Hello, Jennifer. Hi, Shawn. How are you doing? I'm doing okay. How are you doing? One day at a time. Yeah. I'm doing all right. Yeah? Yeah. We're coming to you from our respective homes. I'm in Lafayette, Colorado. My name is Jennifer Ho. I'm in Denver, Colorado. My name is Shawn O'Neal. We are the co-instructors of anti-racism 1. Just a little bit about me. I am a new transplant to the State of Colorado. I just moved here in August 2019, and I am a Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. I also worked at University of Colorado Boulder. I am a fourth year PhD candidate in the Ethnic Studies Department, and I've been in Denver since June of 2009, so about 11 years now, a little over 11 years now. I should ask you for lots of recommendation Shawn since I'm a new transplant. We're here because we've created this three-week course on anti-racism and we're titling Anti-racism 1, because the hope is that there will be an Anti-racism 2, and an Anti-racism 3. What we're here to demonstrate for you are two of the assignments related to week 1 and week 3. Shawn and I are just getting to know each other. I think we've only spoken really a handful of times and we've really never had a race conversation, right? We've really never deliberately sat down and talked about race. That's what we're going to do. Which is if you're looking ahead to week 3, that's an assignment for you to do in week 3. We're going to demonstrate how to have a race conversation that is friendly and easy and we'll also be helpful to you as you're doing the reading and the assignments. The topic of what we're talking about is the assignment for week 1, which is to answer the question, what race are you? What is your racial identification? Then the second part is, how did you learn that you were the race that you were? Do you mind if I begin Shawn, can I ask you? Yes, please. My first question to you is, what race do you identify with? What race do I identify with? It's such a packed question, particularly of knowing what I know now that race is a social construct. I also realized that when we're talking about race, what we're really talking about is cultural aspects and cultural foundations. Race, whether it's black race, white race, so on and so forth, I mean that goes with terms created by the colonizers and by those enacting the enslavement of folk of Africana descent in this country. I've always identified as Black. However, that has shifted over the years as, and I'll speak for my communities, we're always having to go back in and shift how we want to be identified and the terminology around that. So yeah, I do consider myself Black, the Black race, which that's shifted over the years. Afro-American, African-American, black American, the term I go by now this day and age is a person of African descent or a person of Africana descent being that my direct genealogy, of course, is traced back to Africa. Thank you. It's so helpful, you really contextualize the complexity of this question. Then my follow-up question for you is, how did you figure this out? How did you learn that you were the race that you identify? You can either kind of think about like in your earliest days or do you want to talk through now the way that you identify. Either answers are great. Well, I'll come back to my earlier days. Black families, families of Africana descent, particularly in America at least from my experience,have always discussed race. So race has been a discussion going on in my family as far back as I could remember, as far back as I can actually dictate the speech of what my elders were saying to me. I think one of the first moments where I really, really realized my racial positionality in this country, I could have been more than six or seven and my mother and my grandmother sat me down to basically explain who I was and what that meant in the broader aspects of American society. What they told me was is that I was living in a country or in a society that was not designed for me. That it was very important that they understood that and they were very careful about how they explained that to me. My mother and I have gone back and talk about this conversation many times because it really impacted my life. What they told me was is that I operated in a society that was meant to either see me dead or on drugs or in prison by the time I was 18 or 19 years old. Because of that, there were going to be many choices that I was going to have to be able to dictate. Now they as women, what they told me is that all we can do is guide you and give you the right path to go down but the decision is going to ultimately be yours. That you're going to have to make those decisions, or whatever decisions you make, you're going to have to live with that. It was really, really eye-opening. But that in consult with many other discussions that my family have always had, so I've always known that I am a black person, I'm an African person, I'm an African American person. I mean, whether was my uncles, my aunts, we talked about that in many ways and we talked about our culture. I would say 90 percent of our conversations were surrounded about these particular topics, day in and day out. There was no way around it. That's the importance of what we're getting at here with this course. Particularly, because when we talk about white privilege, the fact that whiteness doesn't ever have to be discussed because of the normalization of it. But thinking about other ethnicities, other races operating in these societies that many of us have to engage with this stuff all the time. I have always known my race and what my race means to the larger components of society. I'm sorry, that answer was a little long winded but- No, no. That's the only way to. Yeah. This is great. I should also say for everyone watching, this is not scripted. This is the first time I've ever asked on this question. I'm going to ask a follow-up question, just one to keep this brief. It's a two-part follow-up questions. Okay. When you remember, if you can recall back to when you were six or seven, having this conversation, was your racial identification as black contrasted with whiteness? That's question number one and then number two, how did you feel after hearing your mother and your grandmother sit down and explain what it meant for you to be black, do you recall any feelings that came up? Absolutely, it was contrasted often, because that black, white binary was often always discussed within my family unit and the broader range of my family that those comparisons were always made so I always knew that there was something different about all of us, that we are sharing the same space. Again I'll just talk about this country specifically, I'll talk about Chicago specifically from where I'm at. But that we were all separated by this skin color and that skin color had a lot of other details within that. I was also made very aware of a very early age about the construction of Chattel slavery in this country and that we were still unpacking and dealing with emotionally and psychologically with the damaging effects of slavery and that as a group, as a unit, as a community that we all had to work on that together. The second part of your question was? To feel like, like do you recall what any feelings that emerged? Yeah, I remember a lot of feelings. Sometimes those feelings were of anger and a feeling of the unfairness, often seen the weight placed on my family as compared to maybe seeing another family at the grocery store. The 1980s in particularly was very, very eye-opening because Reaganomics just almost destroyed the black family unit as other executive branches over the years had nearly brought us to our knees. But that was my first real memory of what it really meant to be black in America and the disparities between black and white because Reaganomics almost killed us. He really brought my family to its knees and we collectively pulled it together and made it through, but barely, it was a really, really difficult time. At that moment, particularly during the 80s, with all the things that I was taught in the 70s really came into light. Great. Thank you. Absolutely. Now you. Okay. Same questions. I'm excited to hear this. Okay. Do you want to ask me or should I just answer it? Just go forward. Okay. I currently identify as Asian American. That's actually the predominant way that I will answer the question what race I am, but it's also the predominant answer I give for any form of identity question. That's unusual because I think that really only 20 percent of people of Asian descent will say Asian American in the answer to the question, what are you, or the answer to the question about how you identify either racially or ethnically. I want to start there because my decision to identify as Asian American is very much rooted in my being an ethnic studies scholar and a critical race scholar, that in signaling the identity Asian American what I'm trying to do is to say that I recognize the solidarity that I share with other people of Asian ancestry living in the United States and I also share a commitment to social justice that the term Asian American came out of. The term Asian American, it was really a fairly new term. It was first coined in the 1960s, late 1960s by two graduate students who are working on Third World Liberation movements and in the services of Bay area. Then it came to be used as we now know, both as a census term, people will check off on the census whether you're Asian or on any form, really typical. But for people like me, who study Asian American people, Asian American experiences, it's also a movement that bore an intellectual tradition of social justice. This is how Asian American studies emerged out of the 1960s and '70s through coalition work with other ethnic studies movements, other civil rights movements, and then really side itself with roots in social justice. So that's why I currently identify. But then to answer the question of my first recognition of race, was actually not through an identification with Asian American, but like you or recognition that I wasn't white. That's really interesting. That both of us came into a consciousness of our ethnic, racial identities through knowing or understanding that we weren't white. In my case, I don't recall my parents ever sitting me down and explaining in the way that your grandmother and mother sat you down. But I remember being in a park, again, when I was around six or seven. It's really interesting when kids start to become aware of these social differences. My father was flying a kite and we were on a pitcher's mound. We were on a baseball field in a local park. He was on a pitcher's mound and this young white kid, so I'm six or seven so I think the kid's pretty old, but he might have only been 10 or 11, or he might have been 17 or 18. He would be running and he leap towards my dad. He did that two or three times then my dad yelled at him and he was like, "I know what you're doing." I could see my dad getting super upset and flustered and then he pulled in the kite, and we walked home. I asked my dad, "What was happening?" The kid had a switchblade and he was trying to cut the strings of the kite. Even though my father didn't say anything, I thought, "Oh, this is because we're Chinese." I remember having that thought really clearly in my head. I guess that's the first instance of maybe racism, if you want to call it that. Now again, I want to be really clear like, who knows what the motives were for this teenage boy to be trying to cut the strings of the kite that my dad is flying? It's hard not to think that it wasn't racially or ethnically motivated in some way, shape, or form. It's certainly [inaudible]. [inaudible] microaggressive? Yeah. It's certainly a terrible thing to do to any family, to any father with a young child. But that's when I definitely had the sense like, "Oh, this is happening because we're not white. This is happening because we are a Chinese family." Absolutely. Well, that's interesting. Then we shared a lot of commonalities in that regard, which I'm not surprised at all. What you're saying conjures of other memories of when I first had to realize my race from outside of my family, and those are very painful moments. I remember living next door to white neighbors in a neighborhood that became predominately black. One of the white neighbors used to call my uncle Marvin, the N word, and my uncle Marvin punch him out. We talked about that all the time, those moments in our lives where we really had to take forceful action and stand our ground. Sometimes revolting in violent acts to stand our ground. I also recall the first time I was called the N word by a small white child and the same thing. My family talks about this all the time because I came home crying and they're like, "Well, what happened?" I told them what happened and they're like, "Well, what did you do?" I was like, "I did what I was taught to do. I punched him out." Now, as a kid, I felt I can get away with that. As I got older, I realized that there's got to be another way. I can't go around punching people out. Because again, I'm operating a white supremacist society that doesn't matter what someone else did to me. I'm the one who's going to take the brunt of the persecution for that. Yeah. But I guess what I'm saying is how difficult it has been when people such as you and myself and our families have been put in those situations, and how traumatic they are. Yeah. From a young age, how this really stays with you? Absolutely. Absolutely. This has been great as an initial conversation to have with you about race. I'm sure we're going to have many more conversations about race. I think so. For those of you watching, I hope you see it's really easy, it's not difficult. In our case, it turns out that there were certain similarities. I think there's also really keen differences which we don't have time to get into, but that are definitely worth exploring. Having a race conversation doesn't necessarily mean that you share the same story, but it means really listening, doing some deep listening, and being really respectful. I think that we successfully modeled that. I think that was great. Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you, Shawn. I will see all of you in the next video. Thanks for watching. Bye-bye.
