In this May 2017 interview, Tricia Rose from Brown University discusses the ideological conflict between structural racism and the narrative of colorblindness, while emphasizing the need for a comprehensive understanding of structural racism and its implications. She explains that structural racism leads to chronic disparities in outcomes for people of color, particularly Black people. By acknowledging the existence of structural racism and the privileges enjoyed by certain groups, such as white privilege, society can work towards dismantling systemic inequalities.

Rose suggests that storytelling plays a crucial role in shaping public discourse and perceptions of these issues. She encourages diverse and inclusive narratives that challenge false or incomplete narratives. By integrating a wider range of stories, society can foster empathy, solidarity, and a deeper understanding of ourselves and our collective history. Overall, Rose urges political engagement and the rejection of false narratives to address the complex issues surrounding structural racism and colorblindness.

This interview is a segment of Story In The Public Square, hosted by Jim Ludes (JL) and G. Wayne Miller (GWM), published in May 2017.

Transcript has been edited for clarity.

Jim Ludes (JL): After the 2008 election of President Barack Obama. Time magazine asked if we had entered a post-racial America. From the perspective of 2017, the question seems ridiculous. This week's guest argues, in fact, that structural racism is the key driver of inequality in the United States. She's Tricia Rose this week on Story in the Public square. Hello and welcome to the story in the public square where storytelling meets public affairs. I'm Jim Lewis from the Pell Center at Solvay. Regina University, alongside my friend and co-host Gillian Miller from the Providence Journal. Each week we try to make sense of the narratives that shape public life in the United States and some of the most deep seeded American narratives are about race.

To help us make sense of it all, we're joined this week by Dr. Tricia Rose, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. Tricia, thank you so much for being with us.

TR: My pleasure.

JL: So the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, what's the work you're doing?

TR: We are a research and public events unit at Brown that brings scholars into the campus and features the work of scholars at Brown who study race and ethnicity in America and about the United States. And usually we try to focus on the kinds of issues that are important and cutting edge. We have a lot of topics. We do indigenous rights. We do teach-ins on DAPL or, you know, the Dakota pipeline, on police brutality. And so we try to take, you know, things that people are going to be interested in and then use that as a lens to think more historically or more sociologically or more broadly in ways that news events don't normally cover.

JL: Your audience is typically students? Is it the community?

TR: You know, we have multiple audiences. We have students at both the undergraduate level, graduate students. We have faculty, the community in Providence. But we are really invested in making all of our programming available online so that people can go to CSREA at Brown and watch. Almost 80% of all the programming I've done since I've been the director there. This is my fourth year. So there's incredible scholars. There are activists, people from around the world who've come. Why do we have to be there that one day and never see it again? So we love to document it.

JL: So why is race such a fraught topic in American society?

TR: Well, race is one of the most foundational categories in US history. I mean, you can't understand the formation of the modern West and the British Empire and the US Empire without understanding the transatlantic slave trade and the way that the enslavement of African people was the the basis for racializing all people. And so the creation of racial categories and then the hierarchical arrangement of racial categories literally fueled the logic of the nation state in the modern West and continues to be fraught because we don't want to really confront it properly. That's number one. Number two, we don't want to give up the perks that some of us have based on that characterization of hierarchy. So the people who have more privileges, mostly whites, don't want to give it up, and we don't have enough energy pushing us into really confronting it.

GWM: So the work you do at Brown certainly brings this to a larger audience of people, and yet you can still go into schools, elementary schools and high schools throughout this country where a lot of this history is either not told or is glossed over or alluded to or in some cases rejected.

TR: Or right or manipulated.

GWM: So what's going on here? I mean, for you, it must be self-evident and for a lot of people, I think these issues are, but it's not for everyone, and particularly in different parts of the country.

TR: That's a really good point. But I mean, this is what your show is about, right? One of the stories that we tell about who we are and how do those stories make certain facts uncomfortable, invisible, difficult, and make other facts overly expressive and lauded? So we tell the story of the Civil War as if it was the victory of emancipation. But that's not really all it was, right. It was also a story about power and capital, and influence. So it wasn't about Lincoln. It was also about the abolitionists fighting for freedom. So when you think about the story of race in America and education, we have to ask ourselves, why do these stories make us so uncomfortable? What is it about being honest about what's happened that we run from so much? Why can't we invest in new versions of ourselves that don't make us sort of beholden to the past, that make us agents of justice, no matter what background we have? And I think the more we tell these distorted stories, the more difficult it is to actually become these agents of justice.

GWM: But some of these distorted stories are ingrained in certain parts of this country and certain cultures and subcultures. Yeah, I mean, that sounds like a fairly formidable force because story has power. Well, there's a story that is authentic and truthful or a story that's not right. How do you strike back against that?

TR: How do you break in, yeah. You know, I mean, first of all, I think you have to be relentless, right, in a positive way. You have to constantly make corrections, use history, use ideas to challenge ways of thinking and framing. But the second thing is, you know, the new technologies and access to resources are incredibly helpful. I mean, I'm finding a moment of optimism here that, you know, between social media and the Internet. Just think, when we were kids, you would have to ask a librarian to dig up some obscure piece of information and hope to goodness sake, she or he could find it. Yeah. Now, 100 times that material video, material, documentary film is all available online. So I think we have the potential with these resources to move toward more dramatic storytelling. But the potential of the reverse is also equally so. So we need the will to politically engage on these tough issues and not let people keep telling stories that are fundamentally false.

JL: So one of the issues that you've worked on is structural racism. So for our audience, can you explain that in just sort of basic terms?

TR: Yeah, sure. So structural racism is a description of chronic disparity in outcomes as well as policies and behaviors that produce significant disadvantages for people of color, particularly black people. So to have structural racism, that means there are policies, attitudes, prejudices, a wide range of factors that contribute to the outcomes of disadvantage in a wide range of areas in society. So it isn't just personal behavior. So say there's an individual who has a prejudice. That's not structural racism. Structural racism is when there's significant housing discrimination that plays out, when there's mortgage lending discrimination, when there's police profiling, when there's implicit bias, when there's evaluation on jobs, when there's hiring, discrimination, etc., etc. present tense and past accumulation. And so it's a description of a condition that requires that we think about inequality in ways quite different than we normally do. We normally think of inequality as something that just happens and that with enough hard work and individual gumption, right, we are a nation of opportunity and therefore, you know, circumstances will produce positive outcomes. But structural racism is a massive set of impediments that challenge the myth of meritocracy, because it says that you can behave the same way and you will have these impediments in front of you. You may still make it, but you have to do it with dramatic headwinds that you've had to face.

GWM: But that truth is rejected by some people. And I think that certainly was an undercurrent at the Times, not even an undercurrent. It was on the surface during the 2016 election. So what's going on there? Why is it that what seems, again, so self-evident is rejected by some people?

TR: First of all, we hear it all the time, the main reason it's rejected is that we hear the opposite myth all the time. We have been told that the civil rights movement ended all racial discrimination, that whatever remains is sort of waning and sort of trickling out. We've been told that we are a meritocracy, which is a myth that not only harms people of color, but harms poor people of all racial backgrounds. We are constantly being given stories about poor people's behavior, right. That they're drug addicted, they're criminals, they're lazy. Their. We hear stories that basically say that they are where they are, not because there are structural constraints, but because their behavior is what's holding them back.

GWM: Individual choices.

TR: Individual choices and their behavior. Right. So what we don't hear is how the schools that they go to are inadequate. What we don't hear is the fact that various significant housing policies have destabilized their neighborhoods and communities. What we don't hear is that their parents are being paid an unlivable wage. What we don't hear is that the police are constantly surveilling and ticketing and fining and creating a criminalized environment in their neighborhood, I mean, etc.. I could go on and on. So that story that we create, right, is not only created through presence, it's created through an absence of expression of information. So it's not surprising that many people feel this way because it also justifies their own privilege in many cases. So instead of saying, Hey, I'm where I am because (a) I work hard, but (b) because I was able to use the GI Bill, because I've had other benefits conferred over time, they don't say that. They just say I worked hard. So this other guy, he didn't work hard. Right. That's the parallel opposite that that seems to logically follow.

JL: It's the story we tell ourselves in a lot of respects. But there's also a role that the media plays in this. And I think there's just a general broad shorthand for Republican voters in 2016 that they had economic distress, and that drove a lot of the decision making. But I contrast that with more visible and disturbing images, even in recent weeks of white supremacists and others sort of confronting people on racial bounds. That narrative does not have the same resonance with the broad mass media as the sort of economic disenfranchisement does. How do we better communicate that reality, that reality of race and the role that race plays without being afraid of having that conversation? Because I think that fear, that fear of the conversation, where it is going to take you, stifles the conversation.

TR: Yeah. You know, I think part of the difficulty with the media is that usually we tell stories about race through the news and the news framework is very narrow, right? It's a story about a person, an incident, a place, a thing that just happened. Sometimes you get a little bit of context, but you're not in a perpetual state of sort of educating people about society in the news story framework. So that's one of the reasons I think we ultimately come to the news story, as viewers, pretty impoverished. We don't have enough information. I mean, you know, I spend a lot of time reading about these things, but if I had another job, that might be difficult. This is actually my job. So it's easier. But most people don't have that and they have these other stories in place. And so the news story sets it up as conflict. It seemed like you were referring to just now, for example, the New Orleans monuments. Right. And people all these, you know, very what I call old fashioned hate based white nationalists are fighting and screaming and yelling at other people who want to take down these symbols of their own oppression. Right now, that becomes just a conflict story. We've got two sides, right? We've got the racists and the non racists (or however they're framing it) and we don't understand. And the conflict is what got our attention. And the fear and the worry. But what we really need is to pull back and ask ourselves questions: what is the role of a monument? Like what is the role of a monument? And what does it mean to celebrate a history of violence, degradation?

GWM: Those kinds of stories take time, take effort and take commitment by the mainstream media outlets. And increasingly, as media has shifted, as newspapers have lost thousands and thousands of reporters and also readers. Those kinds of stories no longer have a place or have a lesser place or fewer places to be published. I mean, obviously there are many exceptions to that rule, but that's a function of the changing media situation in this country.

TR: Yeah, it's huge and it's devastating in many ways to our collective intelligence.

GWM: Yeah, I totally agree.

TR: But, you know, you can tell these stories very quickly. You can tell these stories in a brief way. I mean, just that question, what's the role of a monument? Right. That's a Twitter question that's under 140 characters. So part of it is forcing a different framework for the conversation. You don't necessarily have to have a 30 minute segment, too, to really change the framework, but we need to be committed to that change.

JL: And a question like that evokes, for most people, an immediate understanding of really what's at stake here.

We need to take a moment for station identification. This is Story in the Public Square where storytelling meets public affairs. An audio version of this program airs four times every weekend on Sirius XM Satellite Radio's Politics of the United States Channel. The podcast channel number 124 were produced each week by a remarkably talented crew at Rhode Island, PBS and Providence, Rhode Island. I'm Jim Lucas from the Pulse Center at Solvay, Virginia University. If you want to catch up with me on Twitter at GM, Lewis, my co-host, a great journalist with the Providence Journal, is Dewayne Miller. And he's on Twitter, too, at G. Wayne Miller. And our guest, a remarkably talented scholar, public speaker and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. Tricia Rose, You can tweet her out. Prof. Tricia Rose Professor Tricia Rose.

JL: Tricia, you've described an ideological war between structural racism and the story of colorblindness, which some people have embraced. Can you sketch what that conflict is?

TR: Whew. I’ll try not to take the entire rest of the show without one question. So as we said before, structural racism are forces that are personal and structural and institutional that produce chronic negative outcomes right in society. They produce a racial hierarchy. Colorblindness is an idea about how to think about race that we began to promote as a nation in the wake of the civil rights movement. So one of the things that happened is that people felt that Jim Crow segregation based on race, pure hierarchy, colored fountains, white fountains, violent control over separation, that the best way to respond to this was to then never apply color again as a category. And from that idea, which really was a liberal idea for the most part, we got colorblindness. We saw color a lot. We fix it by not seeing it. Now, this makes no sense to do overnight because you have to kind of unpack how 300 years of seeing color may have created so much disparity that you have to look at color again through more just lenses in order to fix it. But it made people feel good because they thought that they would immediately no longer be seeing color. So I would just pretend like I didn't notice you guys were white. I just had no idea. Which is insane to me. It's a little bit like mental illness as policy. But what happened as a result is that liberals began to use this and paper over difficult conversations. “I don't even see color. I don't even know how that happened.” [To which I could say] “Well, I can tell you how it happened.” “I don't know. It couldn't possibly be because I don't benefit. I don't believe this. I don't.

GWM: I didn’t cause it.

I didn't cause it because I don't [see color]. Right. and sort of personalize racism instead of structural. And then it made everyone uncomfortable. So people started losing their ability to talk about race, even among progressives. Right. But it also is, I think, a contributor to the racial resentment we're seeing from the white working class to which Trump has been considered a kind of temporary savior. And that has to do with the fact that if we're a colorblind nation, then this means we don't have any racism, structural or otherwise. And if people of color complain, they must want more. You see the logic. Yes. You have to have a colorblind illusion to have racial resentment and reverse racism as a logic. It makes no sense if you acknowledge structural racism. So colorblindness does this fantastic, you know, sort of magical trick to convince people to be both liberal. “I don't see race” and then conservative. “I don't see race.” And these black people keep raising race, therefore they're seeking an advantage. So it has made it very difficult for the last 30 years really to talk about structural racism without having to really attend to this myth of colorblindness that we have created as a nation.

GWM: Couple of years ago with the Providence Journal, we did a yearlong project on race. And you were a part of that and you were part of that in a story that we wrote about white privilege. And as you will recall, we received via reader comments and emails and other forms of communication to the newspaper, a very strong reaction. And a lot of it was really, really negative. There were people who saw the term white privilege and went, “What the heck?” Why was that reaction so strong?

TR: You know, it's a huge thing.

GWM: The trolls came out in great numbers and it was really nasty. So we had to take some of it down.

TR: Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. It's fascinating and also a bit sad, but there's a lot of different reasons. First of all, the resentment constituency I just talked about, people who literally resent having to confront the fact that they may have privileges that are operating racially. Right. And they just don't want it confronted and they're aggressive about it. There are other people who literally are just so uncomfortable that any kind of mention of it makes them strike out. This other group is hostile. Right. And they're closer to the anti monument and in the New Orleans constituency. But this more liberal group is literally anxious and guilt ridden. There's an institute called the Perception Institute, and they've done studies about bias and fear. And they found that many whites were more anxious (this is a study about five years ago) from being considered racist than they were for being considered a pedophile. So if you ask them which one of these causes more anxiety. Being called a racist, Actually, I thought I'd really rather not be a pedophile. But, you know, maybe I'm different, but this means there's a deep seeded fear and anxiety that signals a certain kind of self that we need to really attend to. So somehow I think we have to figure out how to say, look, you can have racial privilege, be a good person, you can have racial privilege, and actually still have economic disadvantage. Right. So you can say, hey, I'm poor. They're not mutually exclusive. I'm white and poor. And I'm a recent Latin immigrant and I'm poor. There are benefits to being white and poor, even though I'm poor, that this Latin person or this African-American person is not going to have. Just categorically so you don't have to be rich to have white privilege. Right. It's about how race boosts the category of your situation, no matter what economic position you're in.

So part of it is making it more subtle, helping people understand this isn't a moral claim. It's a structural claim that people have been given. Do you see what I mean? But I think people take it extremely personally. And frankly, racists fight this way all the time. I mean, you see it now with the monuments. You see it online. It's a vituperative hate that tries to drive out and stop change.

JL: What's the role of the election of Barack Obama and his reelection and the current state of race relations in the United States?

TR: I was like, I'm sure I'm sure there's a book in being written right now on this. I mean, just very quickly, I'd say one is that many of us, not myself, but many, many Americans, got lulled into a false sense of belief that having a black president meant significant racist ideology was largely over.

JL: There was a Time magazine cover, “The post-racial America.”

TR: And it continued even into the second term.

GWM: This first inauguration. I remember sitting with a bunch of people at the Providence Public Library and the sense of elation and relief and joy and your emotions overwhelmed due to maybe the reality of what had happened which was a historic moment but didn’t solve the problem.

TR: It didn't solve most problems, actually, if you really look at the numbers. Aso it one is that it sort of created this excitement that Wayne's talking about. But the other thing it did was serve as a constant easy way to stoke resentment among a constituency that was largely silenced from mainstream media, which really hasn't been honest about the significant role of racist ideology that exists. It's not a small percentage. It's pretty substantial. And the third thing is that as economic policy has consistently privileged wealthy people at the expense of working people of all backgrounds, that became an easy way to turn into racial resentment. You see, so as whites began to face what many people of color have long been facing, the kind of unemployment levels, the healthcare crises, the policing and the drug addiction and meth and things like that. As those crises increased, Obama became an easy reason. And so I think he became a target of resentment. Doesn't mean he wasn't part of the general problem, but he was no worse than Bush in that way.

JL: If you ask people about the Affordable Care Act, where you asked people about Obamacare. Obamacare polls worse than the Affordable Care Act. Yeah. Is there a racial component in that?

TR: Oh, without a doubt. Without a doubt. I mean, first of all, anybody who wants to tell you that you can talk about a powerful black individual without it having a racial dimension has not been paying attention. It doesn't mean race is everything. It's not everything. There are other things about Obama that make him interesting and can make him a target. But it's absolutely about it being attached to him as a black president and being a liberal president. I mean, both of those things. But black absolutely matters. The viciousness that he faced was huge.

GWM: And not just for the Affordable Care Act, but for many other issues that were dominant during his presidency. So let's go to the next president. The one we have now, President Trump. What is your assessment in terms of race relations here in the spring of 2017 under a new president and a different Congress, but in many ways the same Congress as the last four years of President Obama?

TR: Oh, this is a really tough time. You know, I don't think things are from the vantage point of, say, very poor people of color, there are only a handful of things that I think are going to be immediately impactful. I mean, you have the native lands and you have, you know, the immigration policy changing. And that seems very troubling. But my sense is that what Americans have right, is that there's a lot more similarity between the left and the right at the top of these political parties. And so as much as I despise Trump (and I do and I think he's just morally bankrupt, dangerous and any number of other things), my hope is that that (this is going to sound very weirdly cynical and confusing, but) that the stability of the already existing corruption and the stability of the graft will make it hard for big change to happen. Now, what's good about that is that it won't get much, much worse, I'm hoping. But it's certainly not going to get better. And it's forcing people to fight. So the upside is that I think there might be, you know, things that have been harder for him to do than I think I thought they would be. So I'm happy about that. But the other positive thing that comes out of having such a clear enemy is a lot more solidarity. I mean, you see people at rallies and marches and organizations who would otherwise see themselves as operating in separate circles. And they're like, “We'll figure it out. We need to get along.”

JL: I think, Tricia, that we could talk to you for about three more days, but we're out of time. Thank you so much.

GWM: I would say two weeks. Seriously.

TR: Thank you. Thank you so much.

JL: Tricia Rose from Brown University. If you enjoyed this week's episode and you want to learn more about Story In The Public Square, we invite you to follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Or you can visit us at HealthCenter.org. He's G. Wayne Miller. I'm Jim Lewis. We hope you'll join us again next week for another edition of Story in the Public Square.