(gentle music) - [Karen] A season of protest in 2020, turned up the volume on the nation's dialogue about race and racism.

It's a talk we've begun and dropped for decades.

- [Man] If you're an American, if you love your country, you have to talk about it.

- [Karen] It's time.

The conversation starts with listening.

- People get upset if a group of African-Americans, you know, voice their concerns about the maltreatment, the mistreatment, the racial subjugation and oppression of our people.

And that disturbs me, because America is a nation of immigrants, it's a nation of many people of different races and creeds, religions and we should be able to be able to express our viewpoints.

- [Karen] White fragility.

What is that?

- It's just, it's the way white people respond when you talk to them about racism.

It's Dr. Robin de Angelo that actually wrote the book about white fragility.

And she talks about how when you talk about racism, the response from white people is almost textbook.

They bring up Black on Black crime.

They talk about, well, what about, you know, just many other examples in.

You know, those are some of the things that I used to think myself before I had biracial children.

- If you watch racial dialogues on television, they are not racial dialogues, they're racial monologues.

People do not connect with each other.

They get defensive, they defend their positions.

Very few times do you witness someone who'll say, I'm really sorry, what did I just do or say, tell me.

Everyone really has to begin to understand themselves as racial, cultural beings.

To understand what it means to be Black, what it means to be Asian-American, what it means to be Latinx American.

What does it mean to be white?

- I've heard several people from the white community say, you know, it's not a thing, it's not there.

It's a media-pushed agenda.

It's just something that's pushed to divide the country.

And I don't know how anybody, how any white person can say that, because we will never know.

To me, I always use the analogy of that's like a man telling you that having a baby doesn't hurt.

It's something that you absolutely never experience, and you really can't speak on it unless you've been there.

You know, even me as a woman with biracial children, I have like a very small percentage of understanding.

I see what they go through, but I'll never know what they're going through.

You know, I can educate my children and try to teach them as much as I can, but I can never teach them what it's like to be Black or viewed as Black in the community.

And so that's something for white people I think is important to know, that you can't, you'll never understand.

You can try your best to educate yourself and you can listen and you can sympathize, but you'll never fully understand.

- So when we say we want equal rights, it seems like we see Americans, white Americans especially.

you know, kind of speaking out and being ugly and rude.

And all we're saying is we don't want a handout, we want, we want equal rights.

And it seems like it becomes like, Hey, no, y'all want to take our jobs.

Y'all want to take our homes.

Y'all want to take this.

Y'all wanna destroy this.

And that's not what we are saying, but it feels and sounds like that when I'm dealing with white supremacy in America.

All we're just saying is we wanna be equal.

We wanna be treated as humans.

And I'm scared that, you know, they don't see it the same way.

- For people to feel upset or, you know, somehow disoriented by the fact that, you know, we wanna talk about the issues of policing and racial bias.

We wanna talk about the chokeholds or no-knock warrants, we wanna talk about the mandatory minimum sentencing.

You know, that doesn't make sense to me.

Like, have the conversation, understand that you may not have been oppressed but you can certainly respect someone who was part of a race that has been oppressed.

Sure, you may not have owned human beings and called them slaves, and no one is pointing the finger at you saying that you did, but be a part of the solution.

- No one is immune from inheriting the racial, gender, sexual orientation biases of our forebearers.

For me to believe that I have been born and raised in the United States for some seven decades or more, it's the height of naivety or ignorance to claim that I am completely bias free.

No one in this society was born at birth, yelling out that I wanna be a racist, I wanna be a sexist.

We took this on through a painful process of social conditioning.

And so all of us need to understand that we harbor implicit biases, that it doesn't make us a mean evil individuals.

Most people are good moral individuals who would consciously stand against racism, but don't realize that they harbor racist attitudes and feelings - Still, you know, still prevalent today.

That hate, that bigotry, the pure ignorance, that simply on the basis of someone looking different than you.

maybe worshiping different from you.

Mmybe speaking in a different language than you that they're a threat.

This is America, a nation of immigrants.

Unless you're a Native American, you're not native.

We need people to swallow their pride, admit that, and let's move forward together.

(soft music) - [Karen] The Oxford English dictionary defines an anti-racist as a person who opposes racism and promotes racial equality.

- A close colleague and friend of mine, Dr. Janet Helms, who has written about racial identity, white racial identity and people of color's racial identity.

She makes a strong distinction between being non-racist and anti-racist.

We can put many of our doctoral students through a race lab, and they become aware of their privilege, their biases, their stereotypes.

They can turn on the TV set and recognize, you know, stereotypes being portrayed in commercials.

And then they can go back home and understand that racist jokes are negative.

And at the end of -- they have developed what I call an, increasingly, a non-racist identity.

We ask them, what will you do now?

And many of them will say that I can no longer sit idly by, if I see a Black home worker discriminated against.

I would have to say something.

I can no longer go back home and have a family reunion and hear a favorite uncle tell a racist or sexist joke without taking action.

Our society punishes individuals that engage in anti-racist actions.

Parents and relatives would come down hard on the person by saying, "He or she is from the old school, be quiet, you're disrupting family harmony."

And also think about what would happen if you were a worker, who overheard, I mean, witnessed a discriminatory action towards an employee of color, if you try to intervene, you jeopardize yourself as well.

And these are the powerful hooks in our society.

The ability to punish you when you go against the grain.

It's not enough to be non-racist, because if you sit in silence and inaction in the face of bias and discrimination, you are guilty of conspiracy and collusion.

You are promoting a false consensus.

If you stand there and listen to a racist joke and laugh at it, or just stay there and listen to it, you are communicating to everyone else that is okay.

And so taking action is taking an anti-racist stance.

- We originally originated in Louisiana.

My great-grandfather owned the land, but I never could really get the straight of the story, but he had to leave to prevent being lynched.

I don't know the reason why.

So he took all of his girls and left the boys on the land.

But every place that my grandfather moved, we owned land.

That was something that was instilled in us as children.

Own the land, be property owners.

- [Karen] Because?

- Because when it was time to pay poll tax, you could vote.

- People literally died for what we take for granted today.

We can't take it for granted.

It's something that people shed their blood for.

They suffered, they suffered tremendously.

- That's a good question.

How do we persuade the African-Americans to vote?

In a way you feel that way, that it doesn't matter.

And that may not necessarily be true, but it seems that way, because after vote, after vote, after vote, after vote nothing, not much has really changed for us.

We still have ghettos.

We're still not getting the jobs.

We still have substandard living.

So I think the way to persuade them is to let them see that it actually works, to see change.

Not just getting a person in the office that we think, but to see the person in office and see them make a difference.

'Cause we're hopeless.

Give them some hope.

- We have people even now, you know, you have, people of all races who don't feel the need to vote within our city.

And it's like, we can complain all day, take your complaints to the ballot box, take your complaints to that voting booth, to the voting machine and actually do something about it.

- I also believe it's very important that Black people go out and vote.

For everything, not just the presidential election, but every single thing, every bill, go out and vote.

Because if our voices aren't going to be heard, like if we're not putting them out there to be heard, then no one's going to listen.

- They need to understand that.

They need to understand that somebody fought for you to be able to go and turn your ballot in a November.

Somebody died for you to be counted in your census so that funding could go to your community.

But people don't see that, they feel like for so long I've been disenfranchised, nobody's listening to me.

Nobody cares, but you have to make people care about you.

You have to show them that you're a person and that you deserve to be treated as such and that you won't accept anything less than that.

(soft music) - I think that when, anytime that you want change you have to realize that everybody has to be involved in the change.

It can't be just from one race.

It has to be everybody.

And so you want everybody out there rallying for the same thing.

- If we look back at the Civil Rights Movement, we saw that Dr. King didn't walk down the street or cross the Pettus Bridge alone with all African-Americans.

There were Jewish people.

There were Hispanic people.

There were Anglo people.

To abide in the same mindset is one of the most powerful things that we can do as a nation.

And if we could franchise that idea in this movement, I think that we would make strides in areas like social justice and discrimination.

- [Karen] So what happened that you decided to start Solidarity Isn't Silent.

- It was the murder of George Floyd.

We were angry.

I had a lot of anger and I really wanted to channel that in a positive way.

So I asked a few people to just kind of meet me at my house and discuss what we could do.

And our first thought was we could just organize a march here in Amarillo.

And once we started talking about that, we decided that we kind of wanted to go more towards longevity and do something that we could continue doing work instead of just a one-time march.

- [Karen] What happens after the protests?

- I know for a lot of people, nothing.

For me, it was okay, we did a protest.

what's next?

Most of the people went there with good intentions in their heart.

We're out here, we're gonna make some change today.

I think lot of them fail to realize that change does not happen over one protest.

That was not going to change and reverse 400 years of mistreatment.

That was the beginning of a conversation.

And that was all it was.

- Individuals are either gonna avoid the conversation, or they gonna embrace it.

They're gonna listen.

We're sitting here today, based off of that open dialogue, where you're saying, Hey, I'm gonna listen.

I'm gonna take the time.

I'm gonna listen to each one's experience, because they do have an experience.

They do have something to say, and I haven't experienced it, and I don't know, so let's shed light on it.

And so that open dialogue is the action.

- When you're sitting down, you know, you can't just sit down and have a conversation, but you know, you need a plan.

You need to be able to strategize.

You need to be able to negotiate.

You need to be able to say, how are we gonna come together and unite and accomplish the things that need to be accomplished or try to straighten out some of the issues that are problems.

You know, how do we fix those?

- [Karen] What is one thing that white people and other races can do every day that would change this conversation?

- Start doing your own research, and start being more open-minded and more -- like, it's hard to ask anyone to be more accepting, but like the more knowledge somebody has, I believe the more they're going to be able to unravel these feelings that might be, you know, generations and generations deep.

- We can't stay in the same comfortable setting and make change.

We have to get out of that and be uncomfortable for a little bit.

And it should make you uncomfortable.

It should not be an easy conversation to have, because it was not an easy thing for us to experience.

- It only takes one person to kind of break that cycle of thinking.

Push yourself to do the work and unravel any of that anti-Blackness that you have in your heart.

So that's kind of like getting rid of these stereotypes that we have, understanding how you yourself have been racist or have contributed to this, and understanding how you can turn around and contribute to the conversation or educate somebody else.

And I think it's very important that other races sometimes do the educating or do some of the labor, because it shouldn't be up to, you know, every Black person alone to start these conversations, to keep them going or to hand you every bit of information you need.

And so it's important to start that change within yourself and start that change within your own communities and within your own friends.

- If it doesn't make you uncomfortable then you're not listening.

It has been time to have had a conversation.

It is past due time to have a conversation, which is why we've stopped talking and we've started doing so many protests.

- [Karen] How have you watched the protests and the unrest that's going on across the country now?

- I watched that with a lot of sympathy, sympathy because I understand the point they are trying to make, but I feel that they are trying to make -- the point is good, but the way they are going about it is the wrong way.

All of the negativity toward the races was built into the system.

And you cannot change a system by removing statues, burning people's businesses or marching in the street.

You have to go to the source.

How did this happen?

How did that happen?

What law was passed to put this into play?

You know, they sit down and they figured out how to oppress a people.

Sit down and figure out how to undo what was done centuries ago.

- I think first we have to look at how, housing in African-American communities, those policies, putting in place more fair housing, banking, education of our African-American students, the judicial system, every part of it needs to be looked at and revamped.

Some parts just taken apart and reevaluated when it comes to African-Americans.

- When you see something, say something.

People that are especially in positions of power need to be cognizant of what they can do in their environment and their workplace for change.

- [Karen] What should white people do on a daily basis to make change?

- I think that they should be conscious of their decisions and how they might make someone else feel.

You know, it's difficult if you have a prejudice against someone to not clutch your purse or worry that they're gonna do something to you in the elevator.

But to be open to new friendships and conversations, I think would help a lot.

And then there are those that are going a step further and speaking out and, hey, that's always a good thing.

People that are being oppressed always want to speak up about it and say, "Hey, this isn't right."

But when others that it's not happening to them finally say "Hey, this isn't right," then you know that things are changing a little bit.

- We're in a season of change and it's unlike any other time in the history of the world.

To a point where, if we do something differently now, it can last generationally.

- Get with someone who doesn't look like you, and just have a cup of coffee with them, exchange your experiences, but at the same time exchange your hope and your vision, because we all have hope and we all have vision.

And if it's nothing else, it is one thing that we all have in common, that is for things to get better.

So let's talk about how do we make it better?

How can I help you?

How can you help me?

If we fall short of gaining that understanding of where people have been and where they are, our future is gonna look the same as he does today.

- I think the fact that people are coming together, I think that's really good, but I do believe that that's just the first step.

You know, if we don't advocate for change of policies and procedures and laws that are allowing these things to happen, then we're nothing more than a group of people walking from one location to another yelling about how we feel.

It's that next step that you take, you know.

Okay, so the march, you have the march that's the springboard into the action.

(gentle music) - [Protester] Racism is an American problem.

(crowd applauding) If somebody is telling a racist joke, I need you to hold them accountable and say, I'm not gonna listen to that any more.

(crowd applauding) When somebody is telling a sexist joke, I need you to say, I'm not gonna stand and I'm not gonna listen to that any more.

(crowd applauding) It starts with your ability.

It starts with what you will accept and what you denounce.

But we have to stand together.

We have to be the example.

And we have to say, what will you sacrifice for somebody that you don't even know.

(crowd applauding) In reality, it starts with you.

It starts with your heart.

If we bind together then we can be the change that this society needs.

You came out here today to stand for something, but when you leave these grounds, I need you to still stand for it.

(crowd applauding) (gentle music) (upbeat music)