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

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Race Conversations 2

You’re tuning in to the show designed to get you to think, dialogue, and talk about some of the issues that we’re facing. I’m going to get into a topic that I’ve been vacillating back and forth. I was like, “Should I do this or should I not?” I’ve decided that doing nothing isn’t going to change anything. I’m going to go ahead and jump into a conversation about race. Race is one of the most difficult topics to talk about, at least in America. I’ve been to all parts of this country and have been able to engage people in conversation.

Race is very challenging for all of us, and it’s for a couple of reasons. Before I get to those though, I want to remind you that my approach is my perspective and my ideology. I’m not asking you to agree to lock stock with me. I’m not asking you to believe that my truth is your truth. What I’m asking you to do is to bring an open mind and an open heart and think about what are the impacts of race in your life. For me, I have to think about it all the time because I don’t identify as White. If you look at all of the indicators, I’m identified as Brown and multiracial, which identifiers don’t tell you anything about me. As I share some of my thoughts with you, I want you to think about them. If anything resonates with you, as usual, have a conversation with somebody.

Why We Don’t Talk About Race

If things don’t resonate with you, let them go, and don’t worry about it. I know that what I’m saying will not appeal to everyone. Yet, this conversation is something that we all need to, at some point, come to terms with because we’re being socialized to a lot of false narratives about race in the media and from leaders. It’s time we begin a conversation that keeps us engaged and keeps us humanized. There are a couple of reasons that I’ve experienced in talking to thousands of people over the years about race and why we don’t talk about it. One is that we lead with, “Are you a racist,” versus, “Tell me how race has impacted you.” When we lead in a race conversation with, “Are you racist,” there’s already a presumption that the person I’m talking to may be racist, especially if you’re White.

That notion of stepping into a conversation with this predetermined idea of who the person is can shut down the whole dialogue. If you have that mindset and you hear one thing that you believe leads to this person disparaging a race, then right away, your brain is going to go, “I knew it. You’re a racist.” The conversation then shifts. It’s pretty much over. As soon the person who gets called the racist defends why they’re not, and the person who calls the other person a racist justifies why they are. It ends up in this justify and defend conversation, like, “You are. I’m not.” It’s always lose-lose. Not only do the two people leave believing they’re right, but they leave with the relationship damaged, even more importantly.

The chances of them re-engaging in the conversation go down. It’s like if I said to you, “You’re quite a racist. Can we talk?” The conversation is over because we’re going to both be in different positions. That’s one reason why the race conversation goes so poorly. Another reason is fear. We have been so over-socialized to the meaning of words that people could find racism in almost anything these days in the way that we say it or in the language that we use. The fear of saying the wrong thing causes people to say nothing. When we say nothing, we know that nothing is going to change.

The fear of saying the wrong thing causes people to say nothing. Share on X

If you live in one of those spaces or if you are one of those people who leads into a race conversation questioning whether the person is a racist, or if you lean into that conversation from a perspective of fear, chances of the conversation continuing go down. Issues around race are so socially constructed and so generational. You have hundreds of years of life that they’re not going to be solved in a conversation. I don’t know if they’ll ever be solved, to be honest.   I do know that doing nothing and saying nothing will not change our status quo. I’m done listening to all the false narratives from leaders who label people of all races based on how they see them versus who they are. I can’t sit back again and say nothing because doing nothing will result in nothing.

Structure Of Superiority

What I want to share with you are some insights that I’ve gotten along the way and ways that I approach the race conversation that has shown to be productive from the perspective that people are willing to engage and stay engaged in the conversation. The first point that is important is that when we’re talking about racism, we’re talking about a structure or a pattern of superiority that says one race is better than the other. It can lead to exclusion and discrimination against the perceived unequal or inferior group of people based on race.

 

With that definition, even being somebody who doesn’t identify as White, I could be racist. As long as I, based on my race, look at myself as better than another racial group or I look at another racial group as inferior for whatever reason, then I am exhibiting racism. I know that’s not everyone’s definition of racism. For a lot of people, it’s connected to systemic structures and only people with privilege can be racist. That takes away the idea that we are all impacted by race regardless of what our race is. I personally, from a life experience, can’t negate that in terms of who I am and what I’ve experienced as somebody who doesn’t identify as White.

It goes back to that whole idea of feeling superior. A supremacy mindset or supremacy narrative is not only something that White people have. Yet, a lot of times in our conversations, it’s labeled as White supremacy as if a person who’s not White can’t feel like they are superior to somebody else. In fact, if we take the race out of it and talk about a superiority mindset, everyone has the ability to feel they’re better than somebody else. I bet every one of you reading out there, if you are honest in your own life, you’ll find a time when you thought you were superior or better than somebody else based on a lot of different categories. It could be race, age, socioeconomic status, education, ability, and any number of things.

We, as human beings, all have the propensity to think that we’re better than somebody else. That’s what a superiority mindset is. When we put a race in front of it, we’re almost alluding that those are the only people that have a superiority mindset. For me, it’s thinking about what this whole idea of superiority has to do with where we are in the race conversation and what privilege has to do with it. I don’t use the color in front of privilege either because all people based on any identifier, including race, have the privilege. Is their privilege different? Absolutely. Is it exhibited differently? Do they operate differently in systems? Absolutely. It’s just that these things are not relegated to one racial group.

I am working to expand this conversation so that it moves beyond White people as the people who are supremacists or have the privilege. I know that I have been in a number of instances in my life where I thought I was superior and better than somebody else for a whole variety of reasons. I know that I have a lot of privilege in my work, the way that I work, owning a home, and all kinds of things where we define privilege in relation to material things and even access to leaders and decision-makers. I have access, so I have privileges in that area as well.

Part of what I’m trying to show in this dialogue with you is that this conversation is nuanced and expansive. It’s not solely based on race. We have to also look at the systems that we operate in. I’d like to share some facts about my development work. Here’s one of them. All of the systems that were created in our country were created in the late 1700s and early 1800s to the benefit of the people who created them. The people who created these systems, back in that day, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, were mostly White men. They created them for the benefit of their group. If people who looked like me were building these systems, we would’ve probably created them to the benefit of our group as well.

That’s a fact. The economic system, justice system, political system, educational system, and healthcare, all these systems were created in the late 1700s and early 1800s by White men to the benefit of White men. When I’m out talking and I share those facts, some people will say, “Doesn’t that make them all racist?” I would answer like this and say, “I don’t know. I don’t know them. I didn’t hear their conversations. I wasn’t there. I don’t know if they were racist. I do know that they were biased, and the bias that they had was people who looked like them. That’s about as much as I know.”

Creating Systems From Biases

When we’re talking about biases, we’re talking about creating and structuring systems and processes that are not only beneficial to our own group but exclude people from other groups. Remember these mostly White men were called founding fathers, not founding fathers and mothers. Even White women were looked at less than in that timeframe. It wasn’t just people from different racial backgrounds. That’s an important fact to understand because that’s real. The false narrative in 2022 goes back to this idea that if you are a part of that group or, in other words, if you are a White man, it automatically makes you racist. I don’t believe that. I never have and I never will.

I don’t think that you can apply something that happened hundred years ago by a group of people to another group of people in 2022 who reflect them and say, “You all are the problem.” The way that has been reflected with me all over the country is when I go to have these conversations with mostly White folks, men and women, many of them will ask me, “Is this one of those workshops? Is this one of those development pieces? Is this one of those conversations where I’m going to be called a racist because I’m a White person?” I say, “Absolutely not.”

I don’t believe that number 1) It is a way to authentically engage somebody with a predetermined idea of whom you think they are before they even walk in the room based on racial identity. Number 2) Because I know how much that hurts when you are grouped with a group of people that you had nothing to do with. Being a White man does not make you responsible for what White men did in creating these systems. That’s my belief and perspective. There are a number of people who lead this work around the country in the DEI space who say exactly the opposite. They say that White people are the problem.

They want to judge, shame, and blame them as much as they can. I’ve never found that approach productive. Labeling a group of people as part of the problem is exactly what I’ve been fighting against in my own community of color for most of my life. If it’s not okay for me to be grouped and for people to make false assumptions about me based on my race, why is it okay for me to do that to another group of people? It doesn’t logically make sense to me. If we are going to change these systems, we need everyone to be not only engaged, but we need people to be committed to making changes. We also operate in a patriarchal system. All of these systems were designed for the benefit of men. As a man, I have benefited from these systems.

If we are going to change these systems, we need everyone to be not only engaged but also be committed to making changes. Share on X

It doesn’t make me a bad man. It makes me a man that if I’m aware that I’m operating in the system that gives me benefit, then how do I share that benefit with other people? How do I make sure that people who don’t identify as male have the same opportunities for growth, development, and resources regardless of what they are, what field I’m in, or what my role is in the organization? There is a lot for us to think about in this conversation. The reality of the America that I live in is while we have more women in positions of leadership, we have a lot more White men who are driving a lot of what we’re experiencing on both sides. Believe me, the political system is as broken as the justice system, educational system, and healthcare system.

I truly believe that we’re at an evolutionary part of our growth as a society. We have to start looking at not only who we are as individuals, but we have to look at the systems that we operate in. We have to realize that each one of us plays a role in the perpetuation of how people are impacted by race, gender, liability, disability, or body image. Pick anything. When we’re talking about biases, we’re talking about every identity and every cross-functionality of all of that intersection of identity that we have. We are all part of these systems. Even race, you could say, “Race is a social construct.” When we look at the census, it was created hundreds of years ago by people who work in the Census Bureau to count people.

Increase Race Awareness

If race is a social construct and we didn’t use it as a way to predict people’s behavior, would we still have racism? It’s an interesting thing to think about. Race as a social construct means that if I buy into identifying people based on race and then predicting who they are based on how I’m socialized to look at race, then I’m perpetuating a system of inauthenticity. That is because I won’t allow people from different racial backgrounds to show me who they are. We are socialized to message messages about who people are racially every single day about every racial category, and nobody is being left out.

Rather than tell you all of those, I want you to think about what you have heard about people from different racial backgrounds, news pundits, politicians, organizational leaders, and CEOs. I know that you can all come up with things that you’ve heard and thought, “Did they say that?” I do it every day because I am reading things that I see every day. I’m like, “Did that happen?” Sadly, the answer is it did really happen. Someone did say that to another person. Someone did treat somebody poorly. What I want to start with in this process is to first increase your awareness. I want you to think that race is a factor in how a person will fare in our society. It plays a role. It’s not the only factor. Yet, it’s a factor that if we don’t figure out how to talk about it, it will be part of our demise.

There is a politics of division that’s rooted in race. If we, as different racial groups, continue to fight with each other, how do we ever come together to create a force to push change at the systems level, the political level, and the leadership level? There are a lot of things for us to think about. I want to encourage you to talk about this with other people. Get to know people from different racial backgrounds. Get to know them as a person rather than a group because there’s so much more to everybody out there. I’ll leave you with this. This is something somebody told me years ago when I started to do my own personal work and then work with other people.

She said, “If you remember these two things that everybody has a good heart and everyone deserves to be trusted, you will fare well and do well engaging with other people.” I truly believe that. Everyone has a good heart and everyone deserves to be trusted. Somehow, we have to figure out how to talk about race from the perspective of how has race impacted you versus whether you are a racist or using race as a predictor for how somebody is going to behave and act based on how we’re socialized. We’ll get into another conversation later about how the media is complicit in all of this and believes that they’re not.

 

I hope you have some things to think about. Please engage with each other. Have some meaningful dialogue about how race has impacted you and how you see it impacting others. We will continue this process by diving a little bit deeper. If you have a compelling story about how race has impacted you and want to share your experience, you can reach out to me at Contact@DeLaCruzSolutions.com. We can talk about getting your story on the show. I appreciate you tuning in. I appreciate you sharing. If this resonates with you, please become a subscriber. You will get all of our episodes as they come hot off the presses. Thanks for tuning in. Remember to keep going.

 

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