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#causeascene


How to Be An Antiracist Ep. 18

January 26, 2020

Podcast Description
Survival 
Homework
Ask yourself, what are you willing to do in the service of antiracism?

Transcription
00:10

OK everyone, welcome to today's episode of the #CauseAScene Podcast Book Club episode of "How to be an Antiracist" Chapter 18: "Survival". We're at the end of this book. It took us a minute, but we got here. So we're just going to read through, and then I'm gonna have some final thoughts to end us with. So I'm going to start on page 230:

The source of racist ideas was not ignorance or hate, but self interest.

And I put a star by that because it is so important. We remove agency from a lot of people when we talk about racist ideas come from ignorance and hate and not attributed to self interest. It's another reason why I'm no longer promoting "White Fragility", by Robin D'Angelo. It's not that it's a bad book. What it is is an academic term and and an academic theory, and in the wild, it looks like, "Oh, I'm so ignorant. Oh, I didn't mean to be hateful," or, you know, "That person is hateful," or, "Oh, that's just their white fragility. They didn't mean it."

No, there's a lot out here that's about self interest. And we need to own that. So many people are benefiting in various ways based on white supremacy, and that includes white people, model minorities, and Black people. We all have found a way—or the system has found a way—for us to benefit, so that we will continue to uphold it. If it did not benefit everybody in the system in some kind of way, we would have overthrown this at some point, whether we all recognize where we benefit or not.

02:09

Continuing on:

The history of racist ideas is the history of powerful policymakers erecting racist policies out of self interest, then producing racist ideas to defend and rationalize the inequitable effects of their policies, while everyday people consume those racist ideas, which in turn sparks ignorance and hate. [...] Educational and moral suasion is not only a failed strategy...

And I highlighted this next:

...it is a suicidal strategy.

And I wrote in the margin: "Fuck civility: the expectation that I must appeal to the moral nature of others while I'm being harmed."

02:50

This is so why... "fuck civility" means... it becomes so much deeper to me as I use it and promote it and think about it and process it. At first, it was just, "You know what? If whiteness is—if civility is optional for whiteness and the expected behavior of people of color, then, damn it, I don't want that anymore!" You know, that was me throwing off that that whole... I've always been a person you ain't gonna tell me what the fuck to do. So that's what that was. But the more and more I learn and challenge and reflect and so on, "fuck civility" means so much more than that. "Fuck civility" is, "Fuck white supremacy!

Fuck how I'm supposed to... all those teachers who told me that—I mean, I literally had a teacher in, I think I was in the seventh grade, but I had him. It was in a small Catholic school. He was gonna be my eighth grade teacher. My mom's like, "No, we're gonna take you out of school because there's gonna be hell for me for the year." But he actually had math groups—it was all Black school, he was a white teacher, Mr. Maluth—oh, I hated that fucker. He had two groups of students. He was the only teacher who did this here: the dumb group—and he literally called them [that]—and the smart group. And I was in the dumb group because he was a math teacher and I did not like his ass, and so I really didn't give a fuck about the class.

And it wasn't until... because my mom told me that, "You know what? I can't deal with you being in his class. There is no other class for you to go to. I'm gonna put you in this public school,