Transcript: It takes a long time to internalize the Undoing Racism Workshop. Even as I was one of the trainers in the workshop, I was constantly, in ways conscious and unconscious, internalizing the message. The founders would always say this is about organizing. We would all nod our heads, and when they asked how many of you are organizers in the room?, some of us would raise our hand. We weren't doing any organizing! But we wanted to be one, and you just internalize the message so much over time–not one sitting or two, but many sittings–hearing the way in which people would talk about not just their history but their lives. And saying: talk about your history, talk about your life. What did you do? When did you do it? Who were your mentors? How did you learn what you were doing? That was a struggle, but organizing means that we've gone through an internal process of development. It means that each setting we’re in, the idea of bringing people together is primary. Not just educating people, not just advocating for people, but how do you organize? 

In New York, everybody was an expert it seemed when we first met. We were working in academia, people had written books, people were world-renowned in their field, there was great expertise in the room, but it wasn't organized, you know, this was just a debate. Or you would hold yourself over in one department or another. So bringing that expertise together and hammering on it, saying, we’ve got to move the expertise to action. We've got to organize within the systems we're a part of. And a lot of that is going. In New York City, social work will never be the same again [because of the frequency of Undoing Racism Workshops in that field]. I think I can say that with some assurance, and it feels good to have been a part of that. 

People are talking about racism who've never talked about it, who assume they knew about it. In academia we found this curious thing–we thought we'd be embraced by academia as being colleagues with them, but academia is set up to compete. And so people who would naturally be our allies were in fact reluctant to work with us because it might diminish their role in the academy. We can't condemn that. We have to understand why that is and why–if people think they know–why is there so little organizing? Tenure’s almost impossible for a person of color to get in this country, but we don't say, well why is that? Why is it so difficult for people of color particularly to gain tenure? What is tenure anyway? What is its intent? When did it start? These were all questions that intrigued us. We said, you've got to grapple with this. This is just as racially invested as some of the things that occurred in the 50s and 60s. 

So that discussion of Undoing Racism is happening all over New York City. People stop me on the street–not just me but others they've met–and say, I went to your workshop! Or I'll meet someone in a coffee shop–this happened just recently–a young woman said, can I sit here?, and she said, you’re that Undoing Racism guy, aren't you? I said who are you??, and she said, I go to the nursing school across the street and we're grappling with what The People's Institute teaches. It's very gratifying. You feel that you've contributed something that is greater than yourself.

Transcript: The truth is that this is a race-constructed nation, and we all know it somewhere in our psyche. And yes, there are other forms of oppression, but race is The Great Divide. It is the Rubicon we've never crossed. And in the Undoing Racism Workshop, you hear a strong analysis of, what is this racism business? What is this country about? And how do we undo it? And it doesn't vary. It doesn't say, well, I'm going to talk one way over here and one way over here. I'm going to talk to poor people this way and rich people that way. It talks to everybody the same. 

Then it talks about how understanding this helps us organize around issues of class, around issues of gender or sexuality. See, the reason you got to start with race in this country, in our opinion, is that you're not going to be able to organize around gender in such a way that brings women of color into the work unless you understand that race is right on top of the table. If it's not on top, it's under the table. A lot of us who are white say, well, it's really about a class thing. And in my experience, most of us who say that have never tried to organize interracially around a class analysis. Because it's very hard to keep people in the room who've been oppressed by race for centuries if you don't demonstrate that you understand that dynamic. Now, once you do, you can organize around different forms of oppression and you will see others as allies in that struggle. 

You know, we're pitted against each other across our different philosophies, our ideologies. But we try to say in The People's Institute and in the Undoing Racism Workshop, we've got to come together as a collective. But we have to have a foundation, and we can't continue to debate issues that fragment us. If you're organizing, see, if you’re organizing, you will understand why you must bring race to the floor. Because you won't be able to organize in a labor setting without it, and the same way around other issues.

Transcript: Labor, for example–which from the early 1920s through at least the early 1960s was a major force for change in this country, in fact, one could argue there wouldn't have been the Civil Rights victories without a strong Labor Movement behind it. But Labor had its own issues with race and always had. We like to put a face on it and say no, Labor was bringing the workers together, but it wasn't. There were pockets in which it happened, but in the 1950s, Labor was targeted by forces who felt threatened by people organizing laborers. And the age old rule in this country is to use race to destroy the movement. Use race. And in this way, what began to happen as I understand history, is that you wanted to make the laborers see themselves as white, and see themselves invested in keeping a certain arrangement in place. 

And unions –because they had been so much a part of their own movements, and civil rights–began to be seen as enemies. And there was a concerted effort to destroy union membership. And it wasn't until the Reagan Administration that that was fully developed and now we have a nation that's hardly organized into unions. But race has always been the Great Divide. And we have to understand even as unions did great things, they didn't necessarily treat people of color as equals. Now there are examples to the contrary, but there was a very concerted effort to bust up unions and to make them less of a force. And how do you do that? You do it by emphasizing individual liberties, not collective. Move from a collective redress of grievance–see, that's the movement–to individual expectations, goals. So when white workers begin to have individual goals and ambitions for themselves and their families, then that whole Union solidarity–which is always what changes this country–begins to break up.

Transcript: How do we explain the fact that President Obama, a Black man, has reached the level of power that he has in this country? 

What Obama proved was that good organizing is the only thing that trumps risk. If you would have asked someone a year before the primaries that led to Obama's nomination, he wouldn't even have been a part of the conversation. He flew under the radar for so many months, organizing on college campuses, using the internet in ways that politicians had not dreamed of, and a lot of other things. He understood–because of his training as a community organizer, and at least in part because of his church–he was able to organize a movement that took him from being something that would be impossible… all of us said, there won't be an African-American elected in our lifetime. It just wasn't something that was going to happen. So the nomination and election of Barack Obama is an incredible feat. 

Now, when Barack Obama becomes president, he's in a whole different arena. Because he is surrounded by the systems of the white dominant culture, and he can't move. He can't do anything without people going crazy. He's recently had some victories by virtue of, again, very effective organizing. But in general, no president, in my opinion, has faced the obstacles that he has faced. What do we hear about him? He's a failure, he hasn't done as well. The left criticizes him this way, the right criticizes him that way, and the middle says he's squeamish. It's an impossible task, and yet it's one that he has done. 

The struggle with race and class–to go back to that for just a minute. If, as you moved up the professional ladder or as you moved up the economic ladder as a person of color, if racism ceased to exist, if the micro-aggressions that you had to deal with every day somehow were no longer relevant, then you could say, well, race is largely a class issue. I have never met a person of color who is either high on the economic scale or high on the professional scale say, you know, as I became head of this, or Dean of that, as I became a lawyer arguing before the Supreme Court, racism just didn't factor in anymore. In fact, many insist it factors in more. That you become more pressured. And that's why you run to your own community when you get a break–you don't have to defend yourself all the time. 

It's fascinating, as I came out of a working class background as a white in the south in Mississippi, my way out was very clear: get an education, get into one of the professions, work hard, stay out of trouble, stay in school, get degrees, and you will have things that your ancestors never dreamed of. That's very true. It's not as easy for people of color as they move up the ladder, so to speak, to get rid of racism.

Transcript: I remember Diana Dunn saying to me one time– she's a trainer and one of the founders of The People’s Institute with Jim and Ron and Barbara and others–she would say, you know, there are millions of white people in this country who are poor. She said that to me and I said, well, you know Diana, I know that. I got an analysis. She said, no, no, no, no. That's not what I'm saying. She says, but not one of us is poor because we're white. Damn, that's deep. You know, that's true. I'm poor for a whole lot of reasons. There are all sorts of things that can happen to me and sometimes I’m the object of discrimination, but never on the basis of race. It might be because I don't have the right credentials, or somebody might be prejudiced against short men, or whatever it might be. But the society doesn't work against me, it works for me. 

And that's why we'll hedge our bets. That's why the working class–who for centuries has internalized a certain message–when asked to join Black, brown, and red brethren or sisters, will hesitate. They might not know what that voice is. What that voice is saying is, wait a minute now. If you go too far, you're going to lose that which is the reason why you have advantage in the first place. 

And all white people know this. Some of us are guilty and feed ourselves over it, some of us will deny it and say, but I don’t see myself as white, and we always joke and say, well, you better, because everybody else does! Or white people will say, I don't see color. We say all sorts of things, and those are genuine, very human expressions, but in fact, it doesn't help, it hurts. When the whole world sees you a certain way, but you're in denial, you get out of touch with reality. And the white supremacist culture that we live in—I'm not making an ideological statement with that; it just means that the culture is dominated by how white people think—makes it so I have what I have because of my relationship to these sanctioned systems. I gotta understand that. 

That does not mean that I can't fight racism, that I can't be against oppression and I can't speak on this. I can speak on it if I'm organizing. If you're not organizing, someone can challenge you and say, why do you go around speaking about this? Shouldn't somebody else get asked that all the time? But if I'm organizing with other whites, I'm organizing in coalitions of accountability to people of color, to deny our voice and say you shouldn't speak out is to keep everything the way it is.

Transcript: We have a way of speaking in this country that ill-defines people. Like, we'll say men do this, men are in charge of that, men this, men that. But men of color are not in charge of anything in this country. Never have been. So to include them in the category of privileged by virtue of their gender is to not understand history. That doesn't mean that men of color do not internalize the value system of white male dominated culture, but you cannot say that white men and men of color walk the same streets in this nation. Men of color are hunted in the United States, always have been. At the beginning, if you were indigenous, you were hunted. If you were a runaway African who was enslaved, you were hunted. In the aftermath of the Civil War, states began to pass Black Codes. And you were hunted in the aftermath of World War I when you came back having died for your country as a man of color. You were hunted, and some were hung in their uniforms. 

So the way in which this society kept their racial order was often through the recruitment of working class white men. For generations, those of us who emerged from a working class culture as white men were taught to not only fear men of color–whether it was in the westward movement of white people on what we call “Indian country,” or whether it was tracking down a runaway African–we were taught to fear, but we were also taught to defend. 

You see that today in the interaction between the police departments of the nation and Black men in particular, and Latino men who are Black. It'll always be the same MO: an individual or a group of white police will shoot. It just happened in New Orleans, it happens every day in this nation somewhere. The perpetrator is almost always white, the victim is almost always Black. The police chief and the City will always say it was a unique set of circumstances, the community will always come up with ways to say it wasn't the set of circumstances–he was going for his wallet, he belonged there, he was a police officer himself. If you have been acculturated as a white working class person–I'm not talking about your mother and daddy, I'm talking about a society, generation after generation–then your first reaction is, I fear you. I might not admit it, but I have been trained to see certain people as a threat.

See, if you're going to teach for a test in this country, ask white people to understand racism. Ask us questions about it. You know, it's amazing… I work with young people and I ask them all sorts of obscure questions. Now, 24 out of 25, if you took the test as an individual, might fail. But somebody knew the answer. So by the time I got to eight or nine questions, they were doing well. People know. It's just we don't necessarily ask them what they know. Now, you ask white people, what do you know about the lives of others? Many of us can't say, and we get defensive when asked because it's not the norm.

Transcript: We're very scared. Even when we don't understand why we’re afraid. I watched those community forums when the [Affordable Care Act] was first out there, and I saw white people going to the microphone and just turning blue in the face, as they say. Our veins were about to pop. I said, what the hell is this? Do we love our doctors so much? Does Marcus Welby come to our house? Do we love the insurance premium that is bankrolling us? Do we love to go to the clinic and wait six hours? What are we defending?

There was something psychological, something visceral, about the fear. I don't know what I'm scared of, but I see this Black man up here and I'm wondering if all the promises of this nation to me and mine for generations are now out the window. I am afraid of where this nation is going. You see the rage when it comes to immigration from Mexico and the desire to just build a wall around this nation. It’s deeply rooted fear that somehow we as whites who've been promised and who have benefited so much because we are white, are now no longer able to bank on that. We see the demographics changing. And that fear that comes out now turns to rage. It's an internalized factor that, if I can't get an answer that is sufficient, then I'm going to get angry. Psychologists and other mental health professionals have got to start recognizing the fear that is a part of being white now and begin to address that, because it's very dangerous.

Transcript: Elizabeth Martinez said, very profoundly, that you can't understand racism in this country unless you understand what happened in 1790. I thought, what did happen? And she said, I'm talking about the Naturalization Act of 1790. And in that, if you studied it, you would find embedded that only free white persons can immigrate to this nation and begin the process that leads to citizenship. That didn't mean that all immigrants got citizenship right off, but it was the law of the land. She said it basically stayed the law of the land until the early 1950s. And she would challenge us. She said, what happened between this period–1790 to 1952? And people would say all sorts of things. What she was looking for was that all of the various systems that make up a nation–from education to incarceration, from healthcare to social service–that all of the systems were established during that time that white supremacy was the law. It wasn't just an opinion, it was the law. She blew my mind. I couldn't get over it. I still can't get over it. I said yes, yes! And that's why, even today, when we try to confront what's going on in our school systems that have such an overwhelming negative impact on students of color–why do so few graduate? All these questions–why are children of color more likely to be in foster care and stay there longer? You can't find one system in this country that you can't predict its outcome on the basis of race. So if that's true–and it is–then you have to understand that disproportionate outcomes are the intent of the system. But that doesn't mean that that intent can just be removed by saying, we no longer have that intent. You can't legislate something that becomes a part of a societal DNA. You can't just educate it away, you know? It's going to take hard-nosed organizing because it's not going to come easily. 

Now it's very hard for those of us who are in those systems–and most of us are in one way or another. If you're employed in this country, you're a part of a larger system. If you are unemployed, you are standing outside of that system. But whoever you are, your quality of life depends on the nature of your interaction with systems. Now, those of us who work at the professional level, who run those systems, we're called all sorts of things. From case managers to adjuncts to this to that, but we are educated and trained to play a certain role. But if you don't talk about the race construct–if you don't talk about and walk people through it to say, this is when it happened, this was the day, this was the intent, this is what it's meant–you won’t understand why the systems continue to produce such disproportionate outcomes.

Now, Joyce James and her colleagues in Texas, through their relationship with one of the Casey Foundations, began to take seriously the message of Undoing Racism. See, not all of us who go to a workshop take it seriously, or we don't connect it to our work. She did, and her cadres did. And they began to say okay, all of us are going to go [through the workshop]. You know what's the most amazing thing about that? They're saying that for the first time in the history of Texas there are fewer African-American children being brought into the system. So that never happened before, and the only thing she could point to as the difference was the organizing intent of the Undoing Racism Workshop. So she began to send every employee–from the most powerful to the entry level–through the workshop. She understood the organizing. See, most leaders won't go to the workshop, you know, because they think they already got it, or they're afraid of the implications of it. But what James did that is most powerful, is that they might have done 100 workshops, and I think she and her leadership–I might be a little wrong but I'm not far off–have attended every workshop. I always remember that when someone in a systemic position says I don't have time to do it, but I want my people to do it. It's a sure sign that you're not serious about what you're doing. 

So, disproportionality, again, is one of the great victories that the People’s Institute was a part of. We're not the reason for it, but we're a part of a nationwide movement, now worldwide, that began to discuss these things. You hear disproportionality everywhere you go now in the professional classes, but there wasn't even a word for it in 1990. So that's something that I think those of us in the anti-racist movement, at the People's Institute, can feel really good about. That a nationwide discussion is going on. Now, has it permeated every facet? By no means. But the movement is going. I would dare say that we did not envision this–maybe a couple of folks, maybe they envisioned it, but I don't think so. But now that it's happening, I think we should feel really good about what we're doing and where we're going with this.