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What is up with us white people?

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(Laughter)

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I've been thinking about that a lot
the last few years,

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and I know I have company.

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Look, I get it, people of color

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have been asking
that question for centuries,

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but I think a growing number
of white folks are too,

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given what's been going on out there

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in our country.

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And notice I said,
"What's up with us white people?"

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because right now I'm not talking
about those white people,

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the ones with the swastikas
and the hoods and the tiki torches.

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They are a problem, and a threat.

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They perpetrate most of
the terrorism in our country,

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as you all in Charlottesville
know better than most.

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But I'm talking about something bigger,

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more pervasive.

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I'm talking about all of us,

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white folks writ large.

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And maybe, especially,
people sort of like me,

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self-described progressive,

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don't want to be racist,

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"good" white people.

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(Laughter)

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Any good white people in the room?

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(Laughter)

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I was raised to be that sort of person.

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I was a little kid in the '60s and '70s,

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and to give you some sense of my parents,

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actual public opinion polls at the time

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showed that only a small minority,

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about 20 percent of white Americans,

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approved and supported

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Martin Luther King and his work
with the Civil Rights Movement

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while Dr. King was still alive.

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I'm proud to say my parents
were in that group.

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Race got talked about in our house,

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and when the shows that dealt
with race would come on the television,

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they would sit us kids down,
make sure we watch:

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the Sidney Poitier movies, "Roots."

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The message was loud and clear,

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and I got it.

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Racism is wrong. Racists are bad people.

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At the same time,

45
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we lived in a very
white place in Minnesota,

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and I'll just speak for myself,
I think that allowed me to believe

47
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that those white racists on the TV screen

48
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were being beamed in
from some other place.

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It wasn't about us, really.

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I did not feel implicated.

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Now, I would say I'm still in recovery
from that early impression.

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I got into journalism

53
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in part because I cared about things
like equality and justice.

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For a long time, racism was just
such a puzzle to me.

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Why is it still with us
when it's so clearly wrong?

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Why such a persistent force?

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Maybe I was puzzled because
I wasn't yet looking in the right place

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or asking the right questions.

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Have you noticed

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that when people in our mostly white media

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report on what they consider
to be racial issues,

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what we consider to be racial issues,

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what that usually means
is that we're pointing our cameras

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and our microphones and our gaze

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at people of color, asking questions like,

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"How are Black folks or Native Americans,
Latino, or Asian Americans,

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how are they doing?"

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In a given community,

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or with respect to some issue:

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the economy, education.

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I've done my share
of that kind of journalism

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over many years.

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But then George Zimmerman
killed Trayvon Martin,

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followed by this unending string
of high-profile police shootings

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of unarmed Black people, the rise
of the Black Lives Matter movement,

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Dylann Roof and the Charleston Massacre,

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#OscarsSoWhite,

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all the incidents from the day to day

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of American life,
these overtly racist incidents

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that we now get to see
because they're captured on smartphones

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and sent across the internet.

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And beneath those visible events,

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the stubborn data,

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the studies showing systemic racism
in every institution we have:

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housing segregation, job discrimination,

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the deeply racialized inequities in
our schools and criminal justice system.

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And what really did it for me,

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and I know I'm not alone in this either,

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the rise of Donald Trump

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and the discovery that
a solid majority of white Americans

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would embrace or at least accept

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such a raw, bitter kind
of white identity politics.

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This was all disturbing to me
as a human being.

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As a journalist, I found myself
turning the lens around,

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thinking,

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wow, white folks are the story.

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Whiteness is a story.

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And also thinking,

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can I do that?

100
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What would a podcast series
about whiteness sound like?

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And oh, by the way,
this could get uncomfortable.

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I had seen almost no journalism
that looked deeply at whiteness,

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but of course people of color
and especially Black intellectuals

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have made sharp critiques of
white supremacist culture for centuries,

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and I knew that in the last
two or three decades,

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scholars had done interesting work

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looking at race through
the frame of whiteness,

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what it is, how we got it,
how it works in the world.

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I started reading,

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and I reached out to some leading experts
on race and the history of race.

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One of the first questions I asked was,

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where did this idea
of being a white person

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come from in the first place?

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Science is clear.

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We are one human race.

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We're all related,

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all descended from
a common ancestor in Africa.

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Some people walked out of Africa
into colder, darker places

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and lost a lot of their melanin,

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some of us more than others.

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But genetically we are all
99.9 percent the same.

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There's more genetic diversity
within what we call racial groups

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than there is between racial groups.

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There's no gene for whiteness
or blackness or Asian-ness

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or what half you.

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So how did this happen?

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How did we get this thing?

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How did racism start?

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I think if you had asked me
to speculate on that,

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in my ignorance, some years ago,

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I probably would have said,

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well, I guess somewhere
back in deep history,

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people encountered one another,

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and they found each other strange,

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your skin is a different color,
your hair is different,

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you dress funny.

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I guess I'll just go ahead
and jump to the conclusion

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that since you're different

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that you're somehow less than me,

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and maybe that makes it OK
for me to mistreat you.

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Right?

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Is that something like
what we imagine or assume?

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And under that kind of scenario,

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it's all a big tragic misunderstanding.

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But it seems that's wrong.

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First of all, race is a recent invention.

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It's just a few hundred years old.

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Before that, yes,
people divided themselves

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by religion, tribal group,

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language, things like that,

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but for most of human history,

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people had no notion of race.

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In Ancient Greece, for example,

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and I learned this from
the historian Nell Irvin Painter,

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the Greeks thought they were better
than the other people they knew about,

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but not because of some idea
that they were innately superior.

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They just thought that they'd developed
the most advanced culture.

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So they looked around at the Ethiopians,

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but also the Persians and the Celts,

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and they said, "They're all
kind of barbaric compared to us.

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Culturally, they're
just not Greek, right?"

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And yes, in the ancient world,
there was lots of slavery,

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but people enslaved people
who didn't look like them

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and they often enslaved people who did.

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Did you know that the English word "slave"

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is derived from the word "Slav"?

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Because Slavic people were enslaved
by all kinds of folks,

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including Western Europeans,

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for centuries.

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Slavery wasn't about race,

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either because no one
had thought up race yet.

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So who did?

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I put that question
to another leading historian,

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Ibram Kendi.

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I didn't expect he would answer
the question in the form

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of one person's name and a date,

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as if we were talking
about the light bulb.

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(Laughter)

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But he did.

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(Laughter)

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He said, in his exhaustive research
he found what he believed to be

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the first articulation of racist ideas,

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and he named the culprit.

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This guy should be more famous,

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or infamous.

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His name is Gomes de Zurara.

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Portuguese man.

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Wrote a book in the 1450s

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in which he did something
that no one had ever done before,

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according to Dr. Kendi.

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He lumped together
all the people of Africa,

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a vast, diverse continent,

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and he described them as a distinct group,

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inferior and beastly.

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Never mind that in that precolonial time

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some of the most sophisticated cultures
in the world were in Africa.

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Why would this guy make this claim?

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Turns out, it helps to follow the money.

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First of all, Zurara was hired
to write that book

200
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by the Portuguese king,

201
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and just a few years before,

202
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slave traders,

203
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here we go,

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slave traders tied to the Portuguese crown

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had effectively pioneered
the Atlantic slave trade.

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They were the first Europeans
to sail directly to sub-Saharan Africa

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to kidnap and enslave African people.

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So it was suddenly really helpful

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to have a story about the inferiority

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of African people

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to justify this new trade

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00:10:55,825 --> 00:10:57,518
to other people, to the church,

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to themselves.

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00:11:01,240 --> 00:11:02,922
And with the stroke of a pen,

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00:11:02,922 --> 00:11:05,891
Zurara invented both
blackness and whiteness,

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because he basically created
the notion of blackness

217
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through this description of Africans,

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and as Dr. Kendi says,

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00:11:15,540 --> 00:11:18,239
blackness has no meaning
without whiteness.

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Other European countries followed

221
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the Portuguese lead

222
00:11:24,187 --> 00:11:27,141
in looking to Africa for human property

223
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and free labor

224
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and in adopting this fiction

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about the inferiority of African people.

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I found this clarifying.

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Racism didn't start
with a misunderstanding,

228
00:11:41,817 --> 00:11:43,836
it started with a lie.

229
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Meanwhile, over here in colonial America,

230
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the people now calling themselves white

231
00:11:50,317 --> 00:11:53,385
got busy taking these racist ideas

232
00:11:53,385 --> 00:11:57,072
and turning them into law,

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laws that stripped all human rights
from the people they were calling Black

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00:12:01,468 --> 00:12:07,839
and locking them into our particularly
vicious brand of chattel slavery,

235
00:12:07,839 --> 00:12:13,427
and laws that gave even
the poorest white people benefits,

236
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not big benefits in material terms

237
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but the right to not be enslaved for life,

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the right to not have your loved ones
torn from your arms and sold,

239
00:12:23,212 --> 00:12:25,678
and sometimes real goodies.

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The handouts of free land

241
00:12:27,571 --> 00:12:30,373
to white places like Virginia

242
00:12:30,373 --> 00:12:32,241
to white people only

243
00:12:32,241 --> 00:12:36,152
started long before
the American Revolution

244
00:12:36,152 --> 00:12:38,448
and continued long after.

245
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Now I can imagine

246
00:12:41,636 --> 00:12:45,020
there would be people listening to me,

247
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if they're still listening,

248
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who might be thinking,

249
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"C'mon, this is all ancient history.
Why does this matter?

250
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Things have changed.

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Can't we just get over it and move on?"

252
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But I would argue,

253
00:13:00,528 --> 00:13:02,464
for me certainly,

254
00:13:02,464 --> 00:13:05,707
learning this history has brought
a real shift in the way

255
00:13:05,707 --> 00:13:09,226
that I understand racism today.

256
00:13:09,226 --> 00:13:12,462
To review, two quick takeaways
from what I've said so far.

257
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One: race is not a thing biologically,

258
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it's a story some people decided to tell.

259
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And two: people told that story
to justify the brutal exploitation

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00:13:22,845 --> 00:13:28,674
of other human beings for profit.

261
00:13:28,674 --> 00:13:31,126
I didn't learn those two facts in school.

262
00:13:31,126 --> 00:13:32,582
I suspect most of us didn't.

263
00:13:32,582 --> 00:13:35,638
If you did, you had a special teacher.

264
00:13:35,888 --> 00:13:36,722
Right?

265
00:13:36,722 --> 00:13:38,707
But once they sink in,

266
00:13:38,707 --> 00:13:42,276
for one thing, it becomes clear

267
00:13:42,276 --> 00:13:46,054
that racism is not mainly
a problem of attitudes,

268
00:13:46,054 --> 00:13:48,306
of individual bigotry.

269
00:13:48,306 --> 00:13:50,858
No, it's a tool.

270
00:13:50,858 --> 00:13:53,477
It's a tool to divide us

271
00:13:53,477 --> 00:13:55,339
and to prop up systems,

272
00:13:55,339 --> 00:13:57,754
economic, political and social systems

273
00:13:57,754 --> 00:14:01,374
that advantage some people
and disadvantage others.

274
00:14:01,907 --> 00:14:07,003
And it's a tool to convince
a lot of white folks

275
00:14:07,003 --> 00:14:08,303
who may or may not be getting a great deal

276
00:14:08,303 --> 00:14:11,157
out of our highly stratified society

277
00:14:11,157 --> 00:14:13,424
to support the status quo.

278
00:14:13,424 --> 00:14:16,450
"Could be worse. At least I'm white."

279
00:14:17,575 --> 00:14:22,106
Once I grasped the origins of racism,

280
00:14:22,106 --> 00:14:25,166
I stopped being mystified by the fact
that it's still with us.

281
00:14:26,701 --> 00:14:29,453
I guess looking back
I thought about racism

282
00:14:29,453 --> 00:14:32,156
as being sort of like the flat Earth,

283
00:14:32,356 --> 00:14:35,399
just bad, outdated thinking
that would fade away on its own

284
00:14:35,399 --> 00:14:37,951
before long.

285
00:14:38,336 --> 00:14:41,471
But no, this tool of whiteness

286
00:14:41,471 --> 00:14:43,539
is still doing the job
it was invented to do.

287
00:14:43,773 --> 00:14:46,015
Powerful people go to work every day,

288
00:14:46,015 --> 00:14:50,186
leveraging and reinforcing
this old weapon,

289
00:14:50,369 --> 00:14:52,254
in the halls of power,

290
00:14:52,254 --> 00:14:55,231
in some broadcast studios
we could mention,

291
00:14:56,215 --> 00:14:58,383
and we don't need to fuss
over whether these people

292
00:14:58,383 --> 00:15:00,284
believe what they're saying,

293
00:15:00,284 --> 00:15:02,453
whether they're really racist.

294
00:15:02,453 --> 00:15:05,096
That's not what it's about.

295
00:15:05,096 --> 00:15:08,322
It's about pocketbooks and power.

296
00:15:10,000 --> 00:15:13,204
Finally, I think
the biggest lesson of all,

297
00:15:13,421 --> 00:15:17,897
and let me talk in particular
to the white folks for a minute,

298
00:15:17,897 --> 00:15:22,553
once we understand that people
who look like us

299
00:15:22,553 --> 00:15:26,013
invented the very notion of race

300
00:15:26,013 --> 00:15:29,950
in order to advantage themselves and us,

301
00:15:30,218 --> 00:15:34,121
isn't it easier to see that
it's our problem to solve?

302
00:15:34,663 --> 00:15:37,320
It's a white people problem.

303
00:15:37,320 --> 00:15:40,433
I'm embarrassed to say that
for a long time I thought of racism

304
00:15:40,433 --> 00:15:44,620
as being mainly a struggle
for people of color to fight,

305
00:15:44,620 --> 00:15:47,581
sort of like the people
on the TV screen when I was a kid.

306
00:15:48,898 --> 00:15:52,968
Or, as if I was on the sidelines
at a sports contest,

307
00:15:53,335 --> 00:15:55,745
on one side people of color,

308
00:15:55,745 --> 00:15:58,363
on the other those real racists,

309
00:15:58,363 --> 00:15:59,497
the Southern sheriff,

310
00:15:59,497 --> 00:16:01,199
the people in hoods.

311
00:16:01,199 --> 00:16:04,553
And I was sincerely rooting
for people of color to win the struggle.

312
00:16:05,677 --> 00:16:07,178
But no.

313
00:16:07,178 --> 00:16:10,214
There are no sidelines.

314
00:16:10,214 --> 00:16:11,782
We're all in it.

315
00:16:11,782 --> 00:16:14,743
We are implicated.

316
00:16:14,743 --> 00:16:17,511
And if I'm not joining the struggle
to dismantle the system

317
00:16:17,511 --> 00:16:19,714
that advantages me,

318
00:16:19,714 --> 00:16:21,748
I am complicit.

319
00:16:23,249 --> 00:16:25,677
This isn't about shame or guilt.

320
00:16:25,892 --> 00:16:29,178
White guilt doesn't get anything done,

321
00:16:29,446 --> 00:16:31,682
and honestly I don't feel a lot of guilt.

322
00:16:31,682 --> 00:16:34,891
History isn't my fault or yours.

323
00:16:34,891 --> 00:16:41,433
What I do feel is a stronger sense
of responsibility to do something.

324
00:16:41,433 --> 00:16:46,992
All this has altered the way
that I think about and approach my work

325
00:16:46,992 --> 00:16:49,774
as a documentary storyteller

326
00:16:49,996 --> 00:16:51,663
and as a teacher,

327
00:16:51,663 --> 00:16:54,434
but beyond that, besides that,
what does it mean,

328
00:16:54,434 --> 00:16:56,902
what does it mean for any of us?

329
00:16:57,352 --> 00:17:00,897
Does it mean that we support leaders

330
00:17:00,897 --> 00:17:03,766
who want to push ahead with
a conversation about reparations?

331
00:17:04,033 --> 00:17:07,636
In our communities, are we finding

332
00:17:07,636 --> 00:17:10,179
people who are working to transform
unjust institutions

333
00:17:10,179 --> 00:17:12,631
and supporting that work?

334
00:17:12,631 --> 00:17:14,331
At my job, am I the white person

335
00:17:14,331 --> 00:17:19,362
who shows up grudgingly
for the diversity and equity meeting

336
00:17:19,362 --> 00:17:23,848
or am I trying to figure
out how to be a real accomplice

337
00:17:24,916 --> 00:17:25,883
to my colleagues of color?

338
00:17:25,883 --> 00:17:27,818
Seems to me wherever we show up

339
00:17:27,818 --> 00:17:31,394
we need to show up with humility

340
00:17:31,394 --> 00:17:32,945
and vulnerability

341
00:17:32,945 --> 00:17:38,417
and a willingness to put down
this power that we did not earn.

342
00:17:38,717 --> 00:17:42,761
I believe we also stand to benefit

343
00:17:42,761 --> 00:17:45,847
if we could create a society

344
00:17:45,847 --> 00:17:51,659
that's not built on the exploitation
or oppression of anyone.

345
00:17:51,659 --> 00:17:53,512
But in the end we should do this,

346
00:17:53,512 --> 00:17:57,098
we should show up,

347
00:17:57,098 --> 00:17:58,850
figure out how to take action,

348
00:17:58,850 --> 00:18:01,075
because it's right.

349
00:18:02,995 --> 00:18:04,799
Thank you.

350
00:18:04,799 --> 00:18:07,515
(Applause)