Have you ever interacted with someone of a different race, gender, sexual orientation, or other identity, and felt that you seemed to be talking past each other? Russell K. Robinson’s article Perceptual Segregation article (Colum. L. Rev. (2008) drew on empirical research to argue that Whites and Blacks are predisposed to disagree about racial discrimination because they have different incentives and information about race and racism. Most White people were raised to avoid thinking and talking about race and racism. Such “colorblind” behavior, White people are often taught, makes them good, upstanding people. From the perspective of most Black people, however, the failure to engage racism is a manifestation of white privilege. A wave of recent police killings of African-Americans, including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, has upended this racial order in surprising ways. Whites are learning that being silent about race feeds racism and implicates them in the problem. As one slogan states, “white silence = violence.”
Yet this fresh eagerness among more whites to discuss race and confront racism carries new perils as differences in background understandings of racism and how we relate emotionally to racism predispose even well-meaning people to disagree. For example, Chad Sanders wrote a piece in the New York Times (“I Don’t Need Love Texts from My White Friends”) explaining that after Floyd’s death he received a flood of texts from White acquaintances that expressed love and concern for him, yet these same caring acquaintances seemed unaware that their texts imposed the burden on him of deciding whether and how to respond, which “drained [his] time and energy.” Sanders wrote that he felt these Whites were “using me as a waste bin for guilt and shame.” The gap between the feelings Sanders describes when receiving these texts (and of many Black people who related to his article), and the feelings of those who sent him the texts (and of many White people reading his article), is one example of what we call emotional segregation.
We invite you to submit anonymous stories [here] in which you or someone you know attempted to reach across an identity-related divide (e.g., race, gender, sexual orientation, disability) and were frustrated by the outcome. We are also interested in the emotions you experienced and your perceptions of the other person’s emotional state or reaction. We are thinking about the different perceptual biases and emotional needs of the people in conversation: both those from marginalized identities (who may feel, for example, pressure to manage the emotions of people who hold privileged identities) and those who hold privileged identities (who may struggle to find words at all or to grapple with a sense of making mistakes and causing unintended injuries).
In an intimate conversation to which you are all invited, two scholars of antidiscrimination law, Russell K. Robinson and Elizabeth F. Emens, will examine a selection of your stories and relate them to larger themes of the challenge and promise of 2020 as a turning point in building coalitions across identity lines.
This conversation will be free and open to the public on Zoom on Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2020, at 4 pm Pacific Time / 7 pm Eastern Time. To register and access the Zoom link for this event, please provide your information at this link.
* Your stories are invited, anonymously, at this [link]. Stories are invited from students, faculty, staff, and other members of the public. By submitting a story here, you are sharing it with the understanding that we may or may not bring this story into the discussion, anonymously, at this or future events, or in future writing.
Event will be closed captioned. For others accommodation requests, please email Caroline Cheng at [email protected].
Russell K. Robinson is the Walter Perry Johnson Professor of Law & Faculty Director, Center on Race, Sexuality & Culture, University of California, Berkeley School of Law. He writes about race, gender, and sexual orientation, constitutional law, and law and psychology.
Elizabeth Emens is Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where she is Director of the Mindfulness Program and Co-Chair of the Davis Polk Leadership Initiative. Her principal areas of research and teaching include disability law, family law, anti-discrimination law, contract law, and law and sexuality.
