Transcript
Sam: Hello, hello, hello! Good morning, good afternoon, good whatever time you are listening to this special guest-host edition of “Yo, Is This Racist?” I am Sam Faingold…
Paige: And I am Paige Kern, and we are here to talk about racism.
Sam: Everybody’s favorite, most comfortable topic that two white women should absolutely be discussing with much authority. Um yeah, so we are white, so I – I don’t experience any racism. I mean, you know, and I – I think one thing that I really took for granted about my white privilege, especially as a child, was I see myself on TV all the time. You know? That’s something that’s come up a lot is a lot of representation in media, and that’s something that that I was focused on in my diaries. Uh, what did you think about that Paige? I mean you see yourself too.
Paige: Yeah, I mean, like, in the media, like when Black people are talked about, they’re always villainized as criminals or something else like that; and as a white person like, I always saw myself represented like in princesses, even in like Disney, like though the first Black princess didn’t come until 2009.
Sam: Like, shout out Tiana, but that’s too late.
Paige: Yeah, exactly. Like, I grew up seeing myself on the screen and that’s different for a lot of other people.
Sam: Yeah, that’s something that that I was focused on in my journals, because I’m a communications major I’m really focused on the media. Yeah, so we had Matt James was the first Black bachelor and we’re on season 25, which is absolutely crazy. There have been black bachelorettes before, including Rachel Lindsay, who this story is going to be a little bit about later. Rachel Lindsay has this podcast now and she had, um, Chris Harrison come on. Chris Harrison is, I shouldn’t say obviously, because it’s not, he’s the host of The Bachelor, or he was. We’ll- we’ll get into that later. Um so this season, um Matt James – black bachelor – he ends up picking a white woman to be, you know, his, his match, final rose, I don’t really know the terminology, but white woman’s name is Rachael Kirkconnell, and photos came out after they’d wrapped filming, but before the like last few episodes had come out, where she was at like, Antebellum parties and she was like at plantations, and it was, it was really problematic, and it was like, people were not happy about it. So Rachel Lindsay –
Paige: For good reason.
Sam: For a good reason, yes, 100%. But so Rachel Lindsay had Chris Harrison on her show to talk about it. It just went downhill. So he – my favorite quote, my favorite pull quote that’ll just summarize the whole thing is, “Well Rachel, is it not a good look in 2018, or is it not a good look in 2021? Because there’s a big difference.” That’s what he said about the pictures of her like, at the plantations.
Paige: You gotta like, take a step back, like is there really a big difference, it’s, it’s still the same problem.
Sam: I’m also like, it’s not like it was you know, 1930, not to excuse any of that either, but like, this was three years ago. There’s really not that big of a difference in terms of what is socially acceptable.
Paige: Except there wasn’t as much media over it then as there is now.
Sam: Exactly, which is, which is what we’re talking about, which is very important. And you know, Chris stepped down after that. Well stepped down. I don’t really know, he’s not gonna be hosting it anymore. But obviously, there’s, there’s a lot of issues in media representation, and that’s just reality tv, that’s not talking about you know, characters. I was talking about specifically like black figures Black people versus white people in the spotlight.
Paige: And a lot of it is like, white people trying to talk about Black people’s experiences, which is –
Sam: Which is not their, not their place. Not our place.
Paige: Not our place, exactly. So I, in my journal, I talked about the um prison and police systems, how and that created injustices in the Black community, and um a lot of politicians like literally are aiming to like lesser, lessen the Black community and make them a second class citizen and take their rights away. And the 13, in the documentary, documentary the 13th –
Sam: Oh yeah. Ava DuVernay. We love her.
Paige: It was a very good documentary, so good. Highly recommend. Definitely. The 13th amendment was abolishing slavery, but now there’s so many loopholes to it, that you’re free unless you’re a criminal, and now all these politicians have been putting things in place to make Black men in particular, criminals, and taking their votes away. Like it starts like, with Nixon um, pinning crime, raising crime rates against the Black community.
Sam: Oh yeah, war on drugs, yeah. Let’s go there.
Paige: War on drugs. But it was all pinned against community – communities of color and the Black community.
Sam: Yeah, Nixon’s advisor, they, they got him on tape, remember? He was saying, I’m not going to say verbatim, because I – I should not and also I don’t remember the exact quote but he was like, ‘yeah we couldn’t make being Black illegal, so we just associated Blacks with, with crack and, some other group, the hippies with marijuana.’ They were criminalizing ways of life they didn’t agree with, which in particular was like, a race. Black people. ‘A race.’ We’ll, we’ll use race but, that’s a social construct, but, but keep going.
Paige: Yeah, exactly. Yes, but the war on drugs like, like you said with crack, like crack cocaine was more used by the Black and um minority communities compared to like, just straight crack. And, they had different –
Sam: Yeah, the 101 sentencing rules. Yeah, yeah, because white people use cocaine and Black people use crack.
Paige: Yeah exactly. So like they’re the same thing, like why are they –
Sam: You add baking soda and heat.
Paige: Disproportionate. Yeah exactly, exactly, exactly. Like oh my goodness, but next Reagan continued this incarceration of the Black community by giving mandatory minimums, which is like with the crack stuff, um and it’s very disruptive, because now Black men are being locked up at a higher rate and for a very much longer time. Like in the stat that I saw, it said that one in 17 white men will likely get arrested in their lifetime, while an overwhelming Black – amount of Black men, one in three will get arrested in their lifetime, which is it’s crazy to me, because when you look at like the comparison of them, like white men are the majority, so why is it so much less that they are the ones being incarcerated? Like, black men only account for 6.5% of the population but they’re 40.2% of the prison population. Like that like, makes me take a step back. Like, they’re not inherently more violent than white people. They’re not like, they’re just always pinned as criminals, and like, to pin a whole community as like super predators like that takes a toll, and it’s not – it’s just really hard against them.
Sam: Right, and if you keep seeing that on tv like, or in the radio, or however you’re getting your information, like if you keep seeing that, especially when on the news, our news is so focused on you know, criminals and crime now, which creates this phenomenon like, I don’t know. Communication scholar jumping out, like mean world syndrome, we think that everything is scary and if we are seeing that these people who are being arrested, who are committing all these crimes are overwhelmingly Black men, we’re going to believe that they are the ones being criminals and we will then generalize that as a stereotype that black men are scary, and they’re criminals and whatever other rhetoric we’re fed about them.
Paige: Yeah, it also like blows my mind how like, a Black person doing something that a white person could do without any like, thought is seen as suspicious, like walking down the road with their hands in their pocket. Like I’ve done that many times and not thought a thing, but –
Sam: No, no. I’m a tiny white girl, nobody thinks I’m doing anything. If I was taller and my skin was darker, who knows, like and that’s, that’s absolutely ridiculous, I just happened to look like this.
Paige: Yeah, exactly. That’s what it looks like, what makes me mad, like I happen to be gay, but like I’m able to hide that in certain situations where I feel uncomfortable, and like I always think about it, and I’m like if I were a person of color like, that’s not something that they can just hide or change like, you have to live with that every single day.
Sam: It’s outward expressing.
Paige: I don’t even understand like how hard it is for them. Like I can try, but I will never understand what they go through on a daily basis.
Sam: Okay, so, so how do we fix, how do we fix this larger issue of misrepresentations or just people being left out of, of media, of being able to tell their stories, being able to, to kind of fix this issue we have with presenting which stories?
Paige: There’s this new like, no, I wouldn’t say new, but white fragility is very like, I’d say predominant right now in conversations about racism, and I think as white people, we need to be open to listening and hearing other people and like trying to learn, really like learning information on our own, like there’s so many places where you can learn things that you don’t need to like be oblivious to this and not know your stuff.
Sam: Right, and I think a big part of that right now is that, thankfully, we are moving towards more people of color, more people of different identities and backgrounds being able to tell their own stories. Obviously we’re not in a good enough place, but like, we talked about Ava DuVernay earlier who’s doing like 13th, When They See Us presenting these really great stories that have, you know, history and that they’re educating people and people are paying attention and she’s a Black woman telling the story of Black people.
Paige: I think that’s really important and then I think something to point out is in the documentary the 13th like, um a lot of the speakers in it were people of color, so they’re speaking from experience not just from an outsider white person perspective trying to speak on the topic you know.
Sam: Right, and we, we’ve encountered that I mean, in the class that we’re doing the podcast for, we, we’ve come in contact with, we read um, is that Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe.
Paige: Yeah, I think like something to point out also about Okonkwo’s story is like, at the end of Things Fall Apart is the white colonization guy, he says, ‘I think this can make a good paragraph in my book.’ Like we just read a whole book about this guy’s life and a white man is going to say, ‘I think his death would make a good uh like yeah part of my story.’
Sam: He is distilling his entire life down to one little anecdote that he can fit in the greater white story.
Paige: Yeah, like what blows my mind is like, he doesn’t even realize like why this happened, like that he was the cause of death, like –
Sam: He’s just so so blatantly unaware of his own whiteness and I think now we’re running into a place where white people are having to confront that sort of privilege and the power that they have, you know, historically given themselves by doing awful things to people of color, and that’s what’s, what’s generating this white fragility and people just being so defensive, kind of like Chris Harrison was, where he’s like you know, ‘is it a good look?’ I don’t know, it’s not a good look. Yeah, but I think now just, just making sure that we have these I mean we’ve been talking about you know Black people in particular, so Black creators, or people of color, or trans creators, like being able to tell their own stories and get their messaging out, so that we can listen, so that we can listen to them and be able to fix –
Paige: Raise their voices, and make them the ones that are being listened to.
Sam: Exactly, we just need to, we all just need to shut up and listen. I think, I think that’s a great um, step in the right direction. Uh yeah, of listening to other people. I uh, I think we’re, I think we’re out of time. I think we, yeah I think we talked this one out. I mean, there’s much more to say, but I – I think –
Paige: We could go on and on.
Sam: Yeah, join in next week, there will not be uh next week, but uh yeah. Thanks, everybody for, for coming to listen. I have been Sam Faingold…
Paige: I’m Paige Kern.
Sam: And this is it. This is it. This is it. Goodbye, everybody.
Works Cited:
Gramlich, John. “Black Imprisonment Rate in the U.S. Has Fallen by a Third since 2006.” Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 6 Aug. 2020, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/06/share-of-black-white-hispanic-americans-in-prison-2018-vs-2006/.
Longeretta, Emily. “A Timeline of Chris Harrison and Rachel Lindsay’s Interview and the Fallout.” Us Weekly, 4 Mar. 2021, www.usmagazine.com/entertainment/pictures/chris-harrison-and-rachel-lindsays-interview-fallout-a-timeline/.