The lie that invented racism

To understand and eradicate racist thinking, start at the beginning. That's what journalist and documentarian John Biewen did, leading to a trove of surprising and thought-provoking information on the "origins" of race. He shares his findings, supplying answers to fundamental questions about racism -- and lays out an exemplary path for practicing effective allyship.

What is up with us white people?

(Laughter)

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

and I know I have company.

Look, I get it --

people of color have been asking
that question for centuries.

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

given what's been going on out there

in our country.

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

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

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

They are a problem and a threat.

They perpetrate most of
the terrorism in our country,

as you all in Charlottesville
know better than most.

But I'm talking about something bigger
and more pervasive.

I'm talking about all of us,

white folks writ large.

And maybe, especially,
people sort of like me,

self-described progressive,

don't want to be racist.

Good white people.

(Laughter)

Any good white people in the room?

(Laughter)

I was raised to be that sort of person.

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

and to give you some sense of my parents:

actual public opinion polls at the time

showed that only a small minority,
about 20 percent of white Americans,

approved and supported

Martin Luther King and his work
with the civil rights movement

while Dr. King was still alive.

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

Race got talked about in our house.

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

they would sit us kids down,
made sure we watched:

the Sidney Poitier movies, "Roots" ...

The message was loud and clear,

and I got it:

racism is wrong; racists are bad people.

At the same time,

we lived in a very
white place in Minnesota.

And I'll just speak for myself,

I think that allowed me to believe
that those white racists on the TV screen

were being beamed in
from some other place.

It wasn't about us, really.

I did not feel implicated.

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

I got into journalism

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

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

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

Why such a persistent force?

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

or asking the right questions.

Have you noticed

that when people in our mostly white media

report on what they consider
to be racial issues,

what we consider to be racial issues,

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

and our microphones and our gaze

at people of color,

asking questions like,

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

how are they doing?"

in a given community
or with respect to some issue --

the economy, education.

I've done my share
of that kind of journalism

over many years.

But then George Zimmerman
killed Trayvon Martin,

followed by this unending string
of high-profile police shootings

of unarmed Black people,

the rise of the Black
Lives Matter movement,

Dylann Roof and the Charleston massacre,

#OscarsSoWhite --

all the incidents from
the day-to-day of American life,

these overtly racist incidents

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

and sent across the internet.

And beneath those visible events,

the stubborn data,

the studies showing systemic racism
in every institution we have:

housing segregation, job discrimination,

the deeply racialized
inequities in our schools

and criminal justice system.

And what really did it for me,

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

the rise of Donald Trump

and the discovery that
a solid majority of white Americans

would embrace or at least accept

such a raw, bitter kind
of white identity politics.

This was all disturbing to me
as a human being.

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

thinking,

"Wow, white folks are the story.

Whiteness is a story,"

And also thinking, "Can I do that?

What would a podcast series
about whiteness sound like?"

(Laughter)

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

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

but, of course, people of color
and especially Black intellectuals

have made sharp critiques
of white supremacist culture

for centuries,

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

scholars had done interesting work

looking at race
through the frame of whiteness,

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

I started reading,

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

One of the first questions I asked was,

"Where did this idea
of being a white person

come from in the first place?"

Science is clear.

We are one human race.

We're all related,

all descended from
a common ancestor in Africa.

Some people walked out of Africa
into colder, darker places

and lost a lot of their melanin,

some of us more than others.

(Laughter)

But genetically, we are all
99.9 percent the same.

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

than there is between racial groups.

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

or what have you.

So how did this happen?

How did we get this thing?

How did racism start?

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

in my ignorance, some years ago,

I probably would have said,

"Well, I guess somewhere
back in deep history,

people encountered one another,

and they found each other strange.

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

you dress funny.

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

that since you're different

that you're somehow less than me,

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

Right?

Is that something like
what we imagine or assume?

And under that kind of scenario,

it's all a big, tragic misunderstanding.

But it seems that's wrong.

First of all, race is a recent invention.

It's just a few hundred years old.

Before that, yes,
people divided themselves

by religion, tribal group, language,

things like that.

But for most of human history,

people had no notion of race.

In Ancient Greece, for example --

and I learned this from
the historian Nell Irvin Painter --

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

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

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

So they looked around at the Ethiopians,

but also the Persians and the Celts,

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

Culturally, they're just not Greek."

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

but people enslaved people
who didn't look like them,

and they often enslaved people who did.

Did you know that the English word "slave"
is derived from the word "Slav"?

Because Slavic people were enslaved
by all kinds of folks,

including Western Europeans,

for centuries.

Slavery wasn't about race either,

because no one
had thought up race yet.

So who did?

I put that question
to another leading historian,

Ibram Kendi.

I didn't expect
he would answer the question

in the form of one person's
name and a date,

as if we were talking
about the light bulb.

(Laughter)

But he did.

(Laughter)

He said, in his exhaustive research,

he found what he believed to be
the first articulation of racist ideas.

And he named the culprit.

This guy should be more famous,

or infamous.

His name is Gomes de Zurara.

Portuguese man.

Wrote a book in the 1450s

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

according to Dr. Kendi.

He lumped together
all the people of Africa --

a vast, diverse continent --

and he described them as a distinct group,

inferior and beastly.

Never mind that in that precolonial time

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

Why would this guy make this claim?

Turns out, it helps to follow the money.

First of all, Zurara was hired
to write that book

by the Portuguese king,

and just a few years before,

slave traders --

here we go --

slave traders tied to the Portuguese crown

had effectively pioneered
the Atlantic slave trade.

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

to kidnap and enslave African people.

So it was suddenly really helpful

to have a story about
the inferiority of African people

to justify this new trade

to other people, to the church,

to themselves.

And with the stroke of a pen,

Zurara invented both
blackness and whiteness,

because he basically created
the notion of blackness

through this description of Africans,

and as Dr. Kendi says,

blackness has no meaning
without whiteness.

Other European countries followed
the Portuguese lead

in looking to Africa
for human property and free labor

and in adopting this fiction

about the inferiority of African people.

I found this clarifying.

Racism didn't start
with a misunderstanding,

it started with a lie.

Meanwhile, over here in colonial America,

the people now calling themselves white
got busy taking these racist ideas

and turning them into law,

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

and locking them into our particularly
vicious brand of chattel slavery,

and laws that gave even
the poorest white people benefits,

not big benefits in material terms

but the right to not be enslaved for life,

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

and sometimes real goodies.

The handouts of free land
in places like Virginia

to white people only

started long before
the American Revolution

and continued long after.

Now, I can imagine

there would be people listening to me --
if they're still listening --

who might be thinking,

"Come on, this is all ancient history.
Why does this matter?

Things have changed.

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

Right?

But I would argue, for me certainly,

learning this history
has brought a real shift

in the way that I understand racism today.

To review, two quick takeaways
from what I've said so far:

one, race is not a thing biologically,

it's a story some people decided to tell;

and two, people told that story

to justify the brutal exploitation
of other human beings for profit.

I didn't learn those two facts in school.

I suspect most of us didn't.

If you did, you had a special teacher.

Right?

But once they sink in,

for one thing, it becomes clear

that racism is not mainly
a problem of attitudes,

of individual bigotry.

No, it's a tool.

It's a tool to divide us
and to prop up systems --

economic, political and social systems

that advantage some people
and disadvantage others.

And it's a tool to convince
a lot of white folks

who may or may not be getting a great deal
out of our highly stratified society

to support the status quo.

"Could be worse. At least I'm white."

Once I grasped the origins of racism,

I stopped being mystified by the fact
that it's still with us.

I guess, you know, looking back,

I thought about racism
as being sort of like the flat Earth --

just bad, outdated thinking
that would fade away on its own

before long.

But no, this tool of whiteness

is still doing the job
it was invented to do.

Powerful people go to work every day,

leveraging and reinforcing
this old weapon

in the halls of power,

in some broadcast studios
we could mention ...

And we don't need to fuss over

whether these people
believe what they're saying,

whether they're really racist.

That's not what it's about.

It's about pocketbooks and power.

Finally, I think
the biggest lesson of all --

and let me talk in particular
to the white folks for a minute:

once we understand that people
who look like us

invented the very notion of race

in order to advantage themselves and us,

isn't it easier to see
that it's our problem to solve?

It's a white people problem.

I'm embarrassed to say
that for a long time,

I thought of racism as being mainly
a struggle for people of color to fight,

sort of like the people
on the TV screen when I was a kid.

Or, as if I was on the sidelines
at a sports contest,

on one side people of color,

on the other those real racists,

the Southern sheriff,

the people in hoods.

And I was sincerely rooting
for people of color to win the struggle.

But no.

There are no sidelines.

We're all in it.

We are implicated.

And if I'm not joining the struggle
to dismantle a system

that advantages me,

I am complicit.

This isn't about shame or guilt.

White guilt doesn't get anything done,

and honestly, I don't feel a lot of guilt.

History isn't my fault or yours.

What I do feel is a stronger sense
of responsibility

to do something.

All this has altered the way
that I think about and approach my work

as a documentary storyteller

and as a teacher.

But beyond that, besides that,
what does it mean?

What does it mean for any of us?

Does it mean that we support leaders

who want to push ahead
with a conversation about reparations?

In our communities,

are we finding people who are working
to transform unjust institutions

and supporting that work?

At my job,

am I the white person
who shows up grudgingly

for the diversity and equity meeting,

or am I trying to figure out
how to be a real accomplice

to my colleagues of color?

Seems to me wherever we show up,

we need to show up with humility
and vulnerability

and a willingness to put down
this power that we did not earn.

I believe we also stand to benefit

if we could create a society

that's not built on the exploitation
or oppression of anyone.

But in the end we should do this,

we should show up,

figure out how to take action.

Because it's right.

Thank you.

(Applause)