Hello. First, I would like to thank my hosts here at the Einstein Forum for inviting me. Berlin is a long way from Mississippi and I marvel at the distance I have traveled in miles and perspectives in the span of a mere 36 hours. Mississippi and the Deep South are like no other places on Earth. Conferences like these remind me of the importance of reflecting and sharing work, quantifying successful strategies that will end inequality and achieve solidarity, and draw upon the innovative ideas of people who may be differently connected to the work. Conferences like these are crucial because they bridge the gaps, turf wars, and quiet the tension between academics and equity educator/activists between theorists and practitioners. I hope to contribute by pushing back against the prevailing notions that American Southerners are irredeemably racist, enjoy the fractures and fissures created by injustice and inequality, and do not wish to bring diverse individuals into community. In fact, I believe most white Southerners want just the opposite but prevailing techniques for bringing this about have failed. During my time, I’d like to explain how I came to this work and I will share the techniques that have reaped results for me as an equity activist and educator. I must confess that these techniques are not sophisticated, rather, they are simple and they rest on the tenets of compassion, encouragement, persistence, and understanding.
I began my journey to social justice through academia. I completed my doctoral studies in history and anthropology. I specialized in American intellectual history, women’s, African and Native-American histories, memory studies, and gender, sexuality, historical, cultural, feminist, and critical race theory. I spent 20 years in the undergraduate and graduate classrooms. I especially enjoyed the direct mentoring of students where I actively worked to demonstrate to them the importance, utility, and applicability of their knowledge in their everyday lives. Over the past few decades, our responsibilities as academics have broadened beyond teaching our disciplines and I for one, am glad about it. What use is a liberal arts education if you cannot be a solid contributing member to society? To that end, I channeled all of my energies to not only create excellent professionals, but also productive citizens, and compassionate community members. I did this semester after semester, taught at colleges across the country and finally stayed long enough to achieve tenure, chair academic departments, establish gender and women’s studies programs, and publish. My last professorship was at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. The College sat on sacred land purchased/stolen from Native Americans. I was shocked at the cognitive dissonance of having a western liberal arts college sitting on spaces where racism and violence still cause deep injuries to the Navajo nation. Everyday, I went to work on the stunning southwestern desert-toned mesa, and witnessed people overlooking racial tensions, ignoring Native American culture and privileging white culture, and pretending that all of this was in the past. It was not. I saw the pain in my Navajo students as they reconciled the daily violence committed against them in pursuit of a degree. I also witnessed white guilt manifesting itself in anger at the Navajo for their refusal to have their culture extinguished. I was deeply affected by this experience and became actively involved in straddling the life of an academic and activist, so when I received a call from the Winter Institute for Racial R Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi asking if I might like to become their Academic Director and work as an equity educator, I was immediately intrigued. I hoped that I could combine my interests and employ my academic training to make real impacts on the lives of the students and the communities that I would work in.
I arrived at the University of Mississippi, a neo-Confederate space and historical space where both Civil War and civil rights violence took place aware of what I was getting into. The Deep South and the state have been ground zero for racism so I knew putting theory into practice would be a challenge, and it was. Mississippi is deferential not democratic, decidedly evangelical and distrustful of academics. Most Southerners trust tradition over innovation, are deeply connected to kin and neighbors, and equally suspicious of outsiders. Here is what I learned very, very quickly. Nobody was remotely interested in theories, intellectual discussions, and a discussion of academic history. They knew their own history and it had been passed down through generations and memorials. Southerners deem non Southern academics dangerous liberals who are secretly aiming to upend and destroy the South. I was told often and quite frankly, that my theories and histories were inaccessible and irrelevant. Add to that--I was a Northern Jew and LGBTQ--I became the perfect incarnation of everything the South was threatened by. I understood that while my academic training would eventually be crucial, I needed to build trust and I needed to build trust fast, therefore, I relied on my skills as an educator, compassionate communicator, and dedicated community member. Despite experiencing lots of shunning, misogyny, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and homophobia, I charged on, intent on not failing, because I understood the suspicion, I was committed and, well, I had no other choice. Quickly, I learned that in order to be successful, I would need to rely heavily on my historical and theoretical knowledge, years of working with resistant and frustrated folks in academia, and the patience and compassion I deployed as a professor. In other words, every single bit of my experience was necessary to develop the successful techniques that I eventually deployed. I had to bring my best self at all times and I have been doing so for the past five years. It is challenging but necessary work.
Through this learning process, I soon discovered that I have a special way with, and please don’t be offended when I say this, effectively reaching anxious white folks. Because white Southerners possess most of the political and economic power and social capital and also perpetuate racism, I decided to concentrate my focus on them. I knew that equity’s sustainability depended on many different strategies and entry points and that others were effectively tackling the impacts of racism elsewhere. I also knew that most folks were intimidated by white backlash. I knew that I had to and could confront and collaborate with those who held unearned racial power so, over the past four years, I have perfected techniques designed to reorient white southern thinking, encourage self reflection, and ensure that white southerners realize they have the absolute capacity to upend implicit and explicit bias.
Turning apathy into empathy to achieve solidarity requires that we approach the region without those judgments which views Southerners as backward, ignorant, racist, and actively belligerent. Instead of insulting and unproductive comments to and about Southerners who are still fighting the war, we might try listening to them. In fact, the war is not over, the war continues and has become so normalized in Southern society, it has become quotidian. Here is where my historical analytical training was crucial. Over time as economic, political, and social circumstances have changed, Southerners renamed their wars from the Civil War and its battle over rights and resources, to Jim and Jane Crow, Civil Rights, mass incarceration, and school to prison pipelines. The war continues and every Southerner, regardless of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, are soldiers and casualties. New wars are created as Southerners perceive themselves under threat, struggle to retain power they feel entitled to, and demand rights previously denied to them. These wars continue at both the societal and individual levels and Southerners are so mired. But let us be clear, I do not believe that Southerners want this, in fact, I firmly believe they crave peace.
To turn apathy to empathy and as is the case in war, we must accept that this is a region continuously and deeply traumatized and wounded. Let us abandon the notion that Southerners need to be fixed and instead understand that they are in need of healing. Equity educator/activists must attend to the wounded through triage, rehabilitation, and care. We must collaborate and not correct. Trauma and wounds are the theoretical underpinnings and material framework which guide my work and they are the keys to successful community building. To succeed at fulfilling solidarity and achieving empathy, equity educator/activists must deploy individualized approaches because racist and other oppressive historical and contemporary traumas are experienced uniquely. We cannot create healthy communities unless we undo the individually inherited and experienced traumas created by racist ideologies and actions.
Turning apathy into empathy is to understand the manifestations of racial trauma. While most people understand that racism is sustained by major acts or by publicly slurring individuals or groups, I argue that forms of oppression are fortified through implicit bias, everyday interactions, and stifling etiquette designed to keep people assigned to their classed, racialized, and gendered spaces. The South can be a frightening land of interpersonal violence with insults yelled from slow moving threatening vehicles, giant Confederate flags waving from mammoth bro trucks, and de facto, yet strictly enforced, residential and educational segregation. Laws don’t mean a damn if people feel unsafe and laws don’t fix that. Because we have not effectively attended to the traumas, the South is replete with folks in states of resistance, retreat, and in clusters of comfort. We must begin from this space. To not do so, is a pivot away from possibility.
Turning apathy to empathy means recognizing the symptoms of racial trauma. Southerners continue cycles of racial trauma by repeating racialized thinking and duplicating and upholding racist systems and structures. Like other forms of trauma, racism is rarely discussed; it is avoided, and held deeply within Southerners’ interiors. But it is ever present. Like other forms of trauma, racism consciously and unconsciously frames the way white Southerners exist. White Southerners are bilingual depending on situations and who is within earshot. They mask their trauma by perpetuating untruths and assure each other that everything is fine, that racism is mostly over, that everyone gets along with everyone, and that people are responsible for their own inequitable situations when, in fact, they know that none of this is true. These polished narratives are not lies really, they are the defense mechanisms of wounded psyches.
To turn apathy into empathy and to achieve solidarity, we must abandon traditional forms of doing diversity because, well, we know it does not work. It is a check in a box for Human Resources. It speaks to the converted and makes hostile those who harbor explicit or implicit bias. Existing practices lack proper engagement, short and long term impacts, and sustainability. Here is how normal diversity sessions are viewed by most Southerners. First, regarding white folks: nobody wants to discuss diversity because they 1) find it boring 2) think the training is punitive and most important of all 3) they think you are going to call them all racists. If you are not white, they are 1) worried that this training will further marginalize them 2) be expected to speak for everyone of their race and most importantly 3) don’t know what the hell you are talking about.
In order to be successful, I quickly learned that equity educator/activists need to meaningfully listen. We cannot come in as saviors dictating processes for ending inequality. We must acknowledge and accept that communities can best identify their own challenges and solutions. We must reorient white Southerner thinking and recognize that most Southerners are products of their environment and wish for a more communal society. I have found that most people want to shed the shields of guilt, anger, shame, blame and distrust. We, as equity educator/activists, must recognize that apathy is simply the armor protecting empathy.
Turning apathy into empathy means that those of us guiding folks through these processes must be honest with ourselves. We need to ready and steady ourselves for difficult and exhausting work. Many equity educator/activists mistakenly focus their efforts outwards without any real self reflection. To be successful and to demonstrate to the folks we work with that ending bias is possible, it is mandatory that we take a full accounting of and be painfully honest about our own anxieties or biases. The fastest way to get people to understand how to undo bias is to model it. We simply cannot expect people to perform change when we are unwilling.
Turning apathy into equity depends on being dynamic, enthusiastic, absolutely competent and confident in the material, and being sharply perceptive with the audience. It means directly connecting with your audience because racism has made individuals lonely and afraid and they yearn for connection so that means we must initiate connections and not be rebuffed by resistant behaviors. This is easily accomplished by sharing real space, learning names, holding people’s gazes, meaningfully listening to people, turning to wonder and allowing folks to recover when they stumble or say something problematic. It requires interrupting discomfort, filling knowledge gaps, and responding to resistance with humor and intellect. It means that you understand that your success directly depends on alleviating fears, providing folks with requested knowledge, and working arm in arm with them as they work out their own anxieties. And doing it with compassion and love. Yep, love.
Turning apathy into empathy requires that we have an unwavering faith that equity can be achieved and oppression eliminated. Full stop. We must impress upon each encountered individual that they are crucial to the process. Participants often understand that people who hold more power than themselves are responsible for undoing systemic inequality. We need to make clear that each person has the capacity to undo inequity and that each interaction is the exact right time to chose compassion over conflict, to step in instead of stepping back. I have found that white Southerners need a tremendous amount of encouragement and confidence building. They must be made to understand that racism hurts everyone not just the the targets of oppression. Hatred, inequity, and injustice corrupt absolutely. Again full stop. Participants must be persuaded that all people have value and that tolerance as a paradigm fortifies inequity (run through tolerance/value exercise). This must be conveyed from start to finish and in every collective and individual interaction.
Turning apathy into empathy requires us to stop blaming white southerners for 400 hundred years of racism. Instead, we must limit their responsibility to their own lives and how they educate their family, friends, co-workers, and community members. The blame and shame game results in defensiveness and deafness. Of course, we must hold folks responsible for their own implicit and explicit bias but I like to utilize an anti-deficit approach (meaning that I make no assumptions about the extent of their bias), meet the people where they are, and create non-threatening though often uncomfortable environments where white Southerners will examine current and past relationships to inequity and their participation in these inequitable systems.
This works. There isn’t a training where people don’t report they are buoyed by my enthusiasm and connection. When I was working with large cable laying corporation in a deeply racist space in Mississippi. Diversity training was mandatory. Two guys did not realize they were on a hot mike and I heard an exchange stating “this training was bullshit and if she thinks we are going to just welcome and marry lazy insert slur well, fuck her.” Of course, I chuckled and was undeterred. Throughout the training, I paid special attention to these guys understanding that they were anxious, afraid, and apathetic. I extensively involved them in the conversation and pointedly discussed how racism hurts white folks and their communities, profanes their deeply held religious beliefs, and exhausts limited resources. I was so very proud of these men because they conducted the hard work of perspective change. Harsh body language was replaced with relaxed postures. Belligerent silence transformed to inquisitive engagement. As a final question, one of the men asked “Why do you do this work and how can you be so enthusiastic?” With warmth and quietly, I responded: “Because I want to make a more comfortable life for individuals and communities and because I get to bear witness to the hard work that you and your friend conducted during these past 90 minutes.” I explained that I heard the conversation. He wondered why I would work with him. I said because I must because he was crucial to ending racism and oppression, that I have deep deep respect and love for humanity, and that everyone can recover from long or short term ideologies and actions. Since then, I have heard from both men who have been putting the thinking and the training into practice and have shared it with others. Importantly, we must remember that we can work through a plus one practice, that is, we don’t always require critical mass when conducting this work, we must deploy chaos theory’s butterfly effect. A simple action can result in tremendously positive impacts.
Turning apathy into equity requires that equity educator/activists accept that they walk on painful, contentious and exhaustive ground. Nobody has a comfortable relationship with oppression and they experience it through lenses of hurt and folks will work their shit out on you. An effective facilitator does not personalize that hurt, instead, they up their compassion and they must turn to wonder. Here is what I know, the closer you get to the injury or the trauma, the harsher the defensive response. Equity educator/activists need to stay un-rattled, be compassionate in words, body language, and tone, and must acknowledge the participant’s anger, suspiciousness, and resistance and then gently move them out of the space to consider a different and more empathetic response. Stunningly, a simple “I am sorry that this happened to you” or diagnosing racial battle fatigue does wonders for moving someone from spaces of apathy to empathy.
I was working Memphis Veterans Hospital social workers and they work with an extremely racialized population with serious issues and are beyond fatigued. After what I thought was a reasonably sound presentation, the room was overcome with a barometrically pressured silence and then a nuclear sandstorm hit me. Too many raised hands to count; folks challenged the efficacy of my suggestions. All doubted that change could happen. Taking each concern, I meaningfully listened to their stories of doubt, failure, and resignation. One by one by one, I encouraged where they had done the right thing, I tweaked less than productive pivots, and suggested self care as alternatives to frustration and quitting. Each individual holds their own stories and experiences I knew that I must exhibit and model complete and total focus and empathy to the folks who I hoped would later carry on their own projects of empathy. In these instances, time is irrelevant and I stayed until the last person was satisfied and felt capable of deploying anti-bias techniques. Patience and compassion are key to getting people on board. It worked. I maintain my relationships with the Memphis Veterans Hospital social workers and continue to train each new cohort of social workers and students and they routinely report that, in fact, bias was negatively impacting their relationships with their clients and with these suggested changes, pathways to understanding and trust immediately appeared.
Turning apathy into equity requires that we must understand the defensiveness and depravity of silence and that equity educator/activists must not be undone by it. When the session begins, I am frequently stunned by the absence of sound and withdrawal of energies. This penetrating silence simply cannot be ignored. White Southern etiquette dictates that discussing race or other forms of oppression exacerbates it, is impolite, and can lead from indelicate to violent responses. So, we must invite people to speak about these issues, we must welcome them to the task and insist that we are grateful for their presence and this is the first step to bettering their presents and futures. Racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of oppression are always deeply personal and therefore, discussions about these topics require ground rules for conversations (cue slide and review). To ensure engagement, the facilitator must ask if participants find these guidelines useful, are we missing anything, and can we agree to abide by them? Working with instead of directing participants is always a good strategy. Routinely, groups report that they have shared these ground rules in their workspaces, civic, and communal spaces.
Most white southerners who lack empathy do so because they do not possess the historical, scientific, or sociological knowledge that would lead them to develop it. As equity educator/activists, we cannot weaponized these knowledge gaps. We must fill them. Developing empathy across racial lines depends on providing folks with information on how inequity pervasively exists and how society socializes people to be biased. Here is where all of my academic knowledge was brought to bear. Success depends on extensive knowledge and innovative information delivery. Diversity fatigue is so widespread that if we don’t bring something interesting and engaging, we fail. Moral arguments should be explored but they should not be solely relied upon. I have discovered that people are more likely to respond to brain science and in particular how the limbic system or our guts cannot be trusted because it has, at times, been socialized to ensure racist and oppressive outcomes. We must convince folks how easily our unconscious thinking can lead to perforated logic and we must first accomplish it in positive and non-threatening ways (cue otter slide). Through this, we can assure folks that they can rewire their thinking and that they can reboot their thinking when it comes to the possibility of ending inequality and creating community. I do this in every session and in every session it works.
Here is what I know from delivering hundreds of sessions and engaging with thousands of people, providing knowledge proves liberating for folks. Most respond with relief and feel completely transformed by knowledge and they frequently report sharing equity information with others. I also know this works because such trainings lead to other trainings. All of my work is by invitation only. I have never once, for the hundreds of trainings that I have conducted, sought out work. My work comes solely through word of mouth where participants felt this was important knowledge to share with others. This is how I moved from the University of Mississippi to dozens of universities across the country, to law enforcement agencies, public defenders, hospitals and medical organizations, and non profits and corporations. Most importantly, to tread on a path towards equity and away from injustice, you must move away from aspiration and squarely towards inspiration. It has been my experience that an aspirational approach encourages apathy and is more often than not used as an excuse for why change cannot happen right now. Which it can.
Turning equity into empathy requires establishing trust with the individuals you are working with. Trust, is in fact, earned. How can one earn trust when one has a limited amount of time? Total transparency is crucial. When one is dealing with subjects so personal as these, it is best to eliminate the secrecy, render the invisible, visible, and make audible, the inaudible. It is also important to establish credibility with the audience through respect and letting them know that you are there to make their lives easier and to conduct their jobs more safely and productively. This is how you build trust.
Let me share a story. I was charged with training the Mississippi Police Chiefs Association. In theory, this did not seem daunting at all, rather it was an opportunity, until I pulled into the parking lot. I cannot even begin to describe what I saw. I saw law enforcement vehicles that were so over equipped and weaponized that I was frightened. I thought I was living in a militarized society. When I entered the auditorium, I saw 102 police chiefs from all 82 counties in Mississippi. All white except for maybe 4, all male, full of power and let’s just say, they were not feeling me. I was at DEFCON 1 with this and decided that since I could not run, I needed to build trust and build it fast. I moved through the aisles and utilized small conversation to begin to bring the police chiefs into the conversation. When the formal presentation opened, I was completely transparent about why I was there and why it was important for me to be there. They were not being punished. I drew them in with the language of community and empathy. I asked them why they became officers and in these challenging times, why they had chosen to remain police officers. I preempted the choice of power by boldly stating that if they were in it for the power, I would gladly take their resignations. They laughed and more interesting answers came in. I explained why I thought they were so important, that they and other police officers in their department were the ones who were directly responsible for upholding equity in our society as outlined in the Constitution and in our nation and state’s laws. Assigning importance to their work rather than beginning by charging them with having deficits immediately built trust. We cannot have a nation which axiomatically mistrusts their law enforcement and their citizens. I explained the ways in which bias created and continues to create fractures between community members and that the police have the responsibility and the unique ability to repair those relationships. This created continued engagement.
Finally, it is crucial to teach white southerners not to run when conflict or discomfort arises. How does one do that? You first ask them their best tactics for moving through challenges and positively acknowledge their answers. Then you build on their list. You discuss and teach people about the importance of apologies and how to apologize, how to meaningfully listen when someone challenges an oppressive statement or behavior made, and how to compassionately share an instance of injury, how to ask what steps must be taken to repair the damage done, how to see these steps through to fruition, how to not weaponize someone’s mistakes, how to allow people to recover, and how to teach others to take the aforementioned steps. You provide boiler plate language because that is the number one request—what should I say and do? Then, in that session you ask participants to draw upon real life experiences, devise scenarios, and practice these skills. I am a big fan of muscle memory. Like every other exercise, practicing these anti-bias skills makes it much easier for folks when they actually encounter a racist or oppressive situation.
These are just a few approaches, techniques, and strategies that have worked for me and have worked for the folks I have been privileged to work with. I understand that these may seem like overly simplistic solutions to intractable problems in a world that seems to become more dangerous everyday at a time when the world is more fractures and more divided. This is a difficult historical moment but it may be creating some opportunities as more and more people are seeing and realizing the impact of division on the public realm but on their personal lives. We can see this happening particularly in the US since our recent election. People in this scary and divisive time seem far more willing to reach out for help, accept training, and to assess their own culpability in creating the contexts at has resulted in inequity and in particular, Trump presidency. The other beauty of this approach is that these techniques are ones that everyone can employ with their colleagues, community members, and their families. We know we cannot rely on others to legislate empathy or others to undo racism and its impacts. Historians knows that the past is littered with unintended consequences where something that looks hideous actually presents opportunities for positive change at our most challenging moments. We reimagine our communities to see opportunities where others see obstacles, to see possibilities where others see problems, and solidarity instead of schisms.