Rose’s book offers a new view of structural racism, how it works, and what is needed to make change. So are Americans ready to acknowledge the persistence of racism and how it affects our country? And how is the outlook for improving the situation in the heat of a high-stakes political year? This week on Political Roundtable, I’m going in-depth with director of Brown University’s Center for the Study and Race and Ethnicity in America, Tricia Rose.
TRANSCRIPT:
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Ian Donnis: Welcome back to the Public’s Radio.
Prof. Tricia Rose: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure to be here again. It’s been a minute.
Donnis: It has been and we’re happy to have you back. We’re going to talk in depth about your book and issues that it raises, but I want to start with the news of the week: the nationwide protests about gaza. What is your sense of how this level of activism across the country will influence politics going forward this presidential year?
Rose: Well, it’s certainly going to be at the top of the debates and the top of the sort of Republican versus Democrat, sort of framing of what’s going on. I think what’s so important is that, minus the violence and the issues that are happening that we don’t want to happen when we protest, we want to remember it takes a lot of courage for students to do what they’re doing. Again, minus the negative agitators, I think we really want to focus in on how important student activism has been in many key points in history. In this election cycle, I think it’s going to be really important that Biden figure out a way, given his ardent and unrelenting support for all things Israeli government and state of Israel, that he’s able to sort of imagine that Gazan people are also equally important in the world, and that their allies are in this country, too. So he’s going to have some blowback from that. And I think Trump will probably have less conflict to manage on that subject.
Donnis: The outcome at Brown University, where students agreed to end their encampments in exchange for a vote by Brown later this year on whether to divest from companies doing business in Israel, was in sharp contrast to what’s happened at some other universities, particularly Columbia University in New York, where police shut down a student occupation.
Rose: UCLA is having, yeah.
Donnis: Right. What, what is your takeaway from why things worked out so differently at Brown?
Rose: Well, I mean, first of all, I’m super proud of Brown for this because, you know, there’s also a learning curve. We had a few issues in the fall after October 7th, you know, horrible violence.
And so I think, a few things have happened. One, I think there’s some key people on the campus who have been, who are close to students, respectful of the administration, but, trying to manage that tension with the bigger picture in mind, that, hey, we are, there’s not evil people and good people, and that there are conflicts and disagreements, and we need to figure out how to push people who are comfortable and complacent into change, but still hold on to the notion of a community. And I think Paxson deserves a tremendous amount of credit for being in dialogical conversations. Some boards at other schools and some presidents feel that that’s just an irrational thing to do, to talk to young people. So I think Brown really benefited from our culture and from our leader and from some strategic people who were really instrumental in keeping the teams together talking.
Donnis: Well, let’s get into your book, Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives and How We Break Free. Your book in part is about how individual or personal racism masks what is a complicated and durable system. Unpack that a little bit for us, if you would.
Rose: Sure. You know, we ironically talk a lot about race in this country, so much so that some might think, gee, how come we haven’t solved this given so much talk? What I argue in this book is that the talk we do does not illuminate where I think the most substantial discrimination happens. The talk we do about race are individual stories, extreme examples of individual racism. Police brutality is obviously a favorite among this group. But even individuals who suffer at the hands of local administrators who do something horrible and a family is left destitute, and racism is discovered as a point of origin. Right, those are the kind of stories we tell, like, “What happened to you? What happened to me?” But what’s very rarely said in public is what are the systems and processes and interactions of the way race and racism are operating at regional and national scales that explain the story you’re hearing in a much more productive way.
If we tell a story with connecting individual stories to these broader processes, a much bigger critique emerges, a much bigger understanding of what’s happening emerges. And I think people are uncomfortable with hearing it. And I think event-based news cycles are not as focused on those kinds of systems thinking. So I think that’s really our problem here that we’re not telling the right kinds of stories with the right kinds of evidence, with the right kinds of connectivity in order to come to the places that we should be, given how frequently we speak about race.
Donnis: The murder of George Floyd by police in Minnesota in 2020 kicked off a national protest movement against racism. Of course, it’s a lot harder to make systemic change than to demonstrate. And it seems like a lot of that energy has dissipated. Given what you say about how racism is built into a lot of systemic processes, how can progress be made?
Rose: Well, the point of seeing how systemic racism actually works is so that when we’re in situations like this, we have at our hands and at the ready, the right kind of story to tell that does not let the officer off the hook for choking him to death. But does not act as if this was a one time encounter that just happened to create this crisis. It’s in fact the way Black and brown communities are policed in general. It’s about the extra sort of punishment that has been normalized in schools in every, in the everyday practices of the police in terms of various forms of punishment systems that disproportionately punish Black people, not just the courts, but any number of other outlet institutions.
So having this other paradigm where I emphasize that these are connected systems, connected elements, right? And all of these elements in housing, in education, in health, in wealth, and so on, and criminal justice produce interconnections of difficulty that are greater than any one institution or area alone.
So if you have a criminalized form of, say, student punishment in a school, and that school is the only place this punishment happens, then that’s not going to be an interactive systemic dynamic. But if that kind of hyper punishment is also taking place in municipal courts, taking place on the street with police, it’s taking place in terms of how stop and frisk or stand your ground is being adjudicated, right? Are we going to hyper punish when Black people stand their ground and try to protect themselves? And the answer to that is yes.
Donnis: Let me push back for a second. We’ve heard about phrases for a long time, like the prison industrial complex, the school to prison pipeline, the war on drugs. There’s been a backlash, even by the establishment against these practices to some degree, at least. So does that show that there’s a wider appreciation for what you call metaracism and how the negative effects it has?
Rose: It shows that at different times. This is why systems theory is so helpful to me because systems are not static, right? I mean, you have the Koch brothers who built the whole notion of the prison industrial complex, invested in it profoundly, standing against it at a different historical moment. Now, does that mean we’ve improved things? I would need a lot more evidence than that movement of those two billionaires before I’d say yes. Because now it’s more productive to do something else. So systems adjust to produce similar outcomes. It’s not wedded to the practice itself. It’s wedded to the outcomes.
So as long as the, there’s a comfort zone between a certain kind of advantage for some groups, disadvantage for others. And as long as it happens relatively hidden. Because we no longer tolerate grotesque forms of extreme, you know, hate and subordination. We’re uncomfortable with that collectively. But we don’t mind that Mike Brown in St. Louis, in Ferguson, went to a school his entire life that was unaccredited. His whole life, his whole community went to schools that were unaccredited. They weren’t just a little bit bad. They were atrocious, right? And, and, you know, so when you look at all of this state by state, you’re like, well, how is that tolerable?
Donnis: And you might draw the same point about Rhode Island, that on one hand, we’ve seen a lot of progress that bodies like the Providence City Council, the General Assembly are much more diverse than they once were. The state police and the Providence police are now led by men of color, but public officials in Rhode Island have been talking for decades about the need to improve public schools, not just in Providence, but Pawtucket, Central Falls, Newport, other cities. And there’s been meager, if any, progress,
Rose: Right. And part of that is because when you make a change like that, now what you’re saying is. Yeah, everybody has to have relatively equal access to good opportunity. And once you do that, it reveals that some groups have had more access than others. It wasn’t just they were the norm, they actually had access to more. So in order for everyone to get that, you either have to super hyper fund everybody or you have to sort of redistribute. And that’s when people get very anxious and they feel that, that now they potentially think this is working against them. So why metaracism is helpful, I think, for us is because it helps us see how the system produces an investment in one’s own advantage, if you’re white, and an investment in other people’s disadvantage. It’s not because you’re a bad person. It’s not because you’re any kind of moral person. It’s not a judgment. It’s that that’s how the rewards are distributed, and it becomes a normal part of our process. We need a new way of understanding how these things fit together in society, how they work, so that we can undo it and have, in a sense, meta justice. That all these interconnections actually produce more opportunity for everyone. Not less for some, not reversing it for some and increasing it for others, but a much greater sense of collective access.
Donnis: You write in your book how, in your view, the notion of a colorblind society can really inhibit efforts to reduce racism. Explain that, if you would.
Rose: Yes, that’s a really great question, Ian. I should come here more often. That’s where the great questions live. So the problem with colorblindness is that, on the one hand, it appears to be a race neutral concept. I don’t see color, and therefore, you shouldn’t see color, and then our real selves will be seen. Well, there’s two things wrong with that. Number one, if you can’t see how race and color is operating in society to create tremendous gaps in, you know, wealth, 10 to 1 ratios of wealth gaps between Blacks and whites. Sentencing, hyper sentencing requirements, greater suspensions in school for Black kids, I can go on and on and on, lack of access to health care that is significant, low quality access to health care for Black and brown people. If that’s the case, how can not seeing color Help us actually fix that problem. That’s number one. Number two, the only people who benefit from imagining that we can’t see color are whites, because that is the invisible color that is functioning in this colorblind system. Nobody of color thinks it’s a good idea to not notice color because they have to survive in the world that is so driven by race that if they acted like they didn’t notice it, it would do no good. Now the other third thing that’s critical is that all the laws and policies I refer to in metaracism, almost all, actually all of them have colorblind language. and yet they produce racist results. So a colorblind language does not guarantee an equal colorblind just outcome. We have to examine what the outcomes are, what the advantages and disadvantages are. So we’re just too early to even use this term, much too early.
Donnis: All right. Well, we’ve got to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us. Tricia Rose, author of Metaracism, How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives and How We Break Free and a professor at Brown University.
Rose: Thanks, Ian. It was great to see you again.
– – –
Two years is an eternity in politics. But we can already see the outline of the Democratic race for governor in 2026. At age 72, Dan McKee appears to be preparing to run for another term. And the first-time candidate who nearly edged McKee in the 2022 Democratic primary, former CVS Health executive Helena Foulkes, is actively raising campaign money. You can read more about that in my TGIF column, posting around 4 this afternoon and on what used be known as Twitter @IanDon.