Tricia Rose is Chancellor’s Professor of Africana Studies and the director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. She has written “Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America” (1994), “Longing to Tell: Black Women’s Stories of Sexuality and Intimacy” (2003) and “The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop--and Why It Matters” (2008)
In “Generation Rising,” Brown talks about her latest book, “Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives—and How We Break Free.” Host Anaridis Rodriguez delves into the book’s exploration of systemic racism.
Here is a conversation with Rose. The full interview can be found here.
Tricia Rose says her latest book was inspired by what she saw in the classroom. She noticed that students of all backgrounds “were truly operating as if everything was a meritocracy in America.”
Her students believed that everyone had total access and that Affirmative Action was unnecessary, Rose says. And that societal racism had disappeared.
“We passed laws that demand equality, so then we’re all set. That had really won the day,” she says. “And yet, there was so much evidence to the contrary.
And that’s what got me to thinking, ‘Oh, I need to be able to explain this.’ I can’t just say, ‘It’s everywhere.’ It’s in banking. It’s in policing.”
That would be generalization, Rose said. And her students would say that there were good people.
“Of course there are good people, and so on and so forth,” Rose says. “So that’s what got me really starting, that these incredibly talented students at Brown University had gone to either excellent schools or somehow had read an awful lot and yet, believed this profound fiction.
“And I thought, ‘This is not good. They need to know that this is not the truth.’”
‘I was on a hunt’
Rose then began doing research and asked how racism could be hidden so effectively.
“Once I did that, I was on a hunt,” she says.
Rose adds that her students, educated at some of the nation’s best schools, were unaware about the “profound, unlevel playing fields” and profound impact from policy and practice that created inequality.
“They just had no sense of how all of those things fit together, " she says. “So over the years, they would say things like, ‘Why do we need Affirmative Action?’ ‘Didn’t we end the need for that with these laws?’
“‘Why do we need other kinds of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) things?’”
In other words, what is the point?
“Now, they just think if there’s a big disparity, it must just be the Black people, the women, or the other people of color are not smart enough, or they weren’t dedicated enough or disciplined enough,” Rose says. “And that just became the dominant story.
“The more I dug in, in the classroom, the more I realized this has to be addressed.”
Rose uses storytelling and case studies to examine metaracism and how it produces unequal outcomes and racist disparities.
Asking a different kind of question
She says her research was predicated on asking a different initial question.
“Many people who study race and disparity are asking are what they think is a colorblind question,” she says. “Let’s just see what the numbers are, and then we have to figure out why they’re that way.
“But what I wanted to know was what are these policies? What are their intended purposes? What do they say they’re for?”
Rose said that the idea that America is racist is taken personally because some believe the charge is about people in a personal sense. Rose says that is how systemic racism works.
“In this era, you can have neighbors and friends who socialize across race, who have their kids going to schools some of the time that have mixed racial environments,” Rose says. “But the fundamental reality of that interconnection is a highly unequal relationship, where the outcomes of their experiences in schools, in incarceration, in racial profiling, in policing, in housing, in wealth and lending discrimination is so profound that it cannot be accounted for on a one-by-one basis.
“So what we shouldn’t be asking is, ‘Hey, are you a racist?’ But, how is society advantaging or disadvantaging you ‘based on your race?’”
Generation Rising airs on Fridays at 7:30 p.m.
