Title : Family Health Network Cortland Ny
link : Family Health Network Cortland Ny
Family Health Network Cortland Ny
tim wise is among the most prominentanti races writers and educators in the united states named one of 25visionaries who are changing your world wise has spoken in all 50 states on over ahundred college and high school campuses and community groups across the nationhe has also lectured internationally in canada and bermuda on issues of comparedto racism race and education racism in
Family Health Network Cortland Ny, religion and racism in the labor marketwhy is the author of seven books including his latest under the affluentshaming the poor and the rich and sacrificing the future of america andhis highly acclaimed memoir quite like me reflections on race in a privilegedsign just to name a few
wise has contributed essays totwenty-five books and he is one of several persons featured in white menchallenging racism 35 personal stories here see the 2001 british diversityaward for best feature essay on race issues in his writings have appeared indozens of popular professional and scholarly journals wise is provided antiracing and training to teachers nationwide and was conducted trainingwith physicians and medical industry professionals on how to combat racialinequities in health care he's also trained corporate governmententertainment military and law enforcement officials on method fordismantling racism in their institutions
and has served as a consultant forplaintiffs attorneys and federal discrimination cases in new york andwashington state wise appeared on hundreds of radio and televisionprograms is a regular contributor to discussions about race on cnn and hasbeen featured on abc's twenty twenty he graduated from tulane university in 1990and received an anti racism training from the people's institute for survivaland beyond in new orleans and now we get to add wichita state university to thatroster please give a warm welcome to tim wise thank you all so much for being here itis a real honor and a privilege and i
don't just mean a white privilege thewhite also that it is a general privilege to be able to come in to speakto you for the keynote of black history month for a number of reasons not leastamong them the fact that i am fully aware as someone who is your eyes do notdeceive you not black to be the keynote speaker for blackhistory month to be somebody he's brought in to speak to the issue ofinstitutional racism to the issue of structural white supremacy and to try tocarry on the legacy of all the amazing black history month program that i knowyou've had here before is a daunting task and i'm fully awareof that and i am honored to be able to
try to do it in to offer my voice and toadd my voice to those who have come before me i think it is incumbent uponany of us who were white and do this work as aspiring allies or coke andspirit or whatever term we might choose for ourselves that we acknowledge as wego about the business of doing our work that is much as we are pleased to do itis honored as we are to do it that ultimately the real sign of progresswhether it is at this campus or in the state or in the country as a whole willbe that day when a person of color or multiple persons of color can stand infront of an audience and say all the things that i'm about to say and betaken every bit as seriously as i expect
i will be taken in the next hour forsaying it that is to say that although i'm glad to be here and i'm honored tobe here and i intend to do what i came to do ultimately the wisdom when itcomes to racism white supremacy is present in every classroom at wichitastate it is present in the minds and the hearts of the persons of color in thatroom who have tried so desperately to have those of us called white hear thembut because we cannot apparently in so many cases hear them we have to bringwhite people like me in to break some things down that otherfolks would have broken down to you for free and so i'm happy to do it i am gladto do it but i want us to remember that
when people of color bring thesesubjects up they not i or the ultimate authorities they not i deserve yourrespect i mean i do to earn it but you know what i mean like we have to learnto hear truth from black and brown bodies and if we're willing to do thatthen we will have made some progress on here to do what i came to do but i justknow the importance of listening to the source of wisdom just like those of uswho were men we can talk about sexism and we should we can talk aboutpatriarchy and we should we can talk about rape culture and we must butreally if we want to understand those things we can learn to listen to womenand then we wouldn't have to always
listen to men just want to say that issort of a disclaimer upfront so here's the thing you know we're here for blackhistory month and we' re here to see the title of the talk up there and i thinkboth the title of the talk and the history month that we are here tocelebrate both suggest something right the importance of understandinghistorical context understanding the past and the weight of the past so as tohave a recognition and understanding of how we came to the present moment in ourcountry with regard to race how do we find ourselves here you can't know thatanswer to that question you can answer that question unless you look backwardsee this is why it's so important that
we have these black history monthcelebrations and although it is certainly true as you heard in theintroduction that every month should be black history month we know that in factit is not we know that in fact most of us grew up in communities and went toschools k through 12 in which we learn very little about anything that was nota eurocentric frame of history and literature and the past we learned thepast that made us feel good and not the part that might bring us up a littleshort but it's important to understand history in all of its complexity to make sense of our present we must do thatthat's not true just for society's it's
true for individuals right i mean if wereally want to understand our own damage once we become adults we better getclear on the damage passed down to us in our own families we know that every oneof his comes from a dysfunctional home whether we want to admit it or notwhether we want to tell our friends and our families and our lovers about thatwe all know that we came from dysfunctional backgrounds and we weredamaged by them and the only way we heal from in the only way me move on is toown it and to acknowledge it and not to run from it not to act like it didn'thappen but to be honest enough to admit all the things that were good and badabout our individual lives but when it
comes to a society we don't want to dothat see we might know what individually but collectively we say things like thiswe say things like and when i say we i mean those of his cold white we saythese things to people of color like you need to get over the past you need tostop paying so much attention to the past need to move on from the past don'tget stuck in the past it's time to move on this i would suggest is precious coming from white americans who love thepast more than anything on earth because because my people love the past. we love it so much that some of us a few years ago to dress up in revolutionary warcustoms with powdered wigs and muskets
and perhaps even wooden teeth and goto rallies called tea party rallies which pardon the expression is some oldass stuff when you go to a rally dress like a revolutionary war hero and demandthat you want your country back i think you are in no position to tell blackpeople to get past the pass you see we love the past as long as it makes usfeel special as long as it makes us feel superiorthat's what july fourth is right i mean c'mon now independence day that's some old shit we didn't break away from the british last tuesday that happened in areally long time ago but every july 4th with setting off fireworks eaten applepie where in red white and blue cuz
that's a good wardrobe palette we're inbig i hard the usa buttons on our hat i dare you next independence day go tosomebody the july 4th parade find the guy with the biggest most patrioticbutton the red white and blue clothing i heart the usa go up to him and be likethis just tried this just let me know i just goes for you schools great when are you gonna getover it and then i hope you got some running shoes on cuz he's gonna chase you get over it that's all we tell black folks that's what we tell brown folk that'swhat we tell people of color because we don't want to deal with the implicationsof the past but we linger in the past
all the time as long as it makes us feelgood so this is why we gotta have these conversations about race that's why we gotta have things like black history month is gets ignored otherwise white folks are like well why don't we have white history month? i don't know. i don't know buttercup you got may june july august the hell else you needbut that's the thing right the dominant groups nor never gets interrogated youhave to actually think of me as white history month you should think of it ismay or june and july that's how dominance works right when you are thenorm you don't have to interrogate your stuff as maleficent at temple says youget to universal lies the particular
that which is particularly you you actlike it applies to everybody but in fact we know that some folks get left out you see thats the way that you're a centrosome words is the way that white supremacywork so that's why we gotta have a conversation about the past that anybody wants to stay stuckthere least of all black and brown folk they certainly don't want to be backthere but they want us to remember how we got here and then we act like wedon't have to do that we ignore the most basic fact of all which is what thatinertia is not just the property of the physical universe when you were infourth or fifth grade probably learned
about inertia ride that idea that objectin motion will remain in motion until it stopped by a force of equal or greaterpressure pushing against it so if you roll a ball down a hill right it'll keepgoing right that's inertia on a physical level but inertia is not just a physicalproperty it's a socioeconomic property it's a political property it's acultural property that which happens in one generation affects the nextgeneration and the next generation and the next generation until somebody stepsup and decides to move in a different direction we don't talk about that andour present drama in this country reflects our unwillingness to face itparticularly with regard to these issues
of law enforcement over policing of somethe under policing perhaps of others the movement that you see referenced onthat screen that is now gone blue but a second ago had that picture of me and atitle on it which mention the black lives matter movement very hard tounderstand the importance of proclaiming that black lives' matter if you don'tunderstand american history and particularly if you don't understand theamerican history of policing and communities of color because if youdon't understand that history than to proclaim and to demand that black livesmatter seems like something special so folks strip out the freak out well black lives
all lives matter yes sweetheart they do that is true andutterly irrelevant to the current moment of course all lives matter nobody saidotherwise but you don't have to proclaim that which is taken for granted you haveto proclaim that which is ignored see when white people say all we nevermeant it black people know that brown people knowthat most white people never had to really learned that so we said all menare created equal and we didn't mean that shit see we set it but we didn'tmean it we set it and we wrote black people and brown folks out of all sowhen by people of color here in black and brown folks here all lives matterwhat they hear is the same thing they heard
with all men are created equal that itwas a setup that it was a lie they didn't include them so if you want toactually make it clear that all i was moderate you gotta act like all livesmatter and you gotta really treat people like all lives matter and b you have toproclaim that the lives that you denigrated for centuries actually matterbecause that is the part that gets left out so we say all lives matters to putthis in perspective how ridiculous this comeback is how absurd how sophomorichow nonsensical it is for us to respond to black live matter with all eyesmatter this ticket back to 1971 when the title when the phrase when the statementon the street was what black is
beautiful that was a way that blackfolks are trying to take back notions of beauty from a fashion industry from aglamour industry that it basically define beauty is white right into blackfolks were saying black is beautiful reclaiming their own beauty standardsand norms to say all lives matter in response two black lives matter will belike getting a time machine tonight going back to 1971 hearing somebody sayblack is beautiful and interrupting them so as to let them know we're allbeautiful in our own way yet shut up we know sort of misses the point be like going back to the early eightiesright when the hiv/aids crisis hit in
those first few years of hiv/aids crisisremember we had a government that did nothing president reagan set by and watchthousands of people died before he even uttered the term aids only saidsomething to his body rock hudson from the movies died of it and then hedecided he would speak on it begin to cut loose some research funds for it butfor the first couple years didn't want to say anything about it right in there were activistgroups out in the street right act up gay men's health crisis others out inthe street demanding funding for aids
research and what they were in effectsaying even though they didn't use the term and even though we didn't havehashtags in those days right ultimately what they were saying waspeople with aids lives matter so to say all lives matter in response to blacklives matter would be like going back to one of those rallies in 1982 1983interrupting the rally for aids funding to remind everyone that well people diedof pancreatic cancer to yes sweetheart and totally irrelevant to the currentsituation you have to demand recognition of the thing that gets swept under therug that's black life that's brown life that's people of color you see becausewe are a country built on the premise
that black lives didn't matter and iknow we don't want to hear that but that's just truth we built on a societythat said that black lines didn't matter except in so far as they could providecheap labor to enrich white people that was how black folks were viewed as cheaplabor expendable labor i should also point out it is how indigenous peoplewere viewed as people who could be expendable and committed genocide against withouthesitation it was also the way that many asian-americans review when they werebrought here from places like china to work on the transcontinental railroadworked to death didn't care if they died or not it's the way that latino folkswere viewed when in the nineteen
thirties we expelled tens of thousandshundreds of thousands actually of mexican-americans who were citizens ofthis country we sent them back to mexico in spite of their citizenship to free upjobs for white men can learn that in high school history maybe you ought toask your history teacher why cuz its not contestable is not arguable it's notlike there's a rebuttal to what i just said that happened but we didn't learnabout it because black and brown lives historically have not mattered exceptin so far as they serve the interests of the dominant group now we can eitherdeal with that and be honest about it we can keep running from it and acting likeit didn't happen
but if we don't talk about it if wedon't understand that becomes very difficult doesn't it to understandthe current moment you can understand the movement against police misconductif you don't understand the history of policing in this country visa v people of color see black andbrown folks know this history because it's embedded on their dna it's embedded in theirfamily stories they've had to learn it as a way to stay alive but those of hiscalled white haven't had to learn any of this so we don't have to know the factof modern policing traces back to slave patrols that's where it comes from whatwas the slave patrol it was the thing
that rich white people created to takepoor white people and have them control black folks those of us who don't comefrom wealth might want to think about what that trick was elite who ownedother people telling the rest of us some of us poor white folks who didn't knowanybody hey you're still part of the team you can go control these blackpeople for us so that was a trick that rich folks played on poor folks to makepoor white folks think that they had more in common with rich white peoplethan they did with black people some shit doesn't change that still happenstoday that is still the way that we operate today and if people don'tunderstand that it's because they don't
understand how that system works to takeit back to like twenty years ago now right little over 20 years ago the ojverdict i know there's been a couple i mean the first one the first oj simpson verdict write thisverdict on oj simpson was accused of tried for and ultimately acquitted ofdouble murder in 1995 and you remember there was a big divide racially in thiscountry black folks about two out of three saidthat they agreed with the verdict the acquittal they believed was just doesn'tmean they thought he was innocent by the way i talk to a lot of black folks atthat time they were like i think he did
that shit y'all made the rules and underthe rules that you made about reasonable doubt i think you did not meet yourburden so you made the rules you live by the rules two-thirds of white folks were like ohmy god says the most awful miscarriage of justice i can't believe how in theworld does this happen this is the the system was great until like two minutesago and then oj walked and oh god what the hell is going on in this country major racial divide but listen you knowwhat that racial divide made sense made perfect sense i don't think it wasbecause white people were racist and
unfeeling and uncaring white folks that loved oj for like 20years oj was done with black folks black folks were done with oj like oj and walki'm just being honest like oj was not a black problem oj and walked away from black peoplelike he he grew up in hunters point in san francisco went to usc right there inthe hood and south los angeles and said when he left usc like you never want togo back you never want to get you started making naked gun movies thatlike only white people and then he was like running to the airport in thosehertz commercials rental cars to
white people like white folks loved ojuntil he did something that reminded them of a stereotype they had aboutblack men then it was like oh he's black people's problem again right but oj soso two-thirds of white folks didn't like the verdict two-thirds of black folkslike the verdict believed it was just and that made perfect sense because whathappened if you remember the case and if you don't let me just fill you in realquick one of the reasons that there was any kind of reasonable doubt was becauseone of the chief investigators have found a disproportionate amount of theblood evidence was revealed to be an overt racist right
black folks here that when they hearthat there's a cop who found the evidence implicating a black man in themurder of two white people who regularly uses the n word in an overtly racist waythen some alarm bells go off in black heads right and by the same token whitefolks don't hear those alarm bells because we're like will match thecraziest thing i've ever heard planting evidence on people who doesthat that's bizarre that makes no sense atall that doesn't happen it doesn't happen to us but it does happen topeople of color it is a long history of that in fact not only is there a longhistory at the very moment that the oj
simpson trial was taking place 1994 1995 at that very moment we come tofind out a few years later if you paid attention to the newsout of los angeles that in fact there were dozens of officers in the lapd who were at that very moment engaged in apattern of misconduct and abuse and planting evidence on suspects of colorto sweeten the deal against them in various prosecution's it became therampart scandal you can look that up it was one division of the lapd it washappening at the very same time is that trial so when black folks that we thinkevidence might have been planted in white folks said that's paranoidnonsense in fact it wasn't it was rooted
in a reality in a recognition that thatstuff happens doesn't mean that that's what happened in the oj case it doesn'tmean that that evidence was planted but it does mean it does mean that to wonderif that's possible given the revelations about mark fuhrman the officer in thatcase wasn't paranoid it wasn't irrational it was rooted in one's actualexperience and if you haven't had that experience it's just as logical for youto think it makes no sense in other words our attitudes about race come fromour experiences with race so if we don't see something and somebody else does not because we're bad people in there good people are we're stupid in there moreintelligent it's just you don't have to
think about stuff so you don't that'swhat white privilege really is when it comes to race its about the privilege ofhaving the ability to be stone cold ignorant to other people's truth being oblivious toother people's truth white privileges the blue pill from the matrix is what itis you ever saw the film the matrix and if you haven't you should go see it butjust the first one the other two sides like the first one is damn good rightkeanu reeves plays neo and laurence fishburne plays morpheus and there's ascene early on in the film where morpheus offers neo two pills one isblue one is red right and he says take the blue pill story ends wake up and youremain oblivious and you don't have to
know what's really going on just likemost people in the society they don't want to know what's happening they'd rather die than to know what's really wanna know the truth or you can take the red pill and i can offer youenlightenment i can take you down the rabbit hole and i can show you just howfar it goes and he'll take the red pill when he starts to see if you've seen themovie starts to see all the stuff that's going on that he never knew about thatis how identity functions in this country it's how white identityfunctions male identity straight identity able-bodied identity affluentrich folk identity when you're a member of any dominant group the luxury beingon the blue pill and not having to know
the truth right if you the target of asystem of oppression you gotta take the red pill just to figure out what thehell is going on just so you don't lose your mind makes some sense of your worldbut if you're the dominant group you like on a blue pill iv drip from the dayyou come out of your mama's womb walking around with this damn i v don't evenknow you got it there and then people of color like hey you see all this racismand we're like not got the blue pill i don't see me right same thing on the blue pie know that bein men and on the blue pill me some different stuff in the modern pharmaceutical era thatspharmaceutical humor you're welcome
men don't have to know anything aboutsexism patriarchy rape culture if we don't want to know it those of us who are straighter system wedon't have to know about street supremacy about homophobia sexismtransphobia maybe we do know something but if so it's only because i'm probablylisten to someone who was the target decided to believe them right soultimately we don't have to do we have the luxury of being oblivious taking theblue pill so we have to be clear about this because people of color don't havethat luxury so they know what goes on right now with law enforcement they knowplaces like new york city stop-and-frisk
policies right that over the course ofabout a decade stop what hundreds of thousands couple million several meantwo and a half million people were stopped by the stop-and-frisk policiesthe nypd about ninety percent of them were people of color and of those whowere stopped less than 5% or even issued a ticket hasn't done anything so it's not likethey were being stopped for actual criminal activity there being stopped onsuspicion and the suspicions were not justified in 95% of the instances inless than two percent of the stops were drugs found in less than two-tenths ofone percent were weapons found but that
was the rationale they gave a we'retrying to get drugs and weapons off the street but they weren't finding drugsand weapons what they were doing was taking black folks names and put them ina data base they can't keep eyes on them that's what stop and frisk wasn't peopleof color know it in this country we know from the cdc and other sources that druguse and drug dealing is equivalent between white folks black folks latinoscontrary to popular belief which says that it's black and brown folks who haveand use and sell drugs it actually equivalent across racial lines but weknow that people of color five times more often are going to be arrested fordrug possession particularly for weed
and incarcerated on a drug relatedoffense people of color know that and they know that law enforcement is whodoes that so that's why there's a skepticismtoward police that's why we have to proclaim that black wives matter becauseeverything in the system says they don't they know the data even if they don't know the data they know the reality behind the data that young black men or about 21 timesmore likely to be shot and killed by law enforcement than young white men two tothree times more likely when unarmed and posing no immediate threat people ofcolor know this whether they've done the research and know the exact numbers theyjust know it from their own experience
they know if they know that young blackchildren like to mir rice get shot dead in a public park doing what white boysdo in this country every day play with toy guns white boys play with toy gunsevery day and they do not get dropped by police because those police view them astwenty year old men which is what happened in cleveland right they didn'tsee him as a twelve year old they thought he was 20 because we analyzeblack men and we've made them older than they really are in our imaginations thiskids playing with a toy guns and highways and open carry state right soif he really was a twenty year old male which is what they thought at the timehe had a right to have a real gun not a
toy gun a real gun they had no right toshoot him no right to come up wanna know what to say boo to him in a state thatsays you can walk around with weapons white folks will take their weapons anydamn place we walk into walmart with our guns walk into chipotle seriously googlethat shit google that a year and a half ago white folks were like i'm gonna takemy weapons to chipotle it was like some demonstration or something like just toshow we could we're going to chipotle with our ar fifteens why do you gottahave an assault rifle at chipotle but you can't kill salmonella with thebullet i know they ran out of i know they ran out of carnitas that time but damn they'll get that back you don't
have to shoot him right and white folkswho walk into walmart with the weapon walking to target with the weapon nobodydoes anything nobody shoot some cops don't roll up john crawford on the otherhand in ohio also open carry state right outside of dayton whatever it was rightpicks up a weapon in the air gun air rifle you don't kill anybody with an airrifle and they sell those at the target he picks it up off the shelf for thewalmart which everyone already picked it up off the shelf he's walking aroundhe's just sort of swing he might be thinking of buying and he's talkingon the phone with girlfriend right some white dude sees him freaks out and calls the cops oh black guy walking around with a weapon at the walmart. he calls it in black guy with
an afro ok first of all its twists let'sget our black hair straight please i mean come on white folks you can justgoogle that shit it's not that hard like there's a difference between twists and afroand look can we try to get it straight without touching black people hair canwe do that too can we do that so you can just look that up you don't have totouch it you don't have to touch it you don't have to touch it does cause yougot a black roommate you never seen one before can you get that wet can you swim that's why they have theinternet look it up right so he calls in john crawford black dude with an afrofirst of all think about that it was the wrong hair style so
they gonna get some totally differentblack dude shot on like isle 4 at the walmart on a roll up find the dude withthe afro and kill him but no they found john crawford they come in you can watchthe video yourself they roll up the guy roles that turns the corner opens fireimmediately on john crawford who was posing no threat to anybody drops him atfirst it doesn't kill him john crawford stunned dazed probably in shock gets up off the ground to figure out whysomebody shooting at me moves into the aisle without the weapon which is nownot really a weapon like i said it's an air rifle sitting on the ground in theshooting again five times and drop in
killing no indictments no indictmentsthat officer was by the way the only officer in the history of that suburbandayton police department ever to kill someone he's now killed two that was hissecond still on the force and not indicted by the district attorneylocally so that is why people of color have to proclaim and why we as whitefolks should as well the black lives mattered as long as the system allowsthat what we're saying every day is that they don't you have a system thatscreams every day that those lives don't matter it takes those of us who believeotherwise to suggest the opposite but it's aprivilege isn't it to be oblivious to
history it is a privilege to be able tobe ignorant and still be considered educated how does that happen how is itthat we cannot know these things and still be considered competent right howis it that we can be considered competent to do anything to teachchildren to be a physician to be a social worker to be a psychologist rightto vote and not know these things sort of interesting isn't it because thereare certain things we are expected to know whatever the dominant group thingswe need to know that's what we have to know that's why people of color theyhave to learn white literature white theater white poetry white art i know wedon't call it that that's sort of the
point when your stuff is the norm you don'thave to ever qualify you don't have to talk about where it came from you knowthe call it white literature it's just literature theatre poetry and art people of colorhave to know all that stuff that white folks decided was important these whitefolks don't have to know anything we don't wanna know we can still be deemedcompetent we can still be deemed intelligently can still get a highschool diploma we can still get a college degree a master's degree a lawdegree phd we can get any professional license for any job we want we can gointo black neighborhoods and teach black
children knowing nothing about themtheir families or their communities thinking that because we got five weeksof training with teach for america that we know what the hell we're talkingabout never been up in their space never actually know anything about them butjust show up because we care that's not how the real world works that ignoranceshould mark us as incompetent but it doesn't and it's not just with regard topolicing is with regard to a lot of other things so i was thinking aboutthis recently about a year and a half ago driving our daughters and twodaughters two daughters to 14 and 12 now but about a year and a half ago whenthey were twelve and a half and ten and
a half i was driving them from school todance the dancers and at the time they were dancing at the same studio whichwas downtown about a 10 minutes away from their school and i picked them upand i'm driving the distance between the school and the studio and at one pointyou have to go through a public housing development to get to the studio rightso we're at the stoplight waiting for to turn green surrounded by public housingon both sides and the ten and a half year old his name is rachel takes thisopportunity to ask questions she says daddy why is it that pretty mucheverybody in this neighborhood is black which is a really damn good question right that is an excellent observation on her
part it's a very interestingsociological inquiry in anthropological inquiry and my guess is that that wasn'tthe first day she'd noticed that the neighborhood was pretty much all blackit was just the first day she decided to ask right she had noticed that we'vebeen driving that route for a year year and a half at that point so i'm surethat she had noticed it on that day she decided to ask and she probably askedbecause she figured that daddy might know because he talks about these things maybeyou'll have the answer like if i was an accountant she would have asked me shewould just been like how do i do my taxes would have been like online idon't know but so she asked the question
now here's the thing she asked me why ispretty much everyone in this neighborhood black and of course hersister who's twelve and a half wanting to show up her younger sisterand impress her father naturally decided to intervene with the wisdom that shehad apparently obtained somewhere don't know where to the twelve and a half yearold jumps in and says redlining and this is strangely accurate and for those ofyou who don't know what redlining means because i know not everybody does i willexplain red-lining is in fact part of the answer to the question that hersister as redlining was a practice that was very formal for generations rightwhere banks would basically draw on a map
in their office red lines around blackneighborhoods and essentially anybody that live within the boundaries of thatneighborhood didn't matter what their personal credit history was didn'tmatter what their income was didn't matter what their occupational statuswas didn't matter who they were all that mattered was you live in thisneighborhood you in getting a loan right and that's how black and browncommunities were starved of wealth and star of the resources and so when thetwelve and a half year old butts in and says redlining she's not wrong althoughit was weird and the ten and a half year old the ten and a half year old thensays i don't know what that means and i
said neither does your sister she's justshowing off she probably heard me say that at some point and she was partiallyright so then i proceeded to spend the next two and a half or three minutesshort of giving her brief history lesson right about the way that certain peoplewere allowed to live in various neighborhoods and other people were notpublic housing as it turns out was created in the nineteen thirties forpoor white people black folks weren't even allowed in public housing in mostcases poor latino folks weren't allowed in public housing was set up for poor white folksbut roughly at the same time the government also started to do some otherthings which very quickly allowed white
folks to move out of public housingright so we created the fha loan program the va loan program the gi bill later onmaybe ten fifteen years later and that allowed white folks almost exclusivelyto hustle it out to the suburbs where only we were allowed to live keeping those who weren't allowed tolive there in the cities now you had white folks able to leave for greenerpastures black folks still trapped in urban areas in public housing it was anaccident it was the result of deliberate decisions to prefer white people and togive us a leg up and to denigrate black people because again historicallysystemically black lives did not matter
and so i tell my daughter this it's likea three minute lesson it's not like a big huge discourse notes three minutesand she's like oh ok now i know now i understand but the important thing iwant you to understand about that story is what if i don't know the answer and iwould gather that a lot of families don't particularly lot of white parentswouldn't know the answer to that question again this is what i do so iknow the answer but a lot of folks would know because they were never taught so iactually asked a group of parents about two weeks later what would you have saidif your kid asked that and they were all like no i don't know that i knew theanswer and may be able to change the
subject see there's a problem rightbecause if we don't know the answer and our children are thinking that and notjust the white kids by the way kids of color to we're starting to wonder why isthis neighborhood all black and brown why is this poor neighborhood inparticular all black and brown if i'm a black kid i'm wondering that if i'ma white kid i'm wondering that and you know what if i don't know the answer doyou think my child is it gonna fill in the blanks herself oh no she's gonnafill in the blanks and do you know what she's gonna fill in the blank with she'sgoing to fill it in with the default position of this culture what do youthink the default position is in the
society what is our creation myth whatis our secular gospel you know it as well as i everybody raised here or whowas born and has lived here for any particular amount of time knows theanswer the secular gospel is what that idea that well wherever you end up inlife it's all about you you can make it if you just try hard enough right thatnotion of rugged individualism and meritocracy which history proves is alie but if i don't know history my kid defaults to that cause that's what she'shearing she's hearing that wherever you end up it's all about you so if you madeit out of the hood it's because you must have had a better work ethic or betterdna or whatever get stronger family and
if you're still trapped into somethingwrong with you obviously you're inferior and some weight culturally biologicallyin terms of family structure that's the default position the fact that it's nottrue doesn't matter the fact that we all know it's more complicated than that weall know people don't you work hard the whole life have nothing to show for itwe also know people who were born on third base think they hit a triple andhaven't actually had to work hard at all in their lives we all know that it'smore complicated but children don't know how to process that's what they ask thatquestion and we don't know the history they're gonna assume the reason thesepeople are over here and we're all over
here is because we're better and they'reworse so in other words you see the pernicious element of this racism getsreinforced just by the normal workings of the society doesn't require anyone toactually sit you down and teach you racism it doesn't require someone to sityou down and say these people were better in these people are inferior allyou have to do is just look around see the inequalities and have no answer forwhy and the only answer you're given is theone that rationalizes rugged individualism just as a side note thereis no such thing as a rugged individual right in fact i would argue there's nosuch thing as an individual what the
hell is an individual human beings havealways lived in a social context right if you ever meet someone who's really arugged individual you need to run from that person just seriously that person will bedangerous as hell they would be like a feral dog right a rugged individual besomebody was raised on an island by a porpoise right they would have nolanguage they would just try to eat you because they wouldn't even know thatthat was wrong like right like we're all social beings of the idea that i dideverything on my own nobody did anything on their own right nobody did anythingif i had been born and then just like
left out on my own you think i'd be giving this talk iwouldn't be giving any talk i wouldn't know how to talk i would just gruntright nobody did anything on their own there's no self-made millionaires is no self-madebillionaires certainly somebody then inherited two hundred million dollarsfrom his daddy and wants to be president is not a self-made anything a man whose father actually made his fortune shaking down poor people in public and government subsidized housing i should point out aswell but we don't know the history and this is immigration to the same thing istrue with immigration if you don't
understand history that's why we get alltwisted up about immigration go off on latino folks coming over that border onlythat border though right cuz we only get twisted about that border nobody'sfreaking out about canada the minutemen don't set off the coast of nova scotiawith guns trying to take shots at those sneaky canadians coming into thiscountry to take advantage of our superior healthcare system that would becrazy we only worry about that border i should point out it's an artificialborder that was created as the result of a war of aggression that this countrystarted on the basis of a lie and then we took half their country and now folksare coming home and we don't understand
why coming home you do understand i hope that latino folkswere on this continent and in what we now call the united states longbefore we were right there a mixture of indigenous peoples and european peoplesfar before most of our families got here they were here but we kick him out andthen we changed the locks tell them they can't come home and we called thatjustice the only reason we're able to do that is we don't know our history sothink about it we say things like this well i don't mind if they come i justwant them to come the right way legally like my ancestors the hell legally like your ancestors look here's the deal when our great great whatever's
came here there was no law to breakright to the fact that our ancestors didn't break the law that didn't evenexist doesn't get us brownie points cookies are pats on the back and saysnothing about our ethics doesn't make us better because we came legally there wasno law may be indigenous people wish they'd pass one right maybe they wishthey had a better regime of immigration control but they didn't and now we actlike somehow we're morally superior because we came with papers and no you didn't you didn't have to letme say things like this is why i think we can't see ourselves and immigrantsfrom mexico or central america is
because we've convinced ourselves thatthey're coming for different reasons than we did right so people of europeandescent african folk know how they got here indigenous thought know how they gothere asian folk know they were brought to work on the railroads they know howthey got here but we as european descended people's we act like we havethis fictive narrative that says oh well our ancestors came for principles likeliberty and freedom but those people they're just coming for stuff there tryingto take advantage we came because where these high-minded principalseeking freedom lovers donald trump
says you know mexico they're not sendingtheir best when you think you're upset their best the hell like you think the best of europe of left europe if they were winning in europe why the hell wouldthey get on the boat let's just be honest like our ancestors were thelosers of their respective societies we act like they were noted came fromhigh-minded principal no they didn't they came for stuff they came from landand they came for opportunity they came for the ability to feed their childrenso they wouldn't starve they were starving they couldn't make it is jamesbaldwin said some of them were convicts sold into indentured servitude on behalfof richer people who kept them in
virtual slavery that's who we were wewere the losers of europe and there's no shame in that but we got our own it isif we're not willing to own it we put ourselves above mexican folk right wewere the losers the winners didn't get on the boat i'm not trying to be meannot trying to be mean not trying to be judgmental but the winners did not leaveif you were kickin ass in europe why would you leave it's like we somehowbelieve that like mid sixteen hundred's this conversation happened just imagineif you will the following scene there is a father and about 1650 who gathers hisfamily around the fireplace and says the following all right now
i know that on the one hand things aregoing incredibly well i mean we've got this big house this mansion we've gotall this gold outback remember last friday children when the king invited usto his palace and you played with his children out in the garden i know it wasbrilliant was great was fantastic however daddy has an ideaso in spite of the fact that like we're doing really well right i think thatwould be fabulous for this summer is we are going to give all that up leave it all behind just gather up a fewthings what you can carry in your own hands or a knapsack whatever we have inthe sixteen hundreds that's like a
knapsack and we are going to get on a boat a rickety old shit i don't even know if seaworthy like honestly it might sink wemight be eaten by sharks we might get scurvy or be hijacked by pirates whotake everything that we have but children i think you will agree withfather it will be an adventure ok that shit did not happen that did not happenonly the losers left because the losers had nothing else to lose and here's thething if we would just owned that if we were just acknowledge that then we couldsee us in them and we could see they in us we could understand the connectivitywe have with those recent immigrants who were coming to this country but if wecontinue to suggest that we came for
principal and they're only coming totake advantage of stuff then we can never see ourselves in the other andthat's why we end up in this place that's why we end up with a candidatesays he wants to build a wall but not just any wall wall like you wouldn'tbelieve whatever the hell that means what is a wallthat i wouldn't believe everything he does is gonna be like you wouldn'tbelieve i'm going to support veterans like you wouldn't believe i'm gonna bombisis like you wouldn't believe i'm gonna do everything like what is a wall that iwould it be like the only wall that i wouldn't believe is like a butter wallis that what he means big beautiful
butter wall because i i don't believethat will work i think that'll that'll probably melt in the southwestern sunsyou know but he says things like who can build walls better than trump i don'tknow anybody like trump is never built a wall he builds and builds casinos andhotels and tacky office buildings and actually let's be real honest he doesn'tbuild anything he gets brown people to do that half of whom are undocumented sothere's that but the only reason were living in thismoment is because of the way that we have misunderstood histories historicalmemory matters is not just that the past itself matters and brings us to thispoint though it does also the way we
remember it matters pass that i was talking to my daughterabout is why it is that the typical white family in america is 15 times inthat were that the typical black family eleven or twelve times that of thetypical latino family because certain people were able to accumulate stuffwhen other people were not it's why right now black households headed by acollege graduate have half the net worth on average compared to white householdsheaded by a high school dropout let me repeat white households headed by adropout have twice the net worth on average of black households headed by acollege grad $52,000 on average for the
white household 26,000 for the blackhousehold in spite of greater education levels greater qualifications probablyeven higher income why because in past generations some people could accumulateand others weren't then you passed down those advantages generation aftergeneration so the past matters but it's not just the past it's how we rememberit or choose not to historical memory is every bit as important as history itselfand at this point as a country we haven't gotten clear enoughon that and that's why we continue to have all of these conflicts if we wouldhave an honest discussion about the weight of history and how we got to thispoint we could do something about it we
have to do something about it but by theway not out of some sense of guilt and i'm gonna close with this before i takequestions because this is not at all about guilt no one in this room isguilty of the system that you inherited but you inherited it nonetheless there'sa difference between guilt and responsibility guilt is what you feel for the stuff youactually did responsibility is something that you take because of the kind ofperson you are and we take responsibility for things all the timethat we're not technically to blame for right so think about environmentalcatastrophe ecological crisis facing us
not just as a country but as a planetnone of you i'm guessing have your own personal stash of toxic waste that youinject into the water the soil or spew into the air via your own personalsmokestack and yet we know that the air the water the soil has indeed beenpoison as a result of a number of industrial processes that frankly havebrought our ecology to the brink of collapse and so if we're beingresponsible even though we didn't do it we know we gotta do something about itand most responsible people understand that even though they're not guilty ofthe crime have to take responsibility for the solution the same is true withthis story to illustrate what i mean and
then i'm done and this story has nothingat all to do with race and racism but says something about the subject that ithink will be clear when i'm done the story about something that happened wheni got out of college and graduated from tulane university in new orleans in 1990so 26 years ago and upon graduating i thought that it would be a really greatidea i moved into a large house with nine other people give you a little life advice in caseyou need this case you didn't already figure it out and by the way if youdon't remember anything else i said tonight for the love of god you need towrite this down do not do not think even
for one moment that it is ever a goodidea to live in a large house with nine other people if you can avoid it do not do it i know sometimes folkscan't help it you gotta do what you gotta do but if you can avoid that youneed to try because it is not going to be great it is going to be as it was forme awful i thought it was gonna be greatthough because on the one hand you know when you get out of college you're gonnabe broke surprise and we were in so we thought well at the very least we gotten people in the house will save money so on a financial level it sort of madesense right sort of a good idea
rent was 500 and $25 a month i don'tmean per person i mean total even in 1990 that was pretty good i'm not goodat math but you can do that when right $52.50 of month that's it man you add allthe utilities cable bill we split the groceries everything it was like ahundred a month so on the financial level this was a damn good idea but icame to understand about six weeks in why i made a terrible mistake this ishow i learned that i was working downtown doin work against whitesupremacist former klan leader david duke when he was running for the us-senate and came back uptown one afternoon and i got off the street car and iwalked into the neighborhood and i
walked up the stairs at 1805 robertstreet open the door was met by this incredible smell and i mean that in agood way which you know when you live with nine of the people there lot ofsmells most of them not great this one actually good it was the smellof dinner being made for the whole family the whole family quote unquotethe whole house on the left front burner on the stove one of my roommates wasmaking a big pot of gumbo right orleans and that's what you do and man itlooked good and it smelled good even had some shrimp in there not many like isaid we were broke but had like three had like three of those really littlebitty ass shrimp those tiny shrimp look like
regular shrimp would like jumbo shrimpjumbo shrimp would like lobsters that kind of shrimp you know and it lookedgood and it smelled good but when the roommate asked me if i wanted and heactually said no because as it turned out already had dinner downtown i didn'tknow he was making gumbo if i'd known i would have waited but i didn't and so ihadn't and so when he asked me if i wanted some i said man of love it butyou know i've already eaten so do me a favor take some of that put it in aplastic container put in the fridge i'll take it to work tomorrow as it looksgreat he said cool i'll do that and i said great i went upstairs and hung outwith some of the roommates watch tv
whatever it was we did for fun in 1990there wasn't much social networking in 1990 for those that don't remember it ispretty much just walk down to your roommates room you were like whatcha doing and they were like nothing fool its 1990 man nothing's going on likewant to go to sleep for about 15 years and then there'll be something but rightnow i got nothing for you go to bed right so i went to bed sort of early andi woke up the next morning at about 7:30 to get ready for work to come down toget some coffee and i notice when i came down to get my coffee that on the leftfront burner thats though was still the pot of gumbo it didn't look as good as it had the night before i definitely didn't
smell as good as it had the night beforeand he hadn't saved any of it yet cleaned up the part i mean it was justencrusted disgusting on the side of the park and i was sorta angry but you knowi thought maybe i should wake him up in like telling how angry i am but then i'mlike forget it man you know what i'll take it up with him later for now i'mjust gonna clean it you know so i grabbed the pot of gumbo and bring itover to the sink and i grabbed the scrub brush and get ready to clean this thingout just as a start to run the water into the pot i stopped myself i was likei don't have to do this i didn't make this mess i don't have to do this now ithought really self righteous cause i'm
talking myself out of doing the hardwork which is a skill i learn in college way so i decide forget it man i'ma putthis pot of gumbo right back where i found it so i put it back on the leftfront burner on the stove basically saying he can clean it when he gets uphe'll do it i'll see him tonight so i walk out the door not having done thework and go to work come back that night about 6:30 walk-in notice it when another one of my roomates was making dinner for the house that night on the right frontburner on the stove but on the left front burner is still does pot of gumbonow it is 24 hours old it is smelling even worse it is lookingeven worse i look at my roommate who was
cooking on the right front burner unlikeyou making dinner for us on the right front burner i'm pretty sure you can smelllast night's dinner it's right there why don't you clean that and he's like himand make the gumbo i didn't even have dinner here last night i didn't need anythe company pointed an accusing finger in my general direction asked me if ihad some i said no he said well alright then you want some lentils and rice andi was like yup so i ate my lentils and rice we both ignored the pot a nastystinking gumbo on the left front burner on the stove i wash my plate off put inthe dish rack to dry went upstairs hung out with the roommates again didwhatever it is we did for fun in 1990
and went to bed woke up the next morningabout seven o'clock i'd forgotten to set an alarm but here's a tip if you'reliving in a house where a pot of gumbo has been sitting on the left frontburner of your stove for thirty six and a half hours you're not going to need analarm clock to wake your ass up you will be awake because the smell is going tocrawl out of the pot of gumbo it's going to crawl out of the pot of gumbo on thelegs that it grew over night and i don't mean that metaphorically i mean literallegs with feet and is gonna crawl across the kitchen across the living room upthe back stairs go down the back hall under your door frame and find with theprecision of a laser that thing on the
front of your face that you call thenose and you will be awake and now i was and i was angry because i knew what thesmell meant i knew what was waiting for me on the left front burner of that stove having not been cleaned byanybody least of all the guy that made the mess so i fling open my door startsstomping down the hall trying to wake up anybody let him know how angry i am ilive with nine other people can't find one of them and the guy that made thegumbo right he's like where's waldo nobody knows where the hell he went hejust made the gumbo like a practical joke and disappeared as likely skip townjust to see how long it would take for
somebody else to clean up his mess i getdown to the bottom of the stairs and i look across the living room into thekitchen i see the gumbo and i'm confident to this day the gumbo saw meand it was in that moment that one moment later though not one momentearlier that i came to understand the most important lesson never learnedabout any subject anytime before or since in or out of a classroom not just abouthousehold cleanliness but any topic what was the lesson the lesson was thisdidn't really matter anymore did it whether i was the one who had made themess didn't really matter anymore
whether i was as the same goes theauthor of all this unpleasantness the only thing that mattered was i was tired ofliving in the funk in the residue of somebody else's actions and the same istrue with human society when we get tired of living with the residue of whatother people did with or without our approval will get busy cleaning it upnot because we're to blame because we're the only ones left to do the job thankyou all so much for being here i appreciate you
At the end this articel Family Health Network Cortland Ny
Now you have reading Family Health Network Cortland Ny with link addresshttps://networkrealtionforbussiness.blogspot.com/2017/05/family-health-network-cortland-ny.html
0 Response to "Family Health Network Cortland Ny"
Posting Komentar