RACE RULE #1
Bedrock Race Rule: Choose to Disrupt Racism Every Day
This overarching Race Rule, Choose to Disrupt Racism Every Day, will help you make better decisions in your life, understand people of color, and improve relationships across race. This universal Race Rule can be applied to a broad range of daily cross-racial encounters and lead to less harmful decisions impacting people of color.
When faced with knowledge gaps and uncertainty in how to proceed, interact, or behave in navigating across race or struggling with what to think or say, use this Bedrock Race Rule’s three-step process as your guide. This learning-and-action tool helps you change behaviors, shift mindsets, and know what to do.
This book’s other Race Rules are situation specific. This rule helps no matter the topic.
If you are neutral in situations of injustice,
you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
—Rev. Desmond Tutu, anti-apartheid activist
RULE SUMMARY
CHOOSE TO DISRUPT RACISM EVERY DAY
Complacency supports racism, and the best way to unlearn and disrupt racism is through action and behavioral change starting today:
Step 1—Learn to unlearn (external education)
Step 2—Reflect to repair (internal evaluation)
Step 3—Act to address (positive action)
Anti-racism is about making choices supported through pro-active action. Upholding white supremacy and privilege is a choice. Disrupting racism is also a choice. You cannot become a Racism Disruptor (i.e., a proactive, action-oriented, anti-racism advocate) by merely focusing on your internal mindset, misbelieving that disagreeing with racist societal wrongs is the desired destination or all that’s required of you as a beneficiary of White Welfare. Dismantling racism requires not just choosing to act but also immediately implementing choices in real time. Thoughts without deeds don’t lead to adequate progress. Choices with delayed timelines prioritize the status quo. Self-education without behavioral change is half step-ping—and often morphs into lip service requiring people of color to wait for justice, equality, and humanizing treatment.
KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THE THREE-STEP PROCESS
Unlearning racism is a lifelong process. Not only does this three-step model adapt to changing circumstances to pivot with your needs and situational realities, but it also encourages a normalized routine of perpetual self-education and reeducation. It involves a cycle of learning from mistakes and growing as society evolves:
• Lifelong learner—Every white person needs continuous learning to counter systemic racism and deprogram prejudices ingrained since childhood.
• Daily proactive action—You must act each day to diminish racist beliefs and behavioral choices, including society’s level of racism.
• Joint learning and action—Learning and doing must happen together and not in isolation to evolve and positively affect others.
• Impact over intent—What’s important is how marginalized groups experience you and what’s happening to them as a byproduct of your choices, inaction, and interacting with you and not what you intend or believe.
• Inaction equals choosing complacency—There are no neutral positions with white supremacy. Supporting status quo power structures elevates whites at the expense of people of color.
• Transformation from ally to Racism Disruptor—The role of Racism Disruptor is above ally, which is passive, requires no action steps, and enables lazy bystanders. Racism Disruptors are action-oriented advocates whose behaviors positively support and uplift people of color, aligning the intent of choices with the impact of actions.
• Goal is disrupting racism—Unlearning racism provokes internal and external disruption to your perceived world, prompting behavioral change, reshaping white perspectives, and breaking cycles of intergenerational racism.
Nothing will change and you won’t evolve if you don’t take the first step. Everything hard in life is actually just a series of easy steps, with the first step being to act. You need to commit to action.
THREE STEPS TO TRANSFORMATIONAL MINDSET AND BEHAVIORAL CHANGE
The three-step process helps you achieve this Race Rule’s mandate of continually choosing to disrupt racism every day. It encourages ritualizing doing and avoiding inaction. Each step has a series of questions with universal applicability to any scenario, enabling you to tackle race-related questions and navigate racism in real time as issues arise in your daily life.
By incorporating these steps into everyday decision-making and learning incrementally from successes and failures, you create a continual improvement cycle. Increasingly assess and benchmark your cross-racial interactions, workplace practices and challenges, and community issues through the lens of the multipart model (i.e., learn to unlearn, reflect to repair, and act to address). This normalizes integrating cultural intelligence into how you act and modulate behaviors. This is how unlearning and disrupting racism become second nature. Cumulatively, this process builds a transformational foundation with a lasting positive impact on how you treat people of color and encourages taking bigger steps to disrupt racism in your life and society.
Figure 1.1 shows a snapshot of the three-step process and how each step fuels a lifelong learning loop and improvement cycle to unlearn racism.
Each step of the three-step change model process has five reflective questions to ask yourself to guide your behavior and decision-making toward fewer racist behavioral choices.
FIGURE 1.1. Lifelong learning loop to unlearn racism. There is no final destination or free pass but a continual momentum cycle of daily improvements. Racism disruptors commit to action.
STEP 1—LEARN TO UNLEARN (EXTERNAL EDUCATION)
Step 1 focuses on external education about history, systems, and structures and how they impact people of color. This enables you to learn new information, unlearn previous beliefs, challenge what you believed was true, and stress test whether your perceived world is the real world as experienced and seen by people of color.
Here are five self-reflective questions to ask yourself:
1. What information will help you better understand the situation, people of color, and possible options to pursue in deciding how to proceed? What should you learn to add context?
2. What options and choices do most white people consider and take? Have you questioned why these responses are so common?
3. Who has historically benefited from these common actions?
4. How will each of the various options available to you impact people of color?
5. Which option is the least racist, causes the least harm to people of color, and results in protecting the dominant culture’s power in lieu of distributing power the least?
STEP 2—REFLECT TO REPAIR (INTERNAL EVALUATION)
Step 2 focuses on an internal evaluation to force you to reflect on how your thoughts and behaviors may be offensive and causing harm. It pushes you past a perpetual state of denial about your personal role in harming people of color. It nudges you to accept that your past actions may be racist and your insights into racism are inaccurate and instead helps drive personal accountability and behavioral change. Looking in the mirror is necessary to becoming a Racism Disruptor. This step also helps move you closer to choosing to act.
Here are five self-reflective questions to ask yourself:
1. What does the information learned in educating yourself teach you about your values and your understanding of society?
2. What did you learn about your past actions, choices, behaviors, and inaction? Could they be viewed as racist, and did they cause people of color harm? How have your past racialized actions and choices also harmed you?
3. How does it feel to actively or passively ignore or deprioritize the feelings and rights of others? Does this behavior support a sense of superiority, bolster your self-esteem, or elevate a “white identity” at the expense of people of color?
4. If you wait any longer to act, will you ever truly act? If you were the one waiting for racism disruption, how quickly would you want to see action? By doing nothing or remaining silent, what message are you conveying?
5. What are you protecting or gaining from your choice? How does your choice help or harm people of color? If your choice hurts people of color, is it worth it?
STEP 3—ACT TO ADDRESS (POSITIVE ACTION)
Step 3 moves you past complicity by requiring positive action. It forces both action and a continual learning cycle by asking you to take stock of your chosen action steps. It encourages you to address racism and racialized issues in yourself and in society. As you move past complacency (i.e., inaction) to proactive action to unlearn racism, you’re able to transform into a Racism Disruptor.
Here are five self-reflective questions to ask yourself:
1. When deciding to act, did you listen to people directly impacted by this action or decision?
Listening doesn’t mean reaching out and speaking to a person of color. Self-education should be achieved through books, articles, podcasts, documentaries, films, and other resources to limit transferring emotional labor to people of color and burdening them with carrying your knowledge gaps for you. Their job isn’t to relive racial trauma or become your Race Professor Nominee curating curricula to make your learning easy. If people of color are present during real-time incidents, listen when they speak. Watch their body language. Take in nonverbal cues. Don’t pepper them with questions or draw them into sharing their opinions if they’re not raising their hands.
2. How did your actions empower someone other than yourself? Whom did you share your power with through this action?
3. Whom else did you include who looks like you and needs to learn?
4. Did your actions positively impact people of color and disrupt status quo power structures? Did your actions protect and help minimize harms experienced by them? Did you focus more on your impact instead of the intent of your actions?
5. Now that you’ve acted, what did you learn? What should you replicate, avoid repeating, and learn for next time? What do you need to learn now and share with other white people?
MAINTAINING THE IMPROVEMENT CYCLE
Since learning continues for a lifetime, once you get to Step 3, keep the cycle going. Take stock of what worked well to duplicate it and what went over like a lead balloon to avoid in the future. When reaching a milestone or breakthrough, keep your foot on the gas. People of color don’t get a vacation from racism, thus you don’t get any free passes, and there is no final destination.
If the learning stops, then you’ve proactively demoted yourself and stepped down from Racism Disruptor status. Racism Disruptor status disappears when you elect to take a break since you’ve halted your unlearning racism learning loop. It’s replaced by complicity and supporting status quo racism, which is why disrupting racism is a lifelong obligation and journey requiring consistency.
If you’re resting on laurels from yesteryear, ask yourself, “What have I done for people of color lately?” That’s your Racism Disruptor tagline to perpetually unlearn racism and sustain anti-racist engagement. Each day you choose actions against racism, you’re choosing to disrupt racism.
APPLYING THE BEDROCK RACE RULE’S THREE-STEP PROCESS—RESPONDING TO HEARING THE N-WORD
Let’s walk through an example using this model, revisiting the N-word incident described in this book’s introduction from the perspective of hearing hate speech (see table 1.1). Most people know the N-word is a deplorable racial slur and don’t use it. Upon hearing it, many emotionally distance themselves from the racist act since they didn’t say it—it was someone else who was inappropriate, offensive, or straight-up racist.
While many whites don’t step into the hate-speech-spewing-perpetrator category, plenty float in the deep end of the silent-and-complicit cesspool. This wallflower-witness scenario plays out daily. Countless white spectators watch trauma and pain inflicted on people of color yet sit back—leaving marginalized groups with less power to fend for themselves. Typically, very few whites openly stand in solidarity alongside people of color and proactively choose to minimize the impact of toxic harms. But whites need to disrupt racism as windfall beneficiaries of White Welfare. It’s their obligation.
TABLE 1.1 Problem situation—the N-word
Racial Quandary and Decision Crossroad: “My friend just said the N-word. I know this word is taboo racist. What should I do? Remain silent? Let it blow over? Say or do something?”
BEDROCK RACE RULE: CHOOSE TO DISRUPT RACISM EVERY DAY
THREE STEPS TO DECIDING HOW TO REACT (ANALYSIS AND APPROACH)
This rule’s three-step process, along with each step’s accompanying five questions, guide you in choosing fewer racist behaviors. For each step, ask yourself that step’s related questions.
Step 1—Learn to unlearn (external education)
• Educate yourself to fill knowledge gaps beyond solely relying on knowing that this word is universally racist. The historical background of how the N-word was leveraged as a tool against Blacks helps you understand the reach of its negative impact on the Black community and its linkage to broader strategies of oppression.
• Research can help challenge assumptions about the Black American experience and prevalence of current N-word uses. Explore your past and current views about the term and Black people (i.e., learning to unlearn).
• Think about the impact of choosing to do nothing on those in the room and Blacks in general, and consider whether inaction moves you toward being a Racism Disruptor.
Step 2—Reflect to repair (internal evaluation)
• After self-educating and challenging your thinking, look within and explore your past mindset and actions—either in choosing inaction, remaining silent when witnessing racism, or consuming racist entertainment that uses the N-word.
• Honestly analyze why and when you’ve been silent in the past and what this says about you and your commitment to disrupting or upholding white supremacy—be open to making hard admissions about yourself and whether past choices make you complicit, immune to hate speech or racist behaviors, lazier, or more inclined toward inaction.
• Consider the impact of immediate action on people of color—and then value impact over intent (i.e., avoid hearts-and-minds outlooks, which are actually false rubber-stamp support for anti-racism that deprioritizes the effect of inaction on the lives, feelings, pain, and condition of people of color).
Step 3—Act to address (positive action)
• Now it’s time to act and speak up. Positive action supporting people of color is how you move away from racist complicity or being a passive ally who just mentally disagrees with racist behaviors (i.e., intellectual performative practice) and toward being an action-oriented Racism Disruptor with an actual, meaningful impact.
• You must be less focused on your desire to feel comfortable and align with what’s right and wrong. Racism has no neutral positions.
• Consider if your impact is aligned with your intent. Think about what worked well and what didn’t to encourage a cyclical learning loop of improving by choosing to act and do. Research improved talking points and ask yourself what additional information would be helpful and could be shared with others. Then, implement your ongoing learning process of being a proactive and vocal disruptor—not a wallflower.
• Reflect on future actions you can take to protect and support people of color. Brainstorm additional ways to reduce the harmful impact of racist behaviors on them. Disrupting racism is a daily choice.
ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS
Here are several other points to consider:
• Quick real-time decisions—Sometimes things are unfolding quickly with little time to self-educate and you need to make an immediate decision to act. As a real-time guide when faced with limited decision time, think about how you’d feel if this happened to you. Then, circle back and learn more later.
• Flexible three-step model—The steps aren’t rigid. Depending on the circumstance, they can happen simultaneously and start out of order—especially when facing a time-sensitive issue. What’s important is you engage in the core steps: learn to unlearn, reflect to repair, and act to address. Your goal is to advance toward learning and doing.
• Bedrock Race Rule—Your guiding North Star is whether your decisions align with the Bedrock Race Rule that underlies this three-step process. Are you choosing to disrupt racism every day? If not, you need to make different choices and adjust your behavior accordingly.
• Race Rules as your guide—Use this book’s various topic-specific Race Rules to help remove your blinders, kick-start your unlearning racism process, and make better choices to ultimately cause less harm. They’re great starting points for tackling areas where whites repeatedly fumble and offend.
If you watch someone called or use the N-Word and you do nothing, you are actively engaging in a racist act. While witnessing bigotry or discrimination, you become an approving accomplice. You don’t have to be the person engaging in the overt racist act. If you’re a bystander and member of the dominant culture (i.e., white) who’s doing nothing to curtail racist behavior, then whether you meant to or not, you’ve used your power to join their racism and support it. This is what upholding oppression looks like—through seemingly small, individual choices with cumulative impact. It’s how white supremacy perpetually continues. You can’t be silent and claim you’re behaving like a good or nice person.
While the act of inaction may be easier and more comfortable, let’s not pretend it’s not a choice. The neutral position stands with the status quo, aligned with society’s racist power structures. It advances white supremacy and oppression since it does nothing to disrupt it. The only time sitting on the sidelines is acceptable is when your physical safety is legitimately in danger (e.g., not due to general perceived fears of Black and brown people, which is not reasonable fear but fear rooted in bigotry). But deciding on inaction to protect relationships or because you’re averse to uncomfortable conversations safeguards racism rather than disrupts it. It leaves people of color exposed and standing alone to protect themselves from structures they didn’t create and don’t control.
Although your decision may be understandable, don’t fool yourself. With eyes wide open, you chose the racist path. Instead of rationalizing it, admit you made a trade-off.
In the end, we will remember not the words of
our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights activist
