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Dr. Randy Blazak
On this week's podcast, Carl and special guest Dr. Randy Blazak discussed unconscious bias and how mental processes we aren't even aware of often affect what we think and decisions we make. Understanding the role we each play in enabling systemic racism and racial injustice are critical in disabling them.
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MEET DR. RANDY BLAZAK
Randy Blazak’s scholarship on hate crimes and hate groups has made him a regular commentator in media outlets from NPR and CNN to BBC and Al Jazeera. Blazak earned his PhD at Emory University in 1995 after completing an extensive field study of racist skinheads that included undercover observations and interviews across the world. He became a tenured sociology professor at Portland State University and taught criminology classes at the University of Oregon. His work has taken him from classrooms to criminal trials. His research has been published in academic journals, books and in the mainstream press. His co-authored book, Teenage Renegades, Suburban Outlaws Wadsworth, 2001) and his edited volume, Hate Offenders (Praeger, 2009) have been widely adopted. Since 2002, he has been the chair of the Coalition Against Hate Crimes. He has worked with the National Institute of Justice and the Southern Poverty Law Center on hate crime research issues. Blazak regularly speaks at conferences, consults on criminal cases, and leads workshops on the topics of hate and bias. He is currently the vice-chair of the steering committee in charge of implementing Oregon’s new bias crime law.
Transcript
Carl:
Hey everyone. And welcome to this episode of the Bureau Briefing Live. We are coming to you today with our good friend, Dr. Randy Blazak, how are you, sir?
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Hey, I'm fine. How are you?
Carl:
I'm good. And as most of you know today's show, we were originally going to be focusing on the book, Blind Spot, talking all about hidden biases and how we can get out of our own way so we can be better people. And then in the community we found out about Randy and he was introduced to us. And I don't want to put a lot of pressure on him, but he's kind of a bad ass. We're going to hear a lot. Dude, you went undercover with the skinheads. Come on.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Yeah, well.
Carl:
Don't deflect that. That's kind of an amazing thing. Before we jump in, I do want to thank our sponsors, MailChimp, Invision and Platform.sh. They have been doing a lot for us as we go through all of these changes. And with that why don't we find out a little bit about you Randy? Share with everybody a little bit about your background and kind of what drew you into this work?
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Yeah. I mean, it's a big story but I think where it ties into our conversation today is that it's been very helpful in understanding what the heck is going on in the world right now. I grew up in a town in Georgia called Stone Mountain, which is famous for a big rock that sticks out of the ground. That's the name Stone Mountain. There's a confederate carving which I'm sure is now the center of much debate. Stone Mountain is famous for a couple of reasons, it's mentioned in Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech in 1963 which we're about to mark again this summer. And there's a part where he says... I'm going to sound just like him, "Let freedom ring from the hills and the mole hills of Mississippi and from Stone Mountain in Georgia." And I was a kid. I was like, "Oh yeah, that's my town." It's a very famous speech like my little town but the reason Dr. King mentioned my town is, it's the birthplace of the modern KU Klux Klan.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
In 1915 this guy named Duke saw the movie Birth of a Nation and said, "That looks like a good idea." And tried to revive the Klan. The first cross burning was on top of Stone Mountain on Thanksgiving 1915, starting century of terror from the modern Klan. So I grew up around the Klan and I thought every town had a Klan. I had friends whose parents ran the Klan or fathers really. And they provided basically a sort of a framework of how we thought about race including Atlanta, which is just sort of over the hill from Stone Mountain and is this scary black city.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
And then I went off to college. Luckily, I went to a place called Emory University which is a pretty good school. And I took a sociology class because I had a break between my chemistry class and my physics class. And it blew my freaking mind. We should call it the everything you know is wrong class. And it really helped me to start to understanding how race works. Before we were even having conversations about things like white privilege, I thought, well, I have obligation to try to understand why people like me... Because one of my best friends from school became the exalted Cyclops of the Southern Knights of the KKK. Why are people that I know going into that world? And so once I entered graduate school, I started a kind of longterm field study of the racist skinheads, which were kind of the new hate group on the scene in the late 1980s.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
And so I spent on and off about six years undercover in the white supremacist movement, which led to my dissertation work, trying to understand because it's very easy, this is the us versus them thing that comes up in the book. The way we sort people into groups to think about racist as a separate category of people, those bad people and us good woke, liberal, whatever people. They were so different, we're like genetically different or something you can tell by a BD their eyes that they're racist. And of course, what I found out was, other than the sort of explanations for why this phenomenon was happening they weren't different from me at all. There was just a series of circumstances that we fell into that pushed my friend into the Klan and me into a lifetime doomed as a sociologist.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
And so that's the quick version of my origin story. All that time spent studying the skinheads in the 80s and the 90s has become incredibly valuable in understanding what's happening in the country right now. And maybe we can get into some of those parallels but I came to Portland in 95 and took a tenure track position at Portland state because I wanted to be in a place where there's still a problem with organized racism. And there's a problem with organized racism everywhere, but Portland have a little bit of a history, including a pretty brutal murder by three skinheads of an Ethiopian immigrant in 1988 that kind of put Portland on the map in all the wrong ways. So that's why I ended up here and Stumptown.
Carl:
There you go. So talking about the book for a second and you and I were chatting a little before, I read the book, I think it was a couple of years ago and it was a shock for me, like a lot of people because I joke that my parents were Mississippi liberals and they were run out of there pretty quick. But when I read this book and you find out about the IAT tests, and then you take the test and then you realize I judge people based on their race and I judge people based on their weight. And I judge people based on their sexual orientation, I judge... All these things that they didn't know I did but it's that immediate judgment.
Carl:
And then there's that reflective judgment where you're just like, "Well, that's just a normal human, that's a person. They're loving who they love, they're doing what they do." When you do, because I know you do anti-bias training, how do you get people? And I think this is important for everybody listening. How do we get to a point where we understand the conflict within us? How are we able to look at that?
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Yeah, that's such a good question because we think... I like to sort of broadly summarize about how we tackle these issues of bias in our society. I think this is one of the things that's happening right now with the marches that are happening probably as we're sitting here is that we haven't tackled them enough and in a sufficient way. And so I'm talking about sort of three levels, one are the institutional ways we address it. So getting rid of Jim Crow and changing not just the laws of the land but also the laws in our workplace, the rules of engagement in a law firm or at a university or at a government office. And so how we institute equitable hiring practices and things like that. So when we say institution, we just don't mean changing a law here and there it's really sort of the institutions that we exist in including our faith institutions.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
We tackle them on a cultural level, how we hang out on a Friday night, how do we get out of our bubble? What does our friends circle look like? What is our experience with people from different religions and sort of how we mix it up culturally and that's sort of happening whether you want to or not because we were becoming a much more diverse culture. But the third level is how we tackle it on a personal level, how we engage in on a very micro level and the sort of two parts of that. One is how we interrupt it when we hear it. Because I'm white, somebody might say something racist. What do I do? Because I'm male, somebody might say something sexist. What do I do? But also the reflective piece and that's sort of what you're speaking to is that sort of level like how we engage in it and ourselves.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
And this is not to be overly Freud and about the subconscious and the superego and ego. Anybody that's been in a relationship can know that your ego can get in the way, you can be your own worst enemy. Like anybody who's been in an LTR has had like, "Oh, why do I keep shooting myself in the foot?" Well, we have to have those moments of reflection around these things because we get very defensive. We want to fight, we want to defend ourselves. We want to prove that we're good people. And there is time to sit with that discomfort. There is time to kind of reflect on how we became who we became.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
One of the things that I think is... And I don't know where this came from but this sort of example came across my consciousness years ago and I've been using it ever since. It's somebody who is an alcoholic, who struggles with alcoholism can go for years without a drink, right? They can be dry and sober for 20 years and you will not hear them say, I am no longer an alcoholic, I've been cured, right? They are forever an alcoholic but for the grace of God one day at a time they're dealing with it. Well, these biases are so deeply woven in us. We're never afraid of them. I'm never going to say I'm not a racist, I'm anti-racist, but I am racist. I grew up in Stone Mountain. I grew up in America. I grew up in this world that values white people at a higher level. And I internalize that, I internalized sexism. I internalized homophobia, ableism. I mean, sort of all these things are woven into me way in the back of my head, that implicit bias stuff.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
And so I have to have an honest conversation with myself and get away from the denial because I think that the normal position is we're going to fight, I'm a good person, I'm a good person. And we put up all these things like, "Well I have black friends or my stepson is Puerto Rican, or I voted for Obama or I marched in the 60s or I have a Beyonce record. Don't judge me as an..." Stop doing that. Stop doing that. The first part of this is to have and say it's all of us, including people of color. I have internalized a lot of these messages too. I mean, the people that I study... I'm going to stop talking in a second.
Carl:
No. That's what you're supposed to do.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
But the people that I study, white supremacist, who I would argue technically is everybody will say things like, "Well, black people can be racist too." And they're trying to make the reverse racism argument, like being angry at racist white people is racism. But what we know from the research is that black people can be racist towards black people because they've internalized the same messages about white supremacy that everybody else has. We have a shade, a colorism as we're calling it now. The lighter skin minority is going to get more attention because they look more like the white people.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
I flew into New York to do an interview at CBS with a really great female newscaster that was an African American and one of my African American friends in Portland sort who's darker skin, her tone is darker. And she was like, "Oh yeah, they love those light skinned black women on TV." And I was like, I've never even thought about that, but that's how this white supremacy internalized within the black community. So anyway that was a little bit of a run around, but the answer is that we start having these conversations with ourselves and try not to be so fragile as a term is and defensive and be able to sit with our discomfort. And that's really the first step to this whole thing, I think. The micro organ.
Carl:
Yeah. Acknowledging that we're wired this way and we can't unwire. I was having this conversation with somebody and you just mentioned growing up in Stone Mountain, if the Klan was a thing and is a thing, there are a lot of us who have family members that run it, a lot of white people that are family members of it and they didn't know. And so it's like we do put on that, I think it's called perception management or something like that, where we say the blue lies. We say what sounds right and how we want to be seen. And then we come into direct conflict with the reality that like, for me, my grandfather was in the Klan, I found this out about three years ago. I never met the man. He was dead when I was born, but it's like, you start to realize this is a deeper, deeper issue.
Carl:
And the amazing thing is we were never able to have these conversations before. For the tragedy of George Floyd's murder and all of the murders and everything that's come up, we're now able to have these conversations in a different light. I guess that's also one of the things I'm curious about. Right now we have a moment in history with heightened awareness and a new level of honesty, a new level of transparency. Do you personally, with all of your background think we'll take advantage to move things forward or are we going to fall back into some level of comfort and denial?
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Yeah, it's a really important question. And I think to borrow from our friend Malcolm Gladwell, we are at a tipping point because of the demographic shift in this country, we know from the projections that the 2050 census will show that America in a very short 30 year period will be a majority minority country that the piece of the pie that's white people will be smaller than the non white people. So that change is a reality. We are becoming a browner nation, which I think is a good thing. And so it's kind of like which side or... I mean, I think that NASCAR is sort of the canary in the coal mine. If NASCAR can ban the Confederate flag, it means there's real change happening. There's some momentum behind this change.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
I think it's happening among young people, the millennial and the post-millennial generation are incredibly diverse. The millennial generation is bigger than the baby boom generation. And it is much browner. It's much more immigrants. And so those changes will kind of happen. But I think the question is... I mean, we're having these important conversations, the George Floyd the thing, the parallel I make with George Floyd is the way that white people experience the world when they turned on the CBS evening news in 1966 and saw people, civil rights marchers, including white people, but mostly black people in Selma, Alabama being beaten and having dogs attack them, the sort of wake up call. There was this great study that came out from this guy at Columbia University in the end of the 60s, Ken Keniston who was trying to understand, what the hell is happening? Why are all my students marching in the street? What is all this about? And he did this great study.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
There's his book called on Being Radical. He found out that when people are aware of their values, they value fairness and then you show them the world and say, "That's not fair." You kind of slap them in the face with the reality and show how contrary it is their values, a lot of those people will engage to try to get things to where they think would be in line with their values. And I think the thing with George Floyd is that murder was so unambiguous. There was no chance that he had a gun or he was resisting arrest or anything. For nine minutes this man was calling out for his mother and saying, I can't breathe. And there's just no ambiguity about it. It was a state sanctioned execution in that lens.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Like those images that white people saw in the 60s, they tried. I mean, I have people in my circle that immediately wanted to attack the victim, George Floyd had a criminal record, he shouldn't have blah, blah, blah. I mean, it's just amazing. I was just doing screenshots. A lot of my friends from Stone Mountain who immediately were attacking George Floyd, that's still there, but there is this overwhelming awareness they're like, "Wow."
Dr. Randy Blazak:
I was unsure about Ferguson because I didn't see it too clearly but this I can see clearly, and I can see what people are upset about. To be hopeful, there's a lot of things going on, the economy tanking, the COVID issue, the kind of political division that's happening in the Trump era and all that sort of all coming together. And also this is a huge millennial generation that is now a massive voting block makes me think... My little mantra this past month has been that 2020 is going to make 1968 look like 1954.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Of course, 1968 gave us president Richard Nixon so I should like not use that metaphor too much because there could be the backlash, but it feels like as someone who's been doing this work a long time. People, white people... So I just did a little thing called Normative Whiteness and when I'm talking about white people and I say people it's like to assume everything is male. The white people are more interested in having this conversation about race. I mean, the White Fragility book has been selling like hotcakes because white people are trying to figure out how to engage in this issue. So it feels like we're in a moment that could become a movement.
Carl:
I want to talk about or touch on something you just mentioned and this, again, gets back to the book. Where we categorize things like that's how our brains are able to work quickly. We throw things into categories and we make determinations and somebody walks past us and we're immediately judging them and putting them into some context we know. The concept of mind bugs, where if we don't have all the information we kind of bridge that gap, we just make it up. And then that becomes like kind of a truth. And one of the interesting things was this concept that when you say American, you think white male, right? And that's why we say African-American, and that's why we say Asian-American because American is a white term but only because that's the way we've been conditioned to hear it. So do those things ever change or is that just something that exists?
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Well, of course they change, but they take time because the term sociologists use is socialization, we're socialized to understand what is normal. I have to do a lot of air quotes in my line of work because is normal is constantly being constructed and reconstructed. And so if you grow up in Saudi Arabia, you have a different normal than if you grew up in Stone Mountain. And I saw, we had someone here from Stone Mountain, which is nice.
Carl:
Yeah, Gwen.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Yeah. And so you kind of internalize. I mean, I think growing up in Portland is a different place. People don't know Portland is a very white city. I got here from Atlanta and I thought it was on the Twilight Zone episode. I got on a bus and it was all white people. And I thought where's Rod Serling. You are being taken to a place in the Twilight Zone. And so your environment has a lot to do with your notion of normality but your environment in our world includes the media. Like you can raise your kid to be the most woke kid ever. And they're still getting the world around as... My five-year-old I've noticed sees race and she is seeing that white is normal. And we've realized. I'm like, "Oh my God, I think it would be pretty bad if I was raising a white supremacist." So we need to get in front of this. How do I interrupt this and have some conversations with her. And so she's all plugged into Black Lives Matter now, she was at the march a couple of days ago.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
But a few months ago we were watching the Family Feud and it was a black family and a white family. And she was rooting for the white family. And I said, "Why do want the white family to win?" And she didn't have the language to be able to express it but she had already internalized this notion that white is the normal and nonwhite is sort of the other thing that comes into the scene. And I thought, oh my God, that going to be good for my line of work as an anti-biased trainer for my credit rooting for white people.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
And I think she started to figure that out now because we've been talking to her a lot about George Floyd and Brianna Taylor. And I mean, she understands that there's imbalance and unfairness in the world, which is sad to like lay on a five-year-old. But it was clear that she was taking in the world despite our environment of being a very pro. I mean she's a biracial child, my wife is Mexican. She's internalizing the role that she's in and we do that and it goes right to the back of the head and then we don't see it.
Carl:
So I want to get-
Dr. Randy Blazak:
I hope I'm not like studying her someday. Like, "Hey honey, can I come and rally with you? I know you wanted to some..."
Carl:
I just want to say my dad was a child psychologist and my brother is a scientist and atheist. My sister was a minister for a long time who lost her faith and I've always been agnostic. So do keep an eye on that. Make sure you're not accidentally.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
You know they always say like your kids turn out the exact opposite of you. So that's what I'm worried about. Like she's going to be some super right wing evangelical street preacher.
Carl:
Oh man. I hope not. Let's get to one of our questions, everybody we do have the Q&A open, so feel free to throw questions over there. We'll also keep an eye on the chat. The first one is coming to us from a good friend, Al Immaculate Jacksonville, with so many white people struggling to view their role in systemic racism, how have you bridged the natural defensiveness which occurs when initiating discussion?
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Oh man, I'm so glad this is the first question that comes in. So let me tell you... This is a complex problem with complex solutions and complex ways of talking about it. But I think the most important thing that I've heard over the past two weeks with these protests is the use of the word trauma, the word trauma is being used. And one of the things I've seen at least two or three times in the mainstream media is grown black men talking about George Floyd and breaking into tears because what is it going to take to change things? And that cumulative trauma of being black in America is so overwhelming that in 2020 we're still dealing with this. So since we all have the capacity of being empathetic, since we all have the capacity to be good, kind of caring people if we understand the trauma that is created by bias and sometimes it's by overt acts like the murder of a black man by police officers but sometimes it's just a little microaggressions.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
It's little saying things like, "Oh, you're all dressed for or..." I mean, my wife who I mentioned is Mexican mentioned to me one day that it's hard for her living in an old neighborhood where there aren't any people like her that understand her culture, that living in a predominantly white and African American neighborhood and she doesn't have anybody that affirms her background. It's not being beaten by a cop but it's just another little reminder that you're an outsider. So when we start understanding the nature of trauma and the cumulative impact on trauma... I had a lot of white Stone Mountain folks on Facebook say, "Well, they arrested those cops, why are people so angry? It's done. They arrested that cop." And I'm like, it's not George Floyd it's 1000 George Floyds.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
And it's what that trauma creates in people's mindsets both internally and externally. And if we start sort of seeing that, I think it's a way for us white people to be like, oh my gosh, I didn't realize by saying I'm color blind, I'm actually hurting people. Let go of playing the race card. White people have the privilege of not being a race and what people of color don't. So to be able to have that conversation, I've been assigning white privilege this term... Well, Robin DiAngelo, who does these trainings was talking to sort of a mixed group of people and about how white people get so defensive. So defensive like, "I don't know and it's not me. I can't say anything. I'm just going to shut down." And she asked this African American man, I think to me, this was like the moment in the book, "What would it be like to be able to talk to white people about your experience being black and have them just listen?"
Dr. Randy Blazak:
And his answer was, it would be revolutionary. For me I would just tell you, this is what it's like to be black in America in 2020. And for this white person to sit and listen and not try to say, "Well, that's not me, or things are so much better, or you could be an Africa or would..." Just to get us to listen and to hear the trauma, I think that's the route to empathy and that's when it all of a sudden everything starts to change. And I know as a white person who's been doing this work for a long time, I can get really defensive. I mean, why was undercover not letting skinheads, don't say I'm racist or... I'm guilty of it like everyone else but when I stop centering myself, this is the terminology we use, it's all about me.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
There's a great section in a book called White Women's Tears, about how like when white women start crying, because they feel like they're being accused of being racist, then it's all about that white woman instead of trauma that her racism might be causing. I have to learn... I get paid to talk, but this is where I have to shut up where I have to listen and hear other people's stories and just sit with it and not try to say, "Well, that's not me. I'm one of the good people." Just to sit with it, to hear that and to hear how widespread that trauma is, I think that's a very long answer to a very good question, but to build that on that empathy by thinking about the notion of trauma.
Carl:
Yeah. It's interesting. Something you just touched on and I'd mentioned projecting black quite a few times so a lot of people in the community know them. A boy went in to Jahan who have coached us through different things, we're having a call today and I just mentioned how I've had to change a lot of my inputs because even people I followed who I think were aligned in terms of what we would like to see happen in the world, they're so angry that it shuts me down. And so in order for me to stay motivated and get out of that excuse mentality of I can't do anything right. I've taken it upon myself to make sure that my inputs aren't just an echo chamber. I'm still getting pushed and I'm still learning but I'm also not feeling like I'm not surrounding myself with people who are punching wildly all over, I'm looking for people who were still punching up, who are still trying to make a difference.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Well, and part of this is just the simple recognition that we're not done. There's a country music song that says I'm a work in progress, which is something that I tell my wife on a regular basis. So we're all works in progress, so let's get to work. And to not think that I've got it all figured out. I voted for Obama, so I'm good, but somehow I'm on this side. And that's the binary that we talk about and gender is even a bigger one. I mean, we can talk about trauma associated with gender. I do some CLE trainings with lawyers and I've had so many female attorneys say the impact of showing up again at a deposition and being thought that I was the secretary or the notepaper or the translator. And like, "No, I'm the attorney."
Dr. Randy Blazak:
There was a cumulative impact of that and so for us to sort of understand that we're all part of this process. Like just the language that we use. I had a student this week tell me about who's autistic or use the term neuro-divergent. She said, "Don't refer to me as disabled, I'm neuro-divergent." And I'm like, "Okay." There was a new term for me to incorporate. And so we're constantly on this process and you have to... And the beauty of that is you give yourself permission to be wrong. Nobody's got it perfectly figured out. I had a student this term that said, "How come we say people of color but can't say colored people?" I'm like, "All right, let's talk about that."
Carl:
So about the history of it.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
They want to learn to refer to people how they want to be referred to as. And so that's a process. And part of that process, and this gets to the us versus them thing in the book, is breaking through the binary. It's not those people over there and us over here, it's just us. And we're all figuring this out together, but we're also figuring out how to do it with being less traumatizing and harmful and acknowledging the history of hurt that's there. And so we're on this journey together and that makes it exciting. That's makes it exciting. I don't come in as the expert, I come in as someone who is on this journey, we're all on this journey together. And it's cool because all of a sudden my world is widening. I have so much ableism, I've been drinking a lot of coffee teksik because I stayed up so late watching 90 Day Beyonce, and then I have just been power drinking the coffee. So it is four or three, so I've drank a lot.
Carl:
No, you're great.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
I was going to say like my knowledge about how abelist I am when I say, "Oh, you should walk a mile in my shoes." A lot of people don't walk. And just something as simple as that is an abelist statement. So once you put yourself on that journey of I'm evolving and I'm learning all this stuff, I think it's awesome. It means I'm like no longer the King of the Hill, but let's talk about why I was King of the Hill in the first place, right? There was like 400 years and a thousand years and ten thousand... There's a long history of oppression that put me on the top of the hill. So I'm enjoying sliding down that hill.
Carl:
There you go.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Sliding is fun, right? I mean, when we're kids, we loved to go down.
Carl:
When we're kids we did it all the time.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Let's slide.
Carl:
Exactly. And then suddenly we just want to stay up top. It's not that great up there. Let's see Ashley Kretser. Hey, Ashley, glad that you're here. Do you think the uprising that we're seeing is partly related to the timing of COVID-19 pandemic? In other words, if we weren't in a pandemic the uprising wouldn't be so loud, and this is a great question because we're all at home.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
And there's a couple of pieces to that.
Carl:
Go ahead.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
I mean, the first thing that pops in my head is one of the things that became really clear early on is the COVID had a disproportionate impact on people of color. And it was very clear. I mean, the work that I do is a hate crime person, a person who studies hate crimes, not committing hate crimes.
Carl:
Well, let's see your daughter. We got to wait and see.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Don't encourage her. We saw Asian-Americans being targeted as the source of the Wuhan virus and all that stuff. And then when the data came in about who was being affected the frontline workers are disproportionately black and brown people were getting at a higher rate. So it really revealed the racial imbalance with regards to health inequities. And then on top of that, another like very, very powerful killing of a black man by police officers. And I'll add it to the fact that not only is the impact killing African Americans at a higher rate, but it's also throwing them out of work. So, I mean, it's sort of a perfect storm. I mean, all these things coming together. So I think it's definitely a factor. I mean, we'll have to do the analysis and the surveys to figure out the reality down the road, but it seems like all of this added to the desire to people. And of course one of the things... And then also part of this has been the anti lockdown protests that have been infiltrated by white supremacist-
Carl:
The contrast.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Live with their guns and everybody's saying, well, if a black person marched on the state Capitol with a gun, they'd be dead. We've had a sort of a great time to be a sociologist because day after day we have a lesson about these inequities in our society. And I think it just became too clear for people to see the resistance is still a problem and it green.
Carl:
So one other thing around COVID-19 was, as much as it showed that disparity it also made us all kind of worldwide go through the same thing at the same time. That was just one thing. I know it's like, okay, we're all dealing with a problem at the same time. So does that also kind of level us a little while we're looking?
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Yeah. I mean, I think that's part of it. It has touched everyone in a certain way and it just shows you how quickly... There's all of this going on, but it also shows you how quickly society can change when it wants to. I mean, one of the things we talk about is how in World War II immediately we developed a national daycare system that we had every kid whose mom or dad was working on a ship factory was in a federal daycare. And there was housing built overnight. We had this incredible amount of housing like that. The country changed on that night because we were in a war mode. And so we've seen also a version of that now how quickly things change when we need to, seems like a whole government is relatively on the same page, relatively about the value of shutting down.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
And so there was also the frustration will see when something like this happens, it just happens. It just changes. We don't have to argue about it, the will is there to get it done. So why around some of these other issues isn't the will they are to get those changes done. And I think part of it, like the 1960s, it sort of put everybody in front of the television. And so we've been plugged in whether it's their laptop or their phone or their flat screen TV. All of a sudden we're kind of plugged in. And once we got past Tiger King we started saying, "Hey, what's going on in the world? My gosh."
Carl:
I was only four episodes in, so I don't know if I'm going back.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
I'm still nostalgic for the Tiger King days. It was such a simpler time then.
Carl:
It was a simpler time.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Those were the days.
Carl:
We're going to take a turn and look in Honolulu's direction. Hey, Alan retiree, nice to have you back in the flow. How do we connect all this to our work and team especially for those who compartmentalize work versus life and don't see any relevance. I can go a little deeper on this that Alan was on the call that we had on Monday. And a lot of us were talking about how we talk with our teams about what's going on with racial injustice in the company, do we make a statement? Do we not make a statement? And if we do, what is that? And he had a team member who said, "I don't understand why we're doing this. We build websites."
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Yeah. Well, when we talk about a systemic problem it isn't one system, it isn't policing or it isn't government, or isn't... It is in all systems because all systems are populated by people and all those people internalize the same messages about the world. And so we can find inequity issues in all systems including the way we design things. So a lot of the work I do with the state of Oregon is about getting a hate crime law information to the people.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
And one of the things that we have to think about is we always just assume everybody speaks English and as an aiding native English speaker I don't think, well, there might be some people that are speaking languages that I've never heard of it. So maybe I should think about that a little bit. So part of this is to, again, the reflective piece about how my biases are coming into play here, how am I reproducing a system that looks like me that might block people out? And when we talk about equity, equity is such a... For the last like two or three years it's been such a buzzword. I wish I had a little bell that any time somebody [crosstalk 00:36:26].
Carl:
And a polarizing buzzword too.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Yeah. Right. A lot of people think equity is like hanging up a sign that says, "We don't discriminate. Come join our team." But there are also a lot of people that don't know your team even exists. We want to invite people to the table, but a lot of people don't know that table or even exist or have been sort of not allowed at the tables, so why do I want to go sit at that table? So that means there's outreach that you want to go out and find out what voices are not represented in the conversation it might need to be. We had an experience here in Portland where we had a lot of urban renewal in the city and it usually meant the displacement of people of color.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
We build a highway right through the black neighborhood. We build a stadium right in a black neighborhood. We expanded a hospital. They used to call it, this is a James Baldwin quote, "The urban renewal is Negro removal." That they would just sort of find the black neighborhood and that's where all the new projects were. And so the city finally figured it out, we've gotten this horrible racist history here in Portland and they wanted to sort of recreate this building called the Hill Block building in the black neighborhood and to sort of redo some reparations to repair some of the damage done in the past.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
And so they started planning it and they didn't think to initially invite the people of color to the table to say if even one of the damn building built because they were trying to do good work which is very important without thinking maybe we should talk. I mean, they fixed it since then they have like a little commission and includes the people from the neighborhood, people of color. But the initial impulse was white people know best, we did this bad thing so we're going to go do this good thing and not think about how do we bring people into this team who this is going to affect more directly.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
And so I think on that question is, first of all, anything that you're doing to move the ball of true equity around these issues is a good thing. If you could be a two person bagel shop dealing with these issues is going to be important, but also equity is an action plan. You have to go out and bring people in to the conversation which requires a little bit of work. And that's why a lot of people are like, "I got a couple more episodes of the Tiger King. I'd like to go out and do some community recruitment." But too much work.
Carl:
That's why you hear so many people say and do the work.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
And can I just say something about that? A lot of this is work, like being a white person, confronting racism is hard, being a male person that has to deal with sexism is hard, but you know what? Being a person of color is a lot harder. And being a female in America is a lot harder. And so the black that were like, "Oh my God, I wrote this whole piece because I was having like a fragile moment on my blog about like fatigue of being a progressive." Or like, "Oh, poor me. I should've gotten all my friends at Emory who went to law school or on Wall Street, what am I doing? Like I should have done." Come on. I mean, think about George Floyd's family, right? That is the experience of being a person of color in America. And so for me to have to go out and do some work or do some work on myself, shut up, Randy, just do it.
Carl:
I want to get to another question that's around the workplace and this is around hiring bias. The book talks a little bit about when symphony started doing blind auditions and how that increased the number of women music auditions, they were in orchestras and things like that. The question, a little back straight, they said we've started to put safeguards in place like work first and some blind resume work but I really love to hear what it's the most effective. And as you start to diversify, how do you ensure your new hires don't feel tokenized and that's a whole nother book.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Yeah, there's two questions there. The first is on the hiring itself. I mean, this is where, first of all, we have to have a real clear idea that we have implicit bias, that we have unconscious. I mean, I've been on a lot of university hiring committees and we get down to three qualified candidates. And I know in my head when I'm thinking who of those three I'm going to pick, my thought is, this person I'd like to have a beer with, I can imagine hanging out with this person. I never do have a beer with that person but I kind of have this note and what I'm doing is saying they're sort of like me. I'd like to get to know them better. And therefore I'm excluding the people that aren't like me.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
So to be able to be aware of where implicit bias is at work, just to be really clear about that and try to interrupt it because we're interrupting ourselves, it's like therapy, you get like, "Oh, I've been doing this for years. I got to stop doing this." So to be able to interrupt that bias in those hotspots. I mean, we work with law enforcement, right? And sometimes their implicit bias can be life or death, am I going to shoot the guy or not? If I lobby black as threats, I'm more likely to pull the trigger. So I have to think if I'm going into a situation where I'm going to have my gun drawn, am I going to be working on the lizard brain that says black equals threat? So that part about being really clear about decision making points where implicit bias might be at work is really important.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
The thing about the hiring thing though, is a whole nother challenge. I mean, we have a huge issue here in the Pacific Northwest, especially in Portland about wanting to recruit minority candidates for job positions into a place where guess what, they're not going to feel very welcome. I'm going to invite... I want to hire an African American manager to work at my sports shoe company who's coming with his family and he's got a son who's going to be 16 years old in a year and is going to be driving around this environment where... And so that notion of being tokenized is sort of a... And I've worked with a black urban league that has like a really good perspective on this, which is don't be afraid to see their color.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
The problem is we want to be colorblind and therefore we think that we're woke and we're not judging them by the color of their skin or the content of their character. I mean, we've taken that quote from Dr. King out of context so much. That we need to link those people up with community, with people who are like them, who if there are Cambodian who know where the good Cambodian grocery store is and to connect those people to see their color. Because I think that we're afraid that if we see their color, we're being racist.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
They have to see color, they have to think, am I going to feel safe here? Is my family going to feel welcome? Is our church like my church that I can live near? So we have to have a strategy by which those people, and it could be a minority employee club or something. I mean, something that's institutionalized within the institution to see color. Because we've been trained not to see color, which is a lie. We'll always see color, but to be able to see color, to help those people be able to figure out if they're going to be safe and what their community is going to be once they're hired, it seems counter to like what we've been taught like, don't talk about race.
Carl:
It goes against everything we've been taught. I mean, I think it was Trevor Noah in one of the videos he put out where he was talking about white people are the only race that doesn't talk about race. It's like, if you're somewhere else... And he was talking about a black conversation where somebody says, "Well, Frank's coming by." "Well, black Frank or Chinese Frank?" "Well, Chinese Frank." And it's like just totally normal whereas if that happened in a white conversation and maybe that changes over time, but we'd be like, "Oh my God, I can't believe you said it that way. Why don't you just say his last name?"
Carl:
So that's another thing. We've been from the beginning just not having the conversation and we're not catching up for me much later in life like we're getting here. So I want to go ahead. Let's see, we've got a question here from Wayne, who is our friend in Stone Mountain. Boots on the ground, how do we communicate? Okay. I'm trying to make sure I got this right. How does this communicate that they come from a place of open vulnerability and making clear that we're open probably going to screw it up via micro behaviors, but intentions are good. What's the conversational language? I hope I got that.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Yeah. I get it. Again, I mean, we're on the sort of road and so to be able to have this process of honesty, to be vulnerable, I think especially for men, we're not supposed to be vulnerable or get things wrong. I mean, whoever invented like Google maps, I'm sure was a dude who never wanted to have to ask for directions again, MapQuest. I tell my students, men don't ask for direction. And they're like, "What are you talking about? It's just on your phone." That we're supposed to kind of know it all and be in this position of authority. And so just to acknowledge our... Here's another term that we throw around a lot is ignorant, you're being ignorant is bad. You're ignorant, we're all ignorant.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
I mean, you always don't know more than you know, right? There's all kinds... I know how to speak Swahili or make a souffle. There's lots of things that I don't know about. So to be okay with the ignorance and beyond that sort of learning process to start having those conversations. But we also have to normalize that because we normalize our defensiveness and I know everything. And I mean, this is the folks that we get on in the news, who're just, "I know everything." You never see anybody on CNN or Fox or Windows like, "I don't know. I'm anxious to learn, but everybody comes with this sort of story, they have their pen in their hand always, the prop to show that they know what they're talking about. To be able to say like, "We don't really know, let's learn together."
Dr. Randy Blazak:
And if that was more common than the sort of everybody is kind of an expert and with the definitive answer on everything. I love... There's a great quote from Joseph Campbell about religion, which is, I think I'll put a quote to everything. He says, "He that thinks he knows doesn't know, he that knows he doesn't know, knows." [inaudible 00:46:47] completely gender biased, he should have said, someone, but he's an old white guy. But that notion of being okay with not knowing.
Carl:
He probably didn't know.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
He didn't know that he didn't say he.
Carl:
That's right. All right. Let's see Katie Palmer. Thank you Katie for this question. With tech not truly being an equalizer and blacks making up less than 5% of the workforce in places like Silicon Valley, for those of us doing the DNI work and bringing in more black and AIPAC into our workforce, how do we ensure that there isn't that feeling of tokenism? So we're back to tokenism.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Yeah. Again, it's just this honest conversation about race and to give people and it also could go with regards to disability or for sexual orientation. I mean, trans people get tokenized and gay people get tokenized. So to be able to know that there's a safe space and that people have an honest desire to create an equitable place where everyone is heard. There is a study that came out that said there're people in the workplace who feel they can be totally who they are, whether it's a religion or their sexual orientation or their race or 4.5 times more productive in the workforce. I'm not sure how they measured this, but when they feel like they don't have to... I do a lot of trainings with federal workers and sometimes they'll say, "I can't talk about my religion or I can't talk about being a black man here or I can't talk about being a lesbian here. I have to just leave that at home."
Dr. Randy Blazak:
And that when people can be who they are, they are more productive. So from a purely capitalist perspective to get the worker bees to be more productive when people have a feel like they don't have to hide an element of their personality and that it is welcome there and celebrated without being tokenized that we value... I mean, we know that biodiversity makes things healthier, right? We have an irregular heartbeat. And so we need that sort of mix of ideas and backgrounds. And so when those people are valued but can feel that that space is safe and doesn't require them to sort of not talk about something.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
And there ways of doing that that are inclusive, including just having those honest conversations about these issues. And so when I go in and do trainings often have people of color say, "Oh my God, thank you." Or I have queer people say, "Oh my God, thank you. Because I've felt like I've been suffocated because I'm not allowed to be who I am in this space. And thank you for giving me permission to be here and encouraging my workmates to see me and not be afraid to address these issues." So again, having these conversations.
Carl:
I think that that's excellent advice and it actually brings up something from Daniel Pink's book Drive, where he talks about when we feel like we're treated fairly extrinsically, then we can focus intrinsically. So it's like when that external environment is no longer something I have to keep my eye on because I trust it then I can become a real part of this. Another thing that's come up a few times in the community that I think is to your question a little bit, Katie, is just this understanding that the culture has got to change. If you're going to bring in people that are different than the culture you have. And you have to make room for that and you have to plan for that because otherwise nobody's going to stay for very long if they don't get a chance to be a part of what's happening.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Yeah. And one of the phrases that we've been using is having... It used to be courageous conversations, but having uncomfortable conversations and being okay with that, being willing to not know, like Joseph Campbell being willing to say, "Hey, we have hired a person who's a transgender person, hey, let's have a conversation about this. I mean, how do you feel about the restroom issue here at work?" Let's just deal with it, head on. And that way that person's like, "Wow, they take my issue seriously. They see me." And I know it's difficult because we get very defensive and fragile. I think part of the problem especially with regards to race is just that white people don't want to talk about it and so let's talk about it. And it's going to be awkward and weird, but I think it'll be heard. Awkward and weird that's my high school career.
Carl:
That permission. A friend of mine who grew up in Jack, Willie Jackson, he's in Oakland now doing a lot of consulting around racial justice and diversity. And one of the things he said was that it's totally fine if you want to have your company stay the same. If you're a small company and you're all white and all those things, he's like, that's fine just don't act like you want to change. Don't put things on the website or don't do different things just say, "Okay, this will get this." And I personally think you're going to have a real issue with finding talent in the long run. But it's one of those things I think also I would say, again, back to do the work, it's not enough to interview more people that aren't like your current team. It's not enough to bring in more people that aren't like your current team, you have to change your current team. It has to really change that.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Yeah. Hey Carl, I see this comment on the side of the question from Al about crime and poverty statistics. That is just something that comes up a lot in sociology. So I wanted to address that really quickly, which is Mark Twain once said there are lies, damn lies in statistics. So you can use those statistics out of context to tell any kind of story that you want, ask Donald Trump about the polls and he'll tell you the polls are all wrong. So all those statistics need to be in context where more white people commit crimes but we have a lot of police presence in black neighborhoods. So you're going to get more arrest in black neighborhoods in total, ways of sort of explaining those in context. And so you can throw any statistic out there in the world to make your case. And so I think understanding those things about what drives the property rate, what drives the crime rate are things that you should take a sociology class to learn about. Those statistics have to be understood in context. So I'll just quote Mark Twain and that'll shut them down.
Carl:
There you go. Let's get to Patricia's question. Patricia says white culture is the culture of how people are expected to act in the workplace for the most part, I've been trying to figure out how to get my workplace to understand that we need to be culturally more inclusive so the black people can walk into our organization every day and not have to leave their culture behind. Thoughts on how we do this.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Well, there is a bumper sticker that says celebrate diversity. And I always think the shortcut is always food. You get to people through their... "I don't like Chinese people." "Well, I saw you eating Chinese food." "Oh, I like those Chinese people." So understanding the contribution that different groups make to our culture is sort of the way in. And so I mean, it's a tough thing because it is about changing culture and what is the normal culture. And so part of that, I mean, my piece of this answer is about acknowledging in a kind of like the idea of black history month, but sort of acknowledging how we are a product of our diverse culture that makes us more vibrant, that our diverse culture makes things more interesting.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
I was at an apartment with of a neo-Nazi. It was in his apartment and he had a bunch of [inaudible 00:54:38] a big Nazi flag on the wall and in his favorite TV show was the Family Guy. And he had like all the seasons of the Family Guy on DVD. And I said, "Man, you like the show?" "Yeah. It's so great." I'm like, "Let's look at the back. Let's look at who made this show. I thought these names sound like they might be kind of a Jewish sounding names." He's like, "Oh." Like if you had your world, these people would not exist and you probably wouldn't have the show that you love. And he is like, "Oh."
Dr. Randy Blazak:
It was just a little way in to help him see, even though I foe these ideas actually I'm benefiting from... He was in love with that woman from that 70s show Mila Kunis, I think her name is. And I'm like, "She's Jewish." And he was, "No. Don't." This was like his favorite celebrity crush. And it just crushed him. I'm like, "Don't dude." So when we sort of celebrate diversity, when we sort of can help people realize that it benefits all of us.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
One quick little story. I got called to this high school because there were these skinheads in the classroom, these racists, this kid had made a scale model of Auschwitz for his history project. And I was having lunch with the students and one of the skinheads was eating a bagel and the other one was eating a peanut butter sandwich. And I'm like, "You guys are the worst Nazis I've ever seen. Bagel comes from Jewish culture. Peanut butter was invented by George Washington Carver, you guys should be eating like bratwurst or something." And they're like, "What?" And one of those kids contacted me and he's like, "I was really thinking about what you're saying Randy and I love peanut butter. I don't want to give it up." Because that little thing for him was a window into seeing, what else am I not seeing about the diverse nature of my culture and how I benefit from it? So peanut butter that's the solution or the problem.
Carl:
That is fascinating. That's like absolutely fascinating that a bagel and peanut butter. All right, well, we're coming up at the end of our time together, we've got a couple more questions I want to get out there and I thank everybody for staying with us. One is when we look at bias training, What are the best options? Katie had had a question here and some other people had reached out and asked the videos or other things, a lot of stuff feels out of touch. What do you think is the best way to train a team?
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Yeah. Well, the quick answer is the reflective piece to get people to engage in reflection on their own experiences. I do an experiment assignment with my students where I have people write about their experience with oppression and with privilege because we've all had some element of that. If you're a native English speaker, you've had privilege. If you're right handed, you've had privilege. If you are cisgendered, you have privilege but you've also had the experience of being oppressed, even if it was being a young person. When a young person is like, "Nobody listens to me." So to have an assignment where people get to sort of reflect on both of those elements of their experience and how that felt and how they benefited from privilege, usually you don't even see it. Like right-handed people do not see right-handed privilege but left-handed people see it.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
So to be able to reflect on those things as a way of building empathy with other people who don't have the same privileges that you have. And that's sort of one of the ways that I've tried to work. So to get people to start having those conversations. I talk a lot about right-handed people because it's an easy way. Right-handed people don't see the benefit that they have and left-handed people don't hate them for it. They don't think they're bad people. It's just an unexamined advantage that you have in our society. We had a student who was a national guards person and she said even the safeties on her rifle were set up for right-handed people. So as a left-handed person, she had to kind of go over the gun and that might be problem. That might be something that the US military should look at.
Carl:
That could be. And all I can think about is scissors. And every time somebody left-handed had to use scissors and I have to watch the awkwardness of... Because of scissors were-
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Even our smartphones are set up for right-handed people. I mean, there's just so many. I had ever a conversation with the left-handed person and went down the whole list of things like how you sit in a restaurant and how cars are set up and on and on and on. My dad is left-handed. So I have a little bit of empathy, but he's a little bit of a jeopardist. We had a hardware store one time when I was a kid and he asked me to go over and ask them if they had any left-handed hammers and I did. And I'm like, "You're oppressing left-handed people." They were like, "There's no such thing as left-handed hammer." My dad was just laughing.
Carl:
That's amazing. The last question I had, and it kind of gets back to the book, reading the book and I do recommend it for everybody if you're getting started, it will help you understand where your biases are. And they start off really gentle, at the end they get a little bit... They're really making their case at the end about really important stuff. But the question I have is, is there any newer research? A lot of people talk about how this book's a little bit old. Is there anything new going on that we should be paying attention to?
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Well, the latest research is on sort of the ways of interrupting implicit bias, how we learn these things very early on and how you sort of learn to rewire the brain. And people who are addicts learn to rewire the brain. I mean, you're working on a cognitive level. And so there is research about sort of being able to... And this all sounds very therapeutic, being able to sort of recognize when those things are happening and redirect the thoughts and it requires work. I mean, anybody who's gone through addiction counseling knows that there's a lot of labor involved, but the new research now is about how we kind of can switch to the other like the fork in the road. Because it's kind of go to that one and to look at sort of what we call mindfulness. I mean, that's a very broadful term, but the notion of being mindful of our own biases and sort of retraining the brain to switch away from the implicit bias. So that's fascinating and a lot of that is being done at Harvard right now.
Carl:
Okay, great. Well, Randy, I can't thank you enough for being here today.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
It's been great, really fun.
Carl:
And help races as we figure things out. Anything as the final words?
Dr. Randy Blazak:
My wife told me, mention your website, randyblazak.com. So if you're interested in the work that we're doing here in Portland, please feel free to find me or contact me. You can connect to me through that website. Shoot me a message.
Carl:
Well, that sounds great. Randy, thank you so much once again. Everybody who tuned in today, thank you for taking the time to be with us today. We will get this video posted and the podcast out. And with that once more, I want to thank MailChimp, Invision and Platform.sh for all they do for us and get on with your weekend. And once again, remember get some rest. This is a long effort that we've got ahead of us and we need to make sure we keep ourselves healthy so we can do good for the world. Talk to everybody later. Thanks again, Randy.
Dr. Randy Blazak:
Yeah, sure thing.
