best me! That I can be!

In every chapter of this book, I detail the problems that lies about Black people have created for not just Black people but also society in general. Throughout these chapters, I sprinkle in solutions and strategies for combatting these lies. I spend the rest of this book going deeper on solutions, as well as celebrating UPstanders against racism, past and present. Some of these chapters provide solutions in the educational, government, and corporate spaces. Every chapter provides ideas you can act on in your personal life as well, which is the first place you can start. I asked you to read this affirmation aloud, and I ask you to say it regularly because doing this work will require no less than your best self. And while it is true that on some days, we may not be able to bring our best work and our best selves to the table, bringing our best selves at all times must be the goal if we are to be successful in combatting racism. The supporters of racism and racist ideas bring their “best” selves to their activism. We must do the same and more! Let’s go! I love acronyms. One acronym I love to share is LEAD: listen, educate, advocate, and decide. I am also fond of saying that LEAD stands for Learn Everything and Do! If you learn everything and don’t, then you are not a leader. You simply possess knowledge, but knowledge is not power. The application

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of knowledge is where real power comes into play, so let’s talk about how to listen, educate, advocate, and decide, so we can fully combat racist stereotypes.

LISTEN I have heard and read many stories, articles, and books about what White people need to do right now. Many stories talk about the need for White people to be allies to marginalized communities and commit to more listening to the serious issues these communities face. That is mostly true (more on allyship later), but there are two points that need to be added: how to listen and what to do after Whites listen. I have heard for years that White people will only listen to other White people and they need to have their own conversations. While I do believe that White people need to do more among each other to further the work to end racism, as Robin DiAngelo speaks about in her powerful book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism,1 we must ask what would happen if people like Dr. King believed he could not speak to White people. With that, I am going to share my thoughts on how White people need to listen and what to do after listening. You cannot challenge lies if you are not willing or able to be a constructive listener. The world-renowned motivational speaker Les Brown once said to me that we have two ears and one mouth and that we should use them in proportion. So the first step in listening is to truly commit to not responding to every point brought up by Black people who are speaking up about racism. For example, when I conduct my trainings on Black boys in our educational system, I have been told by White educators that the issue isn’t race; it’s either class, gender, or something else entirely. Are you someone who is quick to say you want to listen but then shoot down the arguments made by the person you claim to be listening to? There is a difference between listening to what you want to hear and what the person speaking must and often needs to say. So rather than listen to correct, listen to respect. Rather than listen to analyze, listen to empathize. Rather than listen to teach, listen to learn. After you listen, acknowledge the words shared with you, and acknowledge what you did not know. You don’t lose anything by being honest. I’ve had multiple conversations with White people who have said things like “I really didn’t understand until I saw that video of George Floyd being killed” or “I really thought we had turned a corner once Obama was elected” or “I don’t know what to do as a White person right now” after the killings of nine Black people in Mother Emmanuel AME Church or the ten Black people slain in the TOPS supermarket

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in Buffalo. Many of us who do this work in the Black community get frustrated by these comments, but I have also heard these and similar comments from Black people who thought those days were behind us. We must accept people for what they know and when they know it, but then it is time for education.

EDUCATE Once you believe that you have become a better (and continual) listener, it is important that you commit to educating yourself on the issues outlined in this book and more. The father of critical race theory, Derrick Bell, states in his seminal book Faces at the Bottom of the Well, Genuine service requires humility. We must first recognize and acknowledge (at least to ourselves) that our actions are not likely to lead to transcendent change and may, indeed, despite our best efforts, be of more help to the system we despise than to the victims of that system whom we are trying to help. Then, and only then, can that realization, and the dedication based on it, lead to policy positions and campaigns that are less likely to worsen conditions for those we are trying to help and more likely to remind the powers that be that out there are persons like us who are not only not on their side but determined to stand in their way.2

These words resonate with me daily. I spoke to a White substitute teacher who said that the kids in her majority-Black school need structure, so she makes sure that they are constantly doing work. I told her that she can give them as much work as she wants, but the aphorism “Kids don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care” does indeed ring true. She pushed back about the need for structure, structure, and more structure. What I would have told her if we did not run out of time was that prisons often have a great deal of structure, as well. Indeed, research has shown that in many schools, the classroom and school structure overall prepare students for bids in prison. I believe this teacher was well intentioned, but her best efforts could indeed create bigger problems for the students she is trying to save, for lack of a better term. You owe it to the communities you are working with to learn as much as possible. You can start with the citations in this book, where you can find videos, books, songs, documentaries, and more. You do us all a disservice if you come into this work and into this movement with unchallenged biases and ignorance. There is simply no excuse to be ignorant in this new millennium. Ignorance is a choice, be it from “diversity fatigue,” which I discuss later, or just a genuine disinterestedness in this work. As Dr. King stated, the two most dangerous things

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on the planet are sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. Both are equally dangerous. Educate yourself to have neither!

ADVOCATE Are you an activist or an act-as-if? What I mean by that is whether you only act as if you really care about combatting racism or are really committed to it. Many people talk the talk, but far fewer walk the walk. Do your actions start and end with posting #blacklivesmatter or making your social media profile black or replacing your image with the image of a recently slain Black person like Ahmaud Arbery? To be clear, actions like these can indeed inspire others to action, but most likely it will only result in some likes and reshares. We need more. What is the point of having all the information provided in this book and elsewhere if you are not going to apply it in the spaces you occupy? If you believe that the full history of America must be taught, then are you showing up to the school board meetings for your community? If you really believe that there is a problem with policing, then are you active in voting for your county sheriff? Are you meeting with your police chief to discuss community policing? If you believe that there are disparities in our health system, then are you working to reduce those inequities? Is your religious institution engaged in fighting ignorance and hate? Dr. King said that he would rather see a good sermon than hear one. This quotation is a call to action. What’s your sermon? Legendary football coach Vince Lombardi was known to say that the only place where the word success comes before the word work is in the dictionary. We can all talk a good game, but we must do the real work to win. The reason Professor Angela Davis and so many others use the term antiracist is because saying you are not racist is not enough. You must fight against it every single day. If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem. There is no middle ground!

DECIDE You must decide to be a partner and not just an ally. The next step after listening, educating, and advocating is to not take the patronizing mentality of “I’ll be your ally.” There is a certain level of arrogance that has developed with the term ally. We don’t need allies. We need partners. Allies help and go home. Partners work together for a common good. Allies go to the sporting venue to cheer on their team and go home after the win or loss. Partners are on the court as a player

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on the team and fight together for a common cause, win or lose. Moreover, they use their talents for the benefit of the team. The 1990s Chicago Bulls had superstars like Michael Jordan who could do anything on the court, but they also had shooting specialists like the Golden State Warriors’ coach Steve Kerr and rebounding specialist Dennis Rodman. Whether you are a writer, speaker, fundraiser, or something else, you have a role to play, but you must be a committed partner. Where do you fit in the stadium of effective partnering on your way to becoming a real partner? Every day you can work on being a LEADer. Every day you can educate yourself. What’s on your bookshelf? Who is on your podcast favorites? What documentaries are you watching? I speak on more of this later when I discuss the Rule of Seven. You must get out and learn so that you can engage the fight against racism and lies about Black people from an informed position. That way, after you decide to LEAD, you can simultaneously engage in the work needed to challenge racism, systemically and individually. Systemic work looks at ways you can challenge racism wherever it presents itself in society. Individual work looks (in part) at conversations you should be having with your neighbors, coworkers, and especially family members who espouse racist ideas right now. On May 31, 2020, NBC reporter Shomari Stone shared a powerful viral video of a George Floyd and Black Lives Matter student protest in front of the White House at Lafayette Park. Some protesters began to jump the barrier, and the police engaged them. One Black student immediately knelt on both knees with his phone in hand, possibly to record the interaction. As the police in full riot gear got close to the young man, a White female student immediately jumped between the officers and the Black male student. She covers him as the police continue to push forward and the video ends with the students stomach to stomach with their hands up. A Twitter user named @kingmonteiro2 (real name Monte) stated that he was the student in the video and posted more of the confrontation where he is yelling at the officers that they should be standing with him. Monte said that he indeed knows the student who stood in front of him but smartly did not share her name online. That White female student is the exact definition of an UPstander. She was not an act-as-if. She was an activist. She was not an ally. She was a partner with Monte in their activism. She understood in 2020 what Dr. King said in the 1960s: None of us are free until all of us are free! Now I understand that every partner may not choose to or are able to fight in this same way, but it does not mean you cannot fully commit! Les Brown often told a story in his motivational talks about the breakfast of bacon and eggs. He says that in order to have that breakfast made, the chicken was involved, but the pig was fully committed! The chicken just gave the eggs and moved on. The pig gave its life! (OK in reality, the life of the pig was taken, not offered,

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but I hope you get the point.) To combat racist stereotypes, you must be fully committed to fighting it however and wherever you can! I found several comments on the story of Monte and the Black Lives Matter protest, including “What’s worse? That she instinctively knew she had to step in to protect him, or that we all instinctively know it, too.” “This shit gave me tears.” “Dear fellow White people; do everything and anything necessary to protect and defend Black people from police and vigilante violence.” “This is both beautiful and heartbreaking at once.” So many people were conflicted because we loved the solidarity but so sad that it was necessary. I still find myself wondering what it would be like if every White person engaged in or initiated just one UPstanding act a day on a path to challenging racist stereotypes in the spaces they occupy. Too many are silent on the issues of stereotypes, race, and racism. There are so many ways to take action in this book. Deciding not to decide is indeed a decision, and your silence is compliance. On Saturday, October 8, 2022, Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville spoke at a mostly White rally with twice-impeached former president Trump. Tuberville stated Democrats are “not soft on crime. . . . They’re pro-crime. They want crime. They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparation because they think the people that do the crime are owed that. Bullshit!”3 He received thunderous applause. If you were in the audience, would you applaud? Would you be silent? Would you call out the people applauding or maybe even leave the rally? The only group seeking reparations in large numbers in the United States is the Black community, so we know exactly whom he was talking about. This was a racist statement from a man who is only famous because of the blood, sweat, and concussions Black student athletes suffered for him as a legendary football coach at the University of Mississippi and Auburn University. Legendary news anchor Dan Rather was an UPstander and immediately called it “straight up racism.”4 Members of the Republican Party dodged responding, including Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, who said on Meet the Press that he simply “wouldn’t say it the same way. . . . That’s not the way I present things. . . . But got to be honest that we have a crime problem in our country.”5 Silence like this is compliance!

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Maggie Haberman is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist with the New York Times who has interviewed former president Trump probably more than anyone who works for a more “liberal”-leaning outlet. While promoting her book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, she was asked by Deadline: White House MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace if Trump was a racist. Her response: “He says and does racist things over a very long period of time. I don’t know how else you would define it.”6 She made the same statement in multiple interviews including with Don Lemon. The inability to directly call out racism is a main reason that racism persists. You must decide today, if you have not already, that you are going to confront lies and racism wherever they are found. The modern-day Republican Party is too busy embracing racism as a campaign technique and partnering with White supremacists. If you are a Republican, are you calling out the members of your party? Republican or not, if you are in the presence of racist ideas or witness racist actions and decide to do nothing, you are part of the proliferation of racism. As I have stated before, there is no middle ground. A great example of someone who decided in recent times to be an UPstander and not a bystander in the face of racism is Doreen Osumi of the Yuba Unified School District. In October 2022, a news story of River Valley High School students imitating a slave auction went viral. The seventeen-second TikTok video showed students pointing, laughing, and bidding on three Black male students in their underwear. There are so many areas that I could write about in this book on this issue: my reaction as a Black father if I saw my own children doing this; the fact that the video showcased not only White students but Latino students, as well, participating; and the concern that videos like these are becoming more commonplace as Black history is minimized or outright banned in our schools. Instead, I focus on the UPstander in this story. Superintendent Osumi issued a statement, which partially read, Re-enacting a slave sale as a prank tells us that we have a great deal of work to do with our students so they can distinguish between intent and impact. . . . They may have thought this skit was funny, but it is not; it is unacceptable and requires us to look honestly and deeply at issues of systemic racism. . . . The recording clearly demonstrates that this situation was orchestrated and organized, which underscores my concern that students spent time contemplating this terrible act without the slightest regard that this action is hateful and hurtful. . . . They may argue that it was a joke, and they intended no harm, but the fact is that this is not only harmful, it is disgraceful.7

Superintendent Osumi and the staff in her district and at River Valley High School who are part of forfeiting this school’s football season are UPstanders.

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The response was swift and immediate. I am not going to go and try to assume what Osumi’s race is based on pictures because her race does not matter. Osumi is a human being responding with her power to a mockery of a dehumanizing experience for millions of people. She and the powers involved could have taken the attitude that the season was almost over, or the kids were just being kids, but she said no. There must be consequences, as well as teachable moments from situations like these. I am sure there are parents of juniors and seniors who will verbalize their anger that their sons’ season ended abruptly and how it affected their college prospects. I am sure there are faux-CRT activists who use this as fuel for their fake fires. Osumi and her team saw an injustice and acted. That is UPstanding behavior! I was invited to a private high school during the Obama presidency a few years ago to engage in a series of events. I was set to speak with staff, students, and parents at separate events relating to being an UPstander and not a bystander. I spoke to the head of school before my event; I’ll call him Jim. He recounted the story of a senior who took a cardboard life-size cutout of Obama and hung it from a noose. Jim did not expel the student but decided that the student could not walk the stage at graduation. The student’s parents were furious. They pulled their other children from the school and went on an active campaign to have him fired. Some other parents joined in actively blocking any of Jim’s efforts on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Again, this was before I spoke. During the first day of my visit to the school, I had very successful talks with students, parents, and staff. I received rave reviews from all three groups. Some parents even came to the later student presentation in part because they were inspired by my talk with them in the morning. I’m sure some came to ensure I was giving an acceptable message to their children, which is understandable, as well. The day was a smashing success. I even met members of the board in the evening. I was set to come back a few weeks later. Unfortunately, the group that tried to get Jim fired began protesting my presence. They found video clips of my prior speeches and started circulating them to others. They brought their complaints to the board. I received a call from Jim a few days later informing me that I was a “lightning rod” of controversy, and as such, I was “banned” from ever coming back to that school. I was floored but not surprised. Rather than take advantage of the teachable moments from the student’s racist actions and rather than work with the entire school to build a community that respects diversity, the more vocal parents and others who were a force for ignorance won the day, despite Jim’s efforts to be an UPstander. I often wonder what happened to the student who hung the cutout of President Obama. Did he learn from his racism? I wonder why so many students and parents could be bystanders to this. I know there were many good-natured

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members of that community who did nothing. Where would you have found yourself if you were part of that school community? Where have you found yourself in other examples of this at your home, in your schools, or in your workplace? Can you honestly say you are an UPstander and not a bystander? If you can be honest with yourself in admitting you have been a bystander, my hope is that some of the many steps I provide will aid you in becoming an UPstander and not a bystander. The steps will aid you in speaking up and being part of the solution and not the problem, but remember again that having the knowledge is not the power. The power comes from the application of knowledge! I saw a sign during the protests after the killing of Breonna Taylor that said, “White silence equals police violence,” and several spins on that. Whether you agree with that or not, it is indeed true that silence equals compliance. By not becoming an engaged listener, educating yourself, and speaking up when you witness ignorance or injustice, you are part of the problem. The great motivational speaker Les Brown stated that deciding not to decide is a decision. As you can see, this country needs an all-hands-on-deck approach. Where do you stand? How will you stand? We are working with or without you, but I believe that success is better together. The last part of this chapter aids you in deepening your commitment to the movement by giving you practical steps you can do right now with what you have. In too many of my presentations across the globe, one challenge I have seen is that people with whom I interact often ask me what books they need to read or what terminology they need to adopt in order to not make a mistake and be called out for being racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, homophobic, and more. While the concern is understandable, this is not the way to achieve true diversity, equity, and inclusion and definitely not a way to become antiracist and challenge the massive levels of ignorance, hate, and outright violence that we see today. It is more of a way to check off a box saying, “I did this, so I’m good.” I propose a simple but more in-depth measure of seeing how committed you are on your antiracist journey with the Rule of Seven. Rather than checking the box or reading an assigned book, the Rule of Seven is personal. The goal is to come up with seven questions that test your commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. I ask you to come up with seven questions because all of us can answer one or two questions that show we are committed to DEI. The more questions you ask, the harder it is for you to pass this test. If you do this on your own, then only you know the answers to these questions, and therefore only you know what you are supposed to do about it. The real question is, Do you have the will to really do something about it, or are you going to stay comfortable and not rock the boat? You can do this with a group of friends or even at your job. The goal is not to come up with an easy list. This should be a list that challenges you to become better on this journey.

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The reason the Rule of Seven can be powerful is because it speaks to what you have already done versus what you are doing and will commit to doing going forward. The seven questions could include 1. What do your seven closest friends look like (or the seven closest friends of your children)? 2. Who are the authors of the last seven books you read (or books bought for your children)? 3. What do your seven closest neighbors (in terms of proximity) look like? 4. What did your last seven teachers look like (or the current teachers of your children)? 5. What does the cast of the last seven shows and movies you have watched (or that your children watched) look like? 6. What did your last seven hires look like, or what do the seven closest members of your work team look like? 7. What do the last seven toys you bought for your kids look like? I could go into more detail about each question, but they are all ­selfexplanatory. If, for example, you’re White and all the answers to all or most of your questions is “White,” then you have more work to do. If you are Black and your answers are mostly “Black,” then you have work to do. If you are a member of one group, say AAPI, Native American, or Latino, and your responses to most of the questions are mostly “White,” then you also have some work to do! For those of you with children or students in your life, this is also important because you may be programming them in a way that reinforces a narrative of superiority or inferiority in their minds in the same way you may have been programmed. If this is too vague for you, that is the point. The goal is to challenge you to work on your own or with colleagues and friends to actively challenge your biases and do the work to diversify your experiences and practices. I can give you books, documentaries, glossaries, and TED talks for days. At the end of the day, however, you must do the work to challenge yourself on your thoughts and experiences with diversity, equity, and inclusion when no one is watching. Lastly, if you want to go to a deeper level, then spend time exploring why your neighbors and teachers all look the same or why you do not work with anyone who does not look (or think) like you. I speak to that in other chapters of this book to help you get started!

MY ANTIRACIST JOURNEY: VELMA PUANANI CRABBE PARKER

Velma Parker is a fifty-five-year-old health-care-outreach branch manager, a position she has held for eleven years. She describes herself as Hawaiian, Chinese, and Caucasian. Growing up, she was told, “Black people are poor and dangerous, on drugs or in gangs.” She primarily learned this from watching television, including the news. Given that she experienced her own stereotypes as a mixed-race person, Velma never fed into the stereotypes and focused on basing her experiences with different groups on her own personal experiences. Unfortunately, people in her community do not feel the same way. Velma is married to a mixed-Black man, and they have lived in a “very old” Asian neighborhood for nineteen years. Though she has lived on the same street her entire life in Hawaii and her neighbors are all the same, including children and grandchildren who are there now, some of her neighbors “don’t associate with [her and her husband] or act afraid” of them. In Hawaii, her husband is a general contractor. Whenever he goes to a job and the people inquiring about the work have an Asian or Hawaiian last name, they are always either disappointed or afraid to see a Black man emerging from the vehicle. She holds that the idea of Hawaii being a melting pot is a lie within itself. Velma is sad and even depressed when she thinks about the direction of America. She longs for a world where everyone contributes to building this nation rather than taking away from it. Velma believes television can go a long way in helping to change perceptions of Black people and different cultures in general. She has never felt as depressed about the future of America until Trump came to power. As a mixed-race person who can pass for a White person, Velma can’t imagine what it’s like to be a Black person and deal with the full brunt of American racism. Velma thinks that more people becoming mixed racially will help racism end, but she feels the “extreme conservative Right White people will fight to the death [to keep] everything in the US for their benefit.”

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IS YOUR ORGANIZATION ANTIRACIST?

When you sincerely do not believe, know, understand, or simply respect the

Black experience in America, none of your efforts will work to holistically better the experiences of Black people in America. This is true on an individual, community, company, and government-wide level. At best, what much of “progressive” America has done is simply check some boxes on new language, like BIPOC, and posted some Black Lives Matter lawn signs. To be clear, some progress has been achieved in the last few years, such as the election of the first Black and Asian vice president of the United States, the confirmation of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and the passing of the Emmett Till antilynching bill after more than two hundred attempts in the last one-hundred-plus years. In too many instances, however, lip service is fed to the importance of progress for the Black community. I saw this demonstrated most recently after the murder of George Floyd. The year 2020 has been called the year of America’s racial reckoning by some. It’s been called a time when movements for racial and social justice exploded on the national scene. To be honest, I am not convinced. As a student of history, I have learned to analyze the difference between what activist Joe Madison calls a moment versus a movement. Was MeToo a moment or a movement? In my opinion, MeToo has turned out to be a moment in history because I have not seen wholesale systemic change in how women are treated in the workplace beyond certain individuals like Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and others rightfully having their careers and fame challenged and more or less ended. I feel a similar vibe happening with the work of antiracism. After Floyd was murdered, corporate America made more than $50 billion in pledges toward racial equity. Many companies also pledged to hire more Black people at higher levels. By May 2021 at least, most of this money had not materialized. Only “$250 million has actually been spent or committed to a specific initiative,” according to Fortune magazine.1 Fortune also holds that



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such companies as Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway rejected a shareholder proposal to release an annual diversity report, while Johnson & Johnson asked the SEC to block shareholder votes on a similar proposal. One of America’s largest banks, Wells Fargo, has increasingly come under fire for racist mortgage practices. In May 2022, it was reported that they boasted about interviewing more “diverse” candidates for executive-level positions, but in reality, they were interviewing for positions that were already filled. This revelation came on top of their 2020 settlement with the Department of Labor for $8 million for discriminating against 30,000 Black job applicants during the year of so-called racial reckoning. It is also important to pay attention to the type of funds pledged in the $50 billion. According to the Washington Post, more than 90%, or $45.2 billion, of the funds were allocated for loans or investments like mortgages that companies could profit from, whereas about $4.2 billion was dedicated to outright grants. Lastly, only about $70 million was allocated for criminal justice reform, which is what sparked the international protests in the first place. And once again, only $250,000 was actually doled out, so in short, much of corporate America spoke nice words and made large pledges but were truly not interested in using their influence to build Black better. An unfortunate incident with Microsoft speaks volumes to the real interest of corporate America to deeply engage in Black causes. In June 2020, artist Shantell Martin was asked by Microsoft and the advertising firm McCann to create a Black Lives Matter mural for their Manhattan store. In an email that she received from McCann, Martin was asked to paint the mural while the “protests are still relevant.”2 She was specifically asked to finish the mural before June 7. While apologies were made, as expected, this incident speaks to how corporations often fail in their attempts to engage with the Black community authentically and genuinely. These stories are not shared to ignore the work that companies like Target, Synchrony, Nike, and Microsoft are doing to address racial equity issues. The main point is to highlight how corporations can often serve as a hindrance to Black-community advancement despite their pledges to the contrary. If companies want to be more committed to their antiracist/proequity efforts, then I offer three suggestions.

WORK INTERNALLY FIRST TO TRULY UNDERSTAND WHAT BEING ANTIRACIST MEANS Is antiracism just a word at your company? Are you and your colleagues really learning vocabulary that speaks to the challenges we face today? Can you and

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your colleagues explain the difference between racism and systemic racism or a microaggression and a stereotype? Words matter. Definitions matter. I have had multiple situations where I had to work with an organization on just agreeing to the same definition of a term, like antiracism, before we could move on in any other part of the discussion, and it was completely worth it because in times when this was not done, we had to backtrack and start over with simple definitions. Agreeing to basic definitions is an extremely important step because if I’m looking at systemic racism as a “form of racism embedded as normal practice within society or an organization” and you are looking at racism from the lens of “I never owned slaves, so I’m not responsible for racism” or “if you just work hard, you can overcome anything” without even acknowledging the systemic part of systemic racism, then any training we do is going to be unintentionally sabotaged from the beginning. Invest the time necessary to get on the same page before you move forward.

YOUR ORGANIZATION IS TOO FOCUSED ON THE PROBLEM AND NOT THE SOLUTIONS Too many organizations have focused their antiracism efforts on reading articles and books and then talking about them. This obviously must continue, but it cannot be enough. For many non-White people, especially Black people, I have spoken to at some organizations, antiracism training is just the replacement term for diversity training. Saying “Black Lives Matter” in some companies is the new version of saying “We value diversity.” Organizations that have been more successful with their antiracism efforts have shown that Black salaries matter and Black employees matter. In short, they understand that representation matters. This is the reason #blackemployeesmatter often trended during the summer of 2020 and beyond. Organizations that have hired more non-White people at the executive level, granted more power to their directors of diversity, and have increased representation of non-White people across the board are experiencing greater Black-employee satisfaction and are celebrated more by their customers. MSNBC named Rashida Jones president of the network in December 2020 and introduced more shows hosted by Black people, such as Tiffany Cross, Jonathan Capehart, and Symone Sanders. President Biden did not just say he believed in diversity, but he also made his cabinet more diverse, including adding Native American congressperson Deb Haaland, as well as appointing the first openly gay cabinet member in Pete Buttigieg.

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ANTIRACISM CANNOT BE A FAD AT YOUR ORGANIZATION I remember during the summer of 2020 seeing Black Lives Matter signs going up everywhere, from Dell to Starbucks. Even Republican senators like Mitt Romney marched for Black lives and verbalized the phrase. While the situation with Martin and McCann does not represent all of Microsoft, it does express the sentiments that I have seen by some leaders of organizations and companies that see work on antiracism as the flavor of the month. The fact of the matter is that, especially in the age of social media, your company will indeed be exposed positively or negatively. Your organization would be better off doing nothing than putting forth a halfhearted measure, which will create more problems than you are trying to solve. Make sure your efforts are sincere, and you are more likely to get buy-in from most involved parties. It is important that your organization steps back to truly assess what your goals are when you state that you want to embrace DEI and antiracist policies. Even though I am an antiracist and committed to the work, I am not a big fan of the word because it literally focuses (by the definition of the prefix anti) on what we are against instead of what we are for. It is similar to the late Mother Teresa stating that she would never attend an antiwar rally but would attend a propeace rally. If you really want to assess your antiracist efforts, then you should look at what progress your company has made after the killing of George Floyd, which was one of the major catalysts for today’s antiracist efforts, along with the killing of Breonna Taylor. In the same way you have not heard their names on television lately due to social-justice fatigue (it is always the right day to arrest the killers of Breonna Taylor), your organization may be experiencing antiracism fatigue or just not moving forward on its promises from the so-called summer of racial reckoning. The three steps here may help you but only if you and your organization are sincere about the work and honest about exposing the challenges your organization faces in order to make sure that you are part of a movement and not a moment.

MY ANTIRACIST JOURNEY: ALLISON CLARKE

Allison Clarke is a fifty-two-year-old White professional speaker and trainer. She was told by her classmates that Black people had extra muscles and did not realize it was a lie until middle school. In high school, she dated one of the few Black men in her mostly White community and learned a great deal from him about racism. Because she realized at such a young age that she was told lies about Black people, Allison has not let the lies miseducate her or affect her life. She does indeed see racism and these lies on the rise in America, but she believes that the best way to counter ignorance and hate is with exposure to diverse cultures.



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CHAPTER NINETEEN

DOES YOUR ORGANIZATION NEED A DIVERSITY DICTIONARY?

Before reading the earlier chapter on critical race theory, how would you have defined it if you did not know what it was? What about antiracism? Microaggressions? Unconscious bias? Furthermore, how would your friends, family, and work colleagues define these and other terms? If you have thirty people around you, then chances are you will receive at least ten different definitions for one of these words. Imagine being in the army and soldiers having ten different definitions of rules of combat. The consequences would be catastrophic. While we are not talking about wars overseas, the analogy fits in the sense that there is an ideological culture war in our society, and you need to arm yourself properly. One of the greatest tools in this battle could be the creation of a diversity dictionary. To highlight the need for a diversity dictionary, I return briefly to the debate over critical race theory and how intensified it has become in K–12 schools. As USA Today reported regarding recent school board meetings across the country, A meeting room was cleared in Michigan. Shouting matches broke out in Kentucky. In Virginia, sheriff’s deputies arrested and cited someone after a school board voted to end its unruly meeting. School board members in New Hampshire were compared to Nazis. A father in New York rushed to the stage to confront a board member.1

Critical race theory has been associated with Marxism, socialism, communism, and other non-capitalist-oriented theories and policies. States across the country are moving to ban critical race theory from being taught in school. Fox News host Tucker Carlson called for police-state-style education, where teachers wear body cameras to ensure that they’re not teaching the “civilization-ending poison”2 called critical race theory, along with civilian review

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boards. The challenge with all of this is that most people who are attacking critical race theory have no idea what it is or where it came from, yet they act as if they do. Those who do know what critical race theory is also know that it is not part of the curriculum in K–12 public schools across the country. One CRT protester stated that the theory teaches that White people are inherently evil and White children in schools should feel guilty for being White. Contrast that with the actual goal of critical race theory talked about in a prior chapter, and you can see how the uninformed are leading the uneducated on this word. In short, American schools have become a battleground over a term that most people cannot accurately define. Reflect on Dr. King’s belief that the two most dangerous things on the planet are sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. There are some things we just do not know. That is sincere ignorance. Then there are people who know the truth but choose to ignore it—conscientious stupidity. The danger is that both types of people act on their sincere ignorance or conscientious stupidity, and here we are. As someone with a heightened knowledge of issues like CRT, you must be active in challenging these things on both fronts. If you believe that this argument is flawed, then I invite you to survey your work colleagues today and ask them to each submit their definition of microaggression or unconscious bias (without going to the internet for assistance) and share the answers anonymously with each other. You may (or may not) be surprised with what you see. Therefore, it is high time for you and your colleagues to have a diversity dictionary. So what does a diversity dictionary look like? I am not going to tell you the definition of all the words that you choose to use in the diversity dictionary, although I have provided some at the end of this book. In too many talks and trainings across the country, however, I often encounter people who just want to be told what to say so they can check off a box. A diversity dictionary is more involved work that everyone must commit to. New hires should be required to read and sign that they agree to the terms in the dictionary. At a school, parents and students should all receive the dictionary so there is no confusion, in the same way they receive and sign a student handbook. If parents choose not to send their children to a school because of how it defines those words, then that is their choice. If some of your coworkers choose to leave, then that is their choice, as well. Too many schools and companies have been caught off-guard because they had no working definition of terms like systemic racism, and now it is time to draw a line in the sand. So now let us discuss how to do it.

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The first step is to acknowledge that this dictionary will be a living document. New words will be added as time goes on, and definitions will possibly be altered as new information becomes available. For example, years ago, we primarily used the term LGBT. Today we use LGBTQ+, LGBTQIA, LGBTQIA+, and other terms. Updates need to be incorporated as needed. If your dictionary has terms like Negro or colored people, for example, then you are a little bit behind the times! The editors of the most popular dictionary company in the country, Merriam-Webster, updated its definition of racism to include systemic racism, as well, because the basic definition of racism was no longer sufficient. The second step is to write down all the terms that your organization uses that relate to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Do not just pick terms that you like. For example, I despise the term BIPOC, and I have written in this book why it should be eliminated from the English language, but I would include it in a dictionary if I was creating one because it has become part of the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Once we agree to the definition, we can discuss why it is problematic. The deeper discussion is why you choose to use one word versus another to define select groups, which is discussed earlier in this book. The last step is to decide where you are going to get your definitions for the diversity dictionary. I strongly suggest that you start with actual dictionary definitions and build from there. Actual dictionary definitions are the most neutral way to go. You may find that just the mere mention of people like Michael Eric Dyson, Ibram Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, Richard Rothstein, and others could be triggers, positively or negatively, for people in your organization. Does this mean you should not read their works? Of course not. I am saying that the work of experts and scholars should be brought in after you agree to basic definitions. It is important that your organization embrace facts and real scholarship on this journey because these individuals have put real effort into their work, and some have been risking their lives to share this work. There are also powerful organizations, like Learning for Justice, as well, that actively do this work. You should lean on their expertise. You cannot shy away from this challenge. You cannot be afraid to rock the boat because right now, the boat is already being rocked by those in society who seek to cut down conversation, and so many people are falling, even jumping, off the boat. Some will refuse to just board the boat, and that is their choice. Sail on without them. We owe it to future generations to be clear in what our objectives are. Inaction is an action, and deciding not to decide is a decision. The more silent you are, the more ignorant and intolerant we all become for it. We

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cannot leave this work up to happenstance. Many leaders have been caught offguard by the activism now overtly directed at them. Maybe your organization is one of them. A diversity dictionary can be a great tool to have in your arsenal as you fight for truth to prevail in your organization. I know you are built for this fight. Now is your time to fight back!

Activity: How Do You Define Black and White? Write down (without use of a dictionary) all the synonyms that come to mind when they think of the words White and Black, and write where these ideas are derived from.

MY ANTIRACIST JOURNEY: FREDERICK WOODSIDE WRIGHT

Frederick Wright is an eighty-year-old retired attorney and the father of Maria Wright. He defines himself as a White male. Growing up, no one directly told him lies about Black people. Rather, the lies came as part of the group acceptance in which I grew up. As is more clear to me now, the lies are interwoven in this nation’s dominant society, culture, ethos, and understandings. Lies assume a White/Caucasian dominance—without necessity of proof or reality.

For Mr. Wright, these lies were omnipresent; “school, sports teams, church classes, informal hangouts with peers are those who taught the lies.” His mother was a major source who helped him counter his group learning by actively teaching him and his brother to not believe the lies they were told. In his early twenties, Wright was exposed to diverse cultures through working as a classroom aide, as well as in the Peace Corps. Sadly, the lies he was told about Black people led him to miss a “whole segment of this nation’s peoples and culture,” and he holds that his “personal development has suffered” because of it. Everything, including possibly choosing a different life partner (his current partner is Black), was affected because of these lies, and “mere mortals” just can never quantify the full effects of what lies about Black people have cost us all because the lies are so ingrained in our culture. He speaks deeply about all the things he has done to ensure his children had real experiences with Black people and what his children now do as adults: I know my wife and I made sure our daughter attended an all-Black kindergarten, that color was not a reason to deny friendship to anyone. My son’s college friends were and are multiracial. My daughter works with, hires, and supports Black, Brown, or whomever can do the work in her business. I represented any individual that needed assistance—most often Brown or Black. I worked for Red governments. My yoga classes have Brown students, and my teaching is to whomever wants, not what color wants. My most recent love is Black. I am uncomfortable around all-White male groups and some all-White female groups.

Wright and his family intentionally made diverse experiences a part of their lives. Given that the Washington Post reported in 2014 that 74 percent of White people

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have no actual non-White friends, the Wright family could have easily chosen a path that would have kept them separate from non-White America overall. I got the feeling from both of Frederick’s and Maria’s interviews that they believe they are better, more complete human beings because of these experiences. According to Wright, to counter these lies on a more systemic scale, we need to counter lies told with “actual experience that disproves them. Experience comes from the home, school, church, sport team, music class, dance class, et cetera. Government and all public and private large-scale entities need to reflect the positive aspects of all races.” Wright holds that “race is here to stay, [but with] hard work and a national individual will, divisive racial attitudes will be moved to a smaller minority of the population.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

BEYOND PERFORMATIVE CELEBRATIONS OF THE BLACK EXPERIENCE

Too often, celebrations of Black people in workspaces are superficial, particularly as it relates to Kwanzaa, Black Lives Matter, and now Juneteenth. If we are not careful, we will see the Juneteenth holiday become as superficial as these organizations have made Black Lives Matter and Kwanzaa. It is important to analyze this at a deeper level if we are to be serious about being antiracist UPstanders and combatting lies about Black people. I have heard companies, schools, famous people, and everyday people proclaim, “Black Lives Matter.” It has been spray-painted across stores in protest, and even Muriel Bowser, mayor of Washington, DC, had it spray-painted across a prominent street leading up to the White House.1 I opened my iTunes account and Amazon Prime account and even turned on my PlayStation, and there it was again, “Black Lives Matter.” This has been followed by companies like Nike and Twitter deciding on days off or some other form of acknowledgment.2 While these gestures of solidarity with the Black community are indeed appreciated, I find myself asking, What happens on June 20? What happens after Black Lives Matter comes off the website? Kwanzaa can provide a strong cautionary tale for this issue. I come from a family who has always celebrated Kwanzaa, the holiday created by Dr. Maulana Karenga for African Americans to honor their African heritage.3 Though it starts on December 26, it has always been a cultural celebration and not a replacement for Christmas, which is a religious holiday. This is the reason some Black families celebrate both Kwanzaa and Christmas. For those of us who celebrate Kwanzaa, it is a sacred holiday, which is why many of us became frustrated when it became commercialized, starting with Hallmark issuing Kwanzaa cards in 1992.4 Now there are stamps and debit cards where the seven candles of Kwanzaa are prominently displayed. Some companies 176

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issue statements honoring Kwanzaa or put out a display in their lobbies. This superficiality of Kwanzaa causes the true nature of it to get lost or never even learned. Kwanzaa is rooted in Black empowerment. To quote an NPR interview with Professor Keith Hayes, author of Kwanzaa: Black Power and the Making of the African-American Holiday Tradition, Whereas Black power uses Kwanzaa to connect Black Americans with the continent of Africa, multicultural America uses Kwanzaa to sell products and consumer goods. Whereas Black power expected Kwanzaa to liberate AfricanAmericans, multicultural America has tried to use Kwanzaa as evidence of racial diversity and Black inclusion.5

But is there real diversity and Black inclusion in your organization on the level that Catalyze Tech calls for? While Black Lives Matter has become a great slogan to show solidarity with Black causes, there are Black employees in every sector, from schools to corporations, who have been saying for years that they want to matter within their organizations. They have called for equal pay, shattering the glass ceiling, challenging everyday discrimination on the job, and so much more. And this is also happening with Juneteenth. Most Black employees I know would rather have a shot at equal pay or an opportunity to advance in their positions than a day off, which should be a day on in terms of continuing the work of antiracism and social justice. If companies are serious about Black Lives Matter and Juneteenth, then they must immediately reevaluate their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. They must do the work to finally hear the complaints and concerns of their Black staff. They need to challenge systemic racism that may have existed in their organizations for years. This is the same country where a statue was built to the father of American gynecology, James Marion Sims, whose work was performed on enslaved Black women without anesthesia. It is the same country that touts having some of the most prominent universities in the world, but they were built by enslaved Africans.6 And it is the same country where some companies have engaged in global travesties, such as the Holocaust and apartheid. Despite the travesties I discuss in this chapter and throughout this book, this country has the ability to self-correct, and so do companies, schools, and other organizations. The statue of Sims came down. Companies like Kodak, Coca-Cola, General Electric, General Motors, and IBM ended up divesting from apartheid, but none of this happened without activism and UPstanders, similar to what we are seeing now. This is how you show that Black lives matter. Before organizations state, “Black Lives Matter,” I strongly suggest visiting the Black Lives Matter website to truly understand its commitment to social, racial,

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and economic justice. Black Lives Matter is about a way of life for society that is truly committed to equity and equality, not band-aids on an open wound still seeping blood from the sword of systemic racism. I have had some very powerful, courageous conversations with companies and schools throughout my career. Some organizations are very far ahead in their work on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and some are just starting out. Wherever your organization may be on this road, what is most important is to stay on that road and not veer off. Almost everything organizations need to do to bring true diversity, equity, and inclusion matters to the forefront has already been documented by the Black employees and other UPstanders in those organizations. Companies and organizations must go beyond the external displays of solidarity to internal responses to the concerns of their employees. This is the best way to truly show that Black lives matter beyond the hashtag and to celebrate Juneteenth 365 days a year. This cannot happen unless your organizations are intentional, which cannot happen if there is not an intentional, top-down approach to this work!

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

INCREASING BLACK REPRESENTATION IN YOUR ORGANIZATIONS

This chapter looks at forward-moving steps that organizations can take to

better recruit Black professionals. For two decades, I have worked with organizations across this nation on diversity and representation. This work takes different forms in different schools, organizations, and corporations. In some organizations, like some schools, I am brought in to work with faculty on ways they can reach their more disenfranchised students. In some corporate spaces, I speak to leaders about their role in creating communities where everyone feels celebrated and not tolerated. In all the spaces I visit, one glaring question always rears its head: Where are the Black people? To be clear, I specifically speak in this chapter about Black professionals beyond building services. In our schools, I talk about school leaders, as well as classroom teachers who do not coach athletics and are not part of the security or custodial staff. Of course, there is no shade being thrown at these positions because all positions are of value when it comes to making an organization function. The problem I have witnessed in too many instances is that the Black people in those positions in schools, for example, become de facto counselors for Black students because there is no Black representation anywhere else in the school. As I mention several times before, this is a solutions-oriented book, so I share four steps organizations can take to start recruiting more Black professionals. You cannot just talk about it. You must be about it! Let’s go!

GO TO WHERE THE BLACK PROFESSIONALS ARE While it is, of course, true that Black people live in every state in the United States, it is obvious that more of us are concentrated in urban areas. Despite this



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fact, I still encounter organizations, especially in cities like Washington, DC, and New York, where I am told that it is hard to find Black teachers. I do not believe this to be true. More effort needs to be placed in going to where Black professionals are and working on recruiting them early. If you play a role in recruitment in your organization, then you should start partnering with universities now about their soon-to-be Black professionals. If you are fortunate enough to have a historically black college and university (HBCU) in your vicinity, then reach out and conduct recruitment fairs on campus and invite potential Black professionals to visit your organization. Well-intentioned recruitment efforts can go a long way in helping Black professionals decide where to work. In addition to partnering with these institutions, there are such events as the Teacher of Color Recruitment Fair and the Black Virtual Career Fair. Your leadership team should also attend conferences, such as the People of Color Conference (POCC), and many other events sponsored by organizations, like Black Enterprise and the Black Business Expo. There are so many others that can be found with a simple Google search. These organizations also have regional events and provide great opportunities for networking. As important as it is to attend events like these for the content, it is equally important to attend as a potential recruiter. There is pretty much an association of Black professionals for every profession Black people are involved in. They all have websites, and all have a social media presence. It will take little effort to reach out and engage them. What it requires is the will to do so. Here are more to consider: American Association of Blacks in Energy (AABE), American Association of Blacks in Higher Education (AABHE), Association of Black Business Coaches and Consultants (ABBCC), Association of Black Cardiologists (ABC), Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi), Association of Black Sociologists (ABS), Black Women in Science and Engineering (BWISE), National Alliance of Black School Educators (NABSE), and National Association of Black Accountants (NABA). There is no excuse in this century to say that you cannot find Black professionals in your field. Do the work!

BE BOLD IN YOUR DIVERSITY STATEMENTS AND DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION PRACTICES I am not saying that every Black professional cares about issues relating to diversity and inclusion. Some, of course, just want to come in and do their work like they see their White counterparts do daily. I do know, however, that many Black professionals do indeed care about where a company stands on issues of

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diversity, equity, and inclusion. I know this because I have met Black professionals in many organizations I have visited over the last twenty years, and this has been brought up most of the time. Most Black professionals I know and hear from are looking for an organization’s statement on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Black parents who are looking for schools for their children are also looking at school websites for DEI statements. Black teachers are all looking to see what progress has been made because they do not want to come to your school and instantly be the “diversity guy” or the “Black guy.” These are the teachers who have all the troubled Black students sent to them, usually are asked to speak to Black parents (or at least be in the room for representation purposes), and are often made to feel like they must “speak for the race” when racial issues occur at school. This is an extremely stressful position for Black teachers to be in, yet it happens all the time, and it happens in other professions, as well. Starting with a diversity statement is a great way to attract the attention of Black professionals, yet I am still amazed by the numbers of organizations I visit that still do not have one. Not having a diversity statement is your diversity statement!

USE SOCIAL MEDIA TO RECRUIT BLACK PROFESSIONALS You cannot be at every recruitment fair every day. Many successful Black professionals have a very active presence online, particularly through LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as on all major social media sites. They are not only posting thoughts about their day, but they are also writing and sharing powerful content that will show you where their values are and demonstrate that they could be a good fit for your organization. You can use the hashtag method to find Black professionals who are writing and talking about the areas you are interested in, such as #diversityandinclusion, #blackteachers, #blackengineers, #blackdoc tors, #blacklawyers, and more. You never know. Some of these professionals can be in your vicinity!

FOR EDUCATORS, TREAT YOUR CURRENT BLACK STUDENTS AS FUTURE TEACHERS This section is specifically for educators. This statement does not mean that you should look at your third-grade Black students and start to actively recruit them. That would be weird. What it does mean is that many schools treat their

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Black students so poorly that they never want to become teachers when they get older. I have generally met two types of Black teachers. There is one group who teaches for the love of teaching. There is another group, however, who teaches for the love of teaching but also sees their job as an actual mission to show Black students that a teaching career is possible. They also want nonBlack students to see Black people in positions of leadership and authority in the education space and go beyond the sports and music stereotypes. In 2017, NPR reported, Having just one Black teacher in third, fourth or fifth grade reduced lowincome Black boys’ probability of dropping out of high school by 39 percent. . . . And by high school, African American students, both boys and girls, who had one African American teacher had much stronger expectations of going to college. Keep in mind, this effect was observed seven to ten years after the experience of having just one Black teacher.1

Representation does indeed matter. While this last part focuses on education, this is indeed true for all professions. Also, seeing Black people in positions of authority is important for non-Black students and non-Black professionals. For those non-Black students, it can help them grow into adults for whom working with or for Black people will not seem foreign to them. For nonBlack coworkers, the presence of Black professionals in their field could also aid them in shattering stereotypes of who works in their industry. At the end of the day, the old saying that you can’t just talk about it but you also must be about it is true. You cannot expect Black professionals to appear in your organization through osmosis. You must actively pursue them. I have met so many Black professionals who do not see certain types of schools or other organizations as an option because there is a perception that these organizations are only interested in checking off boxes for diversity. If you honestly believe that your organization strongly values diversity, equity, and inclusion, then these steps will help you in your efforts to increase the presence of Black professionals in your organization. Let’s go!

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

ELEVATING BLACK STUDENTS Becoming a More Culturally Competent Teacher I WONDER I wonder what my world would be If you could just see me as I see me If you could just greet me with a smile even though you think I’m hostile If you could not assume that I’m doomed for life’s prisons and trials You may see a smile that would light up your room You may see I’m as precious as any child in your room If you could see why we may not see eye to eye And meet me halfway so I’m not that child left behind Maybe, just maybe, we will make some progress If you just looked at me as a scholar and nothing less I hunger for education, but my teachers have me fasting I’m just looking for your love and a little understanding!

I started my work in the field of education, so I want to share something specifically for educators working with Black students. In 2016, I was interviewed by the Atlantic for a story on the #beingblack viral posts, where students were posting their stories about being black at their K–12 schools and colleges and universities. The story started with two students from my alma mater, Boston Latin School, so it was called #BlackatBLS. It was so sad to see the same stories repeating themselves that I dealt with during my own tenure in the 1980s and 1990s. The story touched on the fact that the “complacency and inaction of school administrators following incidents of racism isn’t confined to college campuses.”1 The article was a reminder that extra attention needs to be paid to reaching our Black students in our K–12 classrooms now, so I want to spend some time looking at ways to reach Black students. As I look back at my days as a Boston Public Schools student, and as I look at the multitudes of Black students still being excluded from the educational

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process today, I am left to believe that we are dealing with nothing short of a tragic epidemic. As a seventh-grader twenty-five years ago, I remember a White male teacher dragging me to the office, telling me, “Do you think I’m gonna put up with your shit all year, you fuckin’ punk?” simply because I was a seventh-grader trying to emulate the silly behavior of the White seniors in study hall who were never disciplined. Fast-forward to the early 2000s, and I’m speaking to a Black female principal in DC. She sees one of her students from a distance and says, “He’s really gonna make a great prisoner one day.” Here we have two different cities decades apart, two different races and genders of the educators, but one overwhelming similarity: low expectations for Black students. If you develop strategies to reach your Black students in the classroom, then you learn techniques to reach all your students, but it cannot happen if you are not challenging the racist ideas you may have about Black students going into your school and classroom. The following are some actual classroom strategies that will assist you in improving not only the participation of your Black students who may be struggling but also ultimately will give you a diverse range of tools to pull from in order to make a dynamic teaching experience for all your students! Note that the strategies I share are in addition to the personal work in this book to challenge lies about Black people.

HAVE HIGH EXPECTATIONS FOR ALL STUDENTS, AND COMMUNICATE THOSE EXPECTATIONS TO THEM Many teachers fail to communicate that they expect all students to succeed in class. Truth be told, some teachers just do not expect all their students to succeed or simply don’t want them all to succeed. The students will pick up on that vibe, and many will respond accordingly. Whether it’s by their placement in the back of the class, their watching the same students get chosen to speak, or even witnessing the different levels of discipline for different students, your message will be communicated one way or the other. If you truly believe everyone can succeed, then show them. If you do not believe that every student can succeed, then you should not be a teacher, period.

INCREASE YOUR KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE HISTORY OF YOUR BLACK STUDENTS I speak earlier in this book about the name game as an example of testing how much we actually know about Black people. Too often, if you are not the type

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who actively engages in consuming Black historical knowledge, then your information on Black people may be limited to entertainers and some celebrated figures, like Dr. King and Rosa Parks. There is no excuse to not learn more about the history of your Black students. From Dr. Henry Louis Gates’s two- to three-minute YouTube videos and resources like the Smithsonian websites, to local historical areas in your community and actual living people in your school who can speak on the Black experience, there is no excuse for not learning. You simply do not want to, possibly because you believe there is not a significant enough story about the Black experience to tell. What you know is what you will show!

USE A WIDE RANGE OF EQUITABLE PRACTICES TO INVOLVE ALL YOUR STUDENTS Rather than calling on the same students, use popsicle sticks randomly drawn from a cup so every student knows they could be called on at any time. Students are more likely to be prepared if they believe they will actually be asked to participate. You can also have random grouping, so students do not get comfortable with the same students. Lastly, remember that every student does not always learn solely by written exams. Develop additional ways that students can present their knowledge, be it through oral presentations, musical interpretations, or group projects. Much of these practices can be found in books like The Skillful Teacher by Jon Saphier, Mary Ann Haley-Speca, and Robert Gower.2 If you make a dedicated effort to use these steps and have a mind-set that, as former director of diversity for Montgomery County Schools in Maryland Donna Graves states, there is not an achievement gap but a teaching gap, then you will turn yourself into an educator with the ability to incorporate not only your Black students but also all students irrespective of race, creed, color, gender, or religion! Teach on! I attended a conference where Dr. Cornel West spoke about Black rage. He said something that I still remember more than a decade later: that Black rage can never be contained or destroyed; it can only be redirected. When my teachers could not reach me, I was angry. With all the issues I was dealing with that I have recounted in this book (and some that I have not shared), I felt that I was always on edge, just waiting to be pushed, like the classic rap song “The Message” speaks of. When I was brought down to the guidance office by that teacher for emulating the White students, I sat in the office for what seemed to be hours. While there, I wrote the following poem, which became the title for my first spoken-word album. And while I was able to redirect my anger into the

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work I do today, this poem is a reminder of the rage that too many Black children feel. Maybe you will be the one to help redirect the rage, whether you’re an educator or not. Remember, I wrote this when I was eleven or twelve years old. Children, in my opinion, should not grow up in a society where rage like this inhabits their minds and bodies daily. The reality for too many Black students, however, is that the rage in this poem only scratches the surface of what they must deal with and how too many of them feel today. Luckily, I had my parents, my siblings, and people like Drs. Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni whom I draw inspiration from in the poem.

A YOUNG BLACK MAN’S ANTHEM I am a Black youth who happens to be male. I am not a drug dealer, and my soul is not for sale. But few can see that, for their span is long. They know my history is much longer than some song. But many can’t see that, they don’t give a damn! Because of what they see in this media land. I represent drugs and thieves and thugs, Who have nothing better to do than shoot guns. I admit I run ball and dance and sing, But to this earth, that’s not all I can bring. I can read and write and write poetry, But that’s not what people seem to see in me. It’s quite funny, ignorance that is, That covers the earth like the sky. But realize this, and don’t forget this, I’m a man, and that you cannot deny. “So ain’t I bad, and ain’t I Black?” Yes, this I know is true. “You can write me down with your twisted lies” But Black people cannot be blue. The women of my race cannot be surpassed, In beauty or in mind. They’ve gone through so much and still give so much, That to me, they’re one of a kind.

E levating B lack Students

So treat them with respect if you value your life! But don’t think I’ll take it with the use of a knife. I am not a crazed animal, though you may have heard. I can break you down by the mere use of words. When your children go violent, you say we wrought them. When “gangs” come to your town, you say we brought them. Remember this, you’re not ones of perfection. Your children by themselves go in the wrong direction. Though we are only one race, respect us like the rest. We will no longer play your game of human chess. Put us down even longer, see us in demise. But like Maya Angelou, you know we’ll rise. So if you’re smart, you’ll get on our side, Or I could be your genocide!

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LET’S GO UPstander!

If I want to change the world, I have to change myself For change in the mind is true wealth, it’s true health My environment will never change until I change me Rearrange me, my thinking can never be the same, see Gandhi went from lawyer to leader, changed his mind King from preacher to Nobel Peace Prize, changed his mind In fine time, align your mind and align the world Liberate girls, turn child soldiers to child scholars If you just believe that you can take your mind farther But are you too comfortable to speak up on war Are more of us shedding apathetic armor? I call for us all to do more, it starts now See, we can change the TV, but we need to change we It only takes a minute for you to change your life It starts with you but ends with the world, that’s right You change yourself, you change your home Change your home, you change your block Change your block, you change your ’hood for good but don’t stop Change your ’hood, change your city, your state, your whole country That’s how women got free, slaves to citizens, see If it is meant to be it’s up to you, so do you Unleash the power of 1 it’s all you need to do!

The ball is in your court now! Activist and radio host Joe Madison asks pretty

much daily on his show, “What are you gonna do about it?” regarding the issue he is discussing that day. I ask you the same question. What are you gonna do about this? What is going to be your action plan? What are you going to do to be an UPstander and not a bystander? What are you going to do to challenge racism and the lies told about Black people? Throughout this book are example after example of non-Black people who have stepped up as partners with Black

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people. It is never too late to do something. It is never too late to recognize that you have been part of the problem (maybe simply by your inaction) and then work to be part of the solution. It is never too late to refocus and heighten your efforts to fight racism. I talk to you about the Charles Stuart case in Boston. As tragic as that time was, something good came out of it when the family of Carol Stuart started a foundation to raise money for college scholarships for high school students from Mission Hill. Several scholarships have been set up in her name across the country. Does this heal our trauma? No, but her family decided to be part of the process of healing instead of doing nothing. Lee Atwater, the chair of the Republican National Committee whom I quoted earlier for giving voice to the “Southern Strategy” of how to use policies to hurt Black people, even if some White people were hurt, apologized for creating the Willie Horton ad and promoting racist ideas before his death from a brain tumor at age forty. Lyndon B. Johnson embraced many racist ideas throughout his political tenure but ended up signing some of the most significant civil rights laws for Black people, as well as other groups. President Abraham Lincoln did not want to free the slaves and was also racist. Though his action of freeing enslaved people was not based in pure love for humanity, his action set Black people on the trajectory of freedom that we fought for every day since we were abducted from Africa. As Dr. King said, the time is always right to do right! I specifically designed this book to provide a history of anti-Blackness in the United States (and beyond), to motivate you to take action in part by seeing the work of other UPstanders past and present, and to let you hear the antiracist journey of others so you can see that you are not alone in this work. I infuse poetry throughout this book in hopes that you will see that there are multiple ways to communicate this message. Maybe you will use dance or painting to express yourself as an antiracist. Maybe you will use your pulpit or corporate CEO status to show that you are antiracist. Maybe you will use your dinner table to help everyone at that table understand that you are or will be an antiracist family. Being antiracist and proequality is a journey, not a destination. There will always be hate to fight, as long as there are breathing beings on this planet. That means our work will never be done, but we can make it easier for generations to come! Are you ready? Then let’s go! I close this book with one final poem. The late rapper Notorious B.I.G. wrote a song entitled the “10 Crack Commandments.” I absolutely love remixing songs to show primarily young people that they can sound like their favorite artists without swearing or disrespecting women. I produced three mixtape albums entitled Bootleg to that end that are easy to find for free on sites like

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Bandcamp. I remixed his song into the “10 Antiracist Commandments.” After that, you will find the final activity of this book, which asks you to write down concrete action steps you will commit to. I look forward to seeing you on this road to creating a society where everyone can be who they are and be celebrated and not tolerated. We need you out here! I been in this land for years, they see me as an animal Time to end racist lies, I wrote y’all a manual A step-by-step booklet for you to get Time we learned how to be antiracist Let me lay out the blueprint of how to do it Wanna be an antiracist, this is how you pursue it See it ain’t good enough to say what you ain’t You gotta do the work, box that hate out the paint Start by checking yourself and why you have those fears Look at who’s been teaching you those racist ideas White hate Black, Black hate White, Black hate Black When it comes to being racist, we should all step back Check it all from how we police clothing and behavior To how our system’s based off the need for White saviors From power and body to class and biology The racist roots of society are our biography But this ain’t gotta be just because how it was We can’t keep the status quo just because With our future on the line, I believe that it’s time To look in the mirror start to change our design Rule numero uno: Gotta let people know The racist views you hold and how you plan to let them go Number 2: Here’s a good next move Get a good reading list that challenges your views Number 3: Never trust nobody Who says they ain’t racist when actions speak loudly Number 4: Know you heard this before “Some of my best friends are Black,” don’t say that anymore Number 5: You don’t want racism to stay alive Learn how it all started, then make sure that it dies Number 6: Postracial rhetoric, forget it Think voting for Obama stopped racism, forget it Number 7: This rule is so underrated Understand why our neighborhoods are still segregated ’cause money and race don’t mix

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Like Donald Trump with real ethics Find yourself impeached real quick Number 8: Never keep no hate in you Exorcize it all costs, maybe lose some friends, too Number 9 shoulda been number 1 to me Know from day 1 we’ve been a racist society Number 10: A strong word called alignment Get with like-minded people is your next assignment Follow these rules, your racism starts to shake up If not, maybe a hundred more years until we wake up!

Activity: Your Antiracist Action Plan Write down at least three action steps you will take to challenge lies about Black people and racism in general. Goals can be short term (e.g., diversify your reading lists); medium term (attend a conference on diversity, equity, and inclusion); and long term (move to a more diverse neighborhood or school).

LET’S GO!

GLOSSARY

Note: All terms derived from Merriam-Webster.com.

ageism. prejudice or discrimination against a particular age group and especially the elderly antiracist. opposed to racism anti-Semitism. hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group diversity. the inclusion of people of different races, cultures, and more in a group or organization homophobia. irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against gay people implicit bias. a bias or prejudice that is present but not consciously held or recognized inclusion. the act of including; the state of being included Islamophobia. irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against people who practice Islam microaggression. a comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalized group (such as a racial minority) racism. a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race segregation. the separation or isolation of a race, class, or ethnic group by enforced or voluntary residence in a restricted area, by barriers to social intercourse, by separate educational facilities, or by other discriminatory means sexism. prejudice or discrimination based on sex stereotype. something conforming to a fixed or general pattern, especially a standardized mental picture that is held in common by members of a group and that represents an oversimplified opinion, prejudiced attitude, or uncritical judgment



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systemic racism. the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another transphobia. irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against transgender people

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank God for the continued strength to energize us in the fight to find our common humanity and find common ground in these uncommon times. I thank the ancestors who fought to make this world equitable and equal for everyone. This list of ancestors now includes my father, Reverend Dr. Dibinga wa Said. I thank the elders still with us who made sacrifice upon sacrifice for those coming after them to live a better life. This honorable group includes my mother, Dr. Ngolela wa Kabongo. As my parents, you were my first teachers and taught me what it means to be an activist and to only hate evil, not the perpetrators of it. Thank you also for grounding me in a mind-set of history, love, and appreciation for Black people across the world and all people on earth. I thank my siblings: To Said, Musau, Muadi, Shaumba, Kabongo, Pata, Simba, and Moumié, you have not only inspired me but also protected me on my journey to manhood and continue to do so. I thank my children: To Ngolela, Ndeji, and Yenga, for real, you are my fire, my heart, and my joy. I also thank my extended family and incredible nieces and nephews, Taalib, Shaumba, Mzuri, Zoltan, Ngolela, Kata, Sa, Kasai, and Jalani. I thank several people who have served as mentors for me throughout my academic experience, specifically Drs. Michael Eric Dyson, Derrick Alridge, Carole Anne Spreen, Barbara Finkelstein, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, Margaret C. Lee, Gwendolyn Mikell, James Braxton-Peterson, Sharon Fries-Britt, and Amanda Taylor. I want to also thank my incredible research assistant, Anjali Madaram! Your dedication to this project has been greatly appreciated! Special thanks to my literary agent, Wendy Keller of Keller Media, and Jake Bonar, acquisitions editor with Prometheus Books! Lastly, I thank my wife, Kendra. I don’t really know how to describe to the world what our life trajectory has been like. From dating at age sixteen and seventeen to traveling the world, studying at the world’s best schools, starting successful businesses, birthing three incredible children, and aiding thousands of people in improving their lives personally and professionally, it has been an incredible roller coaster of a ride for nearly thirty years. Thank you for your support, for pushing me when I often did not want to be pushed, and for encouraging me to be my authentic self in my work. Thank you.

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INTRODUCTION 1.  House of Nubian, “The Hate That Hate Produced 1959,” accessed December 6, 2022, https://www.houseofnubian.com/The-Hate-That-Hate-Produced-1959.aspx. 2.  Zoe Schiffer, “Facebook’s ‘Culture Fit’ Is the Focus of a Discrimination Com­ plaint, Report Says,” Verge, March 11, 2021, https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/223 26097/facebook-hiring-discrimination-black-applicants-culture-fit.

CHAPTER 1 1.  Sally Kohn, “Affirmative Action Has Helped White Women More than Anyone,” Time, June 17, 2013, https://ideas.time.com/2013/06/17/affirmative-action-has -helped-white-women-more-than-anyone/. 2. Joe Fox, Adrian Blanco, Jennifer Jenkins, Julie Tate, and Wesley Lowery, “What We’ve Learned about Police Shootings 5 Years after Ferguson,” Washington Post, August 9, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/08/09/what-weve -learned-about-police-shootings-years-after-ferguson/?arc404=true. 3. Josh Levin, The Queen: The Forgotten Life behind an American Myth (New York: Little, Brown, 2020); Los Angeles Times, “In Leaked Audio, LA City Council Members Make Racist Remarks, Mock Colleagues,” Boston Herald, October 10, 2022, https://www.bostonherald.com/2022/10/09/in-leaked-audio-la-city -council-members-make-racist-remarks-mock-colleagues/. 4. Scott Jaschik, “Cornell Students Revive Debate on Whom Colleges Should Count as a Black Student,” Inside Higher Ed, October 9, 2017, https://www.inside highered.com/admissions/article/2017/10/09/cornell-students-revive-debate-whom -colleges-should-count-black. 5. Bilal Qureshi, “In ‘Selma,’ British Actor Brings Outsider’s Perspective to MLK,” Code Switch, NPR, January 19, 2015, https://www.npr.org/sections /codeswitch/2015/01/19/377286482/to-play-mlk-in-selma-british-actor-had-to-learn-what -it-s-like-to-be-black-in-us.



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CHAPTER 2 1.  Ibram Kendi, “How Racism Relies on Arbitrary Hierarchies,” Literary Hub, August 13, 2019, https://lithub.com/ibram-x-kendi-how-racism-relies-on-arbitrary-hierarchies/. 2.  Kendi, “How Racism Relies.” 3.  Revelations 1:14–15, YouVersion, https://www.bible.com/bible/compare/REV .1.14-15. 4.  John Biewen, “The Lie That Invented Racism,” TED, accessed September 18, 2022, https://www.ted.com/talks/john_biewen_the_lie_that_invented_racism. 5.  Quoted in Lannae O’Neal, “Ibram Kendi, One of the Nation’s Leading Scholars of Racism, Says Education and Love Are Not the Answer,” Diversity in Ed, November 1, 2017, https://www.diversityined.com/blog/2017/11/ibram-kendi-one-of-the-nations-lead ing-scholars-of-racism-says-education-and-love-are-not-the-answer/. 6.  Quoted in O’Neal, “Ibram Kendi.” 7.  Roland S. Martin, White Fear: How the Browning of America Is Making White Folks Lose Their Minds (Dallas, TX: Ben Bella Books, 2022, 2). 8.  James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York: Touchstone, 2006), 3. 9.  Ade Onibada, “The Legacy of Sundown Towns Affects Black Travelers,” Real Clear Policy, July 27, 2021, https://www.realclearpolicy.com/2021/07/27/the_legacy_of _sundown_towns_affects_black_travelers_787184.html.

CHAPTER 3 1. J. Gordon Hylton, “Most United States Supreme Court Justices Have Lacked Prior Judicial Experience,” Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog [blog], February 14, 2020, https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2012/03/most-united -states-supreme-court-justices-have-lacked-prior-judicial-experience/. 2. Kiran Dhillon, “Law Schools Most Likely to Produce a Supreme Court Justice,” Time, May 8, 2014, https://time.com/91646/the-most-popular-law-schools-of -supreme-court-justices/. 3.  Veronica Stracqualursi, “American Bar Association Rates Ketanji Brown Jackson ‘Well Qualified,’” CNN, March 18, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/18/politics/ketanji -brown-jackson-aba-rating/index.html. 4.  “Ketanji Brown Jackson: Legal Career Timeline,” Southern Poverty Law Center, April 7, 2022, https://www.splcenter.org/news/2022/04/07/ketanji-brown-jackson-legal -career-timeline. 5. Stefania Palma, “Ketanji Brown Jackson Fends off Republican Criticism on Legal Record,” Financial Times, March 22, 2022, https://www.ft.com/content/64561aed -3c00-45d7-8782-56743b80cf83. 6. Vivia Chen, “The First Black Female SCOTUS Nominee Must Be ‘Twice as Good,’” Bloomberg Law, March 11, 2022, https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business -and-practice/the-first-black-female-scotus-nominee-must-be-twice-as-good. 7.  Quoted in Chen, “First Black Female SCOTUS Nominee.” 8.  Quoted in Chen, “First Black Female SCOTUS Nominee.”

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9.  Malcolms Disciples, “Malcolm X Calls Out Reporter,” YouTube video, 2:39, accessed December 6, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYxXLYjHs7A. 10.  Pamela Wible, “Her Story Went Viral. But She Is Not the Only Black Doctor Ignored in an Airplane Emergency,” Washington Post, October 20, 2016, https://www .washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/tamika-cross-is-not-the-only-black-doctor -ignored-in-an-airplane-emergency/2016/10/20/3f59ac08-9544-11e6-bc79-af1cd3d2984b _story.html. 11.  Derek Hawkins, “Flight Attendant to Black Female Doctor: ‘We’re Looking for Actual Physicians,’” Washington Post, October 14, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost .com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/10/14/blatant-discrimination-black-female-doctor-says -flight-crew-questioned-her-credentials-during-medical-emergency/. 12.  Hawkins, “Flight Attendant.” 13.  Hawkins, “Flight Attendant.” 14.  Wible, “Her Story Went Viral.” 15.  Wible, “Her Story Went Viral.” 16.  Charles M. Blow, “‘The Lowest White Man,’” New York Times, January 11, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/opinion/trump-immigration-white-supremacy.html. 17.  Rick Perlstein, “Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy,” Nation, December 7, 2018, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive /exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/. 18.  Paul Waldman, “Yes, Opposition to Obamacare Is Tied Up with Race,” Washington Post, December 2, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line /wp/2014/05/23/yes-opposition-to-obamacare-is-tied-up-with-race/. 19.  Aaryn Urell, “Crack vs. Heroin Project: Racial Double Standard in Drug Laws Persists Today,” Equal Justice Initiative, June 3, 2022, https://eji.org/news/racial -double-standard-in-drug-laws-persists-today/. 20. “Trump: ‘I Am the Least Racist Person There Is Anywhere in the World’— Video,” Guardian, July 30, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2019 /jul/30/trump-claims-least-racist-person-in-the-world. 21.  Richard Fausset and Julie Bosman, “What Governors Say about Trump’s Response to Coronavirus,” New York Times, March 11, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11 /us/coronavirus-governors-trump.html. 22. Rachel Martin and Steve Inskeep, “Trump Tells Woodward He Deliberately Downplayed Coronavirus Threat,” NPR, September 10, 2020, https://www.npr.org /2020/09/10/911368698/trump-tells-woodward-he-deliberately-downplayed-coronavirus -threat. 23. Ibram X. Kendi, “Why Don’t We Know Who the Coronavirus Victims Are?” Atlantic, April 1, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/stop -looking-away-race-covid-19-victims/609250/. 24.  Elisabeth Gawthrop, “Color of Coronavirus: COVID-19 Deaths Analyzed by Race and Ethnicity,” APM Research Lab, September 14, 2022, https://www.apmresearch lab.org/covid/deaths-by-race. 25.  Adam Serwer, “The Coronavirus Was an Emergency until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying,” Atlantic, June 16, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05 /americas-racial-contract-showing/611389/. 26. John Flesher, “6 Men Indicted in Alleged Plot to Kidnap Michigan Governor,” Associated Press, December 17, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/gretchen -whitmer-michigan-indictments-coronavirus-pandemic-traverse-city-10f7e02c57004da 9843f89650edd4510.

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27. Mia Jankowicz, “Kushner’s Coronavirus Team Shied Away from a National Strategy, Believing That the Virus Was Hitting Democratic States Hardest and That They Could Blame Governors, Report Says,” Business Insider, July 31, 2020, https://www.busi nessinsider.com/kushner-covid-19-plan-maybe-axed-for-political-reasons-report-2020-7. 28.  Michael Siegel, Isabella Critchfield-Jain, Matthew Boykin, Alicia Owens, Rebeckah Muratore, Taiylor Nunn, and Joanne Oh, “Racial/Ethnic Disparities in StateLevel COVID-19 Vaccination Rates and Their Association with Structural Racism,” Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities 9, no. 6 (2022): 2361–74, https://www .ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8553106/. 29.  Ritu Agarwal, Michelle Dugas, Jui Ramaprasad, Junjie Luo, Guije Li, and Guodong Gao, “Socioeconomic Privilege and Political Ideology Are Associated with Racial Disparity in COVID-19 Vaccination,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 33 (July 29, 2021), https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2107873118. 30.  Geoff Brumfiel, “Inside the Growing Alliance between Anti-Vaccine Activists and Pro-Trump Republicans,” NPR, December 6, 2021, https://www .npr.org/2021/12/06/1057344561/anti-vaccine-activists-political-conference-trump -republicans. 31. Associated Press, “AP Fact Check: Trump Seeds Race Animus with COVID Falsehood,” US News and World Report, January 16, 2022, https://www.usnews .com/news/politics/articles/2022-01-16/ap-fact-check-trump-seeds-race-animus-with -covid-falsehood. 32.  John Shattuck and Mathias Risse, “Hate Crimes,” Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, 2021, https://carrcenter.hks.harvard.edu/files/cchr/files /hate_crimes.pdf. 33.  Kimmy Yam, “Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Increased by Nearly 150% in 2020, Most­ly in N.Y. and L.A., New Report Says,” NBC News, March 9, 2021, https://www.nbcnews .com/news/asian-america/anti-asian-hate-crimes-increased-nearly-150-2020-mostly-n -n1260264. 34. Eileen A. J. Connelly and Larry Celona, “Buffalo Shooter Payton Gendron Posted White Supremacist Manifesto,” New York Post, May 16, 2022, https://nypost .com/2022/05/14/buffalo-shooter-payton-gendron-posted-white-supremacist-manifesto/. 35.  Emily Shapiro, “Pittsburgh Synagogue Massacre 3 Years Later: Remembering the 11 Victims,” ABC News, October 27, 2021, https://abcnews.go.com/US/pittsburgh -synagogue-shooting-portraits-11-victims/story?id=58823835. 36. Vanessa Romo, “El Paso Walmart Shooting Suspect Pleads Not Guilty,” NPR, October 10, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/10/10/769013051/el-paso-walmart -shooting-suspect-pleads-not-guilty. 37. Ryan Chatelain, “Tuberville, Greene Slammed for Racist Rhetoric at Trump Rallies,” Spectrum News NY1, October 10, 2022, https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs /politics/2022/10/10/tommy-tuberville--marjorie-taylor-greene-push-racist-rhetoric-at -trump-rallies. 38.  Kelsie Smith, “Hundreds of People Are Volunteering to Escort Elderly Asian Americans to Help Keep Them Safe,” CNN, February 15, 2021, https://www.cnn .com/2021/02/15/us/volunteer-group-helps-to-keep-elderly-asian-americans-safe-trnd /index.html. 39.  Michel Martin and Tinbete Ermyas, “Former Pentagon Chief Esper Says Trump Asked about Shooting Protesters,” NPR, May 9, 2022, https://www.npr.org /2022/05/09/1097517470/trump-esper-book-defense-secretary.

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CHAPTER 4 1.  Jon Jackson, “‘Little Mermaid’ Support Builds after Trailer Dislikes Surpass 1.5 Million,” Newsweek, September 14, 2022, https://www.newsweek.com/little-mermaid -support-after-trailer-attacked-online-trolls-1-5-million-dislikes-disney-1742922. 2.  Je’Kayla Crawford, “Not My Ariel Hashtag Trending on Twitter after Black Actress Is Cast for the Little Mermaid,” Teen Mag, July 7, 2022, https://www.theteenmagazine.com /not-my-ariel-hashtag-trending-on-twitter-after-black-actress-is-cast-for-the-little-mermaid. 3.  David Edwards, “‘Ariel Is White’: Racist Fans Petition Disney to Remove Black Actress from ‘Little Mermaid’ Remake,” Raw Story, December 17, 2020, https://www .rawstory.com/2019/07/ariel-is-white-racist-fans-petition-disney-to-remove-black-actress -from-little-mermaid-role/. 4.  Staff, “Daily Wire Host Says It Is Unscientific to Cast a Black Person as a Mermaid,” Media Matters, September 14, 2022, https://www.mediamatters.org/daily-wire /daily-wire-host-says-it-unscientific-cast-black-person-mermaid. 5.  Alex Abad-Santos, “Teen Titans’ Starfire Is an Orange Alien. Racist ‘Fans’ Don’t Want a Black Woman Playing Her,” Vox, July 27, 2018, https://www.vox.com /2018/7/27/17618954/teen-titans-starfire-racism-anna-diop. 6. Hanna Flint, “Steve Toussaint Isn’t Fazed by Racist ‘House of the Dragon’ Criticism,” Men’s Health, August 23, 2022, https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment /a40933597/steve-toussaint-house-of-the-dragon-interview/. 7.  Meredith Simons, “98 Times a White Actor Played Someone Who Wasn’t White,” Washington Post, January 28, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything /wp/2016/01/28/100-times-a-white-actor-played-someone-who-wasnt-white/. 8.  Simons, “98 Times.” 9.  Jane Elliott, in Roland S. Martin, “Anti-Racist Educator Jane Elliott Blasts White Racist for Criticizing Black Mermaid,” YouTube video, 28:18, September 20, 2022, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ks7I1BnP2g. 10. Giulia Carbonaro, “Fact Check: Did Nigeria Ban White Models from Advertising?” Newsweek, September 1, 2022, https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check -did-nigeria-ban-white-models-advertising-1738957. 11.  CNN, “Study: White and Black Children Biased toward Lighter Skin,” May 14, 2010, http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/13/doll.study/index.html. 12.  Robert F. Kennedy, “Remarks at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, accessed November 16, 2022, https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-family/robert-f-kennedy/robert-f -kennedy-speeches/remarks-at-the-university-of-kansas-march-18-1968. 13.  Sarah M. Coyne, Jennifer Ruh Linder, Eric E. Rasmussen, David A. Nelson, and Victoria Birkbeck, “Pretty as a Princess: Longitudinal Effects of Engagement with Disney Princesses on Gender Stereotypes, Body Esteem, and Prosocial Behavior in Children,” Child Development 87, no. 6 (2016): 1909–25, https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12569. 14.  Sydney Trent, “The Fiercest Federal Lawman You Never Knew—and He Was African American,” Washington Post, December 14, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost .com/history/2019/12/14/fiercest-federal-lawman-you-never-knew-he-was-african-american/. 15.  Joe Madison, “In America, we are culturally conditioned to believe, that White is superior, Black is inferior,” Facebook, October 29, 2009, https://www.facebook.com /MadisonSiriusXM/posts/in-america-we-are-culturally-conditioned-to-believe-that-white -is-superior-black/167640671306/.

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CHAPTER 5 1.  Sandra E. Garcia, “Where Did BIPOC Come From?” New York Times, June 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-bipoc.html. 2.  BIPOC Project, accessed September 29, 2022, https://www.thebipocproject.org/. 3.  Kee Malesky, “The Journey from ‘Colored’ to ‘Minorities’ to ‘People of Color.’” NPR, March 31, 2014, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/30/295931070 /the-journey-from-colored-to-minorities-to-people-of-color. 4. Ryan P. Smith, “How Native American Slaveholders Complicate the Trail of Tears Narrative,” Smithsonian Institution, March 6, 2018, https://www.smithson ianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-native-american-slaveholders-complicate -trail-tears-narrative-180968339/. 5.  Hilary N. Weaver, “A Boiling Pot of Animosity or an Alliance of Kindred Spirits? Exploring Connections between Native Americans and African Americans,” Western Michigan University School of Social Work, December 2008, https://scholarworks.wmich .edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3388&context=jssw.

CHAPTER 6 1.  Nikesha Elise Williams, “I Bought into the Worst Stereotypes about Black SmallBusiness Owners, Even after I Became One,” Vox, November 30, 2019, https://www.vox .com/first-person/2019/11/30/20985982/buy-black-business. 2.  Williams, “Worst Stereotypes about Black Small-Business Owners.” 3.  Williams, “Worst Stereotypes about Black Small-Business Owners.” 4. David Pilgrim, “The Brute Caricature,” Jim Crow Museum, Ferris State University, November 2000, https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/brute/home page.htm. 5. African American Registry, “Thomas Rice, the Face of ‘Jim Crow’ Born,” November 16, 2021, https://aaregistry.org/story/thomas-rice-the-face-of-jim-crow/. 6.  PBS, “Blackface Minstrelsy,” accessed December 7, 2022, https://www.pbs.org /wgbh/americanexperience/features/foster-blackface-minstrelsy/. 7.  NPR Staff, “100 Years Later, What’s the Legacy of ‘Birth of a Nation’?” NPR, Feb­ ru­ary 8, 2015, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/08/383279630/100-years -later-whats-the-legacy-of-birth-of-a-nation. 8.  NPR Staff, “100 Years Later.” 9.  NPR Staff, “100 Years Later.” 10.  NPR Staff, “100 Years Later.” 11.  Katy Gillett, “What Is the Censored Eleven? The Racist Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Cartoons Banned since 1968,” National, April 11, 2021, https://www.thenational news.com/arts-culture/television/what-is-the-censored-eleven-the-racist-looney-tunes-and -merrie-melodies-cartoons-banned-since-1968-1.1198852. 12. Aranude A. Tinubu, “Disney’s Racist Cartoons Won’t Just Stay Hidden in the Vault, but They Could Be Used as a Teachable Moment,” NBC News, April 25, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/disney-s-racist-cartoons-won-t-just-stay-hidden -vault-ncna998216.

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13.  Roy Hurst, “Stepin Fetchit, Hollywood’s First Black Film Star,” NPR, March 6, 2006, https://www.npr.org/2006/03/06/5245089/stepin-fetchit-hollywoods-first-black-film -star. 14.  Mark Freeman, “Amos ’n’ Andy: Past as Prologue?” Jim Crow Museum, Ferris State University, October 2005, https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question /2005/october.htm. 15. National Museum of African American History and Culture, “Popular and Pervasive Stereotypes of African Americans,” July 19, 2019, https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore /stories/popular-and-pervasive-stereotypes-african-americans. 16. National Museum of African American History and Culture, “Popular and Pervasive Stereotypes.” 17. MEASURE, “Unpacking the Sapphire Stereotype to Protect Black Girls,” VAWnet, May 19, 2020, https://vawnet.org/events/unpacking-sapphire-stereotype-protect -black-girls. 18.  Quoted in Jane Clayson and Samantha Raphelson, “Unpacking What It Means to Call Kamala Harris a ‘Jezebel,’” Here and Now, February 23, 2021, https://www.wbur.org /hereandnow/2021/02/23/jezebel-trope-black-women. 19.  William Jelani Cobb, “Is Willie Lynch’s Letter Real?” Jim Crow Museum, Ferris State University, May 2004, https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2004 /may.htm.

CHAPTER 7 1. Rob Haskell, “Serena Williams on Motherhood, Marriage, and Making Her Comeback,” Vogue, January 10, 2018, https://www.vogue.com/article/serena-williams -vogue-cover-interview-february-2018. 2.  Jason Silverstein, “I Don’t Feel Your Pain: A Failure of Empathy Perpetuates Racial Disparities,” Slate, June 27, 2013, https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/racial -empathy-gap-people-dont-perceive-pain-in-other-races.html. 3.  Sophie Trawalter, Kelly M. Hoffman, and Adam Waytz, “Racial Bias in Percep­ tions of Others’ Pain,” PLOS One 7, no. 11 (November 2012): 1, https://journals.plos.org /plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0048546. 4.  Trawalter, Hoffman, and Waytz, “Racial Bias in Perceptions,” 7. 5.  Silverstein, “I Don’t Feel Your Pain.” 6.  Kelly M. Hoffman, Sophie Trawalter, Jordan R. Axt, and M. Norman Oliver, “Racial Bias in Pain Assessment and Treatment Recommendations, and False Beliefs about Biological Differences between Blacks and Whites,” Proceedings of the National Association of Sciences 113, no. 16 (April 19, 2016): 4296–4301, https://www.ncbi.nlm .nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4843483/. 7.  John Eligon, “Black Doctor Dies of COVID-19 after Complaining of Racist Treatment,” New York Times, December 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23 /us/susan-moore-black-doctor-indiana.html. 8.  Equal Justice Initiative, “Latest Data Shows Black Students Dispro­ portionately Suspended, Expelled, Arrested,” April 20, 2017, https://eji.org/news/latest -data-shows-black-students-disproportionately-suspended-expelled-arrested/. 9.  Rebecca Epstein, Jamilia Blake, and Thalia González, Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood (Washington, DC: Center on Poverty and Inequality, Georgetown Law, 2017), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3000695.

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10.  Dexter Thomas, “Michael Brown Was Not a Boy, He Was a ‘Demon,’” Aljazeera, November 26, 2014, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/11/26/michael-brown-was -not-a-boy-he-was-a-demon. 11. Sabrina Saddiqui, “Darren Wilson Testimony: Michael Brown Looked Like ‘a Demon,’” Huffpost, November 25, 2014, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/darren -wilson-testimony_n_6216620.

CHAPTER 8 1. Quoted in Nicole R. Fleetwood, “Opinion: The Case against Mug Shots: A Dehumanizing Tool of a Racist Police System,” NBC News, August 6, 2020, https://www .nbcnews.com/think/opinion/racist-police-practices-mug-shots-normalize-criminalization -black-americans-ncna1235694. 2. Derrick Clifton, “These Two Sets of Crime Photos Represent a Serious Problem in News,” Mic, March 31, 2015, https://www.mic.com/articles/114092/these -two-sets-of-crime-photos-represent-a-serious-problem-in-news. 3. Solomon Messing, Maria Jabon, and Ethan Plaut, “Bias in the Flesh: Skin Complexion and Stereotype Consistency in Political Campaigns,” Public Opinion Quarterly 80, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 44–65, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles /PMC4884813/. 4. Diane Bernard, “‘They Were Treated like Animals’: The Murder and Hoax That Made Boston’s Black Community a Target 30 Years Ago,” Washington Post, January 4, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/01/04/they-were-treated -like-animals-murder-hoax-that-made-bostons-black-community-target/. 5. Equal Justice Initiative, “Racial Double Standard in Drug Laws Persists Today,” December 9, 2019, https://eji.org/news/racial-double-standard-in-drug-laws-per sists-today/. 6. Tim Craig and Lori Rozsa, “Florida Let Them Vote. Then DeSantis’ Election Police Arrested Them,” Washington Post, September 12, 2022, https://www.washington post.com/nation/2022/09/04/desantis-election-police-voter-arrests/. 7.  Mike DeForest, “‘Totes Legit’ Tipster Found 282 Possible Voter Fraud Cases in Florida; Few Prosecuted outside the Villages,” News 6, updated September 20, 2022, https://www.clickorlando.com/news/politics/2022/09/06/totes-legit-tipster-alerted-florida -to-282-possible-voter-fraud-cases-few-have-been-prosecuted/. 8.  Ben Adler, “Republican-Controlled States Have Higher Murder Rates than Democratic Ones: Study,” Yahoo! News, April 4, 2022, https://news.yahoo.com/republican -controlled-states-have-higher-murder-rates-than-democratic-ones-study-212137750.html ?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer _sig=AQAAALsMslftrQnFcN_7NAWISO804_-DuX219ic6db2MLBvMVnLHxJbkd9 icZRYAVyp8IltiVBSsZZNdYfqjiqs8aAc_HISdXAHnIe4gWh8Oar_xMDpyiRuxYGXlA _BI-ZzTvaCN4szxEXxubEyWz2x9IujYkpf8lRCtkZtazcgZjOaL. 9.  The Sentencing Project, accessed October 30, 2022, https://www.sentencing project.org/. 10.  Kimberlee Kruesi, “Slavery on the Ballot in Five States as Activists Challenge 13th Amendment Loophole,” People’s World, October 24, 2022, https://peoplesworld.org /article/slavery-on-the-ballot-in-five-states-as-activists-challenge-13th-amendment -loophole/.

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11. Eli Rosenberg, “Louisiana Sheriff Argues against Releasing Prisoners ‘You Can Work,’ Drawing Slavery Comparisons,” Washington Post, October 26, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/10/12/louisiana-sheriff -argues-against-releasing-prisoners-you-can-work-drawing-slavery-comparisons/. 12.  Ava DuVernay, dir., 13th (Los Gatos, CA: Netflix, 2016), streaming. 13.  Partially inspired by the Prison Moratorium Project.

CHAPTER 9 1.  Jamelle Bouie, “The Deadly History of ‘They’re Raping Our Women,’” Slate, June 18, 2015, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/06/the-deadly-history-of-theyre -raping-our-women-racists-have-long-defended-their-worst-crimes-in-the-name-of-de fending-white-womens-honor.html. 2.  History Matters, “‘Their Own Hotheadedness’: Senator Benjamin R. ‘Pitchfork Ben’ Tillman Justifies Violence against Southern Blacks,” accessed December 8, 2022, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/55/. 3.  Bruce Lambert, “At 50, Levittown Contends with Its Legacy of Bias,” New York Times, December 28, 1997, https://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/28/nyregion/at-50-levit town-contends-with-its-legacy-of-bias.html. 4.  Catherine Silva, “Racial Restrictive Covenants History: Enforcing Neighborhood Segregation in Seattle,” Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, University of Washington, 2009, https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/covenants_report.htm. 5.  History.com Editors, “G.I. Bill,” History, updated June 7, 2019, https://www.his tory.com/topics/world-war-ii/gi-bill. 6. Anna Bahney, “The Black Homeownership Rate Is Now Lower than It Was a Decade Ago,” CNN Business, February 25, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/25/homes /us-black-homeownership-rate/index.html. 7.  Erica Pandey, “HUD’s New Plan to Bridge the Homeownership Gap,” Axios, Au­gust 4, 2022, https://www.axios.com/2022/08/04/racial-home-ownership-gap-marcia -fudge. 8.  Jay-Z, Decoded (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2011), 153–54. 9.  Chiara Vercellone, “Fact Check: Hoover Labeled Black Panthers Biggest Threat among Black Extremist Groups in 1969,” USA Today, July 25, 2021, https://www.usatoday .com/story/news/factcheck/2021/07/25/fact-check-black-panthers-part-biggest-threat -1969-hoover-said/5302912001/.

CHAPTER 10 1.  Kriston McIntosh, Emily Moss, Ryan Nunn, and Jay Shambaugh, “Examining the Black-White Wealth Gap,” Brookings, February 27, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu /blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining-the-black-white-wealth-gap/. 2.  Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2017). 3. Josh Levin, “The Myth Was $150,000 in Fraud. The Real Story Is More Interesting,” New York Times, May 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/opinion /sunday/welfare-queen-myth-reagan.html.

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4.  Washington Star, “‘Welfare Queen’ Becomes Issue in Reagan Campaign,” New York Times, February 15, 1976, 51, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/02/15/archives/welfare -queen-becomes-issue-in-reagan-campaign-hitting-a-nerve-now.html. 5.  Bryce Covert, “The Myth of the Welfare Queen,” New Republic, July 2, 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article/154404/myth-welfare-queen. 6.  Covert, “Myth of the Welfare Queen.” 7.  Covert, “Myth of the Welfare Queen.” 8.  Covert, “Myth of the Welfare Queen.” 9.  Covert, “Myth of the Welfare Queen.” 10. Norman Eisen and Aryeh Mellman, “Trump’s Coronavirus Swamp,” Brookings, July 22, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/07/22/trumps -coronavirus-swamp/. 11.  Emma Newburger, “Tom Brady’s Company TB12 Received More than $960,000 PPP Loan,” CNBC, December 5, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/05/tom-bradys -company-tb12-received-more-than-960000-ppp-loan.html. 12. Julia Mueller, “White House Calls out Greene, Other GOP Critics on How Their Own Loans Were Forgiven,” Hill, August 25, 2022, https://thehill.com/homenews /house/3616055-white-house-calls-out-greene-other-gop-critics-on-how-their-own-loans -were-forgiven/. 13.  Kemberley Washington, “COVID-19 Has Had a Disproportionate Financial Impact on Black Small Businesses,” Forbes, updated June 3, 2021, https://www.forbes .com/advisor/personal-finance/covid19-financial-impact-on-black-businesses/. 14.  Washington, “COVID-19 Has Had a Disproportionate Financial Impact.” 15.  DeNeen L. Brown, “One of the Last Survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre—107 Years Old—Wants Justice,” Washington Post, May 19, 2021, https://www .washingtonpost.com/history/2021/05/19/viola-fletcher-tulsa-race-massacre-survivor/. 16.  Renee Nash, “Congress Hears from Survivors of 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre,” WHUR, May 19, 2021, https://whur.com/whur/congress-hears-from-survivors-of-1921 -tulsa-race-massacre/. 17. DeNeen L. Brown, “Three Survivors of Tulsa Race Massacre Receive $1 Million Donation,” Washington Post, May 18, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com /history/2022/05/18/tulsa-massacre-survivors-donation/. 18.  Andre M. Perry, Anthony Barr, and Carl Romer, “The True Costs of the Tulsa Race Massacre, 100 Years Later,” Brookings, May 28, 2021, https://www.brookings.edu /research/the-true-costs-of-the-tulsa-race-massacre-100-years-later/. 19.  Perry, Barr, and Romer, “True Costs.” 20.  Perry, Barr, and Romer, “True Costs.” 21.  Chris M. Messer, Thomas E. Shriver, and Alison E. Adams, “The Destruction of Black Wall Street: Tulsa’s 1921 Riot and the Eradication of Accumulated Wealth,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 77, nos. 3–4 (October 29, 2018): 789–819, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ajes.12225. 22.  Adeel Hassan, “Georgetown Students Agree to Create Reparations Fund,” New York Times, April 12, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/us/georgetown-repara tions.html. 23.  Katie Reilly, “3 Ways America’s Elite Universities Benefited from Slavery,” Yahoo! Finance, November 7, 2017, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/3-ways-americas -elite-universities-201917928.html. 24.  David Teather, “Bank Admits It Owned Slaves,” Guardian, January 21, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jan/22/usa.davidteather.

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25.  Legal Information Institute, “Affirmative Action,” updated June 2022, https:// www.law.cornell.edu/wex/affirmative_action. 26.  Joseph Noronha, “Helen Richey (1901–47),” SP’s Aviation, December 2014, https://www.sps-aviation.com/story/?id=1585.

CHAPTER 11 1.  Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (New York: Random House, 2021). 2. McGhee, Sum of Us, 24. 3. McGhee, Sum of Us, 24. 4. McGhee, Sum of Us, 27. 5. McGhee, Sum of Us, 25. 6. McGhee, Sum of Us, 28. 7.  Harrison Smith, “Mimi Jones, Civil Rights Activist in a Historic St. Augustine Swim-in, Dies at 73,” Washington Post, July 29, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost .com/local/obituaries/mimi-jones-civil-rights-activist-in-a-historic-st-augustine-swim -in-dies-at-73/2020/07/29/d32b6d20-d1a6-11ea-8d32-1ebf4e9d8e0d_story.html. 8.  Terence McArdle, “The Racist History of Chevy Chase, Long Home to Washington’s Power Players,” Washington Post, September 29, 2018, https://www .washingtonpost.com/history/2018/09/29/racist-history-chevy-chase-home-power-players -like-brett-kavanaugh/. 9.  Bill Turque, “In Chevy Chase, a Conundrum Spouts from Fountain Named after a Racist Senator,” Washington Post, December 26, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com /local/md-politics/in-chevy-chase-a-conundrum-spouts-from-fountain-named-after-a -racist-senator/2014/12/26/517e2946-89e7-11e4-8ff4-fb93129c9c8b_story.html. 10.  Roland S. Martin, White Fear: How the Browning of America Is Making White Folks Lose Their Minds (Dallas, TX: Ben Bella Books, 2022). 11.  Andrew Greif, “Doc Rivers: ‘It’s Amazing Why We Keep Loving This Country, and This Country Does Not Love Us Back,” Los Angeles Times, August 25, 2020, https:// www.latimes.com/sports/clippers/story/2020-08-25/doc-rivers-loving-this-country-and -does-not-love-us-back.

CHAPTER 12 1.  Janice Gassam Asare, “How Communities of Color Perpetuate Anti-Blackness,” Forbes, July 19, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2020/07/19/how-com munities-of-color-perpetuate-anti-blackness/?sh=3fc4d36716db. 2.  Brent Staples, “How Italians Became ‘White,’” New York Times, October 12, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/columbus-day-italian-american -racism.html. 3.  Asare, “Communities of Color.” 4. Alyssa Rosenberg, “Whiteness History Month Is a Great Idea. Here Are 7 Ways to Observe It,” Washington Post, January 20, 2016, https://www.washington post.com/news/act-four/wp/2016/01/20/whiteness-history-month-is-a-great-idea-here -are-7-ways-to-observe-it/.

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5.  Michael Harriot, “When the Irish Weren’t White,” Root, March 17, 2018, https:// www.theroot.com/when-the-irish-weren-t-white-1793358754. 6.  Lex Weaver, Taylor Blackley, and Avantika Panda, “Juneteenth Flag Flies over Carson Beach, Once a Symbol of Boston Racism,” GBH News, June 19, 2021, https://www .wgbh.org/news/local-news/2021/06/19/juneteenth-flag-flies-over-carson-beach-once -a-symbol-of-boston-racism. 7.  Weaver, Blackley, and Panda, “Juneteenth Flag.” 8.  Margot Roosevelt, “In California’s Largest Race Bias Cases, Latino Workers Are Accused of Abusing Black Colleagues,” Los Angeles Times, August 22, 2022, https://www .latimes.com/business/story/2022-08-22/california-racial-discrimination-cases. 9.  Roosevelt, “California’s Largest Race Bias Cases,” 10. Newsroom, “Let’s Be Blunt: Latinos Can Be Racist Too,” Fordham Law News, September 27, 2022, https://news.law.fordham.edu/blog/2022/09/27/lets-be-blunt -latinos-can-be-racist-too/. 11. Newsroom, “The Proud Boys’ Latino Connection, Explained,” Fordham Law News, June 13, 2022, https://news.law.fordham.edu/blog/2022/06/13/the-proud-boys-la tino-connection-explained/. 12.  Newsroom, “Proud Boys’ Latino Connection.” 13.  California Newsreel, “Essential Blue Eyed: Transcript,” accessed December 8, 2022, https://newsreel.org/transcripts/essenblue.htm. 14. Hansi Lo Wang and Ruth Talbot, “This Is How the White Population Is Actually Changing Based on New Census Data,” NPR, August 22, 2021, https://www .npr.org/2021/08/22/1029609786/2020-census-data-results-white-population-shrinking -decline-non-hispanic-race#:~:text=While%20the%202020%20census%20results,of%20 the%20other%20racial%20groups. 15.  Roland S. Martin, “Jaheim McMillan Shooting; Kansas City Serial Killer, BLM Demands LA City Councilmember Resign,” YouTube video, 2:14:14, October 17, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXGfFGjxd1Y&list=PLmMX9liR6cNNyxBqyQd v6OlVM4kaU46-h&index=3. 16. Terry Castleman, “Mike Bonin Tells City Council He Is ‘Reeling’ from Colleagues’ Racist Remarks about His Son,” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 2022, https:// www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-11/mike-bonin-reeling-from-revelations -of-leaked-recordings.

CHAPTER 13 1.  Michelle McGahan, “Kanye West’s ‘White Lives Matter’ Scandal, Aftermath: Everything to Know,” US Weekly, October 17, 2022, https://www.usmagazine.com /celebrity-news/pictures/kanye-wests-white-lives-matter-drama-everything-to-know /kanye-brings-kims-name-into-the-mix/. 2.  Nikki McCann Ramirez, “Ben Shapiro: Kanye Declaring War on Jews Is Bad, But . . .” Rolling Stone, October 12, 2022, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics -news/ben-shapiro-gives-qualified-criticism-kanye-west-antisemitism-1234609753/. 3. Harmeet Kaur, “Kanye West Just Said 400 Years of Slavery Was a Choice,” CNN, May 4, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/01/entertainment/kanye-west-slavery -choice-trnd.

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4.  Anti-Defamation League, “White Lives Matter,” accessed November 25, 2022, https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/white-lives-matter. 5.  Southern Poverty Law Center, “White Lives Matter,” accessed October 23, 2022, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/white-lives-matter. 6.  Southern Poverty Law Center, “White Lives Matter.” 7. Black Lives Matter, “About,” accessed October 24, 2022, https://blacklives matter.com/about/. 8.  Martin Pengelly, “Trump Knew Crowd at Rally Was Armed yet Demanded They Be Allowed to March,” Guardian, June 28, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com /us-news/2022/jun/28/trump-jan-6-rally-guns-capitol-attack. 9.  Nicole Chavez, “Rioters Breached US Capitol Security on Wednesday. This Was the Police Response When It Was Black Protesters on DC Streets Last Year,” CNN, January 11, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/07/us/police-response-black-lives-matter -protest-us-capitol/index.html. 10.  Olivia B. Waxman, “The History of the Chaos around Lincoln’s First Inaugur­ ation,” Time, January 15, 2021, https://time.com/5929078/lincoln-trump-capitol-history/. 11.  Ben Jacobs, “The Secret Service’s Deleted Text Message Scandal, Explained,” Vox, July 23, 2022, https://www.vox.com/23274533/secret-service-text-messages-january-6. 12.  Taylor Griffin, “When the color of your skin is seen as a weapon, you will never be seen as unarmed,” Twitter, August 15, 2015, https://twitter.com/tay_griffin14 /status/632608134557757440?lang=en. 13. Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, “Study Aid: Slavery and the Law in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” accessed October 18, 2022, https://www .gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-resources/study-aid-slavery-and-law -seventeenth-century-virginia. 14. Gary Weaver, Intercultural Relations: Communication, Identity, and Conflict (Boston: Pearson Learning Solutions, 2013), 3. 15.  Marshall L. Shorts, “MLK: Legacy, Legacy, Legacy, Legacy . . . ,” Medium, January 15, 2018, https://medium.com/@mrshortscreates/mlk-legacy-legacy-legacy-legacy-26f94 ae9efbd. 16.  David Medina, “Convicted Felon Charged for Possession of Weapon Used to Allegedly Kill Kansas City Firefighter,” KSHB, October 7, 2022, https://www.kshb.com /news/crime/convicted-felon-charged-for-possession-of-weapon-used-to-allegedly-kill -kansas-city-firefighter. 17. Cassandra Vinograd, “WDBJ7 Reporter Alison Parker, Photographer Adam Ward Killed on Live TV,” NBC News, August 26, 2015, https://www.nbcnews.com /storyline/virginia-tv-shooting/wdbj7-reporter-alison-parker-photographer-adam-ward -killed-live-tv-n416221. 18.  Vinograd, “WDBJ7 Reporter Alison Parker.” 19.  Liz Pleasant, “Watch Jon Stewart’s Moving Comments on Charleston Shooting and Racism in America,” Yes! June 24, 2015, https://www.yesmagazine.org /social-justice/2015/06/24/jon-stewart-on-charleston-church-shooting. 20.  Christina Pazzanese, “How Unjust Police Killings Damage the Mental Health of Black Americans,” Harvard Gazette, May 14, 2021, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette /story/2021/05/how-unjust-police-killings-damage-the-mental-health-of-black-americans/. 21.  Pazzanese, “Unjust Police Killings.” 22.  Rozina Sini, “Justice for Harambe: Mother Harassed Online after Gorilla Shot Dead,” BBC News, May 31, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36416350.

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23.  Robin DiAngelo, “So, What Is White Fragility?” transcript, accessed December 8, 2022, https://robindiangelo.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/zeit-campus-transcript .pdf. 24.  Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan, “Black in Oregon 1840–1870: National and Oregon Chronology of Events,” accessed October 26, 2022, https://sos.oregon.gov /archives/exhibits/black-history/Pages/context/chronology.aspx.

CHAPTER 14 1. Janel George, “A Lesson on Critical Race Theory,” Human Rights 46, no. 2 (Jan­u­ary 2021), https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_ma gazine_home/civil-rights-reimagining-policing/a-lesson-on-critical-race-theory/. 2.  George, “Lesson on Critical Race Theory.” 3.  Kevin Stitt, “Governor Stitt Calls for Special Audit of Tulsa Public Schools,” Office of Governor J. Kevin Stitt, July 7, 2022, https://oklahoma.gov/governor/newsroom /newsroom/2022/july2022/governor-stitt-calls-for-special-audit-of-tulsa-public-schools .html. 4. Hicham Raache, “Gov. Stitt Signs Bill That Restricts Teaching of Critical Race Theory in Oklahoma Schools,” KFOR, last updated May 8, 2021, https://kfor .com/news/oklahoma-legislature/gov-stitt-signs-bill-that-restricts-teaching-of-critical -race-theory-in-oklahoma-schools/. 5.  Okla. Admin. Code §210:10-1-23 (2021), https://casetext.com/regulation /oklahoma-administrative-code/title-210-state-department-of-education/chapter-10 -school-administration-and-instructional-services/subchapter-1-general-provisions /section-21010-1-23-prohibition-of-race-and-sex-discrimination. 6.  Miranda Vondale Foster, “Teacher Resigns after Uproar over Sharing QR Code for Library Access with Classroom,” UTV44, August 24, 2022, https://utv44.com/news /local/teacher-resigns-after-sharing-qr-code-for-library-access-with-classroom. 7.  James Bikales, “Okla. Downgrades School District over Complaint It Shamed White People,” Washington Post, July 30, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/educa tion/2022/07/30/crt-oklahoma-tulsa-schools-shame-white/. 8.  https://www.wkrg.com/northwest-florida/escambia-county/teacher-quits-after -escambia-co-schools-staff-take-down-his-black-leaders-posters/ 9.  Christopher Lugo, “Teacher Quits after Excambia Co. Schools Staff Take Down His Black Leaders Posters,” WKRG, August 12, 2022, https://www.flgov.com /2022/04/22/governor-ron-desantis-signs-legislation-to-protect-floridians-from-discrimi nation-and-woke-indoctrination/. 10.  Lugo, “Teacher Quits.” 11. Sam Dillon, “Study Sees an Obama Effect as Lifting Black Test-Takers,” New York Times, January 22, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/education/23 gap.html. 12.  Dillon, “Study Sees an Obama Effect.” 13. Dave Lieber, “They Named a School after Him, and Now They’re Not Sure If Students Should Read His Book,” Dallas Morning News, August 26, 2022, https:// www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2022/08/26/they-named-a-school-after-him-and -now-theyre-not-sure-if-students-can-read-his-book/.

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14.  Corky Siemaszko, “Texas Lawmaker Says 850 Books Ranging from Race to Sexuality Could Cause ‘Discomfort,’” NBC News, October 27, 2021, https://www .nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-lawmaker-says-850-books-ranging-race-sexuality -cause-discomfort-rcna3953. 15.  Nick Watt, “Conservatives Join Liberals in ‘Quiet and Polite’ Idaho Protest to Protect Their Library from Book-Banners,” CNN, September 5, 2022, https://www.cnn .com/2022/09/05/us/idaho-bonners-ferry-library-books. 16.  Cassy Benefield, “Christian Nationalism Goes to the Local Library,” Spokane Favs, September 5, 2022, https://spokanefavs.com/christian-nationalism-goes -to-the-local-library/. 17. Erin Burnett, “Armed Idaho Locals Show Up to Library Board Meetings to Push Ban of Over 400 Books,” CNN, September 3, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/videos /us/2022/09/03/library-idaho-gender-race-books-ban-ebof-watt-pkg-vpx.cnn.

CHAPTER 15 1.  Emily Sullivan, “Laura Ingraham Told LeBron James to Shut Up and Dribble; He Went to the Hoop,” NPR, February 19, 2018, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo -way/2018/02/19/587097707/laura-ingraham-told-lebron-james-to-shutup-and-dribble -he-went-to-the-hoop. 2.  William Cummings, “Trump Slams ‘Low IQ’ Rep. Maxine Waters Who Called for Harassment of White House Officials,” USA Today, June 25, 2018, https://www.usa today.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/06/25/maxine-waters-trump-exchange /732505002/. 3.  Max Plenke, “The Reason This ‘Racist Soap Dispenser’ Doesn’t Work on Black Skin,” Mic, September 9, 2015, https://www.mic.com/articles/124899/the-reason-this-racist -soap-dispenser-doesn-t-work-on-black-skin. 4.  Pranshu Verma, “These Robots Were Trained on AI. They Became Racist and Sexist,” Washington Post, July 16, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology /2022/07/16/racist-robots-ai/. 5.  Verma, “Robots Were Trained on AI.” 6.  Verma, “Robots Were Trained on AI.” 7.  Verma, “Robots Were Trained on AI.” 8.  Andrew Cheng, “AI-Trained Robots Became Racist and Sexist,” EWC Journal, August 22, 2022, https://www.eyrewritingcenter.com/post/ai-trained-robots-became-racist -and-sexist. 9.  Catalyze Tech Working Group, The ACT Report: Action to Catalyze Tech: A Paradigm Shift for DEI (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute, October 2021), https://actre port.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/The-ACT-Report.pdf. 10.  ACT Report, “About Catalyze Tech: A Paradigm Shift for DEI in Tech,” accessed December 8, 2022, https://actreport.com/about/. 11.  Catalyze Tech Working Group, The ACT Report. 12.  Catalyze Tech Working Group, The ACT Report. 13.  Catalyze Tech Working Group, The ACT Report. 14.  Susan Linn, “How AI-Powered Tech Can Harm Children,” Time, October 21, 2022, https://time.com/6216722/how-ai-tech-harms-children/.

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15.  Linn, “AI-Powered Tech.” 16.  Linn, “AI-Powered Tech.” 17.  Linn, “AI-Powered Tech.”

CHAPTER 17 1.  Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018). 2. Cited in Angelina E. Castagno, Educated in Whiteness: Good Intentions and Diversity in Schools (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), https://aca demic.oup.com/minnesota-scholarship-online/book/21228/chapter-abstract/180886830? redirectedFrom=fulltext. 3.  Tom Boggioni, “CNN 10 09 2022 09 54 59,” YouTube video, 3:10, October 9, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OAks2IbFP8. 4.  Dan Rather, “This is straight up racism,” Twitter, October 8, 2022, https://twitter .com/danrather/status/1578936975133855744?lang=en. 5. Brad Dress, “House Republican Defends Tuberville over Reparations Remark,” Hill, October 9, 2022, https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3680053-house -republican-defends-tuberville-over-reparation-remark/. 6. Politicus Media, “Maggie Haberman Refuses to Say That Trump Is Racist,” YouTube video, 1:01, October 5, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7Q89e8xNsc. 7. Alexandra E. Petri, “California High School Football Team Forfeits Season after Players Staged ‘Slave Auction,’” Los Angeles Times, October 3, 2022, https:// www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-03/slave-auction-high-school-football-team -forfeits-season-yuba-city-river-valley.

CHAPTER 18 1.  Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, “American Companies Pledged $50 Billion to Black Communities. Most of It Hasn’t Materialized,” Fortune, May 6, 2021, https://fortune .com/2021/05/06/us-companies-black-communities-money-50-billion/. 2. Samantha Grindell, “Artist Shantell Martin Called Out Microsoft for Asking Her to Make a Black Lives Matter Mural While It’s ‘Still Relevant,’” Business Insider, June 6, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/artist-slammed-microsoft-for -asking-make-mural-while-still-relevant-2020-6.

CHAPTER 19 1.  Ryan W. Miller, “Shouting Matches, Arrests and Fed Up Parents: How School Board Meetings Became Ground Zero in Politics,” USA Today, July 3, 2021, https:// www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2021/07/03/critical-race-theory-makes-school -board-meetings-political-ground-zero/7785802002/.

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2.  Clara Hill, “Tucker Carlson Calls for Teachers to Wear Body Cameras to Prevent Critical Race Theory Teaching,” Independent, July 8, 2021, https://www.independent .co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/tucker-carlson-teachers-race-theory-b1879886 .html.

CHAPTER 20 1. Martin Austermuhle, “Bowser Had ‘Black Lives Matter’ Painted on a D.C. Street. Now Other Groups Want a Turn,” NPR, August 6, 2020, https://www.npr.org /local/305/2020/08/06/899737397/bowser-had-black-lives-matter-painted-on-a-d-c -street-now-other-groups-want-a-turn. 2. Clare Duffy, “Nike Joins the Companies Making Juneteenth an Annual Paid Holiday,” CNN Business, last updated June 13, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/11 /business/nike-juneteenth-holiday-trnd/index.html. 3.  Official Kwanzaa Website, accessed December 8, 2022, https://www.official kwanzaawebsite.org. 4.  Tawanda W. Johnson, “In the Spirit of Kwanzaa,” Baltimore Sun, December 29, 2003, https://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bal-kwanzaa122903-story.html. 5. Keith Mayes, interview with Liane Hansen, “The Value of Kwanzaa,” NPR Weekend Edition Sunday, December 26, 2010, https://www.npr.org/2010/12/26/132343021 /The-Value-Of-Kwanzaa. 6.  Katie Reilly, “3 Ways America’s Elite Universities Benefited from Slavery,” Time, November 7, 2017, https://time.com/5013728/slavery-universities-america/.

CHAPTER 21 1. Anya Kamenetz, “Having Just One Black Teacher Can Keep Black Kids in School,” NPR, April 10, 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/04/10/522909090 /having-just-one-black-teacher-can-keep-black-kids-in-school.

CHAPTER 22 1.  Melinda D. Anderson, “Being Black at America’s Elite Public High Schools,” Atlantic, May 17, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/05/being -black-at-americas-elite-public-high-schools/483003/. 2.  Jon Saphier, Mary Ann Haley-Speca, and Robert Gower, The Skillful Teacher: The Comprehensive Resource for Improving Teaching and Learning, 7th ed. (Acton, MA: Research for Better Teaching, 2018).