Welcome back to another episode of the Origination Point Podcast. This week, Bill De La Cruz continues his race conversations and discusses race and the youth. Be sure to like and subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends.

 

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Race & Youth

The origination point is connected to bias awareness and bias deconstruction. The origination point is the notion that all of our biases, implicit or explicit, have a point in time where they started. We were given a narrative or had an experience with a small group of people that then we extrapolate to a larger group of people. The reason why the origination point is important is because that is the point of healing and understanding. As we’re deconstructing and making our biases more conscious, the origination point supports us in understanding where they came from, and healing any emotional impacts that we’re currently having in our lives. Sit back, open your mind, open your heart, and let’s see if we can find your origination point to bias.

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This show was created to be able to talk about issues of the day and think about how some of these things get started and why some topics are so challenging for us to talk about in this country and on this planet. We are creating a series on the race conversation. Before I get to my topic, which is going to be our young people. I want you to think about why the race conversation is so hard to talk about. My experience of the conversation about race has been that it pretty quickly digresses into whether somebody’s race is.

When that happens, the conversation is over because as soon as somebody either perceives that they are being called a racist or is called a racist, the conversation’s over. When that happens, the person who was called a racist defends themselves, and the person who called the other person a racist justifies himself. It’s, “Yes, you are.” “No, I’m not.” Which is pretty much a lose-lose conversation that doesn’t get anybody anywhere.

We have got to shift this conversation if we are going to talk about how race impacts our interactions with each other. Another challenge in this conversation is that most people in many of the spaces that I have worked in and facilitated conversations have a certain mindset when they step into the race conversation.

For a lot of people, the mindset is who’s the racist in the room, or is this person I’m talking to a racist? Even that mindset has us on the lookout right away for somebody that we are defining as a racist based on our perspective of what a racist looks like. They may or may not be racist. Yet, if our perspective says a certain behavior or set of actions or language constitutes a racist, we could see or hear this person doing those things and immediately go to this, “I was right. They are a racist.” That shifts our whole interaction with that person. It shifts our dialogue. It shifts how we see them.

One of the things I’m going to suggest to all of you reading is that there are two different ways from my perspective to get into a race conversation. One is to have it in your head that somebody in the room or in the conversation is racist, which will drive how you see them with a question, “Who’s the racist?” Another way is to ask the question, “How has race impacted you?” When I shift the question to how has race impacted you, all of a sudden, I’m opening the space up for a conversation, and asking people about the impacts of race in your life.

It doesn’t matter what color you are. Everyone has a story where race has impacted you at some point in your life. We think that White people don’t have a story about how race has impacted them or if they do have a story about how race has impacted them, it’s invalid because they are White. I don’t believe that to be true. Everyone has a story about how race has impacted you from the perspective of how have you been treated based on your race, and how have you treated somebody else based on their race.

Nobody Is Left Out

Nobody’s left out of this stereotypical and judgmental approach to race conversation. For White people, White men especially, the stereotype is that you are racist and privileged just because you are White based on what your ancestors did 500 years ago. In 2022, to me, that’s a false narrative because we are identifying a whole group of people based on their race and then stereotyping them. What I have been fighting against having to happen in my group for most of the time that I have been doing this work around stereotypes, judgments, and biases is to get people to think about the impact of stereotyping a whole group of people based on how you see them.

 

If it’s not right for people to do that to the groups that I represent, why is it okay for us to do that to a group of White men or White women for that matter? It doesn’t make any logical sense to me that something that I have been fighting against being done to myself now, all of a sudden, is okay to do to another group.

I don’t believe that’s true and I don’t think that’s the way that we are going to understand the whole construct of race, which is a social construct. It was created hundreds of years ago even before America was formed. It was created by researchers and scientists. In the 1400s, they looked at skull size. They deemed that because White people have a larger skull size, they had a larger brain which made them smarter and Black and Brown people had a smaller skull size, which made them less intelligent.

All of this started many years ago. The researchers, theorists, and scientists at that time were looking from my perspective about how to elevate mostly White men because most of these researchers were White men. They were looking at ways that they could scientifically prove that they were better, smarter, or in some way more evolved than people who weren’t White.

It’s then morphed into everything that we have seen here in America. It started with the census in the 1700s where we started to label each other based on race. Now that the whole census questionnaire in 2022 is rooted in both race and ethnicity and there are not enough groups within the census to truly identify the diversity of people that are in our country now.

If race is a social construct, then it means that it’s upheld by the people in our society. I often think that if I didn’t see somebody from a racial perspective, would racism still exist? What I’m talking about there is on an individual basis. It’s not that I don’t want you to see me or you as racially different, whether that race is Black, White, or Brown.

Seeing Race Without Becoming A Predictor

Those are the three races because race is just rooted in skin color. As America has become more multiracial, multilingual, and multiethnic, we have various shades of Black, Brown, and White. As a social construct, those are the three races. Black, Brown, and White. The idea for me in promoting this conversation is to say, “How do we see race without using it as a predictor for how I’m going to treat you? How do we see race without using it as a predictor for how I see and interact with you?”

By that I mean, within every racial category, there is a whole set of stereotypes, biases, and judgments toward those groups of people. I have a choice of either buying into those and saying, “All Brown and Black people are like this.” I can individuate and get to know people from those groups to start to break down this stereotype that they are all the same.

We have both those historical generational stereotypes, and then we have these new ones that are being created now by leaders at the highest levels of our country. Leaders are labeling groups of people, not only based on race. They are also labeling them from a behavioral characteristic. I’m talking about all levels of the political structure down to local school boards and local city councils.

Leadership sets the standard. The standard that we are seeing in America now is that you can not only racially profile somebody, but you could also racially denigrate somebody without any accountability, without much happening other than people wanting to cancel you or people on Twitter or Instagram trashing you from an accountability perspective.

Leadership sets the standard in America that you can racially denigrate somebody without any accountability. Share on X

There’s no structure in place to hold people accountable, so our high-level leaders can demean and denigrate each other and all of us, and never have to be held accountable for what they say. I see that day after day. It’s fascinating to me as a person who has been involved in leadership development for most of my life, both in my world and my profession and working with folks. Coaching folks to see leaders who have very little accountability for the outcomes and impacts of their behavior.

All of that role modeling has now fully infiltrated in impacting our communities, schools, workplaces, churches, and grocery stores pretty much everywhere you go. I was in a shoe store. I heard some man yelling at some woman for something that he perceived her to be and do. Yelling at her in his lungs in a shoe store without any consideration for the person he was yelling at and anyone else in the store.

These are regular things that happen these days where people get mad and they go right from 0 to 100 and 100, in many cases, sadly, is somebody being hurt, dying, or being killed. That’s reality. You can either choose to sit around and do nothing to be complacent or you can sit around, complain, and get angry. You can sit around and think about how to have the conversation, which is what I’m choosing to do.

 

It’s important to understand the impact that the model of leadership has and is having in this conversation. It’s creating this division in our communities where Black, White, and Brown are just fighting against each other rather than looking at what our shared interests are and how we work together to create a political system that is representative of our views, and to hold leaders accountable for a set of behaviors that are not demeaning and denigrating.

If we are fighting with each other, we have no opportunity to do that because we are putting all of our energy into looking at our different racial groups as the other, the enemy, or the person that we need to hold in check when it’s this huge leadership void that is the problem right now. There aren’t leaders who are able to create a middle ground or to create acceptance of difference.

Shaping The Youth

The reason that’s important is that what I want to talk about is our young people. I have always believed that if you want to look at what’s happening in a community, school, and country, look at the youth. They are reflections of what’s happening in that broader community, school, or country. As I see our youth now in this issue of race, I see, hear, and talk to people almost on a daily basis about how somebody is doing something that’s denigrating another person. A White kid calling a Black teacher in a school the N-word. Students who have slave auctions write the N-word out on their shirts, or just do things that are so demeaning to each other.

I don’t approve of that behavior at all. It’s just as demeaning and hurtful as what I see with the adults. It’s just that with our young people, we want to go to accountability. We want to make sure that they learn or understand the impact of their behavior. In one particular case, I was reading about the River Valley High School in California and how the high school football teammates held a slave auction of their Black teammates.

Everybody took part in it, Black and White. When people found out about it, they were distraught that that could happen in their community. They were distraught and barred from playing the rest of their football season. The couple of comments that I read from the superintendent there said things like, “Students don’t understand this notion of intent and impact, and it shows how much work we have to do with our students.”

I’m just going to have us check that a little bit because what our students are doing is emulating and imitating the models of leadership and behavior that they have at the national level, state level, and local levels. It’s just that when our students or our young people do it, we want to hold this higher standard of accountability to them than we do to any other adult, which is hypocritical.

 

Kids understand that. They see us doing this hypocritical approach, especially to this conversation. Rather than look at it as a way to teach them and educate them on the impact of their behaviors, we suspend them, expel them, take away something important to them, and do things that happen to very few adults who do many of the same things.

The worst that happens is in the case of the LA City Council where three of the people were caught on tape disparaging all kinds of people, they just had to resign and quit their council job and that’s what happens to them. It doesn’t change their behavior. It doesn’t teach them anything different. It just pushes them out.

With our young people, there are some that do understand this idea of intent and impact. For those who don’t, it’s not a concept you get taught in school. You don’t learn about intent and impact. The intent is aspirational because it hasn’t happened yet. This is the intention that I want to have, and the impact is factual. Once you get to the impact, then you have to look at what occurred and what was my role, and what occurred.

Intent and impact are things that not even a lot of adults can tell me, “Here’s what it means.” Once a grownup sees the impact of their behavior, they try to rationalize it through intent by saying, “You just took it out of context where you don’t understand what I meant.” In some way, the person or the group that I disparaged is wrong because they didn’t get my intent. We are minimizing the impact of what we did on the group that was offended.

Rather than cancel, fire, expel, and take away from our young people, we need to think about how we have this conversation with them. How do we talk to them about using their voice in a way that is completely different than what they are being modeled now in this country around race and the conversation? About thinking through their actions so that they start to think about what might the impact be before the impact is already there because most of these could be mitigated.

Rather than cancel, fire, expel, and take away from young people, think about how to have the race conversation with them. Share on X

I have a mediation background and when I’m working with people in conflict, I ask them, “If you would have waited 30, 60, or 90 seconds before you said or did what you did that got you into being with me to help mediate a conflict, would you have done it?” The majority of people say, “Absolutely not.” It’s just that we don’t take the time to think about, “If I’m going to do this act, what might the impact be?”

Stop Dehumanizing

That’s about being self-aware and conscious, and starting to understand that the impact that we are having on each other is denigrating or dehumanizing, and it doesn’t have to be that way. We can choose not to see each other through a stereotypical lens of race. We can choose to see each other outside of this judgmental approach that we have around race.

The only way to do that is for everybody who’s reading and doing this dialogue to do your work to understand the impacts that your judgments, biases, and stereotypes have from a racial perspective when you are interacting with people who are different from you. Race dehumanizing is not just with our outgroups people who don’t look like us. They are also with people in our internal group in the Black, Brown, and White community. You can all just think about what are some of the racial stereotypes that you have about people in your group.

It’s not that one group’s any better than the other because the ways that we treat each other from our groups can be just as hurtful. I served on a school board for several years here in Boulder, Colorado, and the community of color, Black, Brown, Asian, and Latino community worked hard to get reelected. Years later, people in the Latino community would come to my school board meetings and spend 2 to 3 minutes of public comment to be sure and tell me that I was a sellout and I was turning White because I wanted to change the system from within.

I expected that there were some White folks who didn’t like somebody who looked like me in charge of their children’s educational journey. I didn’t expect the people who looked like me would come and treat me in that disparaging way. That’s what I mean by the way that we treat each other in our groups can be just as or more hurtful. I didn’t expect it and now I do because I know that everybody is individual and unique regardless.

Race is not a bond of how we see each other. We have to start to be more authentic with each other. What I want to leave you with is to think about what’s happening in your community with your youth, and what the conversations you want to be having are so that our young people learn about what it means to create acceptance.

I was working in a school district in Washington. Having a focus group with a group of high school students and a young senior who was ready to graduate was in the room with his peers. I’m not exactly sure what belief he was talking about, but he said, “There are some beliefs and values that you all have in this room that I don’t agree with and that I will never agree with, and I’m not going to change who I am or my belief system to match you. You are a part of my community, so I’m going to treat you with dignity and respect.”

I thought, “Here’s a seventeen-year-old young man who is more enlightened than some of the adults I talked to in that same timeframe who said, ‘I have got my own beliefs and values. I’m going to stand up for them. I’m not going to change them, and I’m still going to treat you who are different from me with dignity and respect.’” How do we get back to dignity and respect? We all have to treat each other differently. We all have to stop seeing each other as the other and think about how we create a sense of belonging and shared interest in moving beyond the divisiveness that we see in our country and our communities.

As always, as you are reading this, if something spurred your interest or sparked you, have a conversation with somebody. If you agree or disagree with something that I have said, talk about it, and talk about why you agree or disagree. Don’t take anything at face value. What I’m encouraging us all to do through this series of the episode that is going to go for I don’t know how long. This is one of the major conversations in our country right now that we are not having because of all kinds of levels of fear.

If something spurred your interest, have a conversation about it with somebody even if you disagree with each other. Don't take anything at face value. Share on X

It’s to think about how have you been socialized to look at race. What are your stereotypes, biases, and judgments from a racial perspective, and how are they impacting your interactions with people who are different from you? Find somebody to talk to. If you want to share any stories, you can reach me at Contact@DelaCruzSolutions.com and I will be happy to hear your story or even think about if you want to be interviewed as part of this series of shows on the question of how has race impacted you.

I want to thank you for reading, sharing, subscribing, and remembering that the only way we are going to work through this crazy and divisive time that we are all experiencing on this planet is if we figure out how to work together, so it’s all on us. If we are not satisfied with what we are seeing in our young people, then the question to ask is, “What is it about the culture that we as adults have created that is resulting in this behavior that we are seeing in our youth because they are just modeling our behavior?”

 

I, for one, am not going to be complacent and just watch this and say, “That’s the new normal.” I won’t do it. We have done that with too many things. I’m going to ask you all to do your work, keep talking, and most importantly, keep growing. Thank you for reading. Take good care of yourselves and take good care of each other.

 

Important Links

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