In the final episode of The Race Course, the class addresses its last topics, including racism in infrastructure, property, and health care decisions and confusion about affirmative action. In the final course meeting, professors and students discuss what they worked through in the course. It’s kind of a love-fest.
If you have thoughts about what you’ve heard, please drop an email to devilsshare@duke.edu or leave a voicemail at 919-684-2863. If you’d like, we may use your comments in any response podcasts we produce. Thank you!
TRANSCRIPT:
EPISODE 5
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Does anybody here know what affirmative action actually is? You’re not alone … you’re not alone. Part of it is because affirmative action is it’s really interesting collection of policies built us out of a set of executive orders and Supreme Court cases. There’s not any one particular policy which you can point to and say yep, this is different production.
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Hi I’m Scott Huler, and you’re listening to The Race Course, a series from The Devils’ Share, the podcast of Duke Magazine. We’ve followed the first iteration of University 101: The Invention and Consequences of Race, a course offered as part of Duke’s commitment to antiracism, and its pledge to include antiracism not just in its hiring, admissions, and actions, but in its very curriculum. Professors recognized this as a challenge
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HANEY on antiracism
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I don’t know what people mean by antiracist. I mean I think I have an idea of what they think they mean, but I don’t know how to do that. That is not what I do as an academic.
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But they’re academics. They designed a class that ran directly at race: how it does not exist biologically, in what ways it DOES exist, and what happens as a result of the invention of this notion. As we’ve followed along we’ve heard the class struggle through its early technological issues, nonetheless reaching students with material that hit them with the hard facts of race — what it is, what it isn’t, how racism works, and how it lives in everything from the Constitution to immigration policy.
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ELIZA on THE REVELATION
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Critical Race Theory occupied a class, and as the semester neared its end the class looked at deeper and wider applications of the concept of race and how it affects every aspect of our culture.
Deondra Rose, director of the Polis Center for Politics delved into public policy based on American attitudes and beliefs about race:
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So the issue of race historically was part of that reason why the federal government was so hands off when it came to higher education and education policy more broadly….
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… So lawmakers intentionally crafted the policy so that it would be implemented or present work by the states, rather than the federal government, states were charged with cutting this policy work. And so why what did that mean? It meant that they actually could choose not to disrupt how their colleges or universities allocated benefits on the ground. .
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Professor of Public Policy Jay Pearson carried on:
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You see the formal title of my talk today is race, ethnicity, poverty, urban stressor and health in Detroit. But the title I propose to get voted down by my co author was getting down with black, white Brown in detail. I did work in Detroit.
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I’m a population health scientist, and one of the core tenets of health differences research in the US context is that there exists a direct and robust relationship between socio economic indicators, and health, whereby one or some combination of education, occupation, and income, are assumed to be robust predictors of health outcomes.
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Which, guess what those indicators are related to. No, go on, guess.
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persistent and profound differences in a broad range of quality of life, social well being and health indicators, whereby majority population of white Americans hold a distinct advantage relative to many populations of color, virtually all Native American, virtually all black Americans, and select Latino and Asian population.
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This led to what, if you’re looking for it, is probably the best academic definition of privilege you’ll ever hear:
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So in the US context, majority population, white American, ethnic white Americans conceived of themselves as inherently superior to the degree that they get to construct the major institutions and the rules and regulations that govern them. Completely independent of virtually everyone else. Grants privilege, honor and advantages that are conferred as a function of this preferred category, direct access to the resources that the dominant narrative suggests matter, and that those reliably translate into improved health . rank majority group has constructed mechanisms of repression that relegate minoritized populations in furious about position. An example of this is this how construct a race. Discrimination institutionalized, that racialized populations have to engage in negotiate to gain access to these resources.
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That even helps explain how immigrants, who tend to arrive in the United States showing an advantage in health outcomes, lose that advantage over time:
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Now, you may arrive here, not knowing who you are in our system. But if you stay here long enough, not only we will tell you, we will show you by the way that we treat you exactly where you fall out in the stratified heart.
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Public policy was just one focus topic as the class turned towards specifics. Associate professor of political science Candace Watts Smith discussed straightforward questions of psychology:
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I want to know why are people racist. More specifically, I want to know why do people say they want egalitarianism? But they don’t seem to be doing the things that would produce that? What? Why? What explains that? I want to understand if we had a tech change over time, are we moving forward? Are we moving backwards? Do we even have the capability of understanding change? I want to know, how does any of this matter for politics?
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Onetime Duke professor of sociology Allan Parnell, now of the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities, addressed how racism affects the most foundational aspects of our lives:
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I’m going to talk about today is how racial inequality is structured at the human landscape. How racial disparities for example, and exposure to environmental risks and hazards developed by their racial disparities and access to all ranges of public infrastructure….
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which neighborhoods have expressways go through there were landfills located, or toxic chemicals store where it’s mortgaged ownership insurance unavailable. What areas are excluded from basic services like water and sewer?
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Which disadvantages oh, guess who:
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racial residential segregation refers to the spatial separation of racial groups. It’s most persistent manifestation primarily disadvantages… African Americans
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On purpose.
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the ideology of white supremacy and separation and it takes various forms like fight flight when white people fear people thought of moving out and labor there is the additional action the government is going to talk about as you read federal policy programs, state laws and regulations. And the second half of the class will talk a lot about local policies.
So it’s built into the American landscape, but every decision by the federal government and by these governments, federal policies, rules for mortgage insurance underwriting, especially back in the 30s and 40s, state policies or highways go, permits for landfills, things like that. Then local government, land use rules policies, zoning, annexation, things like that.
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Associate professor of sociology Tyson Brown, director of the Duke Center on Health & Society, talked about how race affected medicine and health:
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with the recent attention to structural racism, long overdue, as well as the disproportionate impact that the pandemic is having in black communities. And it’s becoming more and more clear that population health is a mirror reflecting societal arrangements. And along those lines, I’d like to share an overview of research on links between structural racism and health today.
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And this is really this burgeoning body of research that suggests that structural racism is in fact toxic for population health. However, our understanding of these phenomena has been hindered by both conceptual and also mythological gaps in the research literature.
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Here’s a simple way to look at it:
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I’m really interested in studying health inequality because I’d like to shed light on the issue of the unnecessary human suffering, right. And this is particularly striking, if we think about excess mortality or deaths that could have been avoided. And so there was a study by former Surgeon General that showed that 229 excess deaths per day could be averted if the health of blacks matched that of whites. And this is equivalent to a 767, with all black passengers crashing and killing everyone on board every single day, right? So this is this is enormous. That’s really huge implications.
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Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who created the report, suggested ways the Black community could bring its suffering down to the levels seen in the white population:
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Yeah, he used racially charged language, and basically attributed it to higher rates of drinking and alcohol use, right? Particularly among older adults, particularly older black and brown adults. The problem with that explanation and rationale, and prescription, if you will, from the Surgeon General of the United States, is that black and brown people use drugs and alcohol, illicit drugs, at equivalent or lower rates and white people. And so that’s not a driver.
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I also think it’s useful to highlight the fact that health disparities really have substantial economic costs as well for so if it doesn’t really resonate with folks on the humanitarian grounds, then we can take it on sort of the economic front, right. And so there was an influential study that showed that Black White Health Disparities cost more than $200 billion. That’s, that’s with a B, annual, and this is in both direct and indirect costs, right.
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And remember, race isn’t a thing experienced only by Black people. To consider race in popular culture, professor of history and theater studies Esther Kim Lee talked about various pop-culturestereotypes Asian Americans face:
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I think this is really the rep the stereotype from which all the other ones kind of fall through is the perpetual foreigner. This is a stereotype in which Where are you from? Chicago, where you really from? Right, those questions that mark, you as a foreigner and Asian Americans who’ve been here by generation will be complimented on how good their English is,
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And that even a stereotype that the person expressing it might think is positive is … rarely positive.
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Now, the model minority stereotype that’s a more recent decades that came out of the post world war two era in the 1960s, during the Civil Rights Movement, in which Asians who are labeled as model minority pitted them against black and brown people who are protesting and can make noise making trouble. So Asians are labeled as minorities who are immigrants are quiet. They do what they’re supposed to do. They don’t they’re not in the streets and protesting. But this also is an extension of the perpetual foreigner stereotype because this again is saying, you know, Asian Americans are different, so called other kind of ideal America. Exotic outsider, it’s again an extension of foreigner, but it’s in which your mark as Almost like a, like other worldly, other {UNDER}
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Topic after topic, for fourteen three-hour meetings, the flower of Duke’s faculty looking at race gave overviews of their topics and discussed them with the students. And then…
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No other questions? … [Applause] [Under]
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… The last content class was over. Of course there was one more week, with some generalities. The four convening professors stood in front of the class and summed up, then conversed. And between professors and students, their last half-hour together in this first-ever universitywide course on race became something of a love-fest. They’d been on a journey together; clearly they’d loved it. Professor Kerry Haynie started off
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And I just want to began quickly and say in start , and in where I started way back the first day of class and to say that what this was intended to do was to introduce you to this thing called race, something that scientists believe not to exist, but nevertheless in any biological sense, but nevertheless has significant consequences for how we live and interact on a daily basis.
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It’s an academic topic, worthy of some intellectual discovery, and thinking, and more research. The other goal of the class when we started was to introduce you to race from a variety of perspectives. disciplinary perspective, let me see we’ve had sociologists, religion, professors, economists, lawyers, Public Health Scholars, public policy scholars, come through cultural anthropologist, cultural studies, African American Studies.
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This evidently had the desired outcome.
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you all mentioned this serving as sort of a gateway course into like lots of different departments and such I would say like as a freshman, I think this was a really helpful course as someone who’s interested in the humanities and interested in topics on race, to kind of learn about lots of different departments,
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Professor Don Taylor reminded the students that as people genuinely informed about race and racism they still were part of a significant minority:
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So now, the good news and the bad news is that you all know more than most people in the United States do about the difference, for example. I think one thing I would like to encourage you all to do is not to wait like I did, until I was really in my 40s, to interrogate some of the history, or ask about the history that I had been taught, and most importantly, the history that I had not been taught in my in my life growing up.
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And so of course, you know, not teaching the history was not an accident.
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And my main point is that it’s not that we were taught faulty history growing up, even though I’m from that part of North Carolina, it’s like it was never mentioned at all. So the history was erased. And so that’s a that’s a lie, right.
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That’s right. Professor Aimee Kwon reminded the students that the represented a good direction for Duke — but that if it was a new university priority, it was not new for the faculty.
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this class, and the broader anti racism or racism initiative, broadly defined, is, you know, sort of shockingly new, right, even though we’ve always had experts on campus, doing their thing, fighting the, you know, the good fight for decades and decades. But in terms of bringing the entire university, front and center, a unit one on one course, and you know, and all of a lot of you guys got the publicity and all of that, you know, it actually matters not, it’s not just about, you know, commercializing this or branding it, it actually matters that we have the Office of the Provost behind this, you have the Duke Endowment behind us.
15:38
another thing I learned from this experience is that, you know, we’re just individuals. But together, we can make a huge impact. And so I want to encourage all of you guys, I want to applaud you, first of all, for being so engaged and coming. This is not an easy class, I actually teach a lot of trauma topics in my line of work, because I worked on colonialism, and imperialism. And it’s not that I was running to trauma, you know, because I have this perverse fascination with it. But it’s because it’s not avoidable. In the histories that I teach, and they study, it’s not avoidable, and so it kind of runs through all of my classes. And so it’s this class is, is the topic is not easy. And I know that a lot of you guys have really been so engaged, and you know, front and center are facing this every single day.
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Kwon reminded the students that the class was a work in progress and encouraged feedback to make the next year’s class better. Above all, Kwon said,
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I don’t want you to walk away feeling the weight of this, you know, on your shoulder of all of the huge issues that are obviously still problems. But I just want to say that I want you to be encouraged. And in whatever little small, local communities, in your friend groups in your families, you can actually make a huge difference by first of all, staying calm. And, you know, being open to communicating in a way that will invite people to have these kinds of conversations. And so I would encourage whatever you end up doing, you know, just continue this this fight because it is so important. … what I’m heartened by is that, so what I’m heartened by is that I think 2020, we could actually see transformations on the scale of what we saw in the 1960s. So you talk about historical figures of that revolution, a very moment. I think 2020 is that moment for for you. For us, we’re kind of we’re actually ready to give you guys the mantle.
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The students said they felt prepared to do exactly that.
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nd it’s been really interesting, because like, when I bring up the matter of race to my friends here at Duke, … And I feel like I’m comfortable doing that, because of like what I’m learning in this class, or it’s on my mind, because of the class more. When I do that. I almost feel like a sigh of relief from those friends, because they’re like, they usually respond with something like, Oh, my God, I was I’ve been thinking about that, too. But like, no one ever talks about that here. And I think that’s kind of like a powerful tool that all the students in this lecture in this class, now kind of have the tools or maybe the courage to like, speak about more of these issues,
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As part of a commitment to antiracism, the Duke administration dropped a challenge into the lap of its faculty: do antiracism. Whatever it means to you, do it, as academics, as researchers, and as teachers. Do it, give it to your students, and let’s see what happens. What happened is now a hundred or so students are out talking with their friends and their families. They walk into complex conversations bearing history, understanding, and facts. They know what Critical Race Theory is and isn’t, what privilege looks like, that race may not be biological but it has very real consequences. A hundred students took this first course and are carrying that learning with them. The next version of the course — with shorter, twice-weekly classes and discussion built in — has already been successful.
When first charged with doing antiracism, Kerry Haynie worried.
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I don’t know what people mean by antiracist. I mean I think I have an idea of what they think they mean, but I don’t know how to do that. That is not what I do as an academic.
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What professors Haynie, Royal, Kwon, and Taylor did? With a parade of Duke professors and a willing cohort of students?
I think that’s how you do it.
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This has been The Race Course, a series from The Devils’ Share, the podcast of Duke Magazine.
Have thoughts? Email us at devilsshare@duke.edu, or leave a message on my voicemail at 919-684-2863, and if you like, we’ll share your response.
I’m Scott Huler, senior writer at Duke Magazine and producer of The Devils’ Share. Thanks for listening.
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