I got to spend the morning up at the Anatole with some really smart people. The occasion was a panel discussion sponsored by the Embrey Family Foundation and Dallas Faces Race; it was a kickoff to the big Facing Race conference going on in Dallas this week.
I had the privilege of moderating a panel made up of civil rights pioneer Benjamin Zelenko, Race Forward President Rinku Sen, state District Judge Tonya Parker and Dallas attorney Sol Villasana. All four of these folks are rock stars, and the conversation was so interesting that I could have listened to them well into the evening.
Also a part of today’s events was the release of the official findings of a survey on racial attitudes in Dallas. The Embrey Family Foundation sponsored this work as well. (We editorialized on it here; you can see highlights of the survey here the full report here.) Our editorial board will be keeping readers up to date on how Embrey and Dallas Faces Race go forward to turn this research into some type of pilot advocacy program.
Among the interesting moments in this morning’s panel discussion was Sen’s remarks about the need to disrupt the status quo and organize in civil disobedience to bring about action. That sparked lively debate among the panelists about whether demonstrations are merely protests that “preach to the choir” or actually bring about change.
Earlier, Villasana had brought up the issue of Dallas schools that still bear the names of figures from the Confederacy as an example of racial insensitivity. (Eric Nicholson of the Dallas Observer had written about this just yesterday.) So Sen used this example to illustrate what she meant by disrupting the status quo – and at the same time provided a window into some of the discussion that will take place at the national Facing Race conference in the next few days.
She noted that a lot of parents whose children go, say, to DISD’s Robert E. Lee Elementary probably don’t like the name. But they are more likely to talk amongst themselves about the bias the name bestows rather than do anything official to try to change it. But what if not just one or two parents officially complained, but if parents organized and a majority wrote letters of protest? What if they started a petition drive? What if they picketed? What else might they do to make it uncomfortable for DISD to retain the name on the school?
In his piece on Unfair Park about the Robert E. Lee issue, Nicholson paraphrased trustee Mike Morath as saying that “he fields the name-change question from time to time but that he has higher priorities than scrubbing DISD of Confederate references, like improving students’ educational outcomes.”
If Morath had been at this morning’s discussion (and, in fact, Supt. Mike Miles was) he would have heard a number of perspectives on why such a scrubbing should be a top priority.
A lot of passion built around the idea that implicit bias is at the heart of much of today’s discrimination. As Sen said, racism is, these days, unintentional, systemic and hidden – not individual, overt and intentional. To a white school trustee, scrubbing a Confederate reference probably seems like not a big deal, but to young people in the community who are learning the history of the Civil War, how does Lee’s name on a school building compute? Not in a positive way, for sure.
Judge Parker addressed implicit bias in another way. She noted that bias is about “leaning toward something.” It’s about forming opinions about others before they ever open their mouths. It’s about assigning weight and credibility without proof or foundation, just because of how you “register” someone or something just by their “being/existing.”
Whether you spend time with the survey I referenced above or thinking about some of the panelists’ ideas, I hope this blog post will expand the audience of people willing to challenge our own biases and attitudes.