Transcript: JOHN A. POWELL on Institutions of Othering and Radical Belonging [ENCORE] /329
Ayana Young Welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young.
john a. powell How do we make these structures work for all of us? What do we think about structural inclusion and structural belonging? I'll give you a concrete example, I use this a lot, it's like, we build the escalator to get people from one floor to the other and then someone comes along in a wheelchair. So the system we built doesn't work for that person, and so it looks like that person is asking for something special, but that person is asking for what everyone else was asking for, the resources and support to fully participate in society as a person and as a human being to contribute, but what people need to get there or groups needs to get there, is going to be different.
Ayana Young Today, we are speaking with john a. powell. john is the Director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, and Professor of Law, African American and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He was previously the Executive Director at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University, and the Institute for Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota. Prior to that, john was the National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He is a Co-Founder of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, and serves on the board of several national and international organizations. john led the development of an opportunity based model that connects affordable housing to education, health, health care and employment, and is well known for his work developing the frameworks of targeted universalism, and other and belonging to affect equity based interventions. John has taught at numerous law schools, including Harvard and Columbia University, his latest book is Racing to Justice: Transforming our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society. Well, john, thank you so much for joining us today on For The Wild Podcast. This is a real treat for so many of us on the team that have been really looking forward to this conversation.
john a. powell Thanks for having me. Thanks for doing this.
Ayana Young So what I've been learning is that much of your work focuses on the acts and practices of othering and belonging. So I'm hoping to ease ourselves into this conversation, you could begin by clarifying the terminology of othering and belonging, and then more specifically, speak to the difference between othering at a personal or individual level versus at the institutional level, or through structures of power.
john a. powell Well, thanks for the question. So othering is any practice that denies someone their full humanity and their dignity, so it's based on the assumption that either we're better than certain people, or certain people are irrelevant. And at its extreme, it also suggests, some people are dangerous. The other is somehow a threat to our way of life, who we are, our economy, that's an extreme form of othering and out of that oftentimes comes violence. So the thing about othering, which is both interesting and useful, is that it applies across the board. So we're looking at race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or religion, and many others. Other in an individual level, and all of us have some slight where we go to a party and dress wrong, or someone doesn't like the fact that we're vegetarian or not vegetarian, those are individual and you've got to sort of walk away. In a sense, they're transitory, but when you're institutional it's ongoing, and there is a power differential, so when you think about if someone slights me, that's one thing. If someone doesn't give me a loan to buy a house, the implications are much greater. If someone doesn't return, my phone call it's one thing, but if the police grab me in the middle of the street it's quite different. So we live in institutions where most of us don't have that much contact with other people, and we do have a lot of contact through institutions. And so much of the arrangement of othering in the United States, at least until recently, has been through institutions. There's also personal and there's also the intrapersonal, which is that there's a ton of other aspects of ourselves. And so there may be a part of myself that I'd like to acknowledge or beat up on it, maybe properly because I'm trying to change but it's a problem when we don't see the full humanity of life expression across the board and I oftentimes say that intervention for othering is not saving. So some people go from, "Well, no we're all just human beings. We're all human beings" I wouldn't say we're just human beings. We are symbolic animals. We're spiritual animals, we're animals, but we're spiritual and symbolic. And the symbols we've organized around and are all the same. And they're important to us. So the Jewish tradition just celebrated Seder. Many of us don't know what Seder even means and so part of belonging and really seeing people acquires actually also seeing their differences and the differences may not be categorical that is they're not, we're born with them, and they shift. But we do have differences and so to really, counter othering, and embrace belonging we also have to acknowledge that people have differences.
Ayana Young So the creation of the United States and the concept of America or American has historically relied on the process of othering in order to define itself. However, some might point out that this is much more visible in the presence of the current administration. And you've pointed out that globally, ethnonationalism, for example, is on the rise, which leads me to think about how in the aftermath of Trump's inauguration, many were quick to hone in on economic disenfranchisement as the catalyst for his success, but this conclusion fails to take into account the global rise of many Trump like figures and ethno nationalist groups. So I'm wondering if you could speak to this period of global anxiety and perhaps how othering engages with but also act separate from economic change?
john a. powell Sure, there are many things that are causing both dislocation in our society and the world today. And there's certainly issues around economy, but I would argue that, broadly speaking, there are four tracks, one: climate change, two: technology, three: globalization, and four: demographics. You could have economics in there, but I don't think it is necessary. These dynamics happen all over the world, that is globalization, climate change, demographic concern, and technology. So when we're exposed to a lot of change, it actually creates anxiety at the biological level and that's true for any mammal, so if you take any mammal and change their environment, put stress or anxiety onto their system, and because we're symbolic animals, it's, we actually live in stories. And so when this anxiety starts happening, we don't know how to react to it until we have a story. And there are two dominant stories. One is what I call a bridging story, and one is what I call a breaking story, and they're usually told by a leadership of a movement or country, someone people look up to. So the breaking story is that these changes are threatening, and particularly the change, demographic change or possible demographic change, and one of the responses says, "we're going to stop this change, we're going to stop the demographics, we're going to restore safety." The world is scary, there's uncertainty. So you literally want authority. You want someone who's authoritative, who can say, without questions, that things are gonna be okay. And so that's a lot of what's happening around the world. The whole world is experiencing globalization, technology, environment, and concern about demographics, the whole world is not experiencing an economic crisis. In fact, the United States in some measures is not experiencing an economic crisis, it's experiencing an inequality crisis, but no economic crisis. Apparently, most measures are doing quite well, and were doing quite well in 2016, during the election. Also, if you look at the data, people who voted for Trump and the white, upper middle class, Trump's base was very white, but white upper middle class voted for him, so it wasn't just high school dropouts or poor people, and it's almost across the board. White women voted for him, white millennials voted for him. He tapped into deep profound white anxiety, he tapped into that, in that white anxiety is also anxiety about the changing demographics, but people reflectively think of this as a Christian country, so the breaking story of those people are a threat to you. The bridging story would be yes, the world is changing, technology is changing, but you're going to have a place in it and life is going to have meaning in it. You're going to be okay, we brace for people by listening to their dreams also by listening to their suffering and through that we experienced a shared humanity. And before Trump, a lot of the breaking was strategic, but subliminal. You saw, for example, George Bush talked about Willie Horton, Ronald Reagan talked about the welfare queen, everyone said they're talking about Black people. But what Trump does is talk about those people coming from the border, it's a central part of his thing. He actually attacks Muslims, he surrounds himself with people who have a long history of being explicitly racist, who believe in the hierarchy of beings, who believe white people are at the top of the food chain. So yes, he's actually said things that people may have felt a little bit, but instead of offering the world where we share it with others, he's saying, America first, we're taking you back to a past that never was and this past is implicitly when there weren't many People of Color, when there wasn't a Barack Obama, and in a sense, this past never existed. This never was a white country, there were Native people here when Columbus landed, so the point is that these are stories, and it's not just reflecting what we are experiencing, it helps shape what we're experiencing and who we are.
Ayana Young Thinking about Trump and the specificities of our country and culture. I'm especially attuned to the power of language when it comes to both the act of othering and the rise of fascism. All dictators understand the weight of words in shaping our understanding and perception of reality, or perhaps non reality. And I think of Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher who also fled Nazi Germany who wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism, and she wrote "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false no longer exist." So I'm hoping we could contextualize this quote in terms of collective anxiety, and breaking versus bridging, you know, how can bridging and the language of belonging serve as an antidote to what Arendt references?
john a. powell I'm a student of hers as well, and she actually says one of the first things that died in an authoritarian government is the truth. And I think it's been well documented that Trump lies profusely. He's a liar. It's also interesting that his base essentially doesn't care. I mean, sometimes they've literally interviewed people and they said, "Yeah, well we know he lies." In a sense, they're looking for a savior, so they're willing to put up with a lie. You think about how powerful his base is among Evangelicals, he is someone who's on his third or fourth marriage, obviously credible claims of seeing a prostitute while he's married, you would think that would sink him, but it doesn't. People make a lot of excuses, like, he's been set by God and God uses a perfect vessel and stuff like that. But the truth of the matter is, he speaks to their anxiety about race and part of the antidote is for us who don't believe that world is organized by hierarchy among people, who don't believe that you can judge someone just by the the shade of their skin, who actually believe in the dignity of all people, except for us to not only tell good stories, but to engage and show bridging practices, we need to really think about this on multiple levels. How do we bridge with each other? I call those short bridges where we actually bridge with people who share many of our values or concerns, but yet, we may still not be able to work with them, we may still not be able to sort of talk to them. You see this, I mean there are all kinds of splits, within the gay community, there are splits between gays and trans, between the Black community, sometimes between the American-born Blacks and Blacks born outside of the United States, so there are all these ways in which we can split. So bridging doesn't say these splits go away, or we all become the same. It says, we listen to each other and I'm not willing to completely condemn you as a human being because you disagree with me on any number of things. Now I may strongly disagree with some policies, but I also strongly hold on to our humanity, our ability to care and see each other connected. We don't have many practices. I mean, it sounds simple. And you can do this on an individual level, but you could also do it at a national level, or international level, you can say to people, so for example, in Canada, 1% of their population a year are new immigrants, they give them a social pass to ride trains, to go to museums, to expose them to cultural features. They give them a health pass and they can go to any hospital in Canada. Those are institutional ways of saying you belong. The way the police representing the state interact with citizens do people feel like this is my police? Or is this somebody else's police? The way we sort of organize money we will literally say to certain groups, either you don't have access to money, or it's going to cost you a lot more money to have access to money. You know, up until recently, I think when Tiger Woods started playing golf, there were a number of golf courses he couldn't go to because Blacks weren't allowed. Some of them were not allowed. So these are institutional, and we have to sort of address those, but we also have to be willing to bridge even with people who are on the other side, who are involved with these things. Because again, the two dominant stories in the world today, and that is we need a small "we" and everybody else's other. And basically, we're better than other people. And we need to protect ourselves from those other people. And so we have a small "we" and that's what a Trump represents, America as a small "we." And then there is a large "we", which recognizes that we're connected to each other, with people outside the country, we're connected to the Earth, we have a relationship that's not hierarchical, and these stories about a large "we" and so those are the two dominant competing narratives right now, we have a small we, ethnic nationalism, authoritarian, or we have a large "we." And the promise of a large "we" in the past had been globalization, globalization the way it actually developed became a bank for the elites, the idea, and it showed no respect for the local. So it made some serious mistakes, but one author calls globalization minus meaning, in a sense minus the people, but can we have a different kind of globalization where our structures actually serve people, and we still also respect the local. So those are the big challenges we haven't resolved, we're going to go up against this for a while, we're going to be doing both.
Ayana Young So in response to the far rights tactic of stoking the flames of difference as a means to pass policy and legislation, the so-called progressive left almost automatically or maybe even unconsciously, reacts by reminding us that we are all the same. But you point out that this notion of saming and you've mentioned it in this conversation so far, can in many ways be just as detrimental, or at the very least, is not a long term solution. So how does saming bypass the necessary and transformative practice of bridging?
john a. powell Well, it's a very good question and I think the left is probably traditionally more likely to embrace the idea of saming and you know, it starts off with the notion of colorblindness, could be anything, gender-blindness, ability-blindness, and at least some of it comes from maybe a decent impulse, like, you know, we shouldn't see, race shouldn't be important. Gender shouldn't be important. But the word is the operative word shouldn't be because it is important. And we know both at the conscious and unconscious level, most Americans, even "white Americans" who grew up in all white areas, are obsessed with race, think about it at the unconscious level all the time. One of the first things the unconscious does when he meets a person is categorized by race, faster than the conscious can even come online, and not just categorize, it actually affects our behavior. And so part of the problem, you think about Black Lives Matter when people say, all lives matter, yes, of course, all lives matter, but all lives are not being shot down by the politics, as far as I know, in last several years, there hasn't been one white person who complained they were shot, because they are white, we have this notion of hate crime, which says, if everybody was the same, in every situation, we wouldn't have hate crimes. But when you hurt someone, because of their sexual orientation, it is a double hurt, is the hurt, the physical heart, and it's also the emotional, psychological hurt. And we can recognize that. And so the charge that we are all the same, while sounds good, actually erases some people, erases the needs, contexts, and situations of most people. Because when we say we're all the same, the assumption is, we're all the same as me, the dominant group, and which means I don't have to pay attention to your particularities or your needs, which is sort of a soft, soft form of bigotry, if you will.
Ayana Young There's been a resurgence of interest around our understanding of citizenship, especially in the last three or four years. And while I'd argue that citizenship has always been contested in this country, and certainly manufactured and manipulated at the whims of the political elite, in service to the creation of the nation state, I think that many are for the first time questioning what citizenship should mean, as the world experiences climate change, globalization, and even the furthering of technology. And I'm specifically thinking back to something you shared at the Othering and Belonging Conference in Oakland this past month, and you said, "We're taking stuff from all over the world, but telling people you have to stay put. We're disrupting systems and climates all over the world, and then saying, you have to stay put, we're taking oil from the Middle East, we're telling the people in the Middle East, your oil can come but you can't. We're taking minerals from Africa and saying, we need your minerals to build cell phones, but we don't need your people. We have this global consumption. And at the same time, we're trying to shut the door on people. When people try to follow their stuff, then they become the problem." So I'd really love to begin by asking you how you are rethinking citizenship?
john a. powell That is a great question. I mean, you know, this concept of citizenship, and really many times, people have been citizens of countries for a long time. But it's taken on particular meaning only last couple of 100 years where, because, you know, ancient England or France, people were subjects, and they didn't have much in the way of rights and the Magna Carta was a big step forward to saying no people have rights, and they should be respected. But when we started this current strategy, or experimentation with nation states, it's only a couple 100 years old, especially with democracy, there were a whole bunch of assumptions. The assumption, in part, was that our economies are national, and pretty much self contained. Our environment is national, and pretty much self contained. So the idea of boundedness, to some extent, made sense, never completely made sense, but it makes some sense, but as we sort of came further, further into the 19th, and 20th century, in the 21st century, we started recognizing that not only do people move, but products move, and that's a good thing. If you think about human beings, and if we didn't know we'd all still be in East Africa. Human beings move, and we move for opportunity. People didn't leave Africa because they wanted to explore Europe, they left Africa because their conditions changed in terms of food and climate, people followed opportunity. What we've done in the United States and around the world, is we've actually tried to extract the benefit of movement, the things that benefit the elites, but then tell people, they can't move. Now that we think about it, it's interesting, because the European experiment was just the opposite. Or they said things can move, but so can people, so they make their borders more porous. And so we're trying to have it both ways when we say we want all the technology around the world, we want all the minerals, we want all the stuff, but we don't want people. That case creates a structural imbalance and structural inequality. In some sense, we're denying the fact that freedom for people to begin to think about staying, they need their stuff, they need to benefit from their stuff. And so you have this argument from economists for much of 100 years saying, it's better when we have open doors, we trade together, that may be true, that it's better for home. And we can't grow the global economy. And not only tell people that can leave, and also people not reap the benefits of that growth. The last thing I'll say on that is the fear of the other, which is interesting. You can think of colonialism and imperialism, as another expression of what we're talking about now. That is we go to someone's country, we disrupt their land, we disrupt a culture, we disrupt our identity. What conservatives are worried about now is that people are coming to our country, quote, unquote, and they're disrupting our identity, disrupting our land. And, you know, the same argument is the same as that. We don't want to be disrupted. We don't want our identities. No one ever did. You know, people in Africa didn't want that, people in Latin America didn't want that, but we've already done it, we've done it to the benefit of certain countries. So the concern, to some extent, makes sense that people are feeling anxious about all the change. The solution, though, is not a real solution, the dynamics is creating that disability or that this disequilibrium is going to continue, even if we were capable of building borders, even if we're capable of building walls. So part of the thing is, we need a new way of thinking about citizenship, we need a way where there's some parallel between stuff and people, we need to recognize that we need a way of sharing the earth with all people and with the rest of the earth. And it's not the United States that has this corner. I mean, we have bases literally all over the world, we sort of see the world as our playground. And then it's yet we have this, this idea that and under Trump, at least, America is only for really white Europeans.
Ayana Young And there's this entitlement that comes with the conditioning of being especially a white American, that white Americans should be entitled to have anything they want anywhere in the world, and not take care of the people, or the places, the land, the waters that provide all of these luxury items or creature comforts. So I really get chills when I think about that and reading that quote that you had from the conference just last month. It's powerful and very deep. Well, I'd like to transition into a conversation around identity politics and the short sightedness of those who refuse to engage with the role of identity specifically, that it's not race, it's class argument. I'm wondering how race and class are inextricably linked and how is class a fundamentally racialized creation? And how can we engage with this topic in a manner that allows us both to recognize that, yes, the neoliberal class is exploiting identity politics, but the momentum building around class is largely a means to address the white working class.
john a. powell That's right. That's right. I mean, that is all right. So it's interesting because in my assessment, Americans don't understand race or class. And the effort to move to class oftentimes is an effort to avoid dealing with the concerns and demands of People of Color, of trans people, or women is basically no, we're not going to deal with issues that everybody cares about, which is actually not accurate, right? Because people are not situated the same. So we may all care, what is it that we all care about? The environment? No, no, I wasn't talking about the environment, I was talking about the economy. There are obviously things that we all depend on. We depend on the environment. We depend on the economy, we also depend on a certain amount of human dignity and belonging. And so on one hand, the assumption that we should only care about the economy is oftentimes driven by concerns of the white working class, as if we focus on the issue of Black people, the white working class won't like it. If we focus on the issue of marriage equality, the whites, Christians won't like it. So what we're actually doing is not only saying we're going to set the agenda, which is going to be just the economy. We're also saying we're giving conservative whites a veto over things that are important to other people. There's a Nobel economist, he noted that when you attack people based on a certain axis, that axis becomes extremely important. So in the 30s, when they're lynching Blacks, it's understandable that lynching is going to become a huge issue for Blacks, but some whites are saying, well we are fighting a war, there are all of these other issues, which are important too. But if you're lynching people, that's going to become a salient issue. And it should be relatively easy for liberal or progressive whites to say, yes, we have to pay attention to how other people are being excluded and otherized, whether it's through rape, sexual touching, whether it's through police brutality, children being locked up at the border, pipelines going to people's country. So you can't tell people who are literally fighting life and death things to keep those things in abeyance while we deal with a big issue. That's just wrong. I mean, so when people make comments about identity politics, like I said, we can't engage in what is called identity politics in a way that's disruptive. That's actually when they turn to breaking politics, or when I'm not saying my issues are important, your issues are not important. Those are breaking politics, but to say your issues are important and so our mind, that's not breaking. So yes, I don't worry about being accosted on the streets at night, but most of my women friends do. For me to say, that's not an issue because that's not an issue for me, you know, I don't really worry about being homeless, but I know 1000s of people in the United States are homeless. Part of this is kind of group based egotism, I only care about what affects me directly, and that's all you should care about, too. And I hope that the Democratic Party, in essence, has matured enough, because, frankly, if running away from race was not simply saying the economy is most important. When I start doing that, when I saw how the Republicans were effectively using race, it's only being used by one side. The other side, Democrats, largely have been afraid. It's like, "No, we can't talk about that, they can talk about it, they are talking about it. But if we talk about it, we'll get blasted by our white base." And that says, you haven't developed your white base well, and increasingly, shouldn't feel threatened because People of Color are doing better. It's not a zero sum game. And part of it is to make that story clear, we're not talking about helping Latinos and not helping Blacks, helping Blacks but not helping Native Americans, helping men but not helping women, we're talking about everybody. And that's the story we need to be taught, but everybody recognizes people need different things. So not everybody's gonna do one thing, because one thing is not gonna affect everybody in a positive way. So we have to be much more attentive as to how people are situated. And I refer to that as targeted universalism.
Ayana Young I have so many questions, based on that response. And I don't really know how to frame it right now, because I do see the complexity that everybody's problems need to be heard. Because they're all different. I, it's hard to say that there is a hierarchy of issues, but I think probably, there is but who gets to decide that? Then again, we're like mired in these complications of dominance. And, and then, and then I feel like we kind of swirl into this crash, this crashing moment of well, how do we even start? Or where do we even begin to look at all these issues at once? And who's deciding which issues are prioritized? And you don't have to answer that question, because it's not really a well formed one, but I definitely feel-
john a. powell I think part of it is you don't prioritize, but here's the thing, people who are most marginal, we have to make sure their stories are centered. So we have a meeting, for example, oftentimes, I live in Berkeley, oftentimes, if you're middle class myself, it's easy for me to get there. A lot of people that can get off work, they don't have a car if they do get off work. So it's like, just having a meeting is not making it accessible. What do I need to do to make things accessible to make it meaningful for our groups, and we have the concept that comes from belonging as belonging, which is different than inclusion, belonging is about co-creating a thing you're joining. So yes, some groups have a history of actually having a big voice. We're not saying we want them to be silent. We want their voice to step back and let other voices come forward. And so we live in structures and how do we make these structures work for all of us? What do we think about structural inclusion and structural belonging? And the concrete example, I use this a lot, it's like, we build an escalator to get people from one floor to the other, and then someone comes along in the wheelchair. So the system we go in doesn't work for that person. And so it looks like that person is asking for something special. But that person asked for what everyone else was asking for, the resources and support to fully participate in society as a person and as a human being to contribute. But what people need to get there, what groups need to get there are going to be different. And so there's not an absolute priority, but there's recognizing that some people are more on the edge then others. And in some, it's not even issues, it is issues, but it really starts with respect to human dignity. Once I really respect and care about people, then they'll tell you what they need. And you know, but if those people don't count, or those people aren't visible, that becomes a priority. When we change the structure, oftentimes, we change the most marginal, everybody else benefits. Think of curb cuts, curb cuts for people largely in wheelchairs, but if you have a roller bag and catch the plane, if you have a baby stroller, you use curb cuts, if you have a scooter, you use curb cuts. So oftentimes when you change the structure for the most marginal, it also benefits everybody else along the way.
Ayana Young This next question is around white supremacy and I've been thinking, thinking back enslaved Africans who were forced to the British colonies in 1619, meaning that this year actually marks the 400th year since enslaved people were forced to the United States and this act has fundamentally shaped this country in a multitude of ways. And I know I've heard you previously speak to Toni Morrison's work, where she poses the question around what has slavery done to white people? And so I want to broach this question around whiteness, supremacy, and separation when it comes to whiteness as an ideology. And I'm simultaneously thinking about the invisibility, the privilege, and torment of whiteness, you know, I think privilege in the benefits of white people reap in our racial system, invisibility, in its assumed status as the norm and torment in the inherent perversion that comes from benefiting from a system of dehumanization. And so I know, this is a huge question. But I'm hoping to ask you to speak to the necessity of a different sense of understanding of whiteness, and how that is a part of liberating us from ideologies of dominance and hierarchy.
john a. powell That's a great question. A couple of things, I would assert that a lot of the ideology of dominance comes from anxiety and fear. And so part of this is to think about what is the underlying anxiety and fear. And I would say, whiteness as an ideology has all these apparent benefits, but actually has all of these problems associated with it as well. If you think of a small thing, we like what ethnic nationalists do today, and it's not just wrong whiteness, sometimes around Hinduism In India, or around, you know, religion, or the way people talk. So whiteness is the expression that takes dominant form in the United States and with organizing around race and some other important axis, but it can take on any axis as one of the things that's important. But when you have an axis where you have a small, we, and associated with that lots of times is this claim that the we is pure, now think about that. If you're in a world where you need purity, you're in a constant state of anxiety, you need to wear a face mask, probably to never go outside, it's not a good life. In a sense, whiteness sort of wrapped itself up with this idea of purity, of innocence, in a world that's very messy. And so what do you do in a world that is messy, when you need order, we need a particular order, you move to dominance, but the world never quite behaves, and people never quite behave, which means your anxiety about the world being out of control is even more interesting. And it was recently a study on anxiety and found that America, an industrially advanced country, was one of the most anxious, unhappy countries on earth. So we all know by now that the stuff about the increase in white suicide. So a friend of mine, David Roediger, wrote a book called Wages of Whiteness, playing off of W.E.B Dubois and I've been saying to David he needs to write a new book called the Declining Wages of Whiteness, because the benefits associated with whiteness is actually I think, in a fairly steep decline and it should be, but the burden is ascending and the benefit is declining. And it actually shows up in some ways in terms of white anxiety. It's like, yes, the world of white dominance is slipping away, it should slip away, not slip away. We should send it out, a big party, but here's the thing, what will take its place? And I will say white culture in the United States and England, but even more, doesn't have much experience, England has more experience having lost its colonies, of what it means to be white and not dominate what it means to be white and be a co-partner with the rest of the Earth. Whiteness has not meant that. And so part of it is that, can we have a new expression, a new story, where no group is dominating, because this is not trading one group or the other. We're not saying whites step back, now People of Color are going to dominate, we're not saying men step back, now women are gonna dominate, we're saying, can we actually imagine a society a world where we're not dominating, not dominating each other, and we're not dominating nature, or trying to dominate nature, and the jury's out. But we've had some positive experiences. The E.U. was an effort in that way. And so the role of elitism is an important discussion because white supremacy and white privilege has always actually been a misnomer. In some respects. It's only you could say, a privilege and supreme in relationship to People of Color, and that may sound obvious, but it's not privileged and supremacy in relationship to the elite. In fact, pretty clear, the elites consider themselves better than what's called the middle stratum. So what we actually call white people are the middle stratum. And that stratum is being squeezed and should be squeezed, that stratum has been reluctant to identify and work with the people at the very bottom and aspire to be part of the top. So that's the thing, we also have to break that aspiration. It's like no, you know, we have to actually challenge the top itself. And we have to build the society, which is people alone without people being dominated. Now, the good news is a number of whites indicate in some social science research, that's where they're leaning. But we don't have a story, we're gonna have practice. The numbers are probably around 35-40%. But how do we get those numbers up? How do we actually institutionalize that? How do we actually make it real? So we have, again, a future where we all belong.
Ayana Young I know that these conversations are more often than not uncomfortable, especially because white people are not taught to or forced to talk about race. And so there's a lot of white fragility that can come up for people. And additionally, the conversations that are happening and the narratives presented in the mainstream refuse to confront the structure and the systems that perpetuate white supremacy. So I'd like to ask you both the importance and necessity of being uncomfortable, and then how we can contribute and create conversations that confront structural racism and the reality that we are a country that has and continues to devalue life in so many ways.
john a. powell I completely agree. I would expand it though, because we need policies, we need practice, we need perception, we need stories. So it's not just conversations, we need all of those things happening at the same time. And they're not always sequential. It's not like "Well, first I'll figure all this stuff out and then I go out there" a lot of times we're learning what we're doing. And yeah, there's certainly more to whiteness than just the anxiety. I totally agree with that. But the anxiety is very deep and the ideology, we see it framed right now, I would say that Trump is an expression of that. And the expression of trying to go back to an imaginary past, that never was and never will be. So when that fails, and it will fail, will it fail in such a way that destroys our planet? Will, you know, will there be a war, can there be a soft landing, I don't know. In terms of being uncomfortable, there's a study people use. You have three concentric circles, the inner circles are completely calm and relaxed. And the next circle, the middle circle, there's some tension and anxiety, discomfort. And in the third circle, there's complete panic and anxiety. And what the gist of it is, the generative circle is the middle circle, completely at ease, which we need a time to recharge our body to heal. But then we need to get back out there and learn. You know, if you go to the gym, and you never push yourself so that you have any discomfort, it's going to be a long process of getting a shake. So part of it is to have some tension, some discomfort, but enough that you're, again, these physical analogies, you push your body, but if you push it too much you rip the muscles. So in a sense, you want to control stress, you want some tension, but you don't want it to be where the person is actually doing harm. So that's the balance we're trying to get, when people say we want a safe place, I say well not too safe, you didn't come here to take a nap. But also there's a danger some time of people sort of turning on each other and thinking that to be uncomfortable, to essentially break, is value in and of itself. That's an abandonment of being real or being in sometimes people defend it, I'm just being real honest, telling my story. And I say we all have multiple stories. And we have to decide which one to share and what and why we're sharing. And so the goal is not to make people comfortable. But the goal should not be to just to attack people either. And I often say be hard on structures and soft on people, in terms of I talked a lot to people all over the country, including white people. And I never start with white supremacy and white privilege. I get to that, but I don't start there. Because the way to get people into a conversation is you acknowledge their own anxieties and frustrations and suffering. So if I can just sort of start talking to people about essentially how, what a rotten history they're a part of, most of them are going to close up and everybody is not symmetrical. There's a power imbalance, but everybody has pain and the way we actually invite people into a conversation is to also acknowledge their pain without equating it to other people's pain. And so I think sometimes our desire to have this conversation means we rush too fast to, in a sense, not recognize someone else's pain, and want them to recognize ours. That generally doesn't go well.
Ayana Young Thinking about, you know your work with the Haas Institute at UC Berkeley, and it serves as a hub for organizers and policymakers and researchers to, "identify and eliminate the barriers to an inclusive just and sustainable society in order to create transformative change", and I saw that one issue that the Haas Institute devotes a significant amount of energy towards is that of creating new economic structures, not just economic inclusion, and that feels like a topic that is so central to so many conversations I've had. So I'm curious to hear you speak on how it is possible to simultaneously incorporate systematically disenfranchised communities into the economic system, while also navigating this understanding that we're moving into an era where we'll see mass ecological collapse due to that same economic system. So how do we foster economic wellbeing for communities, especially with the understanding that belonging is indeed impacted by economic structures, while ensuring we do not support the continuation of catastrophic capitalism?
john a. powell Again, another great question. Joseph Stiglitz basically said, our current economic crisis is not economic, it is political. And by that he means we've made choices. There's no such thing as a free market. All markets are regulated and should be regulated and they can be over regulated, they can be unregulated, they can be regulated badly. But without regulations, we don't have money. Money is only an agreement that comes from a regulation. Most people don't remember that, that if you have money in your pocket, you have part of the regulated economy in your pocket. And the question is, how do we actually make it work for everyone, and not just ultimately everyone in the United States, but everyone in the world. By some accounts, our current aspirations in terms of use of natural resources, the way we use natural resources, and in a sustainable way, requires at least 1.5 planets, we only have one. So what happens to the .5, and that number is probably going up. And so part of this is to think about not just communities, but that's certainly important, but also think about the planet. And the fact that we have a growing number of billionaires is also problematic in the sense that oftentimes that money from not just individuals or corporations distort the whole political economy, lobbying. It's interesting when corporations were first stripped of their government credentials, because in the early part of the United States, corporations were an extension of the government. And then in the 1830s, they started moving away from that. And one of the first Supreme Court cases that dealt with that said, Okay, we're going to create this space when government and corporations are separate. But corporations will never be able to employ the political structure. That was the Supreme Court saying that, and because they were saying, even then, in 1830s, we recognize that they are allowed to influence the political structure, they have unfair advantage, they have the concentration of money allotted, which is not theirs, they live forever, they can be strategic in a different way. So you've actually structuring is like structuring a basketball team where one team has two players, the other has six and they say go play ball. So corporations are not necessarily bad in and of themselves, but the way we structure them is extremely problematic. We institutionalize greed and irresponsibility, and lack of accountability, especially in the financial sector, especially when you look at what is coming out of Wall Street. So in some ways, the credit market is even more ferocious than other markets.
Ayana Young john, this has been such an incredible conversation and I feel like I could speak with you for hours. If there's anything that hasn't been mentioned or asked by me that you want to make sure is mentioned at this time, please. The floor is yours.
john a. powell Well, I'll just say, first of all, thank you, and thank you, audience. I will add one thing, part of the anxiety that people are experiencing is not just a larger we, but also a new we. We're becoming new beings, that may sound odd. But if you look historically, who it means to be a person, what it means to be a person has continuously changed. When change happens at a rapid rate, you often have mass hysteria, because people don't change easily. And you need something to help people with change, sometimes it is religion. Sometimes a story, sometimes it's a practice. We're experiencing that on a global level right now. So what it means to be white, what it means to be Black, what it means to be gay, what it means to be American, all those things have to be renegotiated. And it's just Trump who is trying to renegotiate. And he's saying what it means to be American is to be essentially racist, xenophobic, is to be sexist. That's what being American means. Some people bind to that, we need an alternative vision, I would say again, 15-20 years from now, if people can reflect back, people will be different than they are now. Not just individually, but the groups and our relationships will be different. That's scary, but it's also an incredible opportunity. So I think, when I talk to my students about how to become a bridge to this future, because the alternative future where we break from each other, we deny our interconnectedness, who deny our relationship with each other and with the planet means that we may not have the future.
Ayana Young Thank you for listening to another episode of For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. The music you heard today was from Ani DiFranco. I'd like to thank our podcast team, our podcast audio producer Andrew Storrs, our Media Researcher and Writer Francesca Glaspell, Social Media Coordinator Eryn Wise, Hannah Wilton, who is our Guest Coordinator, and Carter Lou McElroy our Music Coordinator.