Decoding Disruptors: Race Forward

Baratunde Thurston (0:05)

Most individual white people in America alive today didn't explicitly do anything to gain racial advantage. They simply didn't do anything to let go of that advantage.

Tianna Bartoletta (0:18)

It's hard to live in your own skin when you have to put on a different one to navigate the world.

Shea Serrano (0:25)

We're in the middle of a civic movement that we have not seen in like 50 or 60 years. Like this is a big thing that's happening right now.

Michael Gervais (0:34)

The events of the 2020 summer plunged us into a period of racial reckoning and soul searching. Waves of protests and demonstrations across the globe push race to the center of our social discourse. People are hopeful that this complex, fraught moment is the beginning of a real, meaningful movement towards racial equality.

But change starts within. How can we build the internal skill sets to create the change that we want to see in the world?

Gary Tyler (1:05)

I learned how to forgive because without forgiveness, you can never move forward because you would always be clouded about the things that you dwell on what people done you, how people mistreated you.

Tianna Bartoletta (1:20)

There has to be a willingness to ask the question, to use the wrong word, to risk being misunderstood.

Lindsay-Rae McIntyre (1:27)

How am I going to use my own platform to raise the voices of others and to create systemic change that will result in an outcome that is different than the one that came before us?

Michael Gervais (1:40)

This is a conversation with friends inside our community who are deeply engaged in the struggle for racial equality. So welcome to a conversation about listening, learning and taking action. And I'm honored to be doing this project in partnership with Microsoft. And I hope you appreciate the lived experiences and the implied insights of these remarkable leaders as much as I do.

I wanna share a bit of a backstory on my relationship with Microsoft. For the past eight years, my team and I have had the privilege of working with them, beginning with their CEO, Satya Nadella and his executive team, and then an additional 30,000 people across the company. Microsoft has transformed under Satya's leadership and he's built a culture around mindset, diversity and inclusion, with the inspiring mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. Baratunde Thurston is an Emmy nominated writer, a New York Times bestselling author, an activist and a comedian who tackles challenging issues of race with depth and humor. The clarity of his thinking and the disarming way he communicates is remarkable. In your book, you write, it's an inextricable fact of blackness that one will at some point be referred to as too black or not black enough by white people, black people and others. And then you go on to say, I've yet to meet the Negro who is just right to everyone.

So, can you take that just a little bit further, the subtext of that, because it speaks to the pressure on being black in America, that you have to have a relationship with your color that does not happen for people that are white in America. And so can you double click on that just a little bit?

Baratunde Thurston (3:41)

There's Dr. Ibram X. Kendi has a very popular book now called, How to Be an Anti-Racist, flying off the digital shelves in the summer of 2020 revolution.

But before he wrote that book, he wrote another called, Stamped from the Beginning, that really goes into the history of white supremacy and anti-blackness and the idea of our skin marking us. It's kind of inescapable. There are many forms of oppression.

This is very visible and so you're born branded in a society that may chattel slavery, it's bread and butter, you know, in an almost little sense.

So to wear that skin means to carry some weight with you and some shame and some fear and some expectations. And I think for non-black people and especially white people, there is black as less than, black as something to be feared, black as less intelligent, black as less capable, black as more lazy, which is less competent, less effective, less efficient, less capable.

And when you're forced into this group, right? Okay, you're a part of the black skin club, then within the culture, you've got to find ways to survive. And so you create ritual, you have a sense of belonging, you have an us versus them from the inside of the black community, which says, okay, well, don't stand out too much. And this is what it means to be black.

And then we learn, well, what are the acceptable ways to be black? Oh, so the majority culture thinks this is cool. This is sellable, monetizable, that kind of black is cool. So this is what black people do. So, okay, they play basketball. So if you're a little boy like me, who was terrible at and uninterested in basketball, you're less black.