On June 14, 2019, Professor john powell gave a keynote address at the Mind & Life Institute’s Summer Research Institute in Garrison, NY, entitled, “Contemplative Practices and Interventions for Individual and Social Flourishing.” The week-long immersion was designed to foster collaborations and shared insights among contemplative practitioners and interdisciplinary scholars regarding mental habits, contemplation, and compassion in order to create change for ourselves and society. In his keynote address, Professor powell discussed how major religious and spiritual practices have long reflected common struggles facing a community. Progressives and others who are eager to move towards an inclusive society must not only tell stories about economic and political belonging, but of ontological (or spiritual) belonging as well. That is, to create a world in which all truly belong, professor powell argued that we must understand ontologically who is included in the “we” and how that definition of “we” can be expanded to include all.
Transcript:
Moderator:
I am very happy to be the person who introduces john powell this morning. john comes to us from University of California Berkeley. And by way of introduction, I'm going to say some things that aren't really mentioned in the bio that's printed.
First, john mentioned that he started sitting 50 years ago in 1969, and for a time lived in India deepening his Buddhist practice. john told me about a conversation he once had with Buddhist teacher Joanna Macy, and she'd asked him about his life, his story, and john said something like this: "Oh, we all have many stories. They're all true in some way and false in some ways. So it's hard to say exactly." And Joanna said, "So pick one." And john says he's held onto that bit of wisdom, that vital bit of wisdom, since then.
john mentioned his father is an incredible Christian minister. He is 98 years old and represents the best of Christianity and other religions as well. So he has that sensibility across religious traditions.
Fourth, john's director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. And there are seven faculty clusters in that institute, and one of those has to do with religion and spiritual practices. And john said that the group struggles with hard issues like truth, marginalities and human experience. And what he's seen is that the common thread that runs through all of these difficult issues has to do with othering and belonging. And I think that he may be addressing that more this morning.
And finally, those things in his bio are so impressive and all the ways that he's impacted the world for good. Reading what he's done and hearing what he's done has left a deep impression on me. And then there's this bonus thing that happened when I met him, and that was just a couple of days ago. And I immediately felt like, "Wow, this is somebody I want to hang out with." He just seemed to have such a sense of deep wisdom and gentle humor and love and joy in ways that only a few people that I've ever met have. And so I probably should just warn john that he might be my new spiritual guru. So be careful. john powell.
john a. powell:
Thank you, Andy. So good morning... I know I'm in Oakland, but come on now. Good morning! All right, thank you.
So I'm going to be talking to you about othering and belonging. First of all, I want to thank the folks from Mind and Life for inviting me and having me spend part of the week with you. It's been a delight and I look forward to contact with many of you in the future.
So what you're talking about is building a bigger "we." And so to some extent, in terms of building a bigger "we," it's really taking us into an ontological or spiritual place. It's not just about knowledge, it's not even just about practice—it's about who we are. And this is actually coming not necessarily from the uploading of spiritual practice around the world, it's actually coming from the other pressures that are happening in the world.
I'm going to talk to you about that. So to some extent, I'm going to pull you out from thinking about individual practice to thinking about what's happening in the world and how those practices—what's happening in the world and your practices—might interface.
So I want to suggest, building off W.E.B. Du Bois, that the problem of the 21st century is othering. And othering is a technical concept. And so I want to ground you in the concept, but first I want to introduce you to the word "ubuntu," which is a Zulu word from South Africa, which means "I see you"—or another way of thinking about it, it also is interpreted as "the God in me sees the God in you." And in a sense, that's all what we're trying to do. That's our practice: to recognize the God in each other, recognize our deepest possibility in each other. And so that's the issue of belonging. And so we'll talk about that more as well.
So here's the definition of othering, or one way of thinking about it. So one person says, "Stop othering me." And they say, "What's othering?" "Your kind would not understand."
So it is basically saying that somehow the other—and there's no natural other and there's no natural... Those are all contextual and social. Sometimes we think there's a natural—we think, well, naturally white people want to hang out with each other. I know that's not true. Or only black people want to hang out with each other. Only gays want to hang out with each other, or only... All of those are constructed. And those constructions actually are relatively recent. So we construct group identities, but they're important. As the last speaker suggested, they're not arbitrary. Saying they're constructed doesn't mean that they're meaningless.So there's a story about a famous philosopher who was talking about things being constructed, and he was pontificating. And this woman came up to him and she said, "You said the world is constructed and that the earth is suspended in space. And I liked your lecture, but that's wrong." He said, "What's wrong about it?" She said, "Well, the earth is not suspended in space." He decided to humor her. He said, "Okay, so what's it suspended on?" She said, "It's not suspended at all. It's being held up by four giant turtles." And he said, "Okay, so what's holding those turtles up?" She said, "Four more turtles." "And they're turtles all the way down."
And so this is actually some way of thinking about construction. It's like, is there anything below construction? So the self is constructed, race is constructed... what's not constructed? And of course for those of you who do practice, that's one of the big questions. Do you go all the way down? And if you get all the way down—if you get there—is there emptiness, which is then everything that's constructed is constructed through emptiness and co-creating?
So here's the challenge in the world today: Can we build a small "we" where everyone else is other, or can we build a large "we" where everyone is included? Those are the two fights that's actually defining the 21st century.
So there's some people who say, "Only my group"—and this oftentimes is a racial group or religious group, but it doesn't have to be. It can be a national group—"Only my group really matters. Only my group is fully human." And those of you who are students of history will recognize this assertion to some extent. It's really Nazism. That's what Nazism proclaimed.
And this is interesting about Nazism. Two things are interesting about it. Nazism originated not in Germany, but in the United States. It was exported to Germany. And Germany embraced it, believing that whites were the superior race, the master race—but not all whites. They believed there were four different races of whites in Europe, and only one group was the master race. So they had a gradation for whites themselves, and they obviously developed relationships with Italy even though they didn't believe Italians were part of the master race.
These issues are coming back today. Who really belongs? Who is the master race? Increasingly around the world, more and more people are making claims that "my race is the master race. My race is the only race that counts." So this is the competing vision. Do we have a small "we" or do we have a large "we"?
Now, a lot of times when people hear the term "othering," they think the intervention to othering is "sameness." And that's particularly attractive to people who identify as being liberal. It's like, "We're all the same. Okay, Jews got mixed up on when they should go to church, and Muslims, they pray too much, but really we're all the same." And so I want to suggest that the solution to othering is not sameness, but belonging. And belonging is actually quite different than sameness.
So again, and this has actually been an interesting struggle within the contemplative community and even to some extent within science. When it became popular that, for example, race is not a biological construction probably, but a social construction, there were many people, including some scientists, who returned to that old thing of, "Okay, since race is a fiction, let's stop doing it because really we're all the same." And again, people saying, "I really don't see race, I don't see gender."
And of course the good news from the neuroscience is that the neuroscience suggests that in fact, if I consciously may not see race or gender, my unconscious is all over it. And as you know, the unconscious is very fast. It's very big, a little clunky. And so when someone walks in, while the conscious is waking up, the unconscious has already had a meeting, sent a memo, and made decisions. And yet this is not inevitable, it's not biological. So where does it come from?
And I'm going to show you this video if I can do this.
[Video transcript begins]
"Among all the forces shaping politics and power around the world, perhaps none are more important than our sense of who we are and who we're becoming. We are in a period of accelerated change in at least four areas: globalization, technology, the environment, and demographic change. We can only process so much change in a short period of time without experiencing anxiety, which is a normal biological reaction. But how we respond to this anxiety is social. Our response is greatly shaped by the stories presented by leadership and through culture. These stories speak to our deepest values and our core beliefs about who we are, many of which operate at the subconscious level.
We can respond to these changes either as a threat or as an opportunity. The first response is breaking. The second is bridging.
Breaking can create a deep fear of other groups, making it easier to accept false stories of us versus them. Breaking perpetuates isolation, hardens racism, and builds oppressive systems while driving our politics and institutions toward anti-democratic and inhumane practices.
The other response is bridging, which calls on us to imagine a larger, more inclusive way. When we bridge, we see demographic change and our diverse identities as positive and enhancing who we are. Bridging calls on us to engage in healthy dialogue, requires us to listen deeply. Bridging does not mean abandoning your identity. Bridging means acknowledging our shared humanity, rejecting that there is a 'them,' and moving toward a future where there is instead a new 'us.' For when we bridge, we not only open up to others, we also open up to changes within ourselves, where we can participate in creating a society built on belonging."
[Video transcript ends]
So I just want to unpack that a little bit because there's a lot in there. So what I'm suggesting is that the world is changing, our environment is changing, and it's changing very fast and it's actually creating anxiety. Now that's actually not just true of humans, that's true of animals as well. Animals, when environments change too fast, the animals get stressed out. If the change is very slow, we can adapt without a whole lot of stress. So we are experiencing this collective anxiety, and this anxiety is actually only going to increase. The world is going to speed up. These changes in the world are going to speed up. And what we do with this change is social. What we do with the stress is social. But what a lot of people don't understand is that it's not simply a change in technology or a change in transportation or even a change in demographics that's an issue—it's that the change actually calls upon us to be a different "we."
That is an ontological, spiritual challenge. And we will be a different "we." If you have children, or for those of you who are under 30, you will not be the same 30 years from now. So again, the presenter talked about the student being upset that how people perceive you matters, and it does matter. If no one sees you as the self, you cease to have a self. And so something's going on, and it's actually extreme, not just in the United States but all around the world. And the United States in some ways—it's felt most extremely by whites, even liberal whites, but more by conservative whites, because they've been used to defining themselves. And so now it's like, "All these people who don't look like me, who don't talk like me, who don't worship like me, are coming to this country." And while they focus on the people, really they're focusing on themselves—they're trying to hold on to a rapidly dissolving identity.
So that's the challenge. And so we talk about it in economic terms or political terms, but most people won't get until very late that this is a profoundly spiritual question. And in fact, if you think about religions, generally religions come into being in part to respond to a collective anxiety that people are experiencing. And so religions actually help give people meaning and purpose and ground their identity, and then people can relax and forget about their identities. And so we're going through this rapid period of change, and who we are will not be the same.
Let me just give you one example of that—small example, but an example nonetheless. So I'm older than most of you. So when I was born in the United States in the forties, I was born as a "colored boy." I didn't choose it. Someone else just said, "Look, colored boy, look, colored baby." They also said, "Isn't he cute?" And they were right about that. But later I became a "Negro"—again, I didn't decide to drop "colored" and become "Negro." Later still, largely in part through the work of Malcolm X, I stopped being a "Negro" and became "black." And it was not just me—that was happening all across the country. Negroes were becoming black. You go in this door a Negro, you come out that door black. Y'all should try that sometime.
Now, but that's being contested in part because 10% of the people who immigrate to the United States are from Africa. They're not African-Americans, they're Africans, or they're from the West Indies. And so they're saying, "We're not African-American." And they say, "Well, what are you then?" "I'm Nigerian, Kenyan." And so now we're actually saying maybe we should go back to "black." But what I'm suggesting is that these changes in labels were also changes in identities. And it didn't happen—no one consulted me about these changes, and I don't know what's going to happen next, but I know the next is coming.
So this is what you're experiencing. These changes are huge. And again, they're going to speed up and they're actually interrelated. So the four changes, again: demographic, climate change, technology, and globalization. So the right wing's response to that is to engage in what I call a "breaking story," which is the fear of the other. And it's not just the fear of the other, it's also a fear of the future. So what the right wing does is to argue that we need to go back to some imaginary past when America was great, when India was great, when Australia was great. And usually what that means when you peel out the subtext is when whites dominated unabashedly.
In fact, they asked Trump supporters, "When was America great?" And the range is from 1850 to 1950. Nothing good happened after 1950—certainly not the civil rights movement. So can we go back before the women's movement? Can we go back before blacks could vote? Can we go back to when Native Americans were kept on reservations? Can we go back? The good news is no, we can't go back. And I have this image in my head, which you're welcome to use, of a butterfly trying to crawl back into a cocoon. Now if the butterfly was successful, it would kill itself. Because the future is scary, I understand it. Can we stop the train? And the answer is no.
And so that's part of what's happening, and what gets associated with that is that it's your fault. "The future is scary. It was fine before there were any Indians here, or the only Indians were the ones on reservations, and the world was much better before a black person was in the White House and wasn't a cook." And so can we go back?
Part of that is developed through stories. The stories we tell help people decide which of these they're going to go to. Bridging is one where you actually engage the other, the apparent other, through empathetic stories, through empathetic practices, through listening, through compassion. But you can do these stories on a large scale. It's not just one-to-one. And bonding, which we won't spend much time on, is basically when you try to connect with people that you see as yourself without denigrating other people. So those are the three main moves we make in response. But those moves are affected largely by narratives and our practices—collectively, not individually. These are collective responses that will affect all of us.
These are collective responses that will affect all of us. This is something called the Stereotype Content Model, developed by Susan Fiske and others at Princeton. What she did with this model is create two axes, as you can see. One is competency and the other is how much you like someone. Based on that, she created four boxes. She's done this now in several countries, and basically each country has its own way of responding to this. Who do you consider competent? Who do you like?
In the United States, the favorite group—which is the upper left-hand corner—are white men. This group tends to get a lot of unearned accolades, which some people call privilege. This group here consists of groups that people like, but they don't think they're competent. So the elderly, disabled women—we like them, but we just don't think they're that competent.
When Hillary was running for president, I didn't think she was going to win. One reason I thought she wasn't going to win is because 20% of Americans believed that no woman—not just Hillary, not Elizabeth Warren, not Kamala Harris—that no woman is capable of being president. Why? Because women aren't competent, and people carry that around. These are national samples at an unconscious level.
This group here is a group which we think are very competent—we just don't like them. So Asians tend to fall in that group. Yeah, they can do math and they're pretty good at physics, but we don't like them. Have you ever seen them dance? I saw them last night.
And then this group here—now this group is in some ways the most interesting. It's interesting to look at this model because what Susan Fiske has done is basically say all these groups are othered, but they're not all othered in the same way. We can measure this. This is empirical science, not analytics. What she looks at here is that when a group is seen as incompetent and we don't like them, some terrible things happen.
First of all, there's a part of the brain that lights up when you see another human being. Nature thought it would be kind of cool for us to be able to recognize each other. When someone falls into this quadrant—that is, we don't like them and we don't think they're very competent—that part of the brain does not light up. We literally don't see them as people at an unconscious level. And we can't develop good policies or good practices toward people that we, at an unconscious level, don't see as people. This is actually a big problem.
This takes us into a little bit of the mind science, which you've already been dealing with here—the unconscious. This happens at an unconscious level. So if you ask someone, "Is that homeless person a person?" virtually everyone is going to say yes. But at an unconscious level, the majority of Americans will not see that person as a person.
Now, these are social phenomena. I want to emphasize this. These are social phenomena—they're biases, but they're not individual biases. They're social biases. One of the things I think that's often missing is that in many ways, the unconscious and the biases that come from the unconscious are not individual. They're actually social.
So what you have happening in terms of habits of the mind—where do these social biases come from? Habits. How do we create habits? Habits are created largely by repetition and proximity. So you do something over and over again and you actually build a neural connection. You hit the bell when you feed the dog, you hit the bell, you feed the dog, you hit the bell—the dog starts salivating. The dog has actually created a neural connection between the bell and food. There's no physical connection, but the dog has created one. To some extent, we're all like Pavlov's dog. We're exposed to things over and over again.
So why do we "know" that Black people are dangerous?There's very good data on this. A friend of mine just wrote a book called "Bias"—she's at Stanford, Jennifer Eberhardt. She does really wonderful work. Most Americans, when they see a Black man's face, are primed to see a gun. That is, the unconscious is preparing them to see a gun.
Now think about that: police chasing a young Black man down the street, he goes into an alley, a Black man turns around, the police see a gun and shoot him. It's not that the police officer is racist, and the police may really say, "I swear he had a gun." Where did the gun go? Because that's coming from the unconscious.
Now, that perception of seeing a gun—it's not just in white people, it's actually in Black people too. Not as strong, but it's in Black people because Black people are exposed to the same images of Black men being violent and carrying guns.
Interesting fact: per capita, white men have many more guns than Black men. But the unconscious is not a researcher—it's not going to go check the facts. So where does it get this information from? The media, from stories, from songs, from culture, from our collective processing. We have this interaction between what we call the outside and the inside.
So the unconscious turns out not to be this private space where you hide your most hideous secrets. It turns out to largely reflect what's happening in larger society. So I think, to the extent that that's true—and there's a lot of good research suggesting it is true—it suggests something different about our practice. Oftentimes we talk about our practice in a way that's almost completely individual and separate. In fact, though, we're constantly interacting—the inside and outside are constantly interacting.
So again, these biases are largely not individual. It's not to say—and when I talk about this, sometimes my friends and colleagues get upset. They say, "You're giving bigots a pass. You're saying it's not their fault." A lot of biases that we have are really not our fault, but it doesn't mean we're not responsible once we become aware of it, and it doesn't mean there aren't things we can do.
Although I would caution you—I worked on the Starbucks situation, which was interesting. I'm sure many of you know about it, where two Black men went into Starbucks and somebody freaked out, meaning a white person.
Starbucks contacted me and some other people and said, "This is not who we are. We want to do better. We want to have an implicit bias training and train 80,000 of our employees so tomorrow they won't be biased." And I said, "It doesn't quite work that way."
Here's the thing: you can't get rid of bias. Bias is part of being human. It's part of the way the brain is structured. What those biases are, how strong they are can shift, but you can't just get rid of them. In fact, I'd say we're biased against bias. There's an evolutionary purpose for bias. Most bias is actually positive.
Dan talks about predictive models. The brain is predicting something. What is it predicting? It's predicting something based on biases. That's how we survive. So we have to have a different relationship to bias rather than think we can just get rid of it. These biases are social—they get internalized and externalized.
Here's an interesting fact: Black Americans don't do well on standardized tests. Some of you may know Claude Steele's work, but Nigerians do fine. Why do Nigerians do better than African-American Blacks? One reason is that they're not dealing with the constant stereotype, the constant message that Blacks get that you don't do well on standardized tests. They haven't learned they're not supposed to do well. It takes them about a generation to learn that, and then they fall in line.
So climate change—I suggest that climate change is one of the things that's driving this. These things are interrelated. This is a time map, and I'll leave it with the organizers so you can look at it. What we're seeing is some interesting things: the earth is heating up and changing. It's happening more in the south than the north, and we're getting climate refugees. Then we say, "Well wait a minute, why don't those people stay in their own country?"
Wait—so where is the pollution coming from? United States and China. The north is polluting the south, disrupting their habitat. When they try to move, we say, "Stay in this environment that we created," that the president so eloquently called a "shithole." There's the relationship between these things.
Climate migration is going to be huge, and it's not going to stop, and it's not going to be stopped by a wall. This is a map of what's happening in the world. Now, 60% of the world lives under authoritarian states. Authoritarian states are those states where people are more likely to adopt a position that we need to return to the past—democracy, who needs it? There's some specific "other" that's a threat. The other sometimes are Muslims if you're in India, it's Latinos or Blacks, and anyone who's not a Christian Protestant white if you're in the United States. The issue is heating up in Europe, and you're seeing that migration is one of the things that people use to actually attack democracy.
The interesting factoid as well: authoritarians have a hard time with science.
So you get this thing of made-up facts. It's a complicated story, but it's a story we need to know and figure out how to address. ExxonMobil, in the 1990s, created one of the best climate reports ever done, showing that yes, indeed, the climate was changing and we needed to do something. Then they buried it, and now they're part of the climate deniers. For them, it wasn't that they didn't know—they decided that strategically, it's better if you're Standard Oil or if you're Mobile Oil to be a climate denier than to acknowledge that we have a problem with the climate.I just want to go back—I don't know if you can see, but there are very few countries that are full democracies, and the United States is not one. We've actually lost full democracy, and we're not done. This is some really powerful stuff that's happening around the world, and it's affecting the entire world. In that sense, Donald Trump is not simply an aberration.
These are nationalist attacks by white-wing white extremists. They're happening all over the world. The data for this year suggests that in terms of terrorist attacks, there are more terrorist attacks by white extremists than any other group in the United States. I guess the idea is to build a wall and then send them all to Mexico, but we haven't acknowledged—what is going on within white people in particular that they're feeling so threatened that they engage in violent acts? I'll come back to that later. But the consequence of this is pretty devastating. Again, it's happening not just in the United States, but all around the world.
I know we have people here from Charlottesville. There are more and more Americans—the data suggests now that 10 years ago, 15% of Americans did not believe in equality. So 85% at least expressly believed in equality, even if they didn't practice it. They believed that all people were equal, and 15% did not believe. Now 30% of Americans actually believe that some groups, particularly whites, are dominant and their role is to dominate. So it's doubled in 10 years, and we have people expressly saying that and being invited to White House dinners. Something's happening in the country, and it's happening quite fast.
Again, bonding happens. Bonding happens here—you have affinity groups, bonding happens. To some extent, even breaking happens when a group feels threatened or not fully belonging. It's natural, and you get this a lot. It's like, "Why do Black people need to meet? Why have an all-white party?" There's actually an explanation for that. Until recently, white people in the United States did not feel threatened as a group.
One example I use: I work with the folks who were instrumental in bringing us Black Lives Matter. A lot of people would say, "Why do we need Black Lives Matter? Why don't all lives matter?" My response was, "All lives do matter. But there has not been one incident that I'm aware of—and I'm pretty much on top of these things—where a white person has complained, a white community has complained, that that person was shot because of his or her race." So what Black Lives Matter is really saying is that these are hate crimes, that people are being shot because of their race, which is fundamentally different than just being arbitrarily shot by the police.
The one that we're in some ways most hopeful and interested in is bridging. How do we connect with people who are apparently different than us, especially when there's an apparent threat? The case in New Zealand was just, I think, a beautiful example of bridging. Here's another example where in Tel Aviv, a shop owner basically says if an Israeli and a Palestinian come in together or agree to sit at a table together, he'll give them a discount. So he's incentivizing people coming together who are apparently from different spaces.
There's hard and soft breaking.Soft breaking is where you're not necessarily trying to exterminate someone, but you're not fully acknowledging them. We have a lot of examples of soft breaking. I want to push us on this. I don't know all of you personally, but I'm going to make some assumptions about you. My guess is most of you are left of center, and many of you probably embrace the idea of allyship. I want to suggest that that's actually a problematic concept that can be soft breaking. That is, you can come in and you can participate, but you can't say anything though. This is not your issue, this is our issue. You can be an ally.
I want to suggest that bridging requires going deeper than that. It's not just being an ally. I'm going to use our last speaker as an example. I was at an event—I won't mention the event, but it was a large event, about 1,500 people—and it broke down. There were people of color, there were whites, there were returning citizens. The position became that the only people who could speak with authority on these issues of oppression and racism were people of color, certainly not white people, but people of color and particularly Blacks who were returning from prison. Everyone else could be an ally.
I was the final speaker, sort of like here. I don't know—people put me in the slot because if they have to leave early, they don't have to hear me.
But anyway, I said, "Wait a minute, there's something problematic with this." There was a reluctance to challenge this position. I said, "So I want to do something, and I think I'll do it now—why not?" This is what I did. I said, "If there's someone in your family of a different race or ethnicity than you are, stand up. I want you to look around the room. You are the majority in this room, the vast majority." So you can sit down.
The point I was making there is that when there's a white guy over here saying he cares about racial justice and the criminal justice system, you might think he's an ally because he hasn't had a firsthand experience. But you don't know if his son or his nephew may be a young Black boy. The world is changing very fast.
To some extent, the largest growing population in the United States are not Latinos, certainly not Blacks. They are people in mixed-race, mixed-ethnic families. We don't talk about it, we don't have a space for it. But that is—like in California, by 2025, they say half of the new family formation will be in that demographic. In California—40 million people.
So it's not enough to be an ally. If you mess with my kid, it's not an ally issue. The butt-whipping you're going to get is going to be personal. Part of it, again, is sort of moving into this new space. That's part of the space that the right wing is afraid of. They literally are talking about anti-miscegenation. They're talking about going back to the old days. They're talking about the one-drop rule.There are also short bridges and long bridges. When I talk about bridging, I talked to my friends, the McBride brothers. If you don't know the McBride brothers, they're four brothers in Oakland—they're all pastors. We call them the McBride brothers. So when you call up their homes, "Can I speak to Pastor McBride?" they say, "Which one?"
When I talked to Michael McBride—he's a pastor—about bridging, he asked the question, "Do I have to bridge with the devil?" My response was, "No, start with something closer to home. You don't start with the devil, but be careful who you call the devil."
Oftentimes when we talk about bridging, people go to the most difficult situation: "Do I have to bridge with the KKK?" No, don't start there unless that's your brother. Then you may have to make some accommodation. But the point is, start close to home. Start where you're having difficulty, but you have some shared ground, some shared values, but you still manage to break. Start there. Those are what I call short bridges that eventually you'll get to longer bridges.
As a friend of mine, bell hooks, says, "Bridges are made to walk on or drive on." What she means by that is that when you bridge, you're likely to be attacked by your community. It's like, "Why are you relating to this person who's different than you?"
I've actually become friends with some famous conservatives. Again, within the liberal community, it's like, "Why are you friends with that person? Do you realize their position on X?" Are you saying, therefore, I should deny their humanity?
Bell hooks' point: when you bridge, expect the group that you're part of to challenge what you're doing. Because part of the way we do groups right now is that we break, even if it's a soft break. So bridging and breaking, othering and belonging.
Rwanda is one of the most powerful examples of bridging and breaking in modern history. You may realize that per capita, Rwanda was the worst genocide in the 20th century—worse even than the Jewish genocide.People were killed by the thousands. It's a small country, and it was up close and personal. The weapon of choice at the time was machetes, which means you have personal contact with the person you're killing. Now this is a horrible, horrible thing, but it's also very interesting because, again, genocide is usually directed at a group considered "the other."
So who was the other in Rwanda? Same race, same language, same religion, same ethnicity, and in many cases the same family. So what was the issue? It's complicated. Part of the issue became—and it was partially imposed by colonialism—but part of it was like, "How many cows do you have? You only got four cows? I'm killing your ass."
The reason this is actually important heuristically is that it shows us othering can happen along any axis. It's not natural. When we look for the natural divides, none of them existed there. So let's make something up. Let's tell a story about people and the number of cows they have and use that as the way of othering. So there's no natural other.
Now this happened 25 years ago, so now those people are getting out of prison and they're coming back home by the thousands. Rwanda's trying to say, "Well, we don't want this to happen again. How do we actually welcome them back? How do we bridge?" I consulted with them a little bit, and they said, "What we want to do is create one Rwanda where everybody's the same." My response is, "No, don't do that. Well, you do what you want to do—it's your country."
But I would not advise doing that because a single identity is not a stable identity. A single identity is ripe to be exploited. A single identity tends to be an identity that's deeply anxious. Anytime you're dealing with purity, you're dealing with deep, profound anxiety. So actually what you want to invite is multiple identities.
To some extent, the most powerful expression of multiple identities in recent times has been the EU, the European Union. Now think about it: the EU—in 60 years they had three major wars, including two world wars. The Germans didn't like the French, didn't like the Poles, and they're all sitting right next to each other. So in the 1940s, implemented in the 1950s, they said, "We need to stop this. We need to actually do something different." They created the EU.
What the EU represents—about more than half the people identify now in Europe with two identities, at least two identities.
"I'm German and I'm European. I'm French and I'm European." Those are the people who want to stay in the EU and make it even stronger. But now, 40-plus percent don't believe in two identities—they have a single identity. "I'm British, that's it. I don't like this European stuff, and I want out."
So we can think about multiple identities. The good news is we all have multiple identities. We create a fluidity so we can go back and forth between our multiple identities. Now it's true that if an identity is threatened, that identity is likely to become salient and all the other identities fall into the background. But again, there's a lot in terms of spiritual practice that could help us with this, in terms of moving toward a story about multiple identities.
These are some things that we produce in terms of measuring inclusiveness around the world. You can get it off our website.You'll recognize Maslow's hierarchy, which I don't know why I used. I think he was wrong. But the reason I think he's wrong—his idea is, again, I'm disagreeing with myself. So one of the things about bridging, which is interesting, as I said in the video, is that bridging requires you to bridge with different aspects of yourself. We have multiple identities. Are they all welcome? Not all the time. So the john that put this up here is wrong. I'm glad he's not here today.
But anyway, Maslow's assumption was that as you take care of your physical needs right here—safety and belonging—you get to become more self-actualized. So I just want to ask you: how many self-actualized billionaires do you know? Right? According to Maslow, they should all be here, but they're not. They're somewhere on their yachts, and many of them are building bunkers because they're afraid of what's happening in the world. So they're deeply anxious.
But having said that, belonging showed up very early in terms of the importance of human need. You may know that the UK has created a minister of loneliness.
The numbers are really—it's like one out of three people in England are deeply alone. So instead of feeling like they belong, they are lonely. Think about what's happening in the United States. The suicide rate among the white population has actually skyrocketed. It's actually now higher than it is for African Americans. It's actually called a "disease of despair."When they look at what's going on—I just came back from Pennsylvania—they say that the group that's most likely to commit suicide are white men. Remember that thing I showed you by Susan Fiske? Okay, all right, we may have to put them in a different quadrant now. Veterans and rural. What else do we know about them? They're deeply isolated. They don't feel like they belong. When you don't feel like you belong, bad things happen. So in this case, they kill themselves.
Think about people who commit terrorist attacks in the United States. What's the profile of that group? They're men, they're white. Many of them have a military background, and they're deeply alone. So when you're deeply alone, you're going to kill somebody—yourself or somebody else. But the impact of it in the United States and in England and around the world is quite profound.
So belonging or not belonging has consequences. It has health consequences, it has psychological consequences, it has economic consequences. It has consequences for whether or not we have a democracy or not. I was going to talk today about telomeres until I realized that one of the leading thinkers in the country was already here. I saw that, and I said, "Okay, I'll talk about something else."
But these things matter. And I think in terms of our practice, they matter. And in terms of the science, they matter. So this is something we have on our line—it's called the Circle of Human Concern. Can we create a circle where all humans are valued? Where all humans have dignity?
And some of my students—I teach at Berkeley and the students, they're pretty smart—and they say, "Professor powell, the answer is no, because you can't have a circle without something being outside this circle." And I said, "Very smart. I'm pretty smart too. There's a circle or sphere with nothing outside of it. What is that? It's called the universe." So it's conceivable that you could have a circle with nothing outside of it, but it's not obvious that we can do this.
So three questions: Can there be a "we" without a "they"? Can we bridge without breaking? Can there be a circle without anyone on the outside?
Two quotes: "The outside is not. The inside is two." Let me say that again: "The outside is not, the inside is two." Now for those of you who are practitioners, especially in the Buddhist tradition, you should love this quote—it's anti-dualism. But from our perspective, too often we fall into one or the other.
Let me give you the last one: "When 'I' is replaced by 'we,' even illness becomes wellness." I'll read that again: "When 'I' is replaced by 'we,' even illness becomes wellness." I'm not sure who said that, but it's attributed to Malcolm X. And one love. Thank you.
Moderator:
Thank you so much, john. We have time for some questions. Anil, Anil has his hand up.
Anil:
Thank you. Thank you for a beautiful talk. What I wanted to do very briefly was just underline a parallel that I hope was kind of obvious between what I was saying earlier in the week about biases. When I was talking about perception as an inference, it's exactly aligned with what you were saying—that there are biases that shape our cognition, also our perception, that we're not aware of having, just as we're not aware of having the bias that shapes how we interpret light as coming from above. We don't know our visual system does that. We don't know how our visual system shapes the way we see or don't see people either.
So I just wanted to make that clear—that I felt that was absolutely in line with what I was saying, and that knowing this doesn't give us a pass. Indeed, in fact, the more we know, the more responsibility we have to respond to that knowledge according to our moral values.
I also wanted to say, I wasn't sure whether to stand up or not when you asked that question because as mixed race, I'm not sure what counts as having a different ethnicity in my background. And also apparently I've just learned I'm not supposed to call myself mixed race anymore by people in England, which leaves me... I don't know what I'm supposed to tick now on any box, but that was a moment of interesting confusion.john powell: Well, no one's using "Negro" anymore if you want to use that. I'm just joking.
Anil:
I'll try it out and see how it works, right? But thank you. It was a really lovely talk. Thank you.
Moderator:
Another question? Let's see, there's someone in the back, someone back in the corner there, way back on the right.
john powell:
And to his point, in terms of what to call himself, that's part of what I mean—that who we are, it's not just labeling. We're actually going through some pretty serious changes. And I would invite all of us to participate in helping because people will not navigate these changes well on their own. And the right has stepped into it in a much more profound way than the left. The left actually still is having trouble because it's like, "Well, is this identity politics?" And it's not identity politics—that's the issue. It's "breaking" politics—that's the issue. And so the left and people who care about the earth and planet and other people need to step up in some serious ways and experiment with this new reality that we're going to be facing.
Audience Member:
Thank you so much for a beautiful talk. I thought the first talk really was the perfect segue into this. I teach identity studies, so I know the challenges inherent to this process. And I just wanted to share a short story that fits, I think, really perfectly with what you're saying.
I had volunteered for the Obama campaign in my suburban community. And when Obama won, I was thrilled—I was very excited. And if you'll recall, on inauguration day, he said, "Let's all do a day of service." And so I thought, "Oh, I'm going to do a day of service. That would be awesome." But I didn't really want to go with my volunteers—I just thought I'd do something different.So I looked online and there was a Baptist church in Detroit—I live in Detroit—that was hosting a celebratory lunch. And so I got very excited and said, "I'm going to go to the celebratory lunch at the Baptist Church in Detroit." I went to the bakery, I bought these really beautiful cookies, and I went to this lunch. And I took my two young daughters out of school and they complained the whole way down like, "We had gym today!" But we got there and we were the only white people there.
So it was this very unusual situation for me, and I immediately felt such a profound sense of self-consciousness. But we went in and I delivered my cookies and we were welcomed. And I sat down at a table and I introduced myself and we started to talk. And the woman that I sat down next to was an older woman who told me the story of the first time she was able to vote.
And I thought so much about that day in my life because her joy did not diminish my joy. And my joy did not diminish her joy. We had taken such different paths to get there, but we really interacted at the level of our shared joyfulness of what we perceived to be happening in the world as a positive event. So anyway, that was my story of belonging and it echoed so much with what you shared. I wanted to share it with you.
john powell:
Thank you. Thank you.
Robert Sapolsky talks about in his book Behave—if you haven't read him—he talks about one of the ways in which we help people belong and bridge is by recognizing people's sacred symbols. And he tells the story—and I won't go through the whole thing just because of time—but he talks about Nelson Mandela learning Afrikaans as a way of... actually, think about this: the Afrikaners were actually oppressing black people and killing black people in war in South Africa. And the students in Soweto were rioting because they didn't want to learn Afrikaans. And Nelson Mandela was asking his prison guards to teach him the language of a suppressor because he knew that was their sacred symbol.
And when he got out of prison and was trying to negotiate a truce, he met with the general of the South African army. The negotiation took place in Afrikaans. And that's probably the only reason that they arrived at an agreement. Nelson Mandela was bridging in such a powerful way.
And the only thing I would add to what you said, which I think is a beautiful thing—I'm glad you shared that with us—whiteness is a real problem as an ideology because whiteness is sort of built upon the idea... I'm not saying white people, but I'm saying whiteness as an ideology is an ideology of domination and control. And there's a danger as the country shifts that we could change that where whites are no longer in domination and control, but some other group is. And I think the real thing is: can we have no dominant group? Could we be in relationship in a different way?
And it seems to me that story has not been written, that practice has not been done. But as we do that, it will cause some destabilization and dislocation for all of us, but especially white people.
Audience Member:
Hi john. Thank you for that talk. So I'm here with some friends and family from the Black Lotus Collective and a lot of the work we do, we like to see as bridge building. And in that work we think a lot about what structures and frameworks and qualities need to be present in community to cultivate a sense of togetherness, particularly when being together in the same room can be really triggering to all of us. And so I'm wondering if you can speak more to particular qualities or structures that are needed in a community to be able to hold all of our varying needs and traumas.
john powell:
Thanks for the question. So there's a beautiful story out of Standing Rock. Many of you know that Native people in the United States have the highest suicide rate in the country and they're not doing well as a group. And there have been all kinds of interventions, most of them pretty ineffective. And during Standing Rock, the suicide rate, especially for the tribes involved, went down to almost zero. And the way some people understand that is that people belonged. People came together in a positive way. And for those communities in particular, belonging is not just coming together as people—they were also belonging to the earth. So for Native people in particular, and probably all of us, but they're more explicit about it—to belong requires belonging to the earth.
So I would say one of the things is: help people figure out what their tradition calls for in order for them to belong. So for example, at the beginning of the talk today, as Andy suggested, I grew up in a black church and went to many black churches and then I went to a white school. It was so strange to me. I went to Stanford and I had experiences like you going to that church. It's like, "Where is everybody?" And people don't talk.
I didn't do it here, but I still in the morning get up and play music when I take a shower. And particularly—not only, but particularly—my white friends, if they had the house, "What are you doing? Disco shower?" And so what I'm saying is what we need to belong will be different based on our different traditions. So put that on the table.
The other thing they did at Standing Rock that was very beautiful is they created a sequence for people to speak. And the first group were Native women, then all Native people, then people of color, then they opened up to everybody. And they were recognizing that the structure of speech in our society, of meetings in our society—that if you just threw it open, even if whites are in the minority, they're likely to dominate. And so they weren't saying, "We don't want to hear from you," but "Just wait a minute."
So I think there are many things we can do to begin those practices: how we design buildings. So I was pleased that the people here talked about they realized they needed ramps. And the only thing I would add to what I heard from my perspective—it wasn't simply learning about disabled communities, it was actually helping us go more deeply in ourselves. I think Larry talked this morning—I was at the event, getting ready for my talk—but that when you see something, you're seeing yourself. So can we really build those bridges which would cause us to actually change structures, change discourse, change culture?
And the last thing I'll say on this is that when Black Panther and A Wrinkle in Time came out, we rented some movie theaters in Oakland and gave tickets to the community. And the tickets went in five minutes, which is interesting because we're in Berkeley. I don't know how they found us that fast, but at both events... But at the Black Panther, there were young men—probably half of them were African-Americans—there were young men who were literally crying. They said it's the first time they'd been to a public gathering where they were being celebrated. They'd been to many gatherings where someone died or where there's gentrification, which is important. But to something that celebrated them, just seeing them on the screen.
And the same in terms of Crazy Rich Asians, which is interesting. The last movie that was made—there wasn't a kung fu movie—about Asians in this country was The Joy Luck Club and that was 25 years ago. Sixty percent of the world is Asian. Why did it take Hollywood 25 years to make a movie about Asians?
So I'm just saying that we need to be deliberate. And this is part of what I'm saying about not assuming. We need to establish what people need—to ask them what they need. And it may be awkward initially, but I think we can get better at it.
Dan:
Thank you, john. Just a magnificent presentation, a beautiful way to sum up the meeting. Two very brief questions about your last three slides.
One question is: in your really teaching so beautifully about the power of expanding this "we" to a larger "we," have you come up with anyone who said, "Well, what happened to the 'me' in that?" Because in some talks that I've had the chance to give of "me to we," one student in particular came up and said she was so upset that within the word "we," there's no internality. And that relates to your saying "the outside is not and the inside is." So I'm wondering how that's been for you about what happens to internal development as well as embracing this larger "we." That's the first question.
The second is this last slide you have here. I was at a meeting just two weeks ago in Toronto. We had a whole day on compassion. It was a beautiful training. And someone asked, "How can I have compassion for someone who's doing horrible things like politicians or whatever kind of thing?" And the speaker said, "You can have compassion and you don't have to love them." And the speaker and I had lunch afterwards and I said, "Why are you leaving love out of this? There's a kind of love that imbues compassion with its energy and its care." And he said, "It's a political move that you have to keep love out of the discussion in our work on contemplative practices or it won't go into organizations or governments or schools. So I never used the word love," he said, and a number of people around felt very sad.
And you're ending the talk with love. And so I just wanted to see those two things: How has it been for you to use love right there in a talk and how are you feeling about that? So those two questions: Where's the "me" and how do you feel about love?
john powell:
I feel good about love. I love love, Dan. In some ways I feel like practice is actually about expanding our capacity to love and our capacity to be present. I used to say, when my children were growing up, that if I could wish them one thing, it would not be health, it would not be money, it would not be fame—it would be engagement. And to be fully engaged, to be fully present is such a challenge. And when you're fully engaged, to me, it doesn't mean that you are never upset.
Dr. King talked about righteous indignation and he talked about the indignation one feels when someone violates God's creation, so you should be angry, but it's righteous anger—it's anger that's rooted in love. You're angry because you love, you're angry because you care. And so some people think of love as a weak thing and that we can't act.
And the Nelson Mandela story was just so beautiful in his ability to actually see and acknowledge the general's sacred symbol. And you saw that when he went to the rugby game, which is another example, and that was not an easy thing. He was attacked by the ANC. It's like, "What the hell are you doing? These are bad people." And he was saying, "They're people." And he was head of the army fighting South Africa. So it wasn't like, "I love you," and it's like, "if we don't agree, I'll pick up a gun and shoot you." So it's a complicated thing and I think we've taken the energy out of love and made it something too simple.
Your earlier question in terms of... I think part of the problem, as you know Dan, is that we have a binary. So when people think about people being interrelated, they think about, "So what happened to my individuality?" They think about it's one or the other, instead of that it's unical—it's actually different. It's actually something that... so I would say it's certainly a different "me." It's a different individual, but it's a more real individual. It's an individual that—in a sense we are our best self when we are in relationship with others in a positive way.
And "individuality"—which you didn't say; you said "me"—is a very problematic concept, right? "Indivisible" is something that can't be divided, something that doesn't have a composite. What can't be divided? Now science hasn't found that thing. And I would say practitioners haven't found that thing. And I think largely because that thing does not exist. That's part of the myth of the Enlightenment—that this "I" that I can be separate and need to be separate in order to thrive. I think that's a mistake. I think that's a mistake that needs to be corrected.
Audience Member:
Hi. Thank you very much for your beautiful and powerful talk. Sometimes I like to turn to nature as my teacher. And I know that in nature, in particular in forests of trees, forests are stronger, more resilient, have more longevity, the more diverse they are because there's an intelligence there that knows that the greater the diversity, the less likely one particular species will be able to dominate. And so I see that too as a parallel when we're talking about diversity among the human species.
And when I think about you saying that whiteness is about domination and control, I do diversity work with clinical psychology students myself. And one of the things that I often hear white people, white students say every year when we begin talking about diversity and privilege and oppression is: "I really don't want to join this class because I don't have a culture. I feel like I have nothing to share." And I know that historically the price that white people paid for being able to identify as white was losing their ethnicity and their culture.
And so I'm wondering how you might envision white people embracing their culture and their ethnicity in ways that help them to dissolve the identity around white supremacy and domination and control and superiority, and embracing instead their ethnic, indigenous cultural roots. How you might see that happening on a societal level.john powell:
Great. Thanks for the question. A complicated question, but I'm going to give you a relatively simple answer.
So first of all, I always try to distinguish between white ideology and people who are phenotypically white. I'm not talking about people phenotypically white, although I know there's a correlation and a lot of people who are phenotypically white embrace some version of whiteness. I think we should help them stop doing that. I used to say to my students, "In a fair world, no one would have to live their entire life as a white person," but that's complicated. I don't beat up on white people per se.
When you think about the construction of whiteness in the colonial sense, it came from—it was really the elites that actually created race as we know it. And they weren't white, they were English by and large, and they didn't call themselves white. Whiteness was actually the middle stratum. It was not really the dominant group. And to some extent that's still somewhat true, although the middle stratum identify with the dominant group and their role became to both identify with the dominant group and to police the people of color. So they had that middle stratum and many of them got stuck in that middle stratum and identities came out of that.
The good news is two things. One, we're having a resurgence—this is not good news—a resurgence of white supremacists and white Nazism explicitly, not even subtle. And at a level that's almost unheard of in US history. But the other part of the story, which doesn't get told, is that we also have a group of whites who are more racially conscious and more racially progressive than almost any time in US history.
So we have these two groups and I think it's really important to hold onto both of them. When we do work on race, we actually focus on the first group and they should be watched carefully and whatever, but we don't actually acknowledge the second group. We need to acknowledge that group and help them along because they are us and they're trying to join and sometimes we don't let them join. And when they join, now they have to come in as peers—not to dominate.
In terms of their ethnicity, I would say two things. One, the ending of white ethnicity was actually not very old. It actually happened in the 1940s and '50s. Before then most whites identified in terms of their ethnicities. But also what I said earlier: that we can't go back, we have to go forward. So what does it mean to be white, black, Latino? Anil's question of being half Indian—what does it mean in the 21st century? That's for us to decide. That story's not been written. We're all potentially a bridge to the future, creating a new narrative. So I think we can do that if we're deliberate about it, but I think we have to be deliberate about it.
There will be some shifts, but as W.E.B. Du Bois said, giving up the white dominance, you get something much more precious and much more friendly, not only to yourself, because in order to—and I've written about this in a book called Racing to Justice—cut yourself off from other people, you have to cut yourself off from yourself. You have to cut yourself off from nature. And so there are whites who are trying to figure that out and they may need help—they should get help. And we're trying to all figure it out. So that's what I would say: let's be deliberate about that.The last thing I'll say on this, and I know we have one more question and I'm standing between you and the rest of your life... My father was a sharecropper. I watched relatives literally get killed by racism, but that's not the story I tell very often. And when I was talking to Joanna Macy, I was serious about that because I think there's a lot of systemic suffering and oppression that goes on in the world, especially in the United States. And I've experienced that personally. I remember the furnace blew up in my dad's face and he burned all the hair on his body and we were driving around for an hour in Detroit trying to find a hospital that would take him and they wouldn't take him. He was black.
So I've had these experiences, but I don't feel... I don't know how to say it. I'll just give you a cliff note. My daughter wanted to go to Harvard. I have friends at Harvard—Skip Gates is a friend of mine. I said, "Oh, you're going to go to Harvard, put in there that you know me and that she wanted to study with Skip Gates, Henry Lewis Gates." She said, "No." I said, "Why not?" She said, "That's not fair. I'm using you to get into Harvard and I should get in on my own." And I said, "Sweetie, no one gets in on their own. And yes, you have privilege. That's not the problem. The problem is how you use your privilege."
And so I think again... and I still get stopped by the police or whatever, but also feel incredibly blessed. And when reporters interview me—oftentimes I have coming up today—oftentimes they want to hear the sad story about the black kid who went to school with no shoes and walked uphill both directions. And I don't tell that story. It's boring.
So anyway, I think there's a way in which we can complicate the story and create new stories to invite people in. And the American ethnicity is a new ethnicity. White people here—you're not British, you're not French. I lived in Africa and they were very quick to tell me, "You're not African." I got there and they said, "What tribe are you from?" I said, "I don't know." They said, "What do you mean you don't know? What tribe are you from?" I said, "Look, I told you I don't know." "Where are you from?" I said, "United States." "Oh, the tribe of African American." So they were right. I wasn't Tanzanian, I wasn't Yoruba. We have a new identity and we're making a new identity. And I think whites are as well.
Grant Jones:
Hi, Grant Jones, thank you so much for your talk and for your presence. Something you brought up that I wanted to touch on briefly and would love you to expand on more is this idea that when one is doing the bridging as a person of color, you'll be ostracized or maybe pushed away from or denigrated by your own community. And for me, this opens up a broader question of what do you think the role is for people of color and how do you see structurally people of color leaning into the work that we have to do?
The work of holding this multiplicity of identity, some of which right now may be labeled problematic, some of which we may not be able to hold, and some of which... and I'm curious about this as part of a broader theme of what does it mean to be a person of color engaging with conservative thought, put most simply and most succinctly.
I think something that I've had in my experience is that as one seeks to move into holding elements of whiteness that are in this current moment viewed as less welcome or less acceptable, you kind of get attached to that and you get labeled as embodying that whiteness yourself. And I feel like as somebody who's inhabited white spaces and who's grown up around white people, that's a part of my journey that I feel like I have to downplay because especially in existing in spaces moving more into social justice space, I feel like there's an anxiety that I have of being the person who is leaning into whiteness or having... or even beyond having my blind spots being named, it's being permanently labeled as not being rooted in the work and then cast aside.
And I think for me what this represents is something that's oftentimes used that conservatives talk about as something that's an issue with people of color—that I think that attack is oftentimes a reflection of racism, but actually is getting at something real. It's that as a result of us not being able to hold thoughts that aren't on the left, there's a sense that I get that it prevents us from looking inwards at so much of the work that we have to do and that is needed in our communities.
So long way of saying: what do you think is our role in holding things right of center, in very simple terms?
john powell:
Right, thank you. Complicated question again, and this won't be an adequate answer, but I have kids and I watched them, especially my son, struggle with... So black identity in the '50s and '60s, even in the '70s, became very much identified with being low income, being poor. For example, I sent my son to private school—they welcomed him with open arms until they found out he wasn't on scholarship, that I had enough money to pay for it. And he was the best math student in the school. I'm serious. They just turned on him. It was like, "We want a victim black." And even within the family—and Audre Lorde writes about this—to be other than your own family is even harder. And so when my kids were younger and they would... we'd go back to Detroit—my family's from the South—and they would be like, "You talk like a white boy. You have a funny accent."
One example from my son, which is... and I'm sorry for overusing him, but halfway through high school he had had it being at this private school and feeling that he didn't belong. And so he wanted to transfer to—this was in Minneapolis—he wanted to transfer to a black school that was not doing well academically, but maybe had something culturally happening. And I said, "Okay, here's the deal. You can do it on one condition. You volunteer in the summer teaching math"—he's a computer techie now—"and then you can go." He said, "Okay." He went. The kids teased him so robustly he decided to stay at the school he was at. And so it's hard.
I mean the black middle class... and the reality is my son, and I don't know your situation Grant, but the black middle class is relatively new. And my son was middle class. I mean we were friends with Bobby McFerrin and we knew the black elites if you were... and that's still somewhat true and my son is still somewhat struggling. My daughter deals with it as well. But part of it is that we haven't created a community for ourselves and the community is conflicted.
I mean, so for example, teaching at elite schools, my friends at Harvard—they'd ask like Charles Ogletree, Lani Guinier—they'd be like, "Come go up to Martha's Vineyard and hang out." And it's like, "Oh, that's kind of bougie. I don't think I'd do that." But I mean it's strange. Just to give you one example.
So there's this group, and I won't name the group, but they're a group of basically rich white people who are good intentioned. And so part of the way they express their intention is they give smart, caring people of color money. And so they were courting me and maybe they're still courting me. I don't know—if Mason's in the room, I'm still available. But anyway, they had a meeting and the meeting—these people with money, I mean some of them with crazy money, like hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars—they had a meeting in a place where it was dormitories basically. And they said, "Everyone's going to sleep on a cot, not a bed—on a cot." And I said, "I'm not doing that. I have a bad hip. I'm not sleeping on a cot, I'm sorry." So then I was a strike against me. And then to me, they were performing poor. So they wanted to perform, "We don't have anything"—you just invited me here to give away a hundred thousand dollars. I know you have something.
But anyway, I drove to the meeting and I have a fancy car—I have a Tesla—and I could tell driving up in the Tesla, I could see it's like, "Oh, we thought we were going to help this poor black guy, but he wants to stay at a hotel and he drives this fancy car and no, we don't give you any money." I said, "That's fine."
So the point I'm making is that there's all these pressures in terms of performing. Arthur Brooks is the conservative I mentioned, and I love Arthur. We don't agree on everything, but he has integrity, he cares. He's an empiricist, which means he's willing to be persuaded by facts. He's also cool—he's a magician.
So part of the thing is creating your space. You do need people, you need a posse—creative people who get you. I don't think left or right... I mean I think that this crazy right wing stuff that's happening now is really crazy and I would oppose it. I think the earth and life is at risk, but I don't think beyond that, that because someone is left or right means they're right or left. And I think you have to really be willing to challenge and ultimately find people who will accept that part of yourself and help you grow without performing.
Last thing, and then I'll close. Stokely Carmichael, when he was Stokely Carmichael, I was a young kid at Stanford and he said something and there's a big group of folks—a couple hundred maybe more—and I asked a real question and he just slammed me. And it wasn't because from my perspective the question was... but it was like I wasn't performing. We're supposed to all perform like this group think—we all agree—and it's like I'm trying to figure this stuff out. Someone asked a real question, you're smart, you're whatever, but he wasn't willing to engage and just to be aware of that and be aware of what settings you can really engage with people, who are the people you can really engage with, whether they're black, white or otherwise. And there are some people out there and it's certainly more now than when I was your age. So I appreciate your work and as I say, stay real and stay black.
Event Organizer:
Thank you, john, very much. Thank you so much. That was for sure the grand finale we needed and we'll get to process this together for the rest of the day. At three o'clock, we're going to meet again here and it's going to be an open forum for us to be bringing back our intentions and what we want to take home with us.
We have several faculty leaving today and since we can't all say bye to them, we wanted to just have our applause be our hug of appreciation. So could these people stand up? We have Amit Bernstein, Sensei, Larry, and Larry, and anyone else who's leaving today, please stand up. Any audience members too, please feel free to stand up since we won't know otherwise you're leaving.
I also want to have Laura Schmale and Peter Wayne stand up and just express our deep appreciation for the amazing teachings you have integrated and curated in our mind-body experiences this week. You are both amazing teachers and researchers and your ability to integrate the two has wowed all of us. You've really been bookends to our day. Thank you.
Okay, enjoy lunch.
