Speaker 1: 0:33

Hi Brittany, Hi Karen, how are you?

Speaker 2: 0:36

I'm good, I am ready for another episode of the E-Word.

Speaker 1: 0:40

Yes yes, yes, my favorite time of the week.

Speaker 2: 0:45

I know, I know. I hope you had a good week though.

Speaker 1: 0:48

I did, I did, although I'm a little bit surprised. What are we going to talk about today?

Speaker 2: 0:55

So you might have seen Malik yoba made a statement on social media and he's basically proposing that he's no. Basically he's saying he's no longer a black, black man. He wants to be referred to as non-white, and I think this concept is super interesting.

Speaker 1: 1:20

Okay, I'm a little bit nervous.

Speaker 2: 1:25

Well, basically, I mean, he's challenging the social construct and essentially kind of putting on blast the focus of what this administration is talking about, right? So if there's this backlash against black people or other ethnicities, then really the disparity is between being non-white or white, essentially, and so we should just call it what it is, so that it exposes exactly what the intentions are behind many of these different changes, particularly of DEI and other things that are happening very rapidly over the past few weeks, and so I think it sparks an interesting conversation, like do we actually need to identify as our different races or ethnicities?

Speaker 1: 2:33

Excellent question. So the part of me that loves being a Black woman and would choose to always come back as a Black woman says yeah, absolutely my identity and my unique ethnic and cultural pride, and I also get his point. So initially, when you said that, I was very nervous, I'm a little less nervous now. However, getting rid of the pretext is interesting to just lump us all together. So, whether you are Chinese American or Black American or you know wherever, immediately I thought of you know, being from Ecuador or somewhere. But okay, that's my other question. There are many people who have ethnic origins, right, who may be Latino, for example, and still have different race classifications. Right, you can be a white Latino, you can be a black Latino. You can be an indigenous American. Right, and be Latino, be from a space that speaks Spanish. So what would a white Latino? They would be white. What would a white Latino? They would be white.

Speaker 2: 4:17

Well, they are technically classified that way anyway, right, because typically there are two boxes, so you can be like right, you just said that Latino, and choose to be white or Latino and choose to be something else. I mean, they have choices, which is kind of nice, yeah, yeah. But I think it's an interesting conversation because we know race is a social construct. The people who are identified as non-white and Latino and black, whatever, we didn't create those. Those were created by white people in an effort to other us anyway, to say that we're not white. Yes, white has always been the center, yes, white has always been the center. And so what if we just rejected the construct that they created? We could actually identify as where we're from, or origins or nationality, without identifying as a particular race that they created Because they said we were Black.

Speaker 1: 5:42

That's cool. What'd you say? I said I could just be American. That's cool.

Speaker 2: 5:50

Exactly, and we know in other countries that construct is different. So in South Africa and Trevor Noah talks about this quite eloquently right, yes, there's white, colored and black. Black is the lowest class, okay, and through the years, different races have been categorized based on political affiliation. What I can't remember is if, for instance, the Japanese and the Chinese I can't remember which, I can't remember which, but through politics one group was classified as white and the other group was classified as colored, and of course, white had the most privileges Colored a little less than whites, but definitely more than Blacks. And Blacks don't have much privileges at all, don't have much privileges at all. And so there's this negotiation, okay, of where you sit in the class structure, which technically has nothing to do with how you look.

Speaker 1: 7:04

Correct, correct. So this is really interesting One because there's a pop artist, tyla, who also is from South Africa and she's received some criticism throughout her career because she refers to herself as colored, because that is how she's referred to and perceived in South Africa and that is very difficult for larger markets, especially in the United States, where racial classifications are different Right and in US history, being called colored is inappropriate. That was an antiquated designation designation and so if you look at her you may say, oh okay, this is a Black woman and for her that doesn't quite mesh because she would say I'm a colored woman. This also reminds me in law school I read a case and I'll have to our next episode, I'll have to get the details but I distinctly remember a US court case where people have sued for their whiteness. So there was an Asian immigrant who actually came from Caucasus right, the Caucasus mountains, and would very well be considered Caucasian Right, and so he did not understand why he was not afforded the same privileges as other Caucasians.

Speaker 1: 8:51

Slash white people, right. So white has evolved in the United States. Of course, the Nell Irvin Painter wrote the History of White People. It's a fantastic book. But white has a different meaning in the United States than it does anywhere else, and it's almost odd to say that in other spaces. I've been in other spaces and what we would call white people would say that that doesn't make sense, because in our history Italian Americans were once not considered white Irish.

Speaker 1: 9:35

Americans were once not considered white. Irish Americans were once not considered white, and so on and so forth. Jewish Americans were not considered white. As we're talking about this, it just makes it all seem so ridiculous.

Speaker 2: 9:53

I'm just going round in circles and it's just like this is because it's all made up Right, based on what political influences, what drove the economy? Like it's just. It's not real and I've never visited Africa, but based on what I've heard, Africans didn't really consider themselves any color, essentially until Europeans came and designated them as such, Right. So why are we still embracing what the colonizers dubbed us to be? Why are we holding so tight to it as part of our identity?

Speaker 1: 10:54

Huh Well, maybe, because I mean, history is told through the lens of the victor, right, the perceived victor. And to your point, I have visited the continent and you're absolutely right. And even for my friends, for example, who are Nigerian American and they've talked about their journey to becoming Black, what it means to be Black within the United of Nigeria, and all of those ethnic groups or tribes or however you would want to describe it, all come with these prejudices, Right, Right? So, for example, Igbo people are said to be really good with money and they're perceived to be, to look a particular way European people are perceived to, you know, based on how you present phenotypically, you know, do you have a high forehead? Do you have a low nose bridge, high nose bridge a size of your? All of that can typically have people say, oh okay, I think you're from this particular group, and here's what I believe about this group, for better or worse.

Speaker 2: 12:27

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1: 12:30

And so to and this happens everywhere, right? One of my cousins is Japanese, and so we spoke about how people in Okinawa have curly hair, right, and not everyone in Japan has this bone straight hair, and so the perception of this curly hair really depends, right, depends on where you're from, depends on whether or not it's seen as a good thing or not. Yep, humans, humans are remarkably consistent, I know.

Speaker 2: 13:14

I know we are remarkably consistent, I know we are remarkably consistent, no matter where we are on this planet well, the thing is that what I would love for black people in particular you're talking about the continent right to understand their history and like like that identification that we had prior to being brought to america is just as important as the identification that we have now in order for us to connect back and know what our regions were called before they were named by the Europeans.

Speaker 2: 14:09

And so you know, I don't know if I mentioned this before, but I went and did my African ancestry, so Africanancestrycom, to understand what tribe I came from. Okay, because that's how we identified ourselves. Right, it wasn't necessarily the place I mean, yes, the place, but that was another you know identifier. And so it validated on my mother's side that you know we're Yoruba people, which was very like empowering for me, because when you think of Africa as a huge continent, it's huge. When you get your ancestry DNA, it tells you about a region, but that region is pretty huge. I can name quite a few regions that my DNA taps into, but to understand that my tribe is Yoruba wasn't particularly important and that tribe primarily occupied what today is known as Nigeria. But then there were, like I have DNA, a very European-centric way about how could I be from these two different areas with this one tribe.

Speaker 1: 15:31

These rigid borders yeah.

Speaker 2: 15:33

I didn't get it. And I was traveling one day and I was in the Uber or taxi, I don't know, and it was a Nigerian man and we started talking about this and he said something so incredibly obvious to me. Well, you know, it wasn't called Benin and Togo and it wasn't called Nigeria, right Like the Yoruba tribe moved through this particular area, which is now known as these areas, and then the Europeans erected these borders, but it didn't mean that the people didn't move across and move between them. They operated the same way they always operated. It's just that there's these created boundaries, right?

Speaker 1: 16:16

Trade, commerce, marriage, et cetera.

Speaker 2: 16:20

Exactly. So he basically just educated me on how people moved about, particularly the Yoruba tribe, and I'm also part Fulani and I didn't understand that part too, because that was on my father's side and he was like, well, you know, tribes weren't always warring right, they intermingled and the Fulani really occupied northern Nigeria and the Yoruba primarily occupied southern Nigeria into what now is what is known Benin and Togo, and so there's a lot of trade and intermingling and all that type of stuff. So this is why you could have this nice mixture and it just provided more context to who I was and just inspires me to, you know, dig a little bit further, or a lot further to really understand my ancestry, which has nothing to do with being Black, white or anything of that nature.

Speaker 1: 17:20

Right, and I also want to emphasize, because there are also Black Americans who study Black American culture here and find that, much like in Benin and Togo and Nigeria, highly regionalized, highly dependent upon where you grew up.

Speaker 1: 17:41

So for example, black people. I have family in the Carolinas, north Carolina specifically, and the foods we ate, even now, right, this is informed by hundreds of years of my family being there. And the phrases cultural practices. And the phrases cultural practices, aspects of spirituality yes, to call someone Geechee, right is a truncated reference to the Gullah Geechee people who enslaved and located within this region and have a very, very specific culture. Um, I want to say, maybe it was sherwin williams.

Speaker 1: 18:36

Someone recently came out with a color that indirectly references this culture, that would typically be known as as haint blue, because there's a specific shade of blue that is supposed to be spiritually protected. And so you, if you go into south carolina, if you go into these areas, you will very often see porches. Either the doors or the, the ceilings of the porches or the porches themselves, are painted with this very beautiful shade of blue. Right, that is very different than black Americans who maybe settled near the Gulf in Texas. Mm-hmm, it's still happening. Oh, absolutely Right, even in music, right, the way that West Coast hip-hop sounds versus East Coast hip-hop, it's so specific, the accents are so specific and, of course, we have planes, trains and automobiles. People move, people marry. Right, you adopt a little bit from here, sprinkle it over there.

Speaker 1: 20:05

But another question I have for you as you were speaking, when you said okay, these tribes commingled, intermarried to expand their influence said okay, well, this is why white is created, right, the concept of white within the united states, and back to malik gilbert's point, the concept of not white is to expand power over and access to resources. Right, because we know that English, you know English, descended Puritan descended people, relatively small group, right, so you had to, at a certain point, expand. Whether it's to expand your, your political power Right, to expand your political power, right. Okay, we want these Irish Americans. We're now going to have to consider them white because they're a sizable voting population and we can get in and maintain power, and so we'll just keep expanding that. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 21:21

I mean they expand also through Latinos, who are a huge part of our population, yes, who, like we just talked about, many of which probably check the white box, because if you can get away with it, why would you check? Why would you not check the white box If you could check the black box? Because of how it's perceived, and so that makes it seem, in part, that there are more white people in America. That actually makes our block bigger and, in some ways, creates a different type of united front. Very interesting History has shown that creating subgroups actually benefits the majority group, because we can't come together because we want these different privileges.

Speaker 2: 22:30

Everybody wants to have more privilege. Nobody wants to give up their privilege. How do you create that competition and that division? We break off and we fight amongst ourselves and we don't focus on the real lion in the room, which is potentially whiteness, right? So what if we were like hey, we're, we're all banding together because we're all treated pretty much the same, there's levels of it and if we got off our high horse and was like, hey, I'll give up some of this privilege to help uplift the other groups? That's a very hard concept for people to actually grasp. Let's just dream a little bit. What would that mean? What kind of power would we then wield in society?

Speaker 1: 23:36

I noticed that you made the distinction to separate whiteness versus white people and I want to uplift that. Can you share your perception of what you think the difference is?

Speaker 2: 23:53

I think I start off everybody's pretty much. We're humans, right? We, we, we bleed the same. You know, we have the same type of capacity, but it's really around the privilege and the opportunity that is upheld by being white, right? So white people actually can be in the same station as black people when you think of economics and opportunity and capacity, but their whiteness and the way that the world perceives that capacity and opportunity is greater for white people. So whiteness to me is a concept built off of how the world works. Right, that is primarily that is applied to white people, but it's not applied equally to all white people. But it's just that leg up over non-white people that white people have, which is called whiteness. I don't know if I have articulated that well.

Speaker 1: 25:28

I think it's perfect. Right, whiteness is better, prettier, good-er, right, there's not a word, but we'll use it for these purposes Smarter, richer, more able, more competent, more intelligent, more Whiteness is more than non-white, and so it is this concept that is so seductive, because everyone's in search of grasping toward whiteness. You don't have to be white to try to grasp onto whiteness, and to your point, a lot of people are not fully in possession of this concept of whiteness and also don't lean into it as much.

Speaker 2: 26:04

Yes, I mean some parts of it. They're automatically given because it just exists for them, just like it just exists for us because of the color of our skin. But some people leverage that to provide themselves more opportunity and some people don't, whether they don't want to or they don't realize it.

Speaker 1: 26:24

Yeah, you know, I've had family members who are phenotypically perceived to be white be able to exist in spaces where whiteness abounds and say, oh my gosh you know this is the conversation that's being had, this is the overall perception and use that whiteness that they're gifted to your point to create safety for others. So there are really large ways where that can happen and that has happened in the past. So, for example, you've had with the practice of redlining and preventing people of color, especially black people, from buying in certain neighborhoods. You will have had white people who would show up to the showings and all of the fundamental parts of the home buying process and use their whiteness to create opportunity for these people of color, for Black people, macro way or a large way of doing it.

Speaker 1: 27:46

You've had, like a John Brown right. It was a very fierce abolitionist using his station to advocate for people who were enslaved and oppressed. And then you have small, very small ways where that works, where maybe you're in a meeting and you defer to someone with lesser power who has an idea that you support and, instead of taking the idea for yourself, say, oh, karen had a really great idea we were speaking about earlier. Karen, do you want to share that?

Speaker 2: 28:25

Exactly, and I think that this has been. This concept of whiteness in some ways has been villainized, and I like how you put it, where you said this is a gift. The universe has given you a gift in this social construct which is called whiteness, and just how you described. You can use your powers for good. You can use them for really bad, you can use them to be generally self-serving and neutral, or neutral. You can use them however you want. The first step is understanding your gift and then the second is deciding how you're going to use it. And the third is like. You might decide to use your gifts, sometimes all the time or no time. Those are your choices, but you first have to acknowledge that you have it.

Speaker 2: 29:24

And it's also not saying that other groups don't have gifts as well.

Speaker 2: 29:29

They may not be as powerful as whiteness in certain contexts.

Speaker 2: 29:37

Other groups may have more powerful gifts in other contexts, but when you look at the scale, whiteness far surpasses all of those groups and you have to make an individual decision as to whether or not you believe that it is good for you and society to not use your gifts for good, for example. And that requires in some cases, nobility, because people do focus on their family first. If you can get the leg up, are you really going to bring somebody with you all the time? And the fact of the matter is you're not Right. It is survival of the family and that's why this stuff has been, you know, so pervasive for decades, because people are surviving and they also want to thrive and be better and they focus on themselves and their families first. That's the reality of life and we're trying to get people to kind of shift their mindset and be more inclusive of bringing people along and that by bringing people along, it doesn't necessarily harm you. It actually creates abundance for you, your family and those outer circles.

Speaker 1: 31:06

Absolutely, absolutely. You know, I saw a clip on social media of a reality TV show and the clip was maybe 10 years old and there were these two women that were going to start a podcast. One was white and the other one was black I believe she's black In any case they're arguing and ultimately they decide they're not going to do the podcast together and so they decide they're going to do their own podcasts. And the black woman says you know, good luck trying to get this started without me. And the woman says I'm white, I'm going to be fine. And the woman was shocked into silence, right, because I think very often we walk around and we either assume that people are not aware of their privilege or not aware of the gifts that they have. And for her to say it so clearly and just so openly was like'm going to be, like this is not an issue, and it was so fascinating. But I also want to take it kind of scope out, because I think white and black are really easy, yeah to to juxtapose and to put together and kind of pit against each other. And I think that's always. You know, there's a, there's a theory that everything is always reduced to white versus black? Correct? Yes, that's true. And there's the question of what you do when you don't neatly fit into either of those. Where's your alignment?

Speaker 1: 33:10

I have a client who's from Brazil and she is very frustrated with things like the US Census or job applications which may only allow for one racial identification, because in her experience in Brazil she experienced a lot of racism and here she's considered a Latina.

Speaker 1: 33:50

She's considered a Latina and she feels like that flattens her identity. Because she says do you know that there's so many different. You can be a white Latina, you can be a black Latina, there are Chino Latinos, there are so many different groups that have melded together within Latin America and have created all of these other groups that don't neatly fit within these squares within the United States. And so she's proud to be an Afro-Latina and at the same time she's like well, if I say Black, then I'm ignoring the fact that I'm Latino, and if I say Latino, I feel like I'm ignoring the fact that I'm black. I have heard the same from other friends who are white Latinos and have said other people looking at me One of my friends she said you know, people refer to me as like a spicy white person, which is like a lot, a lot to unpack, and what do you do with that?

Speaker 2: 34:52

I don't know, because you know these constructs were created at a time when the world was, I guess, not that complex and as we've, you know, intermingled as people have voluntarily migrated versus involuntarily, the world has just changed and so it's not. It's literally no longer black and white, yeah, no longer black and white, and you cannot judge people A by the color of their skin. You have no idea what is underneath all of that. And we also have mixed up race, ethnicity, nationality, we've co-mingled all of that, which actually just creates more complexity, which I think makes the argument stronger for white versus non-white, except for the fact that it still centers whiteness.

Speaker 1: 36:01

You are making the exact point I was going to say, which was that I think the world has always been complex in that way. Right? Obviously, these groups have always existed and the ability to access one another has to some extent existed. To access one another has to some extent existed.

Speaker 1: 36:31

The United States and its particular brand of racism is what's new, and so being inclusive has muddied the waters. Right, being inclusive and allowing for our expansion of identity is what, and I see exactly why, to your point, a lot of these people do not want inclusion to advance, because then it makes it more difficult to point out the enemy. Right, or the problem. Right, because within one family, you can have white Latinos, you can have Black Latinos, you can have Indigenous, and the whole family can be concerned with issues like immigration or whatever it is. The whole family can be part of that and their whole experience of the United States can also be very different based on the way that they look, and our current understanding doesn't allow for the complexity of identity. So, to your point, it's just no, but maybe we don't need race anymore.

Speaker 2: 37:58

Maybe that's not necessary If we want to focus on those pockets of experience and culture that really have meeting. That's really under the iceberg that we need to understand, because that social construct of race actually, like you said, flattens us in a way that's not representative of truly who we are, at least today, and so there could be an argument that race needs to just go away. It does, then, still have. There's still a gap in how do you now create meaningful buckets, because any bucket you create is not going to be representative of the total experience of any one person, right. But what is it that you really need to know? And not treat people like this massive monolith, but also not go down a rabbit hole where you have so many data points that it just becomes useless and not sustainable. Now, to counter that, we now have new technology called AI, right, that has the capacity to unpack all of that, and maybe that's a new use case for it.

Speaker 2: 39:19

I don't really know the answer. I know that a couple of years ago, I did want to work on a project that really re-imagined demographics, because it wasn't inclusive of people and people were feeling left out, and if you look at a person like me who I guess would be comfortable with the term Afro-Caribbean, and then you look at your client who's Afro-Latina. Those are two different experiences, right that if we got to know intimately those differences, we can really understand those audiences in a much more deeper way. And that's what we need to do in this new society anyway. There's so much noise out there and you really want to connect, and also, just from a marketing perspective, you really want to connect with your customers that you really have to do so in a very intimate way in order to cut through that clutter. And how are you going to do that if you just label me as black? Right?

Speaker 1: 40:18

And assume that you were right. I mean, I'm just thinking of resource allocation and, to your point, marketing. I'm thinking of Appalachia. It's a very unique, very specific understanding of the world. In the United States versus the coastal United States, which the coastal United States, anywhere from New York to Florida and Washington, throughout the state of California, typically the average income is higher. The level of education, the race will vary, but the concerns and the perceived focus may be different than a group in the Midwest or the South or Appalachia or anywhere else. And so how yeah, I'm just, I'm wrestling with you know how do you break away race and what else do you use to contextualize the human experience within this country?

Speaker 2: 41:28

Yeah, and I think that's the question that we should start asking ourselves. It's time to rethink how we think about people, because we're not the same as a hundred years ago. We have evolved in many different ways, in ways that we can't. It's hard for the human brain to contextualize. So I think it's a really great opportunity to leverage technology to help us think differently, but we have to be willing to embrace that those differences are good, are good, and it requires just a re-imagining of all of our systems too, because they're all based on these boxes Right, these highly antiquated versions of self, and I would say if you want to get your kind of perfect answer, you have change that.

Speaker 1: 42:32

Americans, at this point, want to see Whatever side of the aisle they're on. It's very clear that people are dissatisfied.

Speaker 2: 42:57

Yeah, that's true. Because you can't want change yeah and need change Like we need change. Yeah and need change Like we need change. It's time. I don't know what that looks like. Maybe the aliens can help us figure it out.

Speaker 1: 43:14

You know, maybe that'll be the thing that unites us all.

Speaker 2: 43:21

I don't know Cause. You know they're always portrayed as looking very much the same. Yes, in some cases not all, most cases they have huge eyes, but in some cases they don't. Vision is very limited, which I've kind of always said. I don't want to be around when this happens because I don't want to be blinded. But if we couldn't see, how would our experience with people differ? Right, if you could not look at skin color and judge based on that and there's obviously voice, which different dialects and things of that nature we probably figure out how to separate ourselves somehow, some way, because people are very good at that. It's a superpower of theirs.

Speaker 2: 44:04

They do not know how to separate ourselves somehow some way, because people are very good at that.

Speaker 1: 44:06

It's a superpower of theirs they do not know how to come together. Yeah, I mean, I just think. Who's to say that aliens are anthropomorphic? Why do they need two eyes? You know what? If they're just blobs floating through the air, sentient blobs, what do we do with that?

Speaker 2: 44:23

that's just not how it's portrayed in the movies. Sentient blobs, what do we do with that? That's just not how it's portrayed in the movies. No, no, star Trek did not cover that.

Speaker 1: 44:34

Most of the time they were anatomically different Exactly, so maybe we'll see one day. I don't really want to be around for that. Just different Exactly.

Speaker 2: 44:44

Different color, but you know. So maybe we'll see one day. I don't really want to be around for that, but I don't want it to happen anytime soon. I'm not saying I should it happens tomorrow and I don't want to be around, but one day.

Speaker 1: 45:00

I'm going to hope for dogs. Dogs always bring me joy, so if they look like dogs, then I'd be very happy. I'd be awesome.

Speaker 2: 45:11

All right, we're trying to solve the world's problems and we're relying on aliens and dogs, and so I think that's a good solution. Mina thinks it's a great solution too. Thanks, mina, and thanks Malik Yoba for sparking this conversation. We appreciate you exactly. Alright, until the next time on the eWord, bye.