Going to dive right in here… I heard a super interesting episode of Armchair Expert with Michael Tubbs, the young, black mayor of Stockton, CA. He grew up as an underprivileged youth in Stockton – His mom had him at 16, and his father was incarcerated throughout his childhood. He overcame enormous inequity to achieve admission to Stanford University and became the first black mayor of Stockton at 26 years old (26!!). He’s 30 now, recently had his first child, and he says it would be “terrible” for his son to have a leg up at admissions at Stanford just because both his parents went there. That his son shouldn’t get a leg up over a future, younger version of himself…. Think about this. I’m generalizing here, but it’s the exact opposite sentiment of the hegemonic group (i.e. white in America, ruling tribe in Cameroon, highest caste in India) in which I place myself (I’m not placing judgement on this sentiment by the way…labels are for jars). The hegemonic individual would say [in general], “Of course my offspring deserves preferential treatment because of who I am / what I’ve done. I worked my ass off to achieve x, y, z and that should mean something” Here, Michael is saying, no – I was that person competing with the hegemonic offspring, and I don’t think my son should benefit from the merit of his parents. Powerful. BONUS: He made a comment in passing that I found so beautiful and has stuck with me: how do we ‘put purpose to our privilege’? Check out the episode HERE!
Also…
This week, the Code Switch Podcast explored race and friendship: Keep Your Friends Closer – A statistic from this research that was truly shocking: In the United States, 75% of white people have 0 (ZERO!) friends of color. So while the US is more diverse then it’s ever been, our (white American) social networks are almost entirely homogenous. There are many sociality systems that are designed to product this outcome (HELLO – remember Dan Heath and Upstream!!!) i.e. segregated housing markets, segregated schools. The research outlines that not only are cross-racial friendships difficult to establish, they are also difficult to maintain. The maintenance part of this really rang true for me – I had a very close black friend while working for FDA in Minneapolis, and we both ended up moving to Washington, DC. When I moved back to Minneapolis, we fell out of touch, and now, I can’t help but question if our drifting apart has anything to do with race. So my action… reach out to her and attempt to rekindle the friendship.
Are we better today than we were last week? What purpose are we putting to our privilege?
#courageconversations #blacklivesmatter #purposetoprivilege