Reflecting on Honesty Hour: Let’s Talk About Race one year later
By Christina Craig | (10 min read)
The first ever Honesty Hour Conversation commenced during a pivotal moment of an already pivotal year. A surge of support for the Black Lives Matter movement following the unlawful death of George Floyd sparked global outrage, protests, and an inundation of infographics on social media. In the midst of it all, HH community members came together to have an open conversation about the significance of the movement, our respective places in America’s culture of violence, and the tangible steps we can take to reckon with and rebuild a broken system.
Honesty Hour Co-Founder, Markus Sherman, opened the conversation by asking, “is everyone in this country given an equal opportunity to be successful?” The short answer given by most community members was a resounding no. While trying to unpack this, the conversation quickly steered toward exploring the individual’s role in dismantling the racial hierarchy (perhaps best explained with the help of this metaphor about learning to swim).
Most of us start off wading in the shallow end - examining the existing conditions at play that reinforce anti-Blackness and white supremacy, particularly the surface-level activism that seems to ebb and flow with each passing headline. But, at some point we’re faced with the choice to dive into the deep end - to implement tools, practices, and mindsets that are necessary to ensure lasting change.
If you stay in the shallow end where you can stand comfortably, you never really learn how to swim, but the more you practice techniques in the deep end, the stronger swimmer you become.
Anti-Blackness
From the jump, members of the community shared how they have benefited from white privilege, often without realizing it - which is, ironically, one of the most glaring privileges. “A lot of white privilege is being able to not be consistently confronted with the idea of race,” one community member noted. “I [know] a lot of people who [say]… ‘oh, white privilege isn’t a thing, I haven’t gotten any privilege’… there’s no explicit white privilege.”
Arguably the most tangible example of white privilege is differential treatment by law enforcement bodies. “I’ve been pulled over by police five times, I’ve gotten zero tickets,” one white community member said. It’s important to recognize that the privilege described here is not avoiding speeding tickets (although that sounds nice). The privilege is the benefit of being seen first as a person who ‘maybe’ broke the law. Black Americans, especially Black men, do not enjoy the same privilege in these situations and are instead perceived first, and usually solely, as a threat to the officer’s own safety.
The insistence on viewing Black Americans through such a narrow lens helps to qualify the astounding amount of data that shows how police violence disproportionately affects Black communities. In 2013, a team of analysts, activists and educators at Mapping Police Violence began conducting one of the largest police violence studies in the United States. According to their data, Black people account for 28% of those killed by police despite being only 13% of the population, and are 1.3x more likely to be unarmed than white people in altercations with police.
Source: Mapping Police Violence
All law enforcement officers are obviously capable of arresting people without loss-of-life, especially when it comes to arresting white murderers. Recent high profile examples include Kyle Rittenhouse and Robert Aaron Long, two white men who commited mass murder in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Both were taken in by police without incident and are alive today.
So why are we still bombarded with videos of Black people being murdered by police?
Associate Dean at the University of Texas at Austin Richard Reddick explains that, “by shifting discourse away from police brutality’s disproportionate impact on Black Americans and onto the criminal background of the deceased, people can subscribe to the ‘he had it coming’ trope and deny officers’ responsibility for their actions” (source: Richard Reddick via Snopes).
In the case of George Floyd, many conversations revolved around the fact that Floyd maybe had a counterfeit twenty dollar bill, and that he might have had drugs in his system, as a way to justify Derek Chauvin’s excessive use of force in restraining him. But the fact of the matter is that neither of these things can justify the treatment, the restraint, and the eventual outcome that Floyd was subjected to. George Floyd’s death was entirely avoidable, yet this is the reality that Black Americans are faced with constantly.
The Model Minority Myth
As community members tussled with the difficult-to-swallow truths of anti-blackness, some spoke about the model minority myth and its role in promoting anti-Blackness in minority communities.
The model minority myth is the idea promoted by white elites that Asian Americans are high-achieving and law-abiding by way of natural ability and strict discipline. As a result, Asian Americans are viewed as hardworking and industrious members of society - hence the term model minority - while other minority groups, especially Black and latinx, are viewed as expendable or incapable.
Honesty Hour co-founder Sharadram Sundaresan explains, “The whole model minority myth is based on the fact that somewhere between the mid 50s and early 70s, the United States started letting in a bunch of East and South Asian immigrants because they were highly educated people, or they had valuable skills to the United States that were considered to be… beneficial for the industrialization and furtherment of the country.” Sharadram continues that “...Black people, Latino people, anybody who’s been an immigrant from a non-Asian [or] South-Asian place has not been given that same benefit of the doubt.”
There is of course a very tumultuous and layered history of immigration and immigration policy in the US, but the broad stereotypes that have been reinforced by now-outdated policies still influence legislation today. Look at the difference in the US government’s response to the BLM protests and the Stop Asian Hate protests that responded to a surge of anti-Asian violence in 2020. BLM protests sparked a flurry of anti-protest bills specifically targeting and villainizing peaceful protesters. By contrast, the surge of Stop Asian Hate protests resulted in swift action from the Senate in the passing of a bill targeting Asian hate crimes specifically. The state of solidarity across communities is also wavering. Although the protests in the summer of 2020 seemed to trigger an increase of engagement with the BLM Movement, particularly in white communities, according to a study done by the Pew Research center, support for BLM actually decreased amongst U.S. adults from 67% in June 2020 to 55% as of September 2020 (Thomas and Horowitz, 2020).
So how do we maintain the momentum gained in the summer of 2020? How do we harness the emotion and the passion and the energy into something that can create real and lasting change? Protesting and posting only goes so far.
The Deep End: Anti-Racism in Practice
In identifying techniques and practices to ensure lasting change, community members hit on two major steps: Education and Conversation.
“The biggest impact y’all can make as white people, as non-Black people,” one community member remarked, “is educating yourself.” A huge part of educating yourself is breaking out of the echo chambers and actively confronting other perspectives. By a show of hands, every Honesty Hour community member agreed that they felt like everyone they were interacting with online already believed in the same causes and were seeking to uphold the same values as they were. “We were just reposting the same infographics for each other in an endless loop,” one community member remarked. Everything was comfortable.
During the conversation, fellow co-founder, Markus Sherman, noted that to start, you must open yourself up to content you do not normally engage with online and offline. Read books by authors who don’t look like you, listen to podcasts that discuss issues you don’t face, and follow activists (please follow activists).
“Now, I feel like I’ve been trying to call out some of those friends that I did let slide with a lot of things and I’ve been met with quite a lot of backlash”
When the conversation started to shift towards the confrontations that inevitably arise when breaking out of our echo chambers, many community members spoke of emotionally-fraught interactions they had had with their families and friends. One community member spoke about letting a lot of questionable behavior slide in high school because they didn’t want to draw attention to themselves. “Now, I feel like I’ve been trying to call out some of those friends that I did let slide with a lot of things and I’ve been met with quite a lot of backlash,” they said.
Another community member noted more positively that he had been fairly successful in engaging in conversations with reluctant family members by sending them short articles to read as a way to ease into difficult conversations. “When I give my family members things to read… particularly in times where emotions aren’t highly charged… Those things have been fairly successful because they always want to talk to me about something that they [learned] from the article.” When there’s a document or a film or any piece of media at the center of the discussion, it grounds the conversation and steers it away from emotional personal attacks.
In the conversation’s final moments, USC Professor Stephanie Schwartz joined the call to provide some expert insight on how to prepare ourselves to engage:
Show up and listen to the experts. Learn how to formulate an articulate and well-crafted argument that leaves the other party with something to think about. Work to reach across the line. Call out offensive behavior and language when you see it, but do it with the intent to start a dialogue, not merely to silence.
I’ll leave you with a rare example of productive engagement shared by a community member. I encourage you to watch the full recording of late USC student and activist Victor McElhaney engaging in a dialogue with Republican icon Ben Shapiro when Shapiro visited USC in 2018 - it is enlightening.
The first step to learning is unlearning. It’s time to confront our biases, our prejudices, and our role in the larger system. It’s time to engage, both online and off. It’s time to jump into the deep end.
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