before I get a begin I want to Center
myself so everything that I do I tried
to Center myself so let me do that just
so you know I’m one of six boys from
Little Rock Arkansas so I’m a southern a
in a New England area it was kind of
rough uphill first so I married a New
Englander and she didn’t wanna go south
so so I ended up in Connecticut ain’t
that a but anyway I try not to get the
expletives out and stuff like that
because I have a tendency to let that go
I’m an 18-year veteran in the military
so was you know a hell of an experience
pretty damn way anyway so that’s where
I’m coming from and I attended Brandeis
University while I was trained a PhD in
MA
so sending myself and why I got here and
my especially areas that you saw include
white supremacy I don’t call it just
racism and systemic racism okay so
before I begin and I don’t want to start
with a quote from a mere Karla Brown
from Guinea Bissau
he was an activist who was assassinated
he’s also revolutionary and this is my
mantra and it’s always been my tradition
it’s hide nothing from the people
telling their lives xposed lies whenever
they are told and masks no difficulties
mistakes and failures claim no easy
victory this is not easy to talk about
for most people there there’s white
supremacy but it has to be talked about
because it’s a core foundation of what
it means to be an American right so in
my view the adage that speaking truth to
power in most instances is futile the
reason this is so is that powerful the
powerful have a lot to conserve and
aren’t much interested in anyone else
truth but their own people willing power
usually already know the truth but avoid
it because it’s contrary to their
interests and they don’t want to know
you know hear about it for the same
reason okay so then I speak truth to the
powerless of people who believe
themselves to be powerless this scares
to help are the powerful people who
believe they’re powerful
because I’m not too concerned about
talking to them right I want I want
people who think they are powerless to
embrace their collective power to free
ourselves from the matrix of oppression
similar to potential causes called the
matrix of domination and I’ll talk a
little bit more about that later like my
intellectual predecessors either be
whales Burnett WB Dubois Lorraine
Hansberry Jimmy Baldwin and I’ll G Lord
who are usually not celebrated in the
u.s. Academy of higher education
I found myself out of place in the
Academy that values and respect only
thought in scholarship and teaching that
legitimate systems of oppression if you
don’t believe me just has any professor
at th CCS you you’ll find out you know
what Hardy is that they value that they
reward those professors who reinforce
the dominant ways of being when it comes
to oppression those who question it are
actually cascading we’re really killed
right and we will talk more about that
later similar to these predecessors I
push intellectuals to embrace ideas
critically and I gauge them engage them
in as fundamental components for
fostering human agency in action to
eliminate systems of oppression because
racial oppressors are interested in
their own truth there is no such thing
as self-identified whites ratio
ignorance or innocence okay I want y’all
to hear me now
there is no racial innocence when it
comes to self identifying white people
and notice that turns I’m using right I
say self identify because there’s no
white okay the thing the very thing that
got me into trouble at Trinity College
in 2017 you know summer was that I was
taking issue with whiteness and white
people there’s existence of white people
they don’t exist what exists is John and
Dick and Jane and people like that human
beings okay the fact that the
self-identified White’s believe
themselves to be white pretty much
betrays their ID that idea that they’re
not white supremacist a racist anyone
who calls themselves white from my point
of view in a white supremacist society
is racist okay there are no blacks
they’re just human beings I know I
didn’t wake up this morning calling
myself black John II right
and now I’m saying white people work up
and wake up at least white people say
I’m white I’m like Betty I’m like this
you know so this doesn’t happen so what
we got to do to do then is look at this
idea what white supremacy is white
supremacy is structured it differs from
what it means to be white
that’s a mythical racial category it
does not exist just as all the other
categories don’t exist there’s only one
race it’s called a human race that’s it
okay so racists are fictitious meaning
given to insignificant human
phenotypical differences it is a social
political grouping created to assign
human worth in social status using the
ideology of whiteness as a means to
legitimate the creation and maintenance
of economic and social hierarchy okay
you got that part race is a historically
specific race itself the idea the race
concept a historically specific ideology
that emerges took shape and evolved as
an organized system of thought when a
definitive set of social relations
anchored in global capitalist systems of
production right
that’s what Racing merge from but race
can operate independently of capitalism
these days right it has its own way of
doing things so race and whiteness
ideologies they cultivate social beliefs
that help to sustain a set of
institutional practices and actions
known as white supremacy so if you
believe in this notion of race and
whiteness you’re participating in white
supremacy itself and you’re helping to
maintain the system even though you
think you’re not doing that you think
you’re nice people and all this stuff
but the dilatory effects are still there
it doesn’t matter what the intent of you
are is that it still has these kinds of
white supremacist outcoming these are
deleterious effects without race there
can be no racism simply because race is
constituted through racism okay there
can be none without each other they both
cost to each other race does not exist
in any objective sense and it’s created
through the action of racism itself it’s
basic sociology I’m a sociologist I’m
one of those experts right is that this
fella by the name of ill Mel Mel
Durkheim who talked about how it is that
when you look at religion what’s more
important which of
one is more important to practice a
religion of the belief system and he
said nine times out of ten really ten
times out of ten it’s the ritual the
practice itself which then reinforces
the belief the practice of racism and
white supremacy reinforces the belief in
the ideology of race and whiteness okay
can we organize our lives around it’s a
fundamental organizing principle of our
society so there are no white human
beings found on planet Earth Murli
humans who imagine themselves to be
white or superior to all other life let
me say that again there are no White’s
on earth there’s just other human beings
who imagine themselves to be white and
superior when in fact they’re not so
it’s important to grasp if whiteness is
not about phenotype the phenotype of
genealogy it is a social marker far and
this is critical and allegiance to power
relations grounded in systemic racism
okay
there’s about power relations grounded
in systemic relations I know you guys
don’t get a chance to hear this stuff
often but this is what it is you’re
being told to think in different kinds
of ways individual terms about what bite
supremacy is what systemic racism is so
history white supremacy itself is
historically based it’s an
institutionalized system of exploitation
and oppression function that functions
to maintain white wealth power and
license notice I’m not saying white
privilege I think is best
as Louis Gordon at UConn turns it he’s a
philosopher it’s really best to say
white license because it gives you the
system that it worked in this at work
rather than individuals Americans have a
tendency to think in individual terms
and it the virtual attention from the
systemic nature of the problem itself so
self-identified White’s
all right grant permission to people
like the police force like we know from
Starbucks the other day that the a white
barista the manager of the store called
the police on these guys she was giving
permission to these like these police
officers be they white or black and to
beat up on some black people or even to
kill them so this is what I mean by
white license okay
thus racism is not merely a
manifestation of individual racial
prejudice it is a system of power
relations justified by the ideology of
race okay so when we think about this we
should keep in mind when combating white
supremacy week we don’t make progress we
merely combat individuals themselves so
we’re looking at the individual racial
bigot we must look at the cause it’s the
structure of and the sources of racism
itself that’s the most important thing
to look at and that’s the only way you
deal with the root causes of the
situation if you haven’t figured out by
now I am not merely a lefty I am NOT I
am pretty much a radical to the left of
the left okay I think the root cause of
the problem that’s what I do people
afraid of that in this society to
couples because to be relatively
conscious has changed Baldwin said of
what was going on to us it’s basically
to be enraged all the time and I am
enraged all the time because I think
this is some silly stuff and it’s
killing people around the world not just
in the United States okay
so systemic compression systemic racism
is is expressed in three basic ways so
you know and we see them all the time
violent acts of imposition like police
brutality what goes under in Gaza I’m a
big boy car divestment sanction member
and trying to rectify what is happening
in Israel and Palestine ideology
justifying in positions of of racism
itself that is that there’s these
ideologies like racing whiteness which
work to do things right so groups
basically are violent and so they must
keep violence in check by justifying why
it is that you know that we have racism
in our society the first place is
because it’s the victims problem it’s
not the perpetrators problem we have
that going on in our society today in a
sense of people who believe themselves
to be victims rather than purpose one
can’t be both a perpetrator in a victim
and that’s what we have with white
cisgendered men saying today somehow
losing control of the United States
which there’s no evidence of that okay
if anything that’s firmly in charge
right now the tricky thing about
ideology is gremsky and Du Bois and
finola observe and I hope y’all know who
that is
that their double age so culture itself
can be an instrument of both sub
pression and
but it also can be a foundation for
pushing human beings to liberation human
liberation itself so that’s important to
me as well I think that culture can be
both this kind of ordering maintaining
order but also challenging that order
itself because of this the powers that
be that is people who in the donor
network and so forth they try to
suppress schooling in our society right
and they know it’s important to that to
create technocrats rather than people
who are critical thinkers independent
thinkers people who question the way
things up they know they can maintain
domination that way so racial
oppressions know that the control of
that over the domination is impossible
if they don’t dominate the culture in
which people are in they know that and
they work hard at trying to maintain the
culture of domination itself so
education religion pop culture media all
of these system forces are operating to
maintain it so I’m constantly disturbed
by precedence in their racially or press
collaborators who use terms like
minority inclusion diversity equity
tolerance multiculturalism and a host of
other oppressive in epistemic violent
terms to evade naming the problem white
supremacy language is not neutral it is
in strived in power relations and in
terms of our thinking it shapes it right
so all one needs to do is ask who has
the power to set the parameters for what
is diversity right who is a minority
what is inclusion what is equity and so
forth as those basic questions by
reformulating it then you have you
revealed by this query of power this
query of power reveals those with power
not serious about eliminating their
matrix of systemic oppression at all if
anything they are about evading it right
so it functions to legitimize and
exonerate self-identified white and
normalize racial hierarchy and cruelty
that’s what we have going on so there’s
no such thing as benign white supremacy
there’s no such thing as reforming white
supremacy right it is impossible to
inform reforming system of oppression
you need to overthrow that system of
oppression eliminate it replace it
that’s what you need to do with systems
of oppression
so we even when you have black faces
Felton’s in high places one cannot
change the system of oppression right
the system changes them black inclusion
without structural reform is a window
dressing right that’s why we have more
blacks working in and heading major
institutions never before and the
highest level of racial inequality in
this country right now okay so I know it
all seems bleak but it’s not really
bleak okay we can overturn the workings
of systemic racism and other forms of
oppression in the ideological conflict
and confronts confrontation is
absolutely necessary in order to do this
we have to have different kinds of
thinkers in our society to do that to
come to terms with the fact that
self-identified White’s are doing this
that they have a whiteness problem and a
white problem at each address right so
we live in a nation y’all where people
who believe they awake preside over
oppressive ordering systems that
everyone is expected to accept as normal
so when indigenous black in Latin X
Asian and poor women and gender queer
folks refused to accept this particular
way of operating will publicly cascaded
and falsely accused of preaching hate
okay hate that’s an individual term when
it when the hater is actually the one
who’s killing us every day right so I am
with this speaking right openly and
honestly don’t go go through life being
afraid to speak and write what is on
your mind because of fear retribution
from power both parties are dishonored
by leaving truths unwritten and unspoken
for silence when there is something to
say as much a deception as they spoken
and written like one love appreciate [Applause]
myself so everything that I do I tried
to Center myself so let me do that just
so you know I’m one of six boys from
Little Rock Arkansas so I’m a southern a
in a New England area it was kind of
rough uphill first so I married a New
Englander and she didn’t wanna go south
so so I ended up in Connecticut ain’t
that a but anyway I try not to get the
expletives out and stuff like that
because I have a tendency to let that go
I’m an 18-year veteran in the military
so was you know a hell of an experience
pretty damn way anyway so that’s where
I’m coming from and I attended Brandeis
University while I was trained a PhD in
MA
so sending myself and why I got here and
my especially areas that you saw include
white supremacy I don’t call it just
racism and systemic racism okay so
before I begin and I don’t want to start
with a quote from a mere Karla Brown
from Guinea Bissau
he was an activist who was assassinated
he’s also revolutionary and this is my
mantra and it’s always been my tradition
it’s hide nothing from the people
telling their lives xposed lies whenever
they are told and masks no difficulties
mistakes and failures claim no easy
victory this is not easy to talk about
for most people there there’s white
supremacy but it has to be talked about
because it’s a core foundation of what
it means to be an American right so in
my view the adage that speaking truth to
power in most instances is futile the
reason this is so is that powerful the
powerful have a lot to conserve and
aren’t much interested in anyone else
truth but their own people willing power
usually already know the truth but avoid
it because it’s contrary to their
interests and they don’t want to know
you know hear about it for the same
reason okay so then I speak truth to the
powerless of people who believe
themselves to be powerless this scares
to help are the powerful people who
believe they’re powerful
because I’m not too concerned about
talking to them right I want I want
people who think they are powerless to
embrace their collective power to free
ourselves from the matrix of oppression
similar to potential causes called the
matrix of domination and I’ll talk a
little bit more about that later like my
intellectual predecessors either be
whales Burnett WB Dubois Lorraine
Hansberry Jimmy Baldwin and I’ll G Lord
who are usually not celebrated in the
u.s. Academy of higher education
I found myself out of place in the
Academy that values and respect only
thought in scholarship and teaching that
legitimate systems of oppression if you
don’t believe me just has any professor
at th CCS you you’ll find out you know
what Hardy is that they value that they
reward those professors who reinforce
the dominant ways of being when it comes
to oppression those who question it are
actually cascading we’re really killed
right and we will talk more about that
later similar to these predecessors I
push intellectuals to embrace ideas
critically and I gauge them engage them
in as fundamental components for
fostering human agency in action to
eliminate systems of oppression because
racial oppressors are interested in
their own truth there is no such thing
as self-identified whites ratio
ignorance or innocence okay I want y’all
to hear me now
there is no racial innocence when it
comes to self identifying white people
and notice that turns I’m using right I
say self identify because there’s no
white okay the thing the very thing that
got me into trouble at Trinity College
in 2017 you know summer was that I was
taking issue with whiteness and white
people there’s existence of white people
they don’t exist what exists is John and
Dick and Jane and people like that human
beings okay the fact that the
self-identified White’s believe
themselves to be white pretty much
betrays their ID that idea that they’re
not white supremacist a racist anyone
who calls themselves white from my point
of view in a white supremacist society
is racist okay there are no blacks
they’re just human beings I know I
didn’t wake up this morning calling
myself black John II right
and now I’m saying white people work up
and wake up at least white people say
I’m white I’m like Betty I’m like this
you know so this doesn’t happen so what
we got to do to do then is look at this
idea what white supremacy is white
supremacy is structured it differs from
what it means to be white
that’s a mythical racial category it
does not exist just as all the other
categories don’t exist there’s only one
race it’s called a human race that’s it
okay so racists are fictitious meaning
given to insignificant human
phenotypical differences it is a social
political grouping created to assign
human worth in social status using the
ideology of whiteness as a means to
legitimate the creation and maintenance
of economic and social hierarchy okay
you got that part race is a historically
specific race itself the idea the race
concept a historically specific ideology
that emerges took shape and evolved as
an organized system of thought when a
definitive set of social relations
anchored in global capitalist systems of
production right
that’s what Racing merge from but race
can operate independently of capitalism
these days right it has its own way of
doing things so race and whiteness
ideologies they cultivate social beliefs
that help to sustain a set of
institutional practices and actions
known as white supremacy so if you
believe in this notion of race and
whiteness you’re participating in white
supremacy itself and you’re helping to
maintain the system even though you
think you’re not doing that you think
you’re nice people and all this stuff
but the dilatory effects are still there
it doesn’t matter what the intent of you
are is that it still has these kinds of
white supremacist outcoming these are
deleterious effects without race there
can be no racism simply because race is
constituted through racism okay there
can be none without each other they both
cost to each other race does not exist
in any objective sense and it’s created
through the action of racism itself it’s
basic sociology I’m a sociologist I’m
one of those experts right is that this
fella by the name of ill Mel Mel
Durkheim who talked about how it is that
when you look at religion what’s more
important which of
one is more important to practice a
religion of the belief system and he
said nine times out of ten really ten
times out of ten it’s the ritual the
practice itself which then reinforces
the belief the practice of racism and
white supremacy reinforces the belief in
the ideology of race and whiteness okay
can we organize our lives around it’s a
fundamental organizing principle of our
society so there are no white human
beings found on planet Earth Murli
humans who imagine themselves to be
white or superior to all other life let
me say that again there are no White’s
on earth there’s just other human beings
who imagine themselves to be white and
superior when in fact they’re not so
it’s important to grasp if whiteness is
not about phenotype the phenotype of
genealogy it is a social marker far and
this is critical and allegiance to power
relations grounded in systemic racism
okay
there’s about power relations grounded
in systemic relations I know you guys
don’t get a chance to hear this stuff
often but this is what it is you’re
being told to think in different kinds
of ways individual terms about what bite
supremacy is what systemic racism is so
history white supremacy itself is
historically based it’s an
institutionalized system of exploitation
and oppression function that functions
to maintain white wealth power and
license notice I’m not saying white
privilege I think is best
as Louis Gordon at UConn turns it he’s a
philosopher it’s really best to say
white license because it gives you the
system that it worked in this at work
rather than individuals Americans have a
tendency to think in individual terms
and it the virtual attention from the
systemic nature of the problem itself so
self-identified White’s
all right grant permission to people
like the police force like we know from
Starbucks the other day that the a white
barista the manager of the store called
the police on these guys she was giving
permission to these like these police
officers be they white or black and to
beat up on some black people or even to
kill them so this is what I mean by
white license okay
thus racism is not merely a
manifestation of individual racial
prejudice it is a system of power
relations justified by the ideology of
race okay so when we think about this we
should keep in mind when combating white
supremacy week we don’t make progress we
merely combat individuals themselves so
we’re looking at the individual racial
bigot we must look at the cause it’s the
structure of and the sources of racism
itself that’s the most important thing
to look at and that’s the only way you
deal with the root causes of the
situation if you haven’t figured out by
now I am not merely a lefty I am NOT I
am pretty much a radical to the left of
the left okay I think the root cause of
the problem that’s what I do people
afraid of that in this society to
couples because to be relatively
conscious has changed Baldwin said of
what was going on to us it’s basically
to be enraged all the time and I am
enraged all the time because I think
this is some silly stuff and it’s
killing people around the world not just
in the United States okay
so systemic compression systemic racism
is is expressed in three basic ways so
you know and we see them all the time
violent acts of imposition like police
brutality what goes under in Gaza I’m a
big boy car divestment sanction member
and trying to rectify what is happening
in Israel and Palestine ideology
justifying in positions of of racism
itself that is that there’s these
ideologies like racing whiteness which
work to do things right so groups
basically are violent and so they must
keep violence in check by justifying why
it is that you know that we have racism
in our society the first place is
because it’s the victims problem it’s
not the perpetrators problem we have
that going on in our society today in a
sense of people who believe themselves
to be victims rather than purpose one
can’t be both a perpetrator in a victim
and that’s what we have with white
cisgendered men saying today somehow
losing control of the United States
which there’s no evidence of that okay
if anything that’s firmly in charge
right now the tricky thing about
ideology is gremsky and Du Bois and
finola observe and I hope y’all know who
that is
that their double age so culture itself
can be an instrument of both sub
pression and
but it also can be a foundation for
pushing human beings to liberation human
liberation itself so that’s important to
me as well I think that culture can be
both this kind of ordering maintaining
order but also challenging that order
itself because of this the powers that
be that is people who in the donor
network and so forth they try to
suppress schooling in our society right
and they know it’s important to that to
create technocrats rather than people
who are critical thinkers independent
thinkers people who question the way
things up they know they can maintain
domination that way so racial
oppressions know that the control of
that over the domination is impossible
if they don’t dominate the culture in
which people are in they know that and
they work hard at trying to maintain the
culture of domination itself so
education religion pop culture media all
of these system forces are operating to
maintain it so I’m constantly disturbed
by precedence in their racially or press
collaborators who use terms like
minority inclusion diversity equity
tolerance multiculturalism and a host of
other oppressive in epistemic violent
terms to evade naming the problem white
supremacy language is not neutral it is
in strived in power relations and in
terms of our thinking it shapes it right
so all one needs to do is ask who has
the power to set the parameters for what
is diversity right who is a minority
what is inclusion what is equity and so
forth as those basic questions by
reformulating it then you have you
revealed by this query of power this
query of power reveals those with power
not serious about eliminating their
matrix of systemic oppression at all if
anything they are about evading it right
so it functions to legitimize and
exonerate self-identified white and
normalize racial hierarchy and cruelty
that’s what we have going on so there’s
no such thing as benign white supremacy
there’s no such thing as reforming white
supremacy right it is impossible to
inform reforming system of oppression
you need to overthrow that system of
oppression eliminate it replace it
that’s what you need to do with systems
of oppression
so we even when you have black faces
Felton’s in high places one cannot
change the system of oppression right
the system changes them black inclusion
without structural reform is a window
dressing right that’s why we have more
blacks working in and heading major
institutions never before and the
highest level of racial inequality in
this country right now okay so I know it
all seems bleak but it’s not really
bleak okay we can overturn the workings
of systemic racism and other forms of
oppression in the ideological conflict
and confronts confrontation is
absolutely necessary in order to do this
we have to have different kinds of
thinkers in our society to do that to
come to terms with the fact that
self-identified White’s are doing this
that they have a whiteness problem and a
white problem at each address right so
we live in a nation y’all where people
who believe they awake preside over
oppressive ordering systems that
everyone is expected to accept as normal
so when indigenous black in Latin X
Asian and poor women and gender queer
folks refused to accept this particular
way of operating will publicly cascaded
and falsely accused of preaching hate
okay hate that’s an individual term when
it when the hater is actually the one
who’s killing us every day right so I am
with this speaking right openly and
honestly don’t go go through life being
afraid to speak and write what is on
your mind because of fear retribution
from power both parties are dishonored
by leaving truths unwritten and unspoken
for silence when there is something to
say as much a deception as they spoken
and written like one love appreciate [Applause]
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