WEBVTT

00:00:00.886 --> 00:00:04.713
What is up with us white people?

00:00:05.048 --> 00:00:07.467
(Laughter)

00:00:07.884 --> 00:00:10.370
I've been thinking about that a lot
the last few years,

00:00:10.370 --> 00:00:12.406
and I know I have company.

00:00:12.605 --> 00:00:14.683
Look, I get it, people of color

00:00:14.683 --> 00:00:17.183
have been asking
that question for centuries,

00:00:17.183 --> 00:00:21.170
but I think a growing number
of white folks are too,

00:00:21.688 --> 00:00:24.312
given what's been going on out there

00:00:24.896 --> 00:00:26.031
in our country.

00:00:27.681 --> 00:00:31.001
And notice I said,
"What's up with us white people?"

00:00:31.001 --> 00:00:34.479
because right now I'm not talking
about those white people,

00:00:34.479 --> 00:00:38.951
the ones with the swastikas
and the hoods and the tiki torches.

00:00:38.951 --> 00:00:42.654
They are a problem, and a threat.

00:00:42.819 --> 00:00:45.513
They perpetrate most of
the terrorism in our country,

00:00:45.513 --> 00:00:48.999
as you all in Charlottesville
know better than most.

00:00:49.634 --> 00:00:53.253
But I'm talking about something bigger,

00:00:53.253 --> 00:00:53.898
more pervasive.

00:00:53.898 --> 00:00:55.729
I'm talking about all of us,

00:00:55.729 --> 00:00:57.846
white folks writ large.

00:00:58.114 --> 00:01:01.016
And maybe, especially,
people sort of like me,

00:01:01.016 --> 00:01:03.569
self-described progressive,

00:01:03.569 --> 00:01:06.129
don't want to be racist,

00:01:06.129 --> 00:01:07.913
"good" white people.

00:01:08.430 --> 00:01:09.481
(Laughter)

00:01:09.481 --> 00:01:12.084
Any good white people in the room?

00:01:12.334 --> 00:01:13.301
(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

00:01:13.301 --> 00:01:15.994
I was raised to be that sort of person.

00:01:16.194 --> 00:01:18.447
I was a little kid in the '60s and '70s,

00:01:18.447 --> 00:01:21.003
and to give you some sense of my parents,

00:01:21.003 --> 00:01:23.769
actual public opinion polls at the time

00:01:23.769 --> 00:01:26.511
showed that only a small minority,

00:01:26.511 --> 00:01:28.745
about 20 percent of white Americans,

00:01:28.745 --> 00:01:30.664
approved and supported

00:01:30.664 --> 00:01:34.608
Martin Luther King and his work
with the Civil Rights Movement

00:01:34.608 --> 00:01:37.327
while Dr. King was still alive.

00:01:38.378 --> 00:01:40.982
I'm proud to say my parents
were in that group.

00:01:41.530 --> 00:01:44.791
Race got talked about in our house,

00:01:44.791 --> 00:01:48.994
and when the shows that dealt
with race would come on the television,

00:01:48.994 --> 00:01:51.147
they would sit us kids down,
make sure we watch:

00:01:51.147 --> 00:01:52.432
the Sidney Poitier movies, "Roots."

00:01:52.432 --> 00:01:58.026
The message was loud and clear,

00:01:58.227 --> 00:02:00.178
and I got it.

00:02:00.178 --> 00:02:04.873
Racism is wrong. Racists are bad people.

00:02:04.873 --> 00:02:08.276
At the same time,

00:02:08.276 --> 00:02:10.027
we lived in a very
white place in Minnesota,

00:02:10.027 --> 00:02:12.013
and I'll just speak for myself,
I think that allowed me to believe

00:02:12.013 --> 00:02:14.905
that those white racists on the TV screen

00:02:14.905 --> 00:02:15.622
were being beamed in
from some other place.

00:02:15.622 --> 00:02:20.577
It wasn't about us, really.

00:02:21.211 --> 00:02:26.422
I did not feel implicated.

00:02:27.456 --> 00:02:31.210
Now, I would say I'm still in recovery
from that early impression.

00:02:32.478 --> 00:02:35.253
I got into journalism

00:02:35.253 --> 00:02:39.341
in part because I cared about things
like equality and justice.

00:02:40.842 --> 00:02:45.157
For a long time, racism was just
such a puzzle to me.

00:02:45.157 --> 00:02:49.574
Why is it still with us
when it's so clearly wrong?

00:02:49.807 --> 00:02:53.445
Why such a persistent force?

00:02:53.445 --> 00:02:58.322
Maybe I was puzzled because
I wasn't yet looking in the right place

00:02:58.322 --> 00:03:01.074
or asking the right questions.

00:03:01.074 --> 00:03:03.645
Have you noticed

00:03:03.645 --> 00:03:07.787
that when people in our mostly white media

00:03:07.787 --> 00:03:10.691
report on what they consider
to be racial issues,

00:03:10.691 --> 00:03:13.077
what we consider to be racial issues,

00:03:13.077 --> 00:03:15.651
what that usually means
is that we're pointing our cameras

00:03:15.651 --> 00:03:19.103
and our microphones and our gaze

00:03:19.103 --> 00:03:22.223
at people of color, asking questions like,

00:03:22.223 --> 00:03:27.001
"How are Black folks or Native Americans,
Latino, or Asian Americans,

00:03:27.001 --> 00:03:29.078
how are they doing?"

00:03:29.078 --> 00:03:32.588
In a given community,

00:03:32.588 --> 00:03:34.741
or with respect to some issue:

00:03:35.692 --> 00:03:39.102
the economy, education.

00:03:39.102 --> 00:03:40.086
I've done my share
of that kind of journalism

00:03:40.086 --> 00:03:41.906
over many years.

NOTE Paragraph

00:03:41.906 --> 00:03:45.808
But then George Zimmerman
killed Trayvon Martin,

00:03:45.808 --> 00:03:51.255
followed by this unending string
of high-profile police shootings

00:03:51.470 --> 00:03:53.505
of unarmed Black people, the rise
of the Black Lives Matter movement,

00:03:53.505 --> 00:03:58.768
Dylann Roof and the Charleston Massacre,

00:03:58.768 --> 00:04:00.919
#OscarsSoWhite,

00:04:00.919 --> 00:04:06.290
all the incidents from the day to day

00:04:06.290 --> 00:04:08.533
of American life,
these overtly racist incidents

00:04:08.533 --> 00:04:14.738
that we now get to see
because they're captured on smartphones

00:04:14.738 --> 00:04:15.289
and sent across the internet.

00:04:15.289 --> 00:04:17.049
And beneath those visible events,

00:04:17.049 --> 00:04:19.469
the stubborn data,

00:04:19.469 --> 00:04:24.121
the studies showing systemic racism
in every institution we have:

00:04:24.121 --> 00:04:27.281
housing segregation, job discrimination,

00:04:27.281 --> 00:04:32.009
the deeply racialized inequities in
our schools and criminal justice system.

00:04:33.203 --> 00:04:34.937
And what really did it for me,

00:04:34.937 --> 00:04:37.647
and I know I'm not alone in this either,

00:04:37.647 --> 00:04:39.649
the rise of Donald Trump

00:04:39.649 --> 00:04:44.954
and the discovery that
a solid majority of white Americans

00:04:44.954 --> 00:04:47.730
would embrace or at least accept

00:04:47.730 --> 00:04:52.316
such a raw, bitter kind
of white identity politics.

NOTE Paragraph

00:04:54.352 --> 00:04:59.163
This was all disturbing to me
as a human being.

00:04:59.397 --> 00:05:04.769
As a journalist, I found myself
turning the lens around,

00:05:04.769 --> 00:05:07.254
thinking,

00:05:07.254 --> 00:05:09.279
wow, white folks are the story.

00:05:09.279 --> 00:05:11.754
Whiteness is a story.

00:05:11.754 --> 00:05:13.683
And also thinking,

00:05:13.683 --> 00:05:16.418
can I do that?

00:05:16.686 --> 00:05:21.014
What would a podcast series
about whiteness sound like?

00:05:21.014 --> 00:05:24.066
And oh, by the way,
this could get uncomfortable.

00:05:25.184 --> 00:05:31.096
I had seen almost no journalism
that looked deeply at whiteness,

00:05:31.696 --> 00:05:35.767
but of course people of color
and especially Black intellectuals

00:05:35.767 --> 00:05:39.861
have made sharp critiques of
white supremacist culture for centuries,

00:05:39.861 --> 00:05:42.463
and I knew that in the last
two or three decades,

00:05:42.463 --> 00:05:45.065
scholars had done interesting work

00:05:45.065 --> 00:05:48.511
looking at race through
the frame of whiteness,

00:05:48.511 --> 00:05:51.002
what it is, how we got it,
how it works in the world.

00:05:51.002 --> 00:05:54.897
I started reading,

00:05:54.897 --> 00:06:00.412
and I reached out to some leading experts
on race and the history of race.

NOTE Paragraph

00:06:01.844 --> 00:06:04.515
One of the first questions I asked was,

00:06:04.515 --> 00:06:08.457
where did this idea
of being a white person

00:06:08.457 --> 00:06:10.791
come from in the first place?

00:06:10.791 --> 00:06:13.562
Science is clear.

00:06:13.562 --> 00:06:15.730
We are one human race.

00:06:15.730 --> 00:06:19.692
We're all related,

00:06:19.692 --> 00:06:21.177
all descended from
a common ancestor in Africa.

00:06:21.177 --> 00:06:24.779
Some people walked out of Africa
into colder, darker places

00:06:24.779 --> 00:06:27.424
and lost a lot of their melanin,

00:06:27.424 --> 00:06:29.557
some of us more than others.

00:06:30.324 --> 00:06:36.630
But genetically we are all
99.9 percent the same.

00:06:36.630 --> 00:06:41.777
There's more genetic diversity
within what we call racial groups

00:06:41.777 --> 00:06:44.393
than there is between racial groups.

00:06:44.393 --> 00:06:48.337
There's no gene for whiteness
or blackness or Asian-ness

00:06:48.337 --> 00:06:50.840
or what half you.

NOTE Paragraph

00:06:50.840 --> 00:06:53.092
So how did this happen?

00:06:53.092 --> 00:06:54.760
How did we get this thing?

00:06:54.995 --> 00:06:57.996
How did racism start?

00:06:57.996 --> 00:07:01.606
I think if you had asked me
to speculate on that,

00:07:01.606 --> 00:07:04.499
in my ignorance, some years ago,

00:07:04.499 --> 00:07:06.711
I probably would have said,

00:07:06.711 --> 00:07:11.305
well, I guess somewhere
back in deep history,

00:07:11.305 --> 00:07:15.409
people encountered one another,

00:07:15.409 --> 00:07:16.209
and they found each other strange,

00:07:16.209 --> 00:07:18.202
your skin is a different color,
your hair is different,

00:07:18.202 --> 00:07:19.887
you dress funny.

00:07:19.887 --> 00:07:22.306
I guess I'll just go ahead
and jump to the conclusion

00:07:22.306 --> 00:07:23.715
that since you're different

00:07:23.715 --> 00:07:26.150
that you're somehow less than me,

00:07:26.150 --> 00:07:29.238
and maybe that makes it OK
for me to mistreat you.

00:07:29.753 --> 00:07:31.342
Right?

00:07:31.342 --> 00:07:34.979
Is that something like
what we imagine or assume?

00:07:34.979 --> 00:07:36.714
And under that kind of scenario,

00:07:36.714 --> 00:07:39.841
it's all a big tragic misunderstanding.

00:07:41.660 --> 00:07:43.794
But it seems that's wrong.

NOTE Paragraph

00:07:43.794 --> 00:07:48.115
First of all, race is a recent invention.

00:07:48.115 --> 00:07:50.591
It's just a few hundred years old.

00:07:50.591 --> 00:07:53.760
Before that, yes,
people divided themselves

00:07:53.760 --> 00:07:56.846
by religion, tribal group,

00:07:56.846 --> 00:07:59.122
language, things like that,

00:07:59.122 --> 00:08:02.036
but for most of human history,

00:08:02.036 --> 00:08:04.022
people had no notion of race.

00:08:04.022 --> 00:08:06.291
In Ancient Greece, for example,

00:08:06.291 --> 00:08:08.985
and I learned this from
the historian Nell Irvin Painter,

00:08:08.985 --> 00:08:13.904
the Greeks thought they were better
than the other people they knew about,

00:08:13.904 --> 00:08:15.822
but not because of some idea
that they were innately superior.

00:08:15.822 --> 00:08:22.369
They just thought that they'd developed
the most advanced culture.

00:08:22.369 --> 00:08:25.980
So they looked around at the Ethiopians,

00:08:25.980 --> 00:08:28.182
but also the Persians and the Celts,

00:08:28.182 --> 00:08:31.683
and they said, "They're all
kind of barbaric compared to us.

00:08:31.683 --> 00:08:33.670
Culturally, they're
just not Greek, right?"

00:08:33.670 --> 00:08:38.264
And yes, in the ancient world,
there was lots of slavery,

00:08:38.264 --> 00:08:40.648
but people enslaved people
who didn't look like them

00:08:40.648 --> 00:08:45.253
and they often enslaved people who did.

00:08:46.004 --> 00:08:48.997
Did you know that the English word "slave"

00:08:48.997 --> 00:08:51.632
is derived from the word "Slav"?

00:08:52.184 --> 00:08:56.654
Because Slavic people were enslaved
by all kinds of folks,

00:08:56.654 --> 00:08:57.895
including Western Europeans,

00:08:57.895 --> 00:09:00.197
for centuries.

00:09:00.197 --> 00:09:02.799
Slavery wasn't about race,

00:09:02.799 --> 00:09:07.010
either because no one
had thought up race yet.

00:09:07.010 --> 00:09:09.829
So who did?

00:09:10.064 --> 00:09:13.198
I put that question
to another leading historian,

00:09:13.198 --> 00:09:14.667
Ibram Kendi.

00:09:14.667 --> 00:09:18.944
I didn't expect he would answer
the question in the form

00:09:18.944 --> 00:09:20.412
of one person's name and a date,

00:09:20.412 --> 00:09:22.247
as if we were talking
about the light bulb.

00:09:22.247 --> 00:09:23.482
(Laughter)

00:09:23.482 --> 00:09:24.799
But he did.

00:09:24.799 --> 00:09:26.742
(Laughter)

00:09:26.742 --> 00:09:30.795
He said, in his exhaustive research
he found what he believed to be

00:09:30.795 --> 00:09:33.598
the first articulation of racist ideas,

00:09:34.316 --> 00:09:36.184
and he named the culprit.

00:09:36.184 --> 00:09:37.692
This guy should be more famous,

00:09:37.692 --> 00:09:38.943
or infamous.

00:09:38.943 --> 00:09:42.013
His name is Gomes de Zurara.

00:09:42.280 --> 00:09:44.498
Portuguese man.

00:09:44.498 --> 00:09:46.616
Wrote a book in the 1450s

00:09:46.616 --> 00:09:49.009
in which he did something
that no one had ever done before,

00:09:49.009 --> 00:09:50.594
according to Dr. Kendi.

00:09:50.594 --> 00:09:54.983
He lumped together
all the people of Africa,

00:09:54.983 --> 00:09:58.175
a vast, diverse continent,

00:09:58.175 --> 00:10:00.982
and he described them as a distinct group,

00:10:00.982 --> 00:10:03.570
inferior and beastly.

00:10:04.820 --> 00:10:07.222
Never mind that in that precolonial time

00:10:07.222 --> 00:10:13.137
some of the most sophisticated cultures
in the world were in Africa.

00:10:13.137 --> 00:10:16.295
Why would this guy make this claim?

00:10:16.295 --> 00:10:18.737
Turns out, it helps to follow the money.

00:10:20.105 --> 00:10:23.175
First of all, Zurara was hired
to write that book

00:10:23.175 --> 00:10:25.393
by the Portuguese king,

00:10:25.393 --> 00:10:27.452
and just a few years before,

00:10:27.452 --> 00:10:29.354
slave traders,

00:10:29.354 --> 00:10:30.906
here we go,

00:10:30.906 --> 00:10:34.091
slave traders tied to the Portuguese crown

00:10:34.459 --> 00:10:37.835
had effectively pioneered
the Atlantic slave trade.

00:10:37.835 --> 00:10:41.589
They were the first Europeans
to sail directly to sub-Saharan Africa

00:10:41.788 --> 00:10:45.375
to kidnap and enslave African people.

00:10:45.375 --> 00:10:47.702
So it was suddenly really helpful

00:10:47.702 --> 00:10:50.804
to have a story about the inferiority

00:10:50.804 --> 00:10:52.589
of African people

00:10:52.589 --> 00:10:54.957
to justify this new trade

00:10:55.825 --> 00:10:57.518
to other people, to the church,

00:10:57.518 --> 00:11:00.536
to themselves.

00:11:01.240 --> 00:11:02.922
And with the stroke of a pen,

00:11:02.922 --> 00:11:05.891
Zurara invented both
blackness and whiteness,

00:11:05.891 --> 00:11:08.950
because he basically created
the notion of blackness

00:11:08.950 --> 00:11:13.172
through this description of Africans,

00:11:13.172 --> 00:11:15.540
and as Dr. Kendi says,

00:11:15.540 --> 00:11:18.239
blackness has no meaning
without whiteness.

00:11:18.950 --> 00:11:21.152
Other European countries followed

00:11:21.152 --> 00:11:24.187
the Portuguese lead

00:11:24.187 --> 00:11:27.141
in looking to Africa for human property

00:11:27.141 --> 00:11:28.615
and free labor

00:11:28.615 --> 00:11:31.618
and in adopting this fiction

00:11:31.618 --> 00:11:34.371
about the inferiority of African people.

NOTE Paragraph

00:11:35.839 --> 00:11:38.250
I found this clarifying.

00:11:39.515 --> 00:11:41.817
Racism didn't start
with a misunderstanding,

00:11:41.817 --> 00:11:43.836
it started with a lie.

NOTE Paragraph

00:11:44.120 --> 00:11:48.498
Meanwhile, over here in colonial America,

00:11:48.498 --> 00:11:50.317
the people now calling themselves white

00:11:50.317 --> 00:11:53.385
got busy taking these racist ideas

00:11:53.385 --> 00:11:57.072
and turning them into law,

00:11:57.072 --> 00:12:01.468
laws that stripped all human rights
from the people they were calling Black

00:12:01.468 --> 00:12:07.839
and locking them into our particularly
vicious brand of chattel slavery,

00:12:07.839 --> 00:12:13.427
and laws that gave even
the poorest white people benefits,

00:12:13.427 --> 00:12:15.714
not big benefits in material terms

00:12:15.714 --> 00:12:19.023
but the right to not be enslaved for life,

00:12:19.023 --> 00:12:23.009
the right to not have your loved ones
torn from your arms and sold,

00:12:23.212 --> 00:12:25.678
and sometimes real goodies.

00:12:25.678 --> 00:12:27.571
The handouts of free land

00:12:27.571 --> 00:12:30.373
to white places like Virginia

00:12:30.373 --> 00:12:32.241
to white people only

00:12:32.241 --> 00:12:36.152
started long before
the American Revolution

00:12:36.152 --> 00:12:38.448
and continued long after.

00:12:40.106 --> 00:12:41.616
Now I can imagine

00:12:41.636 --> 00:12:45.020
there would be people listening to me,

00:12:45.558 --> 00:12:47.293
if they're still listening,

00:12:47.293 --> 00:12:49.312
who might be thinking,

00:12:49.312 --> 00:12:52.600
"C'mon, this is all ancient history.
Why does this matter?

00:12:52.600 --> 00:12:54.124
Things have changed.

00:12:54.124 --> 00:12:57.975
Can't we just get over it and move on?"

00:12:58.360 --> 00:13:00.528
But I would argue,

00:13:00.528 --> 00:13:02.464
for me certainly,

00:13:02.464 --> 00:13:05.707
learning this history has brought
a real shift in the way

00:13:05.707 --> 00:13:09.226
that I understand racism today.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:09.226 --> 00:13:12.462
To review, two quick takeaways
from what I've said so far.

00:13:12.729 --> 00:13:16.328
One: race is not a thing biologically,

00:13:16.328 --> 00:13:19.259
it's a story some people decided to tell.

00:13:19.858 --> 00:13:22.845
And two: people told that story
to justify the brutal exploitation

00:13:22.845 --> 00:13:28.674
of other human beings for profit.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:28.674 --> 00:13:31.126
I didn't learn those two facts in school.

00:13:31.126 --> 00:13:32.582
I suspect most of us didn't.

00:13:32.582 --> 00:13:35.638
If you did, you had a special teacher.

00:13:35.888 --> 00:13:36.722
Right?

00:13:36.722 --> 00:13:38.707
But once they sink in,

00:13:38.707 --> 00:13:42.276
for one thing, it becomes clear

00:13:42.276 --> 00:13:46.054
that racism is not mainly
a problem of attitudes,

00:13:46.054 --> 00:13:48.306
of individual bigotry.

00:13:48.306 --> 00:13:50.858
No, it's a tool.

00:13:50.858 --> 00:13:53.477
It's a tool to divide us

00:13:53.477 --> 00:13:55.339
and to prop up systems,

00:13:55.339 --> 00:13:57.754
economic, political and social systems

00:13:57.754 --> 00:14:01.374
that advantage some people
and disadvantage others.

00:14:01.907 --> 00:14:07.003
And it's a tool to convince
a lot of white folks

00:14:07.003 --> 00:14:08.303
who may or may not be getting a great deal

00:14:08.303 --> 00:14:11.157
out of our highly stratified society

00:14:11.157 --> 00:14:13.424
to support the status quo.

00:14:13.424 --> 00:14:16.450
"Could be worse. At least I'm white."

00:14:17.575 --> 00:14:22.106
Once I grasped the origins of racism,

00:14:22.106 --> 00:14:25.166
I stopped being mystified by the fact
that it's still with us.

00:14:26.701 --> 00:14:29.453
I guess looking back
I thought about racism

00:14:29.453 --> 00:14:32.156
as being sort of like the flat Earth,

00:14:32.356 --> 00:14:35.399
just bad, outdated thinking
that would fade away on its own

00:14:35.399 --> 00:14:37.951
before long.

00:14:38.336 --> 00:14:41.471
But no, this tool of whiteness

00:14:41.471 --> 00:14:43.539
is still doing the job
it was invented to do.

00:14:43.773 --> 00:14:46.015
Powerful people go to work every day,

00:14:46.015 --> 00:14:50.186
leveraging and reinforcing
this old weapon,

00:14:50.369 --> 00:14:52.254
in the halls of power,

00:14:52.254 --> 00:14:55.231
in some broadcast studios
we could mention,

00:14:56.215 --> 00:14:58.383
and we don't need to fuss
over whether these people

00:14:58.383 --> 00:15:00.284
believe what they're saying,

00:15:00.284 --> 00:15:02.453
whether they're really racist.

00:15:02.453 --> 00:15:05.096
That's not what it's about.

00:15:05.096 --> 00:15:08.322
It's about pocketbooks and power.

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:10.000 --> 00:15:13.204
Finally, I think
the biggest lesson of all,

00:15:13.421 --> 00:15:17.897
and let me talk in particular
to the white folks for a minute,

00:15:17.897 --> 00:15:22.553
once we understand that people
who look like us

00:15:22.553 --> 00:15:26.013
invented the very notion of race

00:15:26.013 --> 00:15:29.950
in order to advantage themselves and us,

00:15:30.218 --> 00:15:34.121
isn't it easier to see that
it's our problem to solve?

00:15:34.663 --> 00:15:37.320
It's a white people problem.

00:15:37.320 --> 00:15:40.433
I'm embarrassed to say that
for a long time I thought of racism

00:15:40.433 --> 00:15:44.620
as being mainly a struggle
for people of color to fight,

00:15:44.620 --> 00:15:47.581
sort of like the people
on the TV screen when I was a kid.

00:15:48.898 --> 00:15:52.968
Or, as if I was on the sidelines
at a sports contest,

00:15:53.335 --> 00:15:55.745
on one side people of color,

00:15:55.745 --> 00:15:58.363
on the other those real racists,

00:15:58.363 --> 00:15:59.497
the Southern sheriff,

00:15:59.497 --> 00:16:01.199
the people in hoods.

00:16:01.199 --> 00:16:04.553
And I was sincerely rooting
for people of color to win the struggle.

00:16:05.677 --> 00:16:07.178
But no.

00:16:07.178 --> 00:16:10.214
There are no sidelines.

00:16:10.214 --> 00:16:11.782
We're all in it.

00:16:11.782 --> 00:16:14.743
We are implicated.

00:16:14.743 --> 00:16:17.511
And if I'm not joining the struggle
to dismantle the system

00:16:17.511 --> 00:16:19.714
that advantages me,

00:16:19.714 --> 00:16:21.748
I am complicit.

00:16:23.249 --> 00:16:25.677
This isn't about shame or guilt.

00:16:25.892 --> 00:16:29.178
White guilt doesn't get anything done,

00:16:29.446 --> 00:16:31.682
and honestly I don't feel a lot of guilt.

00:16:31.682 --> 00:16:34.891
History isn't my fault or yours.

00:16:34.891 --> 00:16:41.433
What I do feel is a stronger sense
of responsibility to do something.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:41.433 --> 00:16:46.992
All this has altered the way
that I think about and approach my work

00:16:46.992 --> 00:16:49.774
as a documentary storyteller

00:16:49.996 --> 00:16:51.663
and as a teacher,

00:16:51.663 --> 00:16:54.434
but beyond that, besides that,
what does it mean,

00:16:54.434 --> 00:16:56.902
what does it mean for any of us?

00:16:57.352 --> 00:17:00.897
Does it mean that we support leaders

00:17:00.897 --> 00:17:03.766
who want to push ahead with
a conversation about reparations?

00:17:04.033 --> 00:17:07.636
In our communities, are we finding

00:17:07.636 --> 00:17:10.179
people who are working to transform
unjust institutions

00:17:10.179 --> 00:17:12.631
and supporting that work?

00:17:12.631 --> 00:17:14.331
At my job, am I the white person

00:17:14.331 --> 00:17:19.362
who shows up grudgingly
for the diversity and equity meeting

00:17:19.362 --> 00:17:23.848
or am I trying to figure
out how to be a real accomplice

00:17:24.916 --> 00:17:25.883
to my colleagues of color?

00:17:25.883 --> 00:17:27.818
Seems to me wherever we show up

00:17:27.818 --> 00:17:31.394
we need to show up with humility

00:17:31.394 --> 00:17:32.945
and vulnerability

00:17:32.945 --> 00:17:38.417
and a willingness to put down
this power that we did not earn.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:38.717 --> 00:17:42.761
I believe we also stand to benefit

00:17:42.761 --> 00:17:45.847
if we could create a society

00:17:45.847 --> 00:17:51.659
that's not built on the exploitation
or oppression of anyone.

00:17:51.659 --> 00:17:53.512
But in the end we should do this,

00:17:53.512 --> 00:17:57.098
we should show up,

00:17:57.098 --> 00:17:58.850
figure out how to take action,

00:17:58.850 --> 00:18:01.075
because it's right.

NOTE Paragraph

00:18:02.995 --> 00:18:04.799
Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

00:18:04.799 --> 00:18:07.515
(Applause)