Good afternoon everyone. This is what our national conversation about race sounds like. Come here this afternoon to help us do something about that. There are differences in this world and there are disparities. A disparate the disparity being a particular kind of difference, one that goes against what we expect and calls for an explanation. If two population groups, for example have equal rates of criminal behavior than we would expect them to be equally likely to wind up in jail, or those in similar economic circumstances would have access to a similar quality of life as reflected and things like where they live and send their children to school and buy their food, or those with similar educational and other qualifications would have similar incomes and rates of success in finding and holding a job, or that those with similar health needs would receive equivalent care.

But we know from an abundance of evidence that when otherwise comparable groups differ by race, the outcomes are not at all the same. White college graduates are only half as likely to be unemployed as college educated blacks. The height income advantage among people working year round and full time is 44% Compared with African Americans and 60% compared with the Latino Latino population, higher education does not narrow the disparity. It makes it larger. And the white advantage in wealth is much larger than for income since wealth accumulates over time, with the average white household having 18 to 20 times the net wealth of Latina, Latino and African American households. The subprime lending disaster caused perhaps the greatest loss to people of color in modern US History, being 80 to 90% more likely than white people to lose their homes through foreclosure.

Even among high income borrowers, they were 70% more likely than whites to lose their homes. Following the 2008 financial collapse, white household average wealth dropped by 34% to 95. thousand dollars. Black wealth dropped by 77% to an average of $2,100. White people control every major social institution from universities to government to corporations and the professions. neighborhood and school segregation in the United States is actually increasing, not decreasing, and they get a sense of what that means. If we wanted to have integrated neighborhoods in this country, roughly 70% of the entire white population would have to move.

The implications of segregation are enormous. From safe streets and good schools to political power, the absence of toxic waste nearby, and access to everything from healthcare, grocery stores and public transportation to jobs that pay a living wage. Segregation also makes profoundly ignorant of one another, with most people in this country, regardless of their racial identification, spending almost the entirety of their growing up years in what are essentially mono racial and mono cultural environments. The criminal justice system incarcerates white people at rates far lower than their rates of criminal behavior, creating a disproportionately large prison population of people of color, in what has become a new era of Jim Crow, of exclusion, stigma and disenfranchisement. And, of course, there are the glaring racial disparities in health and health care. All of these patterns are related to one another.

The mass incarceration of people of color, for example, is connected to economic and health disparities, not in the sense that one is necessarily the direct cause of the other although that certainly happens. But more broadly that they share a common source, which is what I've come here today to talk about. I want to say at the outset that even though the people who invite me to speak often have the word diversity in their job titles. It's a word that I don't use in my work. And the reason I don't use it is that a too easily lends itself to the impression that the problem that we have around these issues is difference, that there's something about human beings Please answer that. And if it's for me, tell them I'm busy.

It creates the impression that human beings just have this disability that when we encounter someone who looks different than we do, we go a little nuts. We don't know how to behave, we get scared and bla bla bla bla bla. This is simply not true. Human beings for hundreds and hundreds of years have had contact with people who are radically different in appearance from them, and not only not been terrify, they've been fascinated Watch toddlers sometimes get into things that they shouldn't get into because they're so curious. You know, my grandson when he was really little got bit by something, he got bit by a little a little garter snake venom. Why?

Well, because he was picking it up because he was really curious about it. Now I asked adults, how they feel about snakes, we do not come into this life being afraid of difference, we are fascinated by it. So the problem is not difference. It is not a failure to appreciate, celebrate, and certainly not to tolerate difference. The problem is how systems of privilege have been organized around differences that would otherwise have little if any significance at all. And so the solution lies not intolerance or celebration, the solution lies in doing something about those systems of privilege.

So the patterns that I described to you just a little while ago, where do they come from? And as with every question, the answer depends upon how we Think about it. The default way of thinking in this society is to use an individualistic model that assumes that everything in human life begins and ends with individuals, that outcomes large and small, from interpersonal violence to the global economy depend entirely on what individual people, what kind of people they are, our character and personality, our knowledge, ability, wisdom, values, beliefs. So if White people have better health on the average, the individualistic model tells us that it is because of who they are as individuals that enables them to take better care of themselves. They must be more intelligent, for example, or harder working or responsible or with better impulse control. Just as poor health among people of color must indicate something wrong with them that needs to be fixed.

The alternative is that white people must be to blame for personally engaging In oppressive and discriminating behavior against people of color in ways that damage their health. Either way, the individualistic model assumes that everything bad must be somebody's fault. That it is always a matter of people doing what they are. And all we have to do is to identify them assign blame, and then figure out how to change, stop or fix them. There are some problems with thinking this way, because you knew there would be. The first is that of course, if everything bad has to be somebody's fault, Who among us wants to be fingered as the one who is to blame?

The bad person who needs to be fixed? White people in particular are terribly sensitive to the accusation of racism. And I want to take a moment here to say something about that word, because it's probably one of the most powerful buzzwords in this culture. Racism is typically seen as a personal antipathy. toward people based upon their physical appearance. And I want to offer a definition from a sociologist named David Wellman who wrote a wonderful book called portraits of white racism, in which racism Wellman says we need to define it not simply as some kind of personal thing going on an attitude inside of individuals, because it's really hard to know what those are, since we cannot look into one another.

Racism, he says, needs to be a word that describes anything that has the consequence of perpetuating or enacting white privilege. intentions, he says, are irrelevant to that. How do I know someone's intentions? Can I look into someone's heart? Of course I can't. But we can look at the consequences of what people do and do not do, what they say and their silence.

I think one of the most racist behaviors in this culture in which everyone including yours truly engages at one time or another is silence because without Silence it could not continue. So the consequences of our national silence about race and white privilege is a key factor in perpetuating it and the silence is racist. I am not racist because I have these times when I am oblivious and silent. But the silence itself is years ago I taught a course on race in America with an African American woman. And she said, There is nothing more boring than guilty white people. Because guilt is of no use.

One of the most important things I want to convey to you this afternoon is that white privilege is enacted and supported overwhelmingly, by the normal everyday behavior of decent, moral, well intentioned people. This is how it's accomplished, not by bad people. The students that are in Oklahoma do white privilege a favor when they get singled out as the problem, then we get rid of them Don Imus, his thing, you know, he was doing white privilege of favor without knowing it. Because then the rest of us could just sort of say, well say there it is. There's the problem, not me. Which is the second problem with the individualistic model, which is that it lets all of these decent moral well intentioned white people off the hook.

If I can look into the mirror, as I did this morning and see a decent, moral, well intentioned, nice white guy looking back at me I can say to myself, Alan, good for you. Go Live your life. Because if I do not see how I am inextricably unavoidably connected to the problem, I will not feel morally compelled to make myself part of the solution. Especially when it's hard. And let's face it around this issue, it's pretty much always hard. The third problem is the big one, which is that the individualistic model isn't true.

Social life does not work this way. Nothing really comes down solely to us as some kind of isolated individuals, even psychologists these days, say there's no such thing. Our lives are so embedded in social systems, our families, schools, everything from the moment we pop out into this world, that we don't exist, really, as people except through our participation in all of these countless social systems that make up our lives. This gathering is a social system and it's a good illustration of one of the key things to understand about systems is that well, in an individualistic society, we will think that a system is just a collection of people. We will reduce the system to the people who participate in it. huge mistake.

Second most important thing I have to say to you today will take me a while to say it. This is an IT that we are participating in right now. It is not us. Someone can understand what if someone is lost in this place and they walk through that door, it will take them about a half, maybe two seconds to identify where they are. They don't know anything about me or you or anyone else in this room. And yet they will be able to predict with pretty good accuracy, how we would feel in light of various things they might choose to do.

They know that about us. They don't. They assume that they know things about us as individual people by their identification of the system that they just walked into. We are not the system. The system is not us. In fact, what makes the world happen what produces all the consequences of human life arrive Just out of the dynamic relationship between the social systems and the people like us who participate in them, it's not one or the other, it is never one or the other.

It is always both. And which means that if we're going to understand anything in this society, whether it's small or large, good or bad, we have to understand what that dynamic relationship looks like. And how it works. It has two parts to it, I would be the one visual that I would put up here, but I'm so averse to PowerPoint and all this stuff that I just I draw in the air, so just bear with me up. Up here is his social systems down here is individuals and their arrows connecting the two going in both directions. The first arrow says that as we participate in these systems, we become human beings, we get shaped from one moment to the next.

Socialization is the big word for it. We learn a language we acquire worldviews, all that stuff. We also get shaped from one moment to the next by what I call paths of least resistance, which refers to the fact that in any social situation, there are certain alternatives. They have less social resistance attached to them than everything else. So for you right now, the path of least resistance has to do with as far as I can tell, pretty much all of you are doing. You're sitting down your face in my direction, you're quiet except for appropriate laughter and other responses.

And you're presenting yourselves, your facial expressions, your posture, and so on, as if you're at least mildly interested in what I'm saying. That is the path of least resistance. That does not mean that it's easy. You might be thinking, why did I decide to sit near the prompt? Get up and leave people will notice to want to know why when I don't come back. For many men going off to war is following the path of least resistance when they compare it to the alternatives that they see for themselves to be seen as unpatriotic is not true men and so on.

It's far from easy. second half of this dynamic has been As we participate in these systems, we make them happen. This system right here is happening right now. The last conference that was in here it happened that happened to I don't know how that happened might have happened very differently from this month. What I do know is that anyone in this room at any time could dramatically change how this system happens. If one of you is physically able, for example, and decided to you can walk up to the front of the room, pull out that chair and stand up on it with your back to me.

I have never in more than 200 presentations had that actually happened. It's going to happen. And I guarantee you it would take maybe 510 seconds, I wouldn't know what the heck, you could bring this event to a halt. If you are willing to deal with the increased resistance, people's disapproval of you and sanctions they might deliver against you. This is what's sitting down and this is what citizens were all about in the south, around civil rights. People didn't go into the the Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina and make speeches and hand out pamphlets.

They went and sat down So we'd like lunch, we only see a menu, we'll leave when we get lunch. That's all they did. All they did. They brought the whole system of segregation in public accommodations down. They and I think those young men had no idea. That's what they were setting out to do.

They were just mad that they hadn't been allowed these lunch. That's the way the world works. That little model explains marriages, global economy, everything. And the only thing I would add to it is that there's a big arrow coming out of that dynamic. And it points to the word consequences, which is why we're here today. And there are all kinds of consequences.

Good ones, bad ones, big ones small. And those consequences, in turn, come around and affect the whole thing. It's a loop. It's a feedback loop all the time. So white racism in the United States, every single manifestation of white privilege in the United States has consequences mostly for people of color that we are aware of, but all those consequences they come around. They affect test system.

When something happens like in Ferguson or Oklahoma, there isn't there are all kinds of consequences that come out of that. This is what we're participating in. My favorite example of paths of least resistance is the elevator. And I suggested if you're ever in a place where there's an elevator, and especially if there are people you don't know, try this experiment, get into the elevator with other people and go back to the back of the car and just stand facing the back of the car. I don't have to go any further. You will feel how powerful it is.

Our need to have everyone on the path of least resistance how easy it is to make people uncomfortable. Just because they don't know what you're doing. First time I did this was at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. And I could feel the people in that car want to lead a turnaround and when I did I could feel this kind of okay, everything's fine. Little do they know I'd be telling about them for years and years to come. So imagine if the stakes are much higher than an elevator.

I mean, what's the what's the threat in an elevator? Imagine that the stakes are being in an organization and being the first to raise the issue of race. It's easier to understand why it's so easy to remain silent, which is the path of least resistance. And my favorite example of this whole dynamic is the game of Monopoly, which I don't play anymore. Because monopoly is a game that produces the same result every single time it's played. This is the third most important thing I have to say to you today.

It doesn't matter who's playing the game of Monopoly. It could be for Mother Teresa's playing the game of Monopoly, as long as they stay on the path of least resistance and play the game the way it says on the inside of the cover. How is it gonna end? One person is going to have everything the shoe to get out of jail free cards, all the money, the property. Everyone is going to dissipate in this game that produces a greedy result every single time. How much more greedy can you get?

You want it all. We do not have to be greedy people to produce this result. And we do not have to be bad racist people to produce the results that I described to you at the beginning. It's extraordinarily important to get this because it's a way especially if you're white to get yourself off that hook. That the only way I can connect myself to this horror is by seeing myself as bad. You get off that hook.

It is of no use. So that we can then put ourselves on the hook that does matter, which is that it's up to us to do something about. That's why I gave up monopoly. I didn't like behaving that way. And if I didn't, my kids would say, Dad, you're not playing the game. The players cannot be used to explain the game.

And the game the system cannot be used to explain the players. It's about both and the relationship between the two, because each the system and the individuals exists only in relation to the arm. So it is a well established fact that race is a biological fiction, which means that health disparities cannot be explained by differences in skin color, or other markers that are used In the social construction of race, racial disparities can only arise from people's participation in social systems as members of different racial categories. So what kind of social system in which most people follow the path of least resistance? Most of the time, we produce patterns in which white people have dramatically better health outcomes than people of color. And the answer I offer you today to that question is a system of white privilege.

It's the first time No, it isn't the first time I use the word privilege, but I need to say something about what that word means. It's what another one of those buzzwords I often get emails from angry white people telling me that there is no such thing as white privilege. Really, privilege is a particular kind of advantage. It has three characteristics. The first is that it is unearned. The second is that it is exclusive to a particular category of people.

The third which I think is really probably the most important is that it is socially conferred. In order to have access to it, people have to put you in the right category, there has to be some recognition involved in that. So it's a social phenomenon. Now, there are all kinds of unearned advantages that are not forms of privilege. I am relatively tall. For example, I'm still managing to only last a quarter of an inch as I've gotten older, but I'm taller than most people.

And that gives me certain advantages at home, I can reach things that Nora in the kitchen cannot. I think that's an advantage, except when she's wanting me to reach things all the time for her. I did not earn this advantage. It's exclusive to tall people. But it is not a form of privilege. Because she doesn't have to recognize me as a tall person in order for me to go into the kitchen and grab something off a high shelf I just do.

Then we noticed that 90% of CEOs and US corporations are above average in height. We think so, if there's something about how far you are from the center of the earth that affects your intelligence, your leadership capabilities and all that stuff, you know, maybe it's something about the polar gravity on your brain cells. There are all kinds of attributions that get made to people based on their height, that have nothing to do with who they really are. They are attributions. So there is a dimension of height. That is a form of privilege in this society.

Because it means people get things attributed to them positive and negative that they did not earn and that advantage them simply because people look at them and say, Oh, you're top. Oh, sure. That's privilege. When white people are treated routinely as visible and distinct human beings are assumed to be intelligent, rational, credible, reliable, honest, stable, peaceful, hard working and calm. And until they show otherwise, while people of color are treated as invisible, indistinguishable, and assumed to be unintelligent, irrational, not credible, unreliable, impulsive, dishonest, unstable, dangerous, lazy and incompetent until they prove themselves otherwise. Then fundamental assumptions that underlie social life are transformed into forms of privilege that are routinely allowed or some and denied to others.

Those assumptions in turn serve often as substitutes for the reality of who people are affecting how we see both other people and ourselves. There's all the research on first impressions For example, I mean, I just I know that when I when I got up here this afternoon, everybody in this room consciously or not probably unconsciously formed instant impressions of who I am Including things about Can I believe this guy? Oh, I didn't know he was white. I mean, there are all kinds of things that we we do this all the time. We form these intuitive instant impressions of other human beings. It's part of being human.

It's not a bad thing, but it's really powerful. Because once we fix that impression in our minds, there's all kinds of research on this. What first impressions are really powerful, because then we then start interpreting everything they do in terms of them. So if I made a mistake up here and visibly so you could see me level or something like that, misspoke or whatever, you will be far more likely to forgive it than if you had formed a skeptical suspicious first impression on me in which case you'd be waiting for me to screw up and up there it is. Confirming bias, we we see the evidence that confirms those impressions, we don't even see the evidence that does not study schizophrenia, schizophrenia at one time, a long time ago, a classic study being saved in insane places it was called. And they had a site.

You know, the people working for the research project, they went to a mental institution, and they presented themselves as having one symptom. They heard a voice saying the word thud. They were, they were brought in with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. And what they were noticing was that in the days that followed, they stopped reporting the symptom. And everything they did was interpreted in terms of the diagnosis of schizophrenia. So they would sit outside the lunchroom before lunch was served.

And they and they would be there early. And they were noting room they're sitting outside of the lunchroom. They were hungry. And there was nothing to do. They were bored. Or they would take notes on what was happening because they're researchers, right?

They're taking notes on all this stuff. And on the charts. I said no taking behavior in the context of a system of white privilege being identified as a person of color, or as white has similar effects, and they are very powerful. And for the most part, I'm conscious. A white person listening to this might be thinking, I don't know what you're talking about, because I don't have privilege. I don't feel privileged.

And I thought about this for some years before it dawned on me that they were right. But only if you think of privilege as something that you can have, like a shoe or a car. privileges not like that. privilege is not a possession that we can have or giveaway, which makes it easy to think that it doesn't exist because after all, if we had something you would think we would know it privileges not attached to individual people, but to social characteristics such as male and white, straight or non disabled. To be eligible for privilege. All you have to Do is appear to belong to the dominant category.

Consider for example, the difference between the name Allen Johnson on a job application, and Jamal Jones, or Hector Martinez. The Allen Johnson's in this country are the research shows are 50% more likely to get called in for an interview. They're also more likely to be believed when they speak in front of large audiences. All kinds of research shows this if I if I could somehow magically present myself to this half of the room as as what you're seeing right now to this half of the room is a man of color or a woman of color even more so. And we did, you know, feedback questionnaires at the end of it. This half would give me much better marks than this halfway, even though I'm saying and doing everything exactly the same.

Tons of research gender race. So when I walk into this room When you look up here, and you identify me as a white male, presumably straight, not visibly disabled, I have all kinds of advantages going for me from the get go that I did nothing to earn. In conferring those advantages, my guess is actually I'm pretty sure this you're not conscious of it. You're not aware that there's a filter operating as you here and watch me. And in receiving it, I will not be conscious of that. Unless I do something to intervene in my process and say, Well, of course, I have some advantages up here that have nothing to do with what I actually do.

So we're participating in a system of white privilege. And if we want to understand what's going on, both in ourselves and in the world, we need to understand what that thing looks like. In the same way that we have to understand how the game of Monopoly is played. If we want to understand why does it always end With that same outcome every single time, every system of privilege has four basic characteristics. And what I'm going to do now it's like reading the inside of the cover of the Monopoly game. I'm not saying anything about the people who participate in this system, I'm talking about the system itself.

And these four characteristics apply, not just to white privilege, but to male privilege, straight privilege, non disabled privilege that can be used for all of them, which is one of the reasons I like it so much, because it's so powerful. The first characteristic of the system of white privilege is that it's white dominated. And all that means is that the default is for power to be held by white people. This does not mean that all white people are powerful. Most white people are not the most white people spend their days doing what other people tell them to do, whether they want to do it or not. It also does not mean that people of color cannot be powerful as individuals witness the President of the United States.

But of course, the President of the United States would not be able to govern were it not for thousands of powerful white people. Who allow him to govern, and we've seen how obstructive those people can be over the last six years. If they want him to fail, they can do a pretty good job for all his presumed power. second characteristic of systems of privilege is that they're organized around an obsession with control. Control is enormously important. Because it is needed in order to keep the subordinate group in this case people of color in their place.

It's also needed to enforce solidarity within the dominant group. We need white people to be believing in this system and not bucking it. So coercion is need needed across the board. The control is then justified by stereotypes about race used to justify controlling those people, including the long history of demonizing black people and black men in particular as violent and criminal, the most recent version of which we've seen In the nationwide militarization of police forces, most of which gets directed at communities of color. All of that application of force is justified by ideas and stereotypes about who those people are, and how the it is necessary to control them, which began really in earnest after in after in during Reconstruction after the Civil War, when the plantation system of controlling African Americans was gone, they then had to replace it with something else, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, etc.

The third characteristic of systems of privilege and the system of white privilege This is one is more complicated than the other two and that is that it is quite identified. And I must say the longer I do this work, the more I think this may be the real linchpin of the whole system. White identification means that the path of least resistance is to use white people as the standard for human beings. To be white is just to be human. But of course, the question People are the humans, then people of color must be something else. And in our hierarchy of beings, something else means less than human, some human savages, not like us.

You can see this in the language people of color are still routinely referred to as non white, which does not tell you anything about what they are. It could be transparent for all we know. It simply tells us what they are not. What they are not is the standard and the standard is quite to get an idea of the power of that, imagine that we flipped it over. Imagine we lived in a culture in which white people were described as non colored, or colorless. White identification means provides the basis for the assumption that white people are better or more worthy, that their lives are more important and how people walk Talk, dress, dance, wear their hair.

All of this defines what is normal. The idea of normality is really important and understanding systems of privilege. Because very often we talk about white supremacy and all that white people, I hear them say, I don't feel superior to anyone, the very American thing to say, nobody's better than anyone else. I'm not superior, and I don't feel superior. But they do feel normal, quite identification to find quite as normal, then we get our cake and eat it too. Because then people of color are less than normal.

So it's not that I feel superior. It's not that I'm superior. It's that you are inferior. It's a very powerful, subtle device for getting us off that hook. Because the United States no one is supposed to act like they're better than anyone else. Wide identification means that the White Point of View has authority behind it, no matter who expresses it, even and especially when applied to other groups.

White identification authorizes white people to dismiss what people of color, say, especially about the reality of their own lives, that they're exaggerating that they're making it up. They're hypersensitive, they're ignorant. They're unintelligent, they're not credible, even when reporting on their own experience, or their own condition. This is where it hurts. Quite identity identification also means that white is the default in any social situation. If a group of people gather outside of the halls of Congress to protest some building enacted, and they're all white, The Washington Post is not going to remark that you know, there are a bunch of white people outside of Congress protesting something that must have been about race.

Let's look into that. It'll be a bunch Citizens people, humans, were a group of people of color gathered outside for exactly the same process conducted exactly the same way the Washington Post would say there was a racial thing going outside on outside of Congress. And they would try to understand what the racial angle was. People of color in a white identified society are marked as exceptions, outsiders the other, and have to live with a paradox of both being highly visible as members of a social category, but virtually invisible as individuals within our lives. Because White is the assumed race, the path of least resistance for white people, is to be unaware that they even have one. The late essayist and novelist James Baldwin once said that be White means never having to think about it.

So if you ask people of color how race affects their experience, including in health care, they will have stories to tell. The more interesting experiment is to ask white people how does race affect your visit to the doctor? Because in a white identified society, the path of least resistance for white people is to never even think about that question or to deny that race even exists. In contrast to whites, it is hard for people of color to escape constant reminders of their race. All the ways there are to be avoided, ignored, dismissed, doubted, not taken seriously patronized condescended to asked what you are, where you are from complimented on your ability to speak English, called upon to speak for your people treated with suspicion and hostility walking down the street or The ways there are for one human being descend to another through the slightest shift in the muscles of their face, the quality of listening, you are not white, you are not one of us, you are not good enough.

You do not not deserve to be here. There is something wrong with you, you do not fit, you do not belong. In a white identified world, white people are rarely ever put in this position. Because in a white identified world, they can assume that people of color do not have a point of view on whites are the authority behind it to give white people reason to be aware of themselves as white. So I could be having a conversation for example with a Native American woman. And as a white person white identification authorizes me the path of least resistance for me is to interact with her without it ever hurrying to me, that she might be looking at me and seeing the white man that she might have some associations in her mind with that, about the group of people that tried their damnedest to practice genocide on her people that took all their land that tried to destroy their culture.

So I don't even have to imagine she might be going through deciding whether to trust me because she's looking at a white man, because as far as I'm concerned, in a democratic society, I'm not white. I'm just a human being. And if you bring that up to me, quite identification authorizes me to get upset with you. I'm not a member of a category. I've heard this so many times when people I'm not a member of a category, I'm a human being. I'm an individual, how dare you try to put me in to some kind of category when People do think about race.

Quite identification encourages them to assume that what they consciously know about race, what they are aware of, is all there is to know. Or all that matters. So if White people are not consciously aware of how their behavior promotes white privilege, even in their silence at the expense of people of color, then the path of least resistance is for them to assume it does not. And to take offense at any suggestion that it does. I didn't mean it, and therefore, it doesn't count. And in particular, I am not accountable for the consequences.

This has been called the luxury of obliviousness. It is one of the keys in systems of privilege, the freedom of dominant groups to decide when and where they will be aware of their own dominant status and the benefits that come with it. That's one identification. The last one is way simpler. And that is that all of the first three lead to a society that is quite centered, which simply means the path of least resistance is whenever there's a choice put by people at the center of attention, whether it's a classroom or a clinic or something like this. If you look at the news, it's really easy to get the impression that everything that matters is done by white people, straight non disabled, white men in particular.

I mean, if the anthropologist come here, after we're long gone as a species, and they're sifting through all the evidence that come across this video library, they'll go, wow, this is pretty much a society in which that's those are the people who counted. Those are the people who did things that were worth paying attention to. If you look at the films that get the Oscars, Oscars for best picture, you know, that tells the most powerful story about what it means to be a human being. There is never been a single picture that won the Oscar for Best Picture in which the main character was the person in the car and the film wasn't available. Race. In other words, people of color don't get to be just human beings who have human experiences.

They fall in love, they do courageous things, etc. why people get into this routinely? Because we are the human beings 2015 the best acting nominees were all quite people, every single one. And of course, the film Selma did get nominated for Best Picture along with bless their hearts best song. But strangely enough, I never recall this ever happening before. Selma did not get nominated for any of those qualities that generally make a picture eligible to be the best picture.

It's direction, it's writing, it's acting, it's past nothing, no one. So somehow this picture qualified to be the best of the year but none of its components was that good. It's hard to miss the message. That's what we're partitioning. In our game of Monopoly, a system of white privilege that is white dominated by identified by centered, organized around an obsession with control. There's only one reason to organize a society in this way.

And that is white privilege and white supremacy. Both the idea that white people are better than people of color, and the social reality of advantages and the distribution of power, resources, opportunities, rewards, and justice. And one of its most glaring consequences is the dramatic difference in the quality of people's lives, reflected in racial disparities in health and longevity. The system of white privilege, of course, does not stand alone, especially in relation to male privilege and the capitalist economic system out of which the idea of race was invented in the first place. There's a very detailed history of whiteness and where it came from. And it really is not very old.

Europeans had extensive contact with Africans for hundreds of years before they started writing and talking about Africans as being somehow different kinds of people based upon their physical experience. I recently learned that it was not until 1774 into two years before the US Declaration of Independence, that the Oxford English Dictionary first defined race in terms of different types of people. The race had been the, I should say different kinds of human beings, biologically different. The term race have been used before that for a long time, but usually to refer to cultural differences, not until the late 18th century, that they start using the word race to represent physical characteristics, biology and the imputation of superiority and inferiority based on those differences. And that, of course, coincided with the African slave trade. It was only when Europeans Started kidnapping and buying Africans to take them to slavery in the Western Hemisphere, that race started, literally was invented as a way of distinguishing the enslavers from those who are being enslaved.

That idea of race both in relation to Africans and of course, Native Americans was used to justify the capitalist expansion that drove the taking of North America from indigenous nations. It's really instructive to ask yourselves if you haven't already done this. whose land Are we on right now? And how did it come to be taken from? You don't know it was the western abenaki where I live in Connecticut, it was the master code bussaco. Everywhere in this country, why people are living and working on land that was taken from the people whose it was the US government made more than 400 treaties with Native American nations.

Almost all of which used words like promise, and forever, we held to not a single word. The Black Hills were taken from the Lakota Sioux because cuz George Armstrong customers army found gold. They were taken. And in the 19th, I think was 1975, the US Supreme Court ruled that the Black Hills had been seized illegally. They have not been returned. And of course, after the in addition to the taking of North America, there was the transatlantic and domestic slave trade, the exploitation of various peoples of color, mostly predominantly African Americans, but also Mexicans, Chinese and Japanese, not only in the growing of cotton, tobacco, but sugar.

All of this tremendous generated a tremendous amount of wealth. And it's really important to be aware of what that wealth did. But it was instrumental in doing it financed the Industrial Revolution. Just think about where this country would be without the Industrial Revolution. And over the last two centuries, the industrial revolution has benefited white people far more than people of color. It has been a rising tide that lifts all boats, some more than others.

But none at all. If you aren't allowed to own a boat, which was the situation of people of color has been the situation for most of the history of this country. those benefits have accumulated across generations and been amplified by policies and practices that have systematically advantaged white people at the expense of people of color. These include the original legislation for social security that ended up in a de facto way basically excluded most people of color, unemployment insurance, labor laws protecting the right to unionize the home owners loan corporate Corporation designed to protect people from foreclosure during the Great Depression. all white people benefited from this the GI Bill after World War Two, the only beneficiaries were white people different sentence. The GI bill after world war two providing cheap mortgages and college tuition almost completely excluded veterans of color and their families, their residential reg redlining and segregation, all of this together, giving white households their current nearly 20 to one net advantage in household wealth.

The pattern of favoring whites continues today from hiring, segregation, discriminatory lending practices, and the siting of waste toxic waste dumps to community resources and services such as grocery stores, hospitals, schools, and police protection. Both history and the current practices make it clear that the payoff the economic in particular, pay off from hundreds Yours of white privilege is not simply something of the past, the institution of slavery is not something simply in the past because the fruits of it are present today. There's a recent book that came out of a blank on the title of it now. This came out in the half that has not been told in which he lays out in great detail that the the economic boom in the United States simply would not have happened without the institution of slavery. So it is in this room. The effects of the institution of slavery are in this room is in our pockets.

It is important to note, I think, since I get a lot of emails from working class white people who are angry at the attention that is paid to people of color through affirmative action, for instance, and it's really important Note that the benefits of white privilege are not evenly distributed among white people. Class position is a major component of white privilege. If you're born white, you have a better chance of getting into a good class position than if you're born a car but that is not a guarantee at all. And it's not a guarantee because capitalism is a system that is and I'm not making this up. You don't have to be Marxist to say this. You just have to read the New York Times.

It is it is an economic system that is organized in ways that promote extreme concentrations of wealth. This is the outcome. The top 20% of the US population holds 87% of all the wealth. The bottom I love that the bottom 80% holds 13% of all the wealth that's houses stocks, bonds, land 13% 25% Seven of US population has either zero or negative net wealth. 40% of African Americans have negative or net or zero net wealth. The top 1% takes 21% of all the income every year, the top 40% takes 73% of all the income every year, which means that the bottom 60% must compete with one another.

So the 27% of the income that is left over, which creates a condition of what has been called artificial scarcity, scarcity. We have a society that produces abundance and yet huge percentage of the population is living as if we were in a situation of scarcity there isn't enough. So we have to fight with one another over this. My view on the the US economic system these days is it's like a game of musical chairs. Very anybody here not knowing the game of musical chairs from someplace else? We need to explain it.

Okay, well, you know, you play the game of musical chairs and you know, you gain this insight as they start the music and you all move around and you're, you're paying attention right to the person on your left and the person on your right. Where's the nearest chair? Right? And music stops? And what do you do you die for a chair. During that game?

What's your attitude towards the person on your left and your right? You're not getting my chair. Especially if you're white, you're raised to think you have a right to a chair. You have an entitlement to a chair. Somebody winds up on the floor. So let's say you always wind up on the floor and you get tired of that.

So you hire a personal trainer. And you really go at this. reflexes strength peripheral vision, the whole thing, right? Can you get a chair now every single time but now somebody else is on the floor. They go This is no good. So they all get personal trainers.

So now we have Olympic grade people playing musical chairs. How's the game going to end so now the person on The floor is gonna be really good. Why? What's the structure of the game that makes that avoidable? aren't enough chairs. Throughout the whole history of the United States, I mean, the whole history of the United States, there has been a continuing effort to keep people who are playing because the upper class is not playing musical chairs, is to keep the people in that 60%, for example, to keep them so focused on getting a chair and so mad at the person who just took the chair from that they don't stop and say, Whoa, let's all take a look around where all the chairs is it that we don't produce enough chairs for everyone.

It's just you know, there just aren't enough chairs. Rarely in the history of this country that people stopped long enough 100 years ago or so there was the labor movement, the United States and they did stop seeing this really serious way and they really brought the machinery to a grinding halt in many ways. Because they were forcing the question of where all chairs And historically white people have been set at the throats of people of color by being told that they're after your chair. Using using African Americans as strike bakers strike breakers during the labor union movement 100 years ago was very effective because the employers were hoping that the white union workers would that their racism would Trump their class position. That they would turn on people of color instead of seeing that they had a lot in common with people of color. And it took some decades before fight labor unions realized that they were shooting themselves in the foot by keeping out people of color, I think was the AFL CIO, that first decided to allow anyone into their union.

This is what we're participating in every single day. Right now. It's going on, and we're participating in it right now. Let's do that. In this room, I'm participating in it right now, by standing up here and saying what I'm saying, what we are participating in is a system and oppressive system of privilege. That By the way, it is organized just like the game of Monopoly is organized to produce certain outcomes.

By the way in which this system is organized, it invariably creates division and conflict around socially constructed differences of price. It is important to remember that we are not the system that I have been describing to you this afternoon. And that system is not us. And in that sense, it is not our fault. systems of privilege are something larger. The system of white privilege is a legacy that everyone in this room everyone in this country inherited the moment they were born in may not be our fault, but it is our responsibility.

Because we are the ones we're here now. We are the ones who one moment to the next decent, moral, well intentioned human beings. We are the ones by our choices, conscious and mostly unconscious so far. We are the ones who make it happen from one moment to the next. Do I stand up? Do I sit down?

Do I speak Am I silent and in that we are responsible for the consequences that get produced. If we are going to pass on a legacy that was different than the one that was passed to us, we are going to have to begin by radically rethinking the our understanding of social systems, especially social systems of privilege, and understanding who we are and how we live our lives and do our work in relation to them. Which is what I tried to help us do today. Of course, this is not an easy thing. It's not a one shot deal, a program of the month, or a good day to be done when we've got the time. And by some miracle, there is money in the budget that we don't need for something else.

If we are serious about this, if we are serious about being part of the work that will pass on a different legacy to generations to come, then we must find ways to put the question of what can we do at the core of what we are. By that, I mean, we must include it among the metrics to which we hold ourselves and one another accountable as individuals and as organizations, the standards goals and expectations that define what we are about and what we are here to do. such that if we fail to meet them, we know we're in trouble before anyone else finds out. We are challenged to step off the path of least resistance that have kept this country stuck for nearly 400 years to find the will to step up together and respond to the living nightmare of injustice and unnecessary suffering. That is the ongoing history of race in the United States.

Thank you very much.