It’s our weekly check-in friends. This is lucky podcast number 13. I wonder if there is ever going to be a week where I say, wow not much happening here, things are pretty quiet on the Southern front, let’s talk about our enneagram. We are not at a place to talk about the enneagram… yet.
On the one hand, you may be longing for a week like that because you are tired of all of it, on the other, feeling like there is much work to be done and now is the time. I don’t see us downshifting anytime soon, but I think we can slow down. I guess we better get comfortable in our active stance and just take breaks when we need and ensure we get rest, stay hydrated, and find a couple of people that have our back.
When people say life changes in a blink of an eye, sometimes it’s more like 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Watching it was like watching an ultimate “uncle” game without the release after the “uncle” not to mention the fact that it wasn’t a game; it was someone’s life and then the loss of it.
I saw a picture of a sign this week that said, judging a demonstration by its most violent participants but not judging a police force by its most violent cops is the language of the oppressor. (DOUBLE GULP) I’m going to need a little time with that one.
A long time ago, a wise woman told me amid my struggle with a long-held belief that I couldn’t seem to make sense anymore if you think at 40 precisely what you thought at 20, you haven’t lived much of a life. I would answer if you believe at 40 differently than you thought at 30, that transition has included some discomfort, swallowing of pride, blood, sweat, and tears. The space we are in is not an easy one no matter who you are, I think we can all agree on that.
I am categorically impatient in most capacities of my life besides listening and work. But last week, I laid down on the ground for 8 minutes and 46 seconds with a bunch of other people. I wasn’t impatient; I was just heartbroken.
I’ve been thinking, reading, listening, thinking some more about racism. I have a lot of time to make up for, so it feels pretty intense. It is that same feeling of when I had my first baby. Everything was new, I hadn’t done any of it before, and it was a constant trial by fire- breastfeed or bottle, ear infection or new tooth coming in, solid foods yet or hold off, turn the car seat or wait two weeks, stay in the crib or toddler bed. Each decision was agonizing until I had made it, and the unsolicited advice, overwhelming. When I got to kid number two, I had a game plan; I knew who to ask, I had some wisdom under my belt so that I could act with more confidence and assurance.
In 2017 when the confederate statue controversy became headline news, Mitch Landrieu, the then-mayor of New Orleans, made a speech. If you haven’t read that speech, you should, it’s moving and powerful. Before I read the speech, I wasn’t sure how to feel about these statues and their removal. I just had never even thought of it before. I didn’t understand what the big deal was all about. I mean, it’s a statue, right? I rarely look at statues because I’ve got places to be, you know. Unless I am on vacation or I’m visiting a site specifically to LOOK AT a statue, I don’t look. I’ve never lived in a city where there were statues on my way to work or where I ate lunch or by my kid’s school. No statues equals no thoughts on statues. So I made flippant remarks like, “what is all the fuss about?” Then I read the speech by a mayor I knew nothing about. Then I knew exactly why I was wrong; Mitch Landrieu laid it out for me. He said,
“But there are also other truths about our city that we must confront.
New Orleans was America’s largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were brought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor of misery of rape, of torture.
America was the place where nearly 4000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined ‘separate but equal’; where Freedom riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp.
So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history; well, what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth.
And it immediately begs the questions: why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame—all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans.
So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission. There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.”
That is some thought-provoking stuff right there, right? That speech was written in 2017, and it changed my mind forever on the debate about confederate statues and why cities should vote for their removal. I read more, I thought more. I learned the language to use, I learned how to say it, and then, I started saying it. And then, it was kind of like my second baby, not so hard because I had some experience and wisdom to rely on.
I feel like my education is happening all over again, but now there are new and more terms I need to know and understand. Just the process of defining words for myself, white fragility, protest vs. march, defunding, The Justice in Policing act, Anti-racist vs. I’m not racist, microaggressions, Juneteenth. I had to make some room for this, and I’m still doing that. I’m not saying you have to know how to feel about these words, but it is time that you familiarize yourself with them so you can begin to navigate how you think about them. It’s like we are having a first baby all over again. Don’t be scared of it, don’t let someone else tell you how you have to do it, don’t not re-think about it because you are sure your 20-year-old self was right. That means you ask questions, listen, read, listen, ask. Making sure I was asking all different people helped to, I asked a minority police officer; I asked a white friend, I asked a black friend, I asked my husband. I talked to someone who loves history; I spoke to my conservative friends and my liberal friends I spoke to everyone. I wanted to hear it from all sides.
Some of you may know that I went to a Jesuit college. It had an enormous impact on me. Their dedication to education and service was amazing to experience in my late teens and early 20’s. I didn’t know why Jesuits were different from the parish/diocesan priests I had listened to my whole life; I just knew they were. There is a word that is known in the Jesuit tradition as casuistry. The word means specious moral reasoning. If you have listened to Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History (Season 4, episode 5, 6, and 7), this may sound familiar to you as he did three incredible episodes on it (http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/35-the-standard-case).
The idea is this, when difficult problems or ethical dilemmas arise, instead of approaching them with broad principles, you approach each challenge with details on its own. You begin with the microscope focused in, and then you turn the dial to move it out. It seems backward, doesn’t it? I mean, we can’t start by looking at a problem individually, can we?? Or maybe we do this, at our convenience, all the time.
We have lived our lives believing that when we use principles and laws, things will be fair. If we use a law or spiritual guidance, then we can solve it, we will achieve the answer or solution. Only we know by now that not all laws are just, that people don’t always act with high moral character and that there are “versions” of history, of studies of everything.
Recently someone asked me to describe in broad terms the general attributes of white vs. black vs. Asian people. Take a second to think about it. I was “today” years old when I learned, that typically, in this country if “we” meet a white person, with a negative attribute, let’s say obesity, we note that this INDIVIDUAL is obese, we would never translate that negative characteristic to, all white people are obese. But, if we meet a black person who, for example, was undereducated, we grabbed a big paintbrush and paint ALL black people as undereducated.
Maybe this doesn’t sound right to you. Perhaps you think, Lori, you’ve got this one all wrong. But just think back for a second to your memories or what you’ve heard from friends, neighbors, patients. I look back through the years of the many stories I have been told about people who have had bad experiences, and they often sound something like this. When I was young, a black kid took my backpack. When I was a teenager, a black kid taunted me a parking lot, and I got suspended for getting in a fight. When I was a teenager, a black kid took my spot on the basketball team even though he could barely make the grades to play.
It sounds kind of silly, doesn’t it? I mean, did you somehow manage to escape childhood with only black kids mistreating you? Was there not an experience where a kid that was not black mistreated you, scared you, or caused you pain. Why is it that we remember MOST when someone of ANOTHER color harms us? The black waitstaff, the black accountant that made us wait, the black electrician that came to fix our backyard lighting and didn’t finish the job, the black physician that was aloof. Or maybe you are avoiding the black person anyway because you don’t want a black accountant, electrician or doctor. Are you still blaming black people today for your childhood terrible experiences? Are you painting with your broad brush instead of remembering all the other lessons too? Why do we take the time to describe people as the “black person” vs. just the crappy electrician who didn’t know the first thing about rewiring? There are VERY few instances where we need to use skin color as a qualifier or descriptor. It isn’t like I’m going to know which black kid beat you up in your youth, so why use the word? Why do we do that? I don’t know, but I think we should collectively agree to stop doing that.
This is how descriptive word association sunk its piranha teeth in and how it continues to survive. I “learned” to associate words like criminal, lazy, stupid, on the system, and disrespectful with black people. I heard people tell negative stories, and then I just started making assumptions. ALL people can be criminal, lazy, stupid, on the system, and disrespectful, but we don’t say that do we. No one ever talks about the white kid that stole your basketball and hid it from you in 3rd grade. Back to the question above, what words do you think of when you hear the words “white people”……. The only word that comes to my mind right now is LUCKY.
This is hard to swallow. It may be too much at once. I am fortunate that some of this information has come as a trickle through the years so I could wrap around it. Black Lives Matter was explained to me well a few years ago, so I am now well versed at explaining to others. If it is just too much to discuss right now for you, I recommend either reading the book, How to be an Anti-racist, or Stamped from the Beginning both by Ibram X Kendi or check out the most recent Unlocking Us with Brene Brown and Dr. Kendi. Then just think, and maybe try thinking the Jesuit way.
Casuistry specious moral reasoning is what allows us to look at facts and details and not the broad strokes that we’ve excepted as truth because our parents accepted them, and their parents accepted them. It allows us to focus in.
Let’s try some examples:
One common belief held by white people is that a large percentage of Black Americans are on
government assistance programs. What are the factors that lead Americans to need government assistance- poverty and lack of education? Black Americans don’t own the monopoly on either of those two things. If you are white, poor, and undereducated, you likely receive government assistance. If you are Asian or Latino poor and undereducated, you probably receive government assistance. If you are black poor and undereducated, you likely receive government assistance. Yet, we witness experiences like this, “She’s buying a new purse and wearing designer jeans, and she’s probably on welfare” whispers the just loud enough white woman at the back of the line about the black woman checking out at the department store. Or a more recent example you may have seen on social media, while waiting in line to board an airplane, a white woman asked the black man in front of her to excuse her because first-class and priority boarding had started, he politely said, “I know, I have a first-class ticket” and she said, in a whispered tone just loud enough to her companion, “he must be military.” Yes, Karen, what on earth would a black man be doing with a first-class ticket on your airplane?
Another common misconception is that black people aren’t as smart as white people. They have lower graduation rates and do poorly at school. What is our broad stroke here? The number of studies that prove how preferentially white children are chosen for gifted classes and black children are not, even with the same test scores, is in the hundreds by now. This doesn’t also account for how black students are treated in the classroom.
Further studies that discuss how this alters one’s trajectory in life is also accurate. These stem back all the way to Brown vs. the Board of Education when black teachers were no longer hired in integrated schools because white people were so mad that schools were integrating. We used our power in punishment. We had fewer black teachers, which meant we had fewer black students chosen for gifted programs. According to a new Vanderbilt University study published in AERA Open, using data on more than 10,000 elementary school students from the U.S. Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten cohort, the study found that black students are 66 percent less likely and Hispanic students are 47 percent less likely than white students to be assigned to gifted programs. The researchers sought to examine this discrepancy and evaluate both socioeconomic and education factors that may be contributing to it. But in fact, those factors did not influence if students were chosen, even if the students were wealthy, they still weren’t chosen if their teacher was white. Only in the instance when the black student was taught by a black teacher, were students of selected equal caliber. These are the details; these are the truths; these are the facts. And they are not easy to swallow.
I had never heard the idea that there are only racists and anti-racists in the world until recently. I didn’t understand it at first. You may be noticing a trend here. I don’t believe a lot of things the first time I read or hear them. It was right back to having a new baby again. But now I’ve had some time, I’ve listened and read and thought. If your anti-racist, you must begin by actively admitting the ways you are and have been racist. You have to accept things like; I can’t think of a single generalized negative word that describes white people as a whole, because I don’t hear people use them. This idea that I, as a white person am not racist, means that I deny that I have been a part of the system that taught me that General Lee was an honorable hero, that I should read black authors during black history month but shouldn’t feel compelled to do so at other times, that black actors have the same opportunity to lead roles as white actors, and that people I listen to and follow on social media should be people that look like me. I mean we #hadablackpresident so that alone shows we aren’t a country steeped in racists, right? I am a racist; I have acted in racist ways my whole life, and now I want to be an anti-racist. The forms I used are small, the techniques stealthy, but as we talked about a couple weeks ago, I acted in the small papercut ways of racism, not the KKK kind of ways. Things like, I’m going to introduce myself and meet you, smile and wave, and always stop to say hello, but I’m not going to invite you to my house because I assume you won’t want to come or I am not sure what we will talk about. Or maybe I DO invite you over to my house, so I can tell all my white friends that I had a black family over to my house, I do it for proximity “credit” not for connection.
I did it a few weeks ago when a patient asked me why so many black people are getting infected and dying of Corona at higher rates than white people, and I said, I’m not sure why perhaps it is because they have a higher incidence of diabetes. You know what the risk factors are for type 2 diabetes are- obesity, fat distribution, inactivity, family history, and race, including African Americans, Alaska Native, American Indian, Asian American, Hispanic/Latino, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander. The awful truth of it is, if a person came in and said, my Asian grandmother has Corona, I would not say, is it because she has type 2 diabetes? After all, I wouldn’t assume she did?
This, my friends, is hard. We must use new terms that may be unfamiliar and language we haven’t used before. We must not deny and say we aren’t racist; we must work at being ANTI-RACIST. It means we are aware; it means we will admit what we’ve done, the mistakes we have made, and actively work against them. It means if we are corrected, instead of defensive, we appreciate the chance to know more to be educated in another way. This is also why, when I read or listen to black people’s impatience with white people like me, I do ask for grace. I am trying, think of me as a new mother. I have to learn everything again for the first time, but I will learn, and I will get better. This impatient middle-aged white lady is asking for what she needs, which is more time to think and listen and learn and act.
Don’t be scared of not knowing, start somewhere, listen hard
Advice From A Friend: Forget the broad strokes and dig into the details