ASM186 Tori Williams Douglass

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this week we're having a conversation with tori williams glass about anti-racism on ask sciencemike [Music] welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life i'm your host science mike real name mike mccarth but this week i'm asking the questions my friend tori williams douglas has joined us on the show to talk about faith and science and neuroscience and anti-racism it's a really great conversation and i think we've got a lot to learn together so what do you say let's get it started well i am so excited uh this week i think this is my first ever twitter fave ask science mike episode i am absolutely giddy to be talking with tori williams douglas this week tori is a single mom a student a writer an anti-racism educator we'll talk about that a lot on this episode and probably my favorite part of her bio is also not your black friend tori welcome to ask science mike hi science fake i'm so excited to talk to you today tell me about this right in your bio you had to add that not your black friend what's that about um i think that so many well i mean first of all i i grew up in portland oregon i still live here and yeah having like having like a black friend is kind of like people's you can't talk to me about racism card that they like to play um it's like i associate with someone who's black and i always want to be like yo thomas jefferson also associated with black people that doesn't mean you're not a racist so um being in proximity i'm trying to remember who said this okay i feel like it might have been clint smith on twitter but um yeah being in proximity to black people does not make you not racist so um yeah i try to like encourage people to go out and find other people to be friends with other people of color because yeah having just one having just one black friend is not that's not good enough sorry twitter accounts though twitter friends count so what's interesting is uh depending on what research you're looking at somewhere between 40 and 75 of white people don't have literally any black friends um and so i i think what's funny to me is how for white people they can feel this sense of exoneration from matters of race because literally having one or two black friends puts you in a very small minority of white people and maybe compared to other white people almost an expert on matters of race which is not my way of uh validating the people with one or two black friends but just like illustrating how insular and how frankly ignorant white culture is about what society is like for everyone else uh it's a fascinating dynamic to me that you know i could imagine there are literally thousands of people who follow you on twitter who you are the most significant personal representation of black culture and black identity in their lives um which makes me like really excited that you take on advocacy the way that you do despite the personal costs that would have the emotional labor involved but it also makes me really sad that our country has unfolded the way that it has that white culture has been so carefully and meticulously engineered to keep white people kind of among themselves and separated from the consequences of their lifestyles and the economic systems that empower those lifestyles yeah absolutely um i think that uh self-segregation is kind of the i mean it's kind of the results of like white flight and after you know after the civil rights movement and you know there was a lot there were a lot fewer restrictions i mean the restrictions still kind of existed they just you know were underground as opposed to being blatant um in terms of where black people could live and work and um yeah so after after legal segregation ended there was kind of like this rush to like self-segregate um and yeah that that has consequences and like you said it means most white people don't have a black friend or you know they have like somebody a colleague like someone on their team at work or something like that um but not someone who's ever invited them over for dinner um which is kind of that's kind of the metric that i use i can't even remember who told me that originally but it's like if a black person hasn't invited you over to their house for dinner they're not your friend and um i think that i think that's kind of true in a lot of ways but then you know social media makes it so that there's just there's not any excuse regardless of where you live um to be surrounded by only hearing only white voices so yeah i occasionally and not so occasionally have white friends uh get upset with the ways that i talk about white supremacy and uh several of this has not happened once this has happened several times a friend has come to me and said well i asked my black friend at work and he said what you're saying is too far and i'll say you asked your black friend at work have you ever seen this friend outside of a work context oh no i've never seen them outside of work okay does this person like report to you perhaps yes this person reports to me yikes like an unfiltered perspective from a person of color who works for you and you haven't seen outside of your office right but that gets labeled as friend right like they came to you and said this is my friend when actually it's like this is my subordinate and they want to keep their job right right what i mean but white culture is kind of uh imploding on itself right now anyway i mean white people have few friends in general especially in a post-religious context and it's like spread this expanding of the word friend to include acquaintances almost this matter of like survival i mean you've got this super high suicide rate for boomer whites a lot of which extends from just a basic sense of profound loneliness um and that that's i maybe we'll start there you know we've had this considerable exodus from the church over the last 25 years it's really accelerated the last 10 and uh so there's a lot of people who listen to science mike that have faith backgrounds and not you know probably about half of the people that listen are still in some church context today or some faith tradition today i wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your own history with faith and kind of the story of how you got to where you are now yeah absolutely um i uh grew up in the evangelical church in portland oregon and you know the evangelical church is as we know overwhelmingly white in general but in portland it's pretty much white um portland is not a diverse city compared to other major cities in the u.s so um yeah i had that as kind of my cultural like the cultural backdrop for what i experienced and also um i was also homeschooled for religious reasons um so and i can't you know we were in a homeschool group of you know probably 50 to 100 families i would guess and i can't think of any kids in that group at all who weren't white except for us um so yeah i mean i was raised going to church regularly you know two to three times a week generally and um i really you know i really thought that i would be in the church in the you know probably in the evangelical church for for my entire life um and then once i hit college there was a lot of a lot of fear-mongering kind of started in in the evangelical community um in regards to gay marriage being being legalized and so there was this major push in multiple states to you know re rewrite state constitutions to define marriages between a man and a woman oregon had one of these um um oregon had a bill on this specific subject and i you know i was like i know that you know in my head i'm supposed to [Music] you know judge judge lgbtq people and you know the bible says quote unquote being gay is sinful um that was scare quotes by the way um and but then i'm like i you know i work with i work downtown with all these amazing people who are queer and i'm supposed to you know i'm supposed to be like judging them and they're frankly kinder more generous people than any of the people i go to church with and so i've you know i'd been i struggled with that for a very very very long time um because i you know i kept finding myself in these church contexts where i was like well i want to go to church i want to go to a church that like takes the bible seriously which kind of means literally um and all of those churches are kind of you know have these like anti-lgbtq theological stances that they take and you know so i you know i've wrestled with this for for a really long time um just the kind of chasm between what i was being taught about you know in church and then my actual experiences with queer people um this you know this was before i mean and this is the same time i guess that i'm like realizing that i also am like probably queer but i can't really act on that in any significant way because you know that's not biblical and saving yourself for marriage and all this stuff so um i really i really started to wrestle with this when i was in this crazy cult like fundamentalist church uh run by mark driscoll that you might have heard of called mars hill in seattle and um i was like how am i how am i supposed to like in good faith tell these people that i know like hey you know god's drawn a line and you're out and i'm in and i couldn't do it and i finally realized if i was going to be judged for something you know by god i wanted it to be for being too inclusive as opposed to excluding people that god loved and cared for and you know had saved so i kind of came to that conclusion um about the same time that um about the same time that we started seeing all of this documentation of um police brutality and violence and murder and that was kind of that was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back for me even though it wasn't you know in the grand scheme of things it was a very heavy piece realizing that evangelical church when it came down to it if they had to choose between like me like a member of their community and a cop if they would choose the cop every time um and you know it was realizing like my my life here on earth had no no value to them whatsoever um you know and and seeing like the evangelical response to um the murder of michael brown was just that was that was kind of it for me um i was like okay well i'm clearly not wanted in this space and um you know if this were me if this were my dad if this were my brother if this were my cousin like you'd you'd still be out here on facebook gloating even though you know me personally um and so that was i kind of kind of threw in the towel at that point um in terms of christianity and um yeah i'm not really sure exactly where i land right now spiritually i don't have i don't really have any like spiritual practices unless you want to include like meditation but it's i don't know i don't necessarily i do okay great i don't i don't believe in like a higher power necessarily um but i will you know in in the summer time when i get to like go out with my boys and like look at the stars and talk to them about just like how amazing and unfathomable the universe is like that's a pretty incredible spiritual experience and it doesn't come with any of the like guilt or shame that church generally comes with um so yeah that's kind of that's kind of my my spiritual background i'm now here in in no man's land and i you know have found that in terms of building community shared values are more important than shared beliefs and so that is that's kind of where i've landed so i have people all over the theological spectrum um who are in my life and really important to me and because we share values we don't have any we don't have any like religious conflict um or like arguments you know we respect one another and our experiences and beliefs and that's kind of yeah that's kind of where i've landed so i don't necessarily associate with like the atheist movement and you know in part because i'm a black woman and they don't have any need for me or want or whatever i mean it's it's the same as evangelicalism functionally it's the same as evangelicalism they're like we don't care like you can be on our side but you know we don't care if you live or die um so yeah that's um you know to me like shared values are are much are much more important um than like believing the same thing so yeah that's kind of my religious background in not a nutshell me rambling for 15 minutes i have do you no you're not rambling oh my gosh um i have this like very similar frustration i lost a kind of higher power belief in a very similar way that you did and felt very at home for a short while in the atheist movement but like my loss of theology sent me in search for a new moral philosophy and as i started to study humanism um i became wildly more progressive on justice issues and what i found was that most other atheist humanists their primary preoccupation was the elimination of religion the freedom from religion but they didn't want to talk about police brutality they didn't want to talk about poverty uh they didn't want to talk about white supremacy they didn't want to talk about the fact that somehow conveniently this supposedly superior way of understanding the world through skepticism seemed to uniquely find high income high education white men and few other people and when i would bring those things up people got really vicious online like really really vicious and a lot of the people i used to talk to in the atheist movement have kind of blacklisted me and moved away from me not because i identify as a christian again but because they'd rather talk about like jordan peterson or something than the significant issues facing most people on earth and it's it's fascinating to me the way that both evangelicalism and atheism create this like highly cerebral world focus that almost limits people not almost does limit people from engaging with some of the most pressing issues that again face most people in the world and it's a new sort of insular bubble it's why i have such frustration both with my christian background and my atheist background both are utterly united in the fact that uh the way forward for the liberation of people of color is for them to to make the correct intellectual ascents it's crazy and that's also how i got to um noticed you because i noticed you had um some common faith experiences in the in the evangelical church but you also had a very high degree of science literacy um a very high degree of science literacy and when i saw you talk about the brain often i would see you even referencing things that i hadn't read yet which if if you're trying to figure out listening right now on the podcast how to get my attention say things i haven't heard about the brain yet it's like uh an irresistible lure like the warner brothers cartoons the uh when the little little uh smoke trail would come out from a pie and everybody would float toward it that's me only with brain science so i was curious what got you into neuroscience and studying the brain uh well that was kind it was kind of a fluke honestly so um initially it was because um i had started to wonder if my oldest son was on the spectrum and so i started reading kind of every kind of like parenting book i could get my hands on um and trying to put you know put what i was like learning in context because i was surrounded by um you know i was a new mom and surrounded by people who were you know shilling essential oils and um kind of like fact you know skeptical of vaccines and i was like okay i need i you know i need more than this i need to understand what is going on like in my child's brain and um i so i just you know i just began reading researching um brain development was incredibly incredibly fascinating to me um and so that was kind of that was kind of where it kicked off um ended up going and you know ended up going back to school and just taking some like basic biology classes like like biology 101 102 and that was that was really educational for me because it gave me the ability to explain a lot of neuroscience on like a very kind of basic level you know in the way that like you know a child can understand it and then excuse me i ended up getting a job actually in a neuroscience lab so that was i guess yeah that was kind of how that that kicked off um oops oh yeah okay so yeah being in a neuroscience lab absolutely like exposed me to all kinds of um like all kinds of different things that i'd like never learn so i learned a lot more about like brain structure brain wiring um and things like that and that was and also i happened to work with someone who was um somebody who was uh a macarthur fellow who got funding to study uh police brutality and um so having you know having that there was like just gave me the ability to learn and absorb so much being in that environment um you know every single day and that was kind of yeah that was kind of where it it um that was kind of where where it all came from like trying to figure out like kind of the neuroscience behind racism at the same time that i'm trying to figure out the neuroscience behind autism and then i you know just so happened to get a job in a neuroscience lab and so that was kind of yeah it was a pretty incredible experience for me and um gave me a lot of education and tools and resources to be able to educate other people so is that what um for anyone who's listening and doesn't like pay attention there's uh like a movement a hashtag i don't really know what you would call it called ex evangelical on twitter of which many people who listen to ass science mike and the liturgist podcast participate in um and tori is kind of a really well-known voice in that community that overwhelmingly white community how much of a role did your discussions of the neuroscience and racism play in what i've kind of noticed which is a massive white person pylon of you like where people uh people suddenly are like oh wow white supremacy might be a thing clearly tori's best use of her time is to explain it to me and tell me what to do oh my goodness yes um well yeah so ex-vangelical um you know what i mean people and even before ex-evangelical you know people who had just left the evangelical church um you know the evangelical church again is overwhelmingly white and so because of that you know the people who are leaving are overwhelmingly white um and i think that i think that yeah i think that the kind of neuroscience and leaving you know the neuroscience combined with leaving the church combined with um or i mean it wasn't even leaving the church initially it was questioning the church um combined with um kind of the anti-racist education that i was putting out on twitter ended up being i'm trying to think here i mean it definitely got it definitely got me a lot of attention um but i realized that there are a lot of people who really want resources and it is yeah as you know mike it is not a good use of my time to answer everybody and handhold on twitter and so i decided to start putting together some resources on my website um you know kind of creating and curating resources from other places as well as you know distilling what i'd read and made making it you know more accessible because a lot of what a lot of what i had access to was very academic and um you know so making it accessible to to folks who would you know never actually sit down and read a research paper or know what to do with the information they found in one um became a pretty big priority for me in that space and um yeah like i said it got me it got me a lot of attention on twitter um some of it some of it not good but most of it's been incredibly overwhelmingly positive so that's great and so that leads to this like amazing new project uh which you're calling white homework tell us a little bit about that yeah so my what i originally you know what i'd originally started thinking was if i can put all of this all this information into one spot like that would make it that would make it um you know so that when people would come to me on twitter and be like okay what do i do about racism i could say go to this link so um you know because it did it ended up like sucking up so much of my time and my emotional energy and then you know sometimes even as we know twitter can do you know sending me into like this kind of tail spin of like just anxiety and depression because people are you know a lot of people on twitter are not not kind people um and so you know and i would get pushback like i don't mind going and like you know going and fetching information or like hey you should read this book um for people if you know if i know you if i have a relationship with you but if you just like show up in my timeline and start blowing me up and you're like you need to provide receipts i'm like honey i have receipts or i would not be saying this um but i'm not gonna go and i'm not gonna go google this for you because if you don't know anything about it that tells me you don't actually care about the work um so what i've decided to do with white homework is put everything into one spot and i'm trying to make it a very diverse group of resources because i understand after like promoting all kinds of podcasts like up the wazoo on twitter that podcasts don't work for everybody so um i'm going to you know collecting podcasts that are um another you know uh resources that are created by people of color for people of color mostly mostly for people of color because we live in a society where every day we hear conversations between you know white men especially but but white people and being able to sit in conversa you know sit and listen into conversations that people of color especially women of color have is incredibly insightful and um i think it has this really powerful kind of humanizing effect like you know we were talking about self-segregation and the fact that you know most white americans don't have a black friend um so yeah having these resources available where you can where you can sit down you can hear these conversations that people would be having on on their front porch or you know at the kitchen table um i think is really i think it's really important i think it's an important way to educate yourself and also you know for me when i you know when i share resources um i recently i recently put together a little video and threw it up on youtube called why your brain is racist and it just talks about you know american society and the way that that was structured and the way that like we're only exposed to most of us including myself are only exposed to you know very negative images of of black people um or if they're positive they're super human so like think football um and or black panther and so having having this idea and you're having these ideas not even in your head it's not things that you seek out but just like culturally in the ether has an impact on your brain wiring um and you know i try i've tried so hard to explain this to so many people and you know one way that it really strikes me is i don't do you know i don't do gendered anything but my kids because they live in a society where there is like this gender norm that is binary are like oh well pink is for girls it's like no pink is for everybody it's like headbands are for girls no headbands are for people with heads um and you know so they're internalizing all these things just because every day they exist in an environment where it's considered the norm and even when i push back against it because i do intentionally um it's still it still is not it still doesn't counter what they experience um just on a daily basis and the same you know the same thing ends up being true for our experiences or lack of experiences um with people of color so i really wanted to kind of you know i work really hard to try to like humanize people of color especially black people um because of that and that you know that's a big part of what white homework is when you know when i tell people like hey you know anti-racism is it's a lifelong commitment to seeing the world around you for what it is right not this like fictional american myth that we've been sold but like actually understanding and seeing the effects of the fact that white supremacy was literally written into the constitution like into the founding documents of the country um you know we have to we have to work to replace a lot of these negative images that just exist by virtue of it being you know we live in 2019 in the united states of america um so i would do a lot of this really actually on instagram excuse me and i posted i posted something about this this morning because you know i end up sharing oh my gosh sorry i end up sharing a lot of photos of black people just being normal on instagram and the reason i do that is because so many people like have almost no actual experiences with people of color black people specifically and so just seeing like a black family you know in yosemite like that's that's not something that they usually see right and it's not a part of like you know it you know your life is segregated like in reality but also a lot of the time online and so just saying like hey you know follow people of color like and like look for people of color where you are because a lot of the time you know we don't see what we're not looking for um and kind of sharing these very like normalizing images i think is incredibly important in what i'm doing you know just like reinforcing this normalcy of black people um you know it's like us is fun and get out is fun and black panther is fun but like let's let's just be normal like let us just be human um so that's kind of that's kind of where white homework stemmed from was this idea of like okay you need to replace these negative images that are being uh you know negative or superhuman images that are being put into your head with reality um you know and just like intentionally seeking to humanize black people um is kind of like the root of of what i'm doing in my homework because i think that that is a lot of the practice of anti-racism is just finding the humanity in people of color in you know in a society in a culture where you know we're just dehumanized by default so you know i think there's has been a lot of frustration in my audience people who listen to me in whatever context um over how i relate to what i kind of internally label nice white people and nice white people aren't um white people that are hiding their segregationist or overtly white supremacist tendencies right those are those are really awful white people but nice white people uh are about my age or younger and they grew up in a public education system where uh classes were racially and ethnically mixed and the the message from all their teachers was we're all the same and we're in america and everybody has the same rights in america and so these children grew up with this you know post-racial colorblind way of understanding race in america and then the last few years have been really tough on them psychologically as the realities of the fundamental injustice in our quote justice system unquote are revealed the injustice in our economic systems the injustice surrounding schooling and surrounding housing everywhere you look every every name that's a death that turns into a hashtag has slowly debased these folks like me of the notion that they grew up in a colorblind post-racial america but once they have that insight if they're evangelical or post-evangelical uh there's a very common pattern step one oh my gosh america is better for white people and that's a really like frightening and emotionally upsetting notion which creates this this profound sense of guilt if you're white and so being good evangelicals faced with a problem the first question is how do we save these people which leads them to come into a public space or or talk to people they know barely at all and say how can i help how can we fix it and why i reference frustration in my audience is they get frustrated that i get so frustrated with questions like how do i help how do we fix it what am i supposed to do what am i supposed to google like white people don't know where to begin to talk about anti-racism and i get frustrated because i'm so embarrassed because that was me like three years ago like it's not like i'm so you know some super enlightened person on matters of race like i figured out we live in a white supremacist society literally like three calendar years ago and i've reflected a lot on this tendency for clueless and suddenly aware there's a problem white people kind of chasing people of color down the street saying help help me help you tell me what i'm supposed to do like how does that happen and i think i i think i have some idea at least how it happened for me to be a good evangelical was not to do your own work but to listen to your pastor and listen to your sunday school teacher and do what they told you and so you have all these white evangelicals and they've lost their pastor and they've lost their sunday school teacher but they haven't learned how to learn for themselves and so with a kind of i think a positive approach in their life an acknowledgement of racism they then place the nearest person of color in the role of their pastor or their sunday school teacher and say tell me what to do and what excites me so much tori about white homework is you assembling a curriculum that lets people not only start to learn about anti-racism but in the process of going through resources on their own actually learn how to learn for themselves without having to lean into a central authority and i think this is world changing stuff i i think that the promise for things like white homework is to not only help white people understand how to engage in anti-racist actions but also to take accountability for their own understanding of the world that they didn't have previously and that's why i'm so excited that we get to talk today and that everyone listening right now has the opportunity to do something really special and that's help you launch this work so would you tell us about your patreon and how people can get engaged in making white homework happen and available for all yeah absolutely um so basically everything all of tory on the internet is tori glass or slash story glass so my patreon is patreon.comglass and yeah that is where i am currently for you know the month of july doing um a big push to get um funded so that i can do a podcast i realize that there's all kinds of people obviously learn in all kinds of different ways and so um having resources resources available on my website is great um but i think that having them after talking to my audience it seems like most people find podcasts to be the most accessible way to learn and educate themselves so um yeah right now i am working on that and i'm super excited about it um so we're gonna do a podcast and then you know there's gonna be more more educational resources coming after the podcast is launched um and gonna be you know doing some some events as well um next year which i'm super excited about so um people should definitely stay tuned for that but um yeah i think that yeah tori glass.com or you know patreon.com tori glass either one of those will get you um to the right spot um so i have a little i've got a little support button on my website so if if you wind up if you end up there you know it's still easy to get navigate over to patreon and um yeah i mean i'm super interrupted i'm sorry but i you can't say this yourself tori is an incredible writer like an incredible writer and already has a significant amount of written and blog material on her website that is super worth reading and learning about oh thank you so much yeah i mean i try to like i try to make it accessible and um even though i do get extremely angry sometimes on twitter i try to try to make what i'm writing like kind of calm i guess and not like shamey or like trying to guilt people just you know being honest about like when you like you said like when you get to that point of oh my god like we live in a white supremacist culture like what do i do um you know if you can if you can get to that point then i think that yeah the content on my blog is really is really um helpful um if you haven't gotten to that point like go read the book white fragility because that'll help um and yeah so that's i mean right now that's that's really what i'm working on is just getting getting funded so i can get my podcast launched and um after that there'll be all kinds of fun stuff so yeah is there anything else you want to tell folks listening hmm okay so this is what i've been this is what i've been sitting with for like the last several weeks um is this idea that anti-racist work is it's a lifelong commitment i mean it's lifelong commitment for me because i was raised you know in all white spaces so i have you know i have the same work that i have to be doing um and i recently realized in a lot of ways that it is like tending a garden and like you you know we get super excited when you first plant a garden like you get super excited but you don't just drop seeds in the ground and then like come back the next day or come back the next month and like take your fruit into the house right like you actually have to show up on a regular basis and get in the dirt and do the work and pull the weeds and you know you don't get to like skip days because you know the weather's gross or whatever like that might be the time that you have to do more work um and so i've kind of been like sitting with this idea of you know anti-racism work be like being like pulling weeds and like tending a garden and making sure that like the soil is a place where you can actually grow decent fruit um i think that the bar is so low for white people in this country like you don't i'm obviously like look at the trump administration but um there is making it i think that this for me like this makes it a very accessible idea right of like yes it is work i i do have to get into the dirt i do have to like show up on a regular basis um but it's not impossible right like it's not something that you that you can't achieve you know and if you can consistently do that eventually you will see a harvest i think that that harvest is going to benefit black people otherwise you're not doing it right but i think that that for me has kind of been like what i am you know what i'm sitting with and kind of what i'm engaging with is just this idea of of tending to my own personal anti-racist practice tori thanks for making the time to talk this morning yeah thank you so much for having me i really appreciate it so again to learn more about torrey's work and to support her new project white homework just go to torrey glass dot com which there'll be a link to on ask sciencemic.com just in case you literally can't figure out how to spell tory glass i want to thank andrew golucky for pre-production greg nordine for production and jed botiford for writing the ass science mike theme song thanks to all my patreons for making ass science mike exist and my rent get paid and uh thank you all for listening i can't wait to speak with you next week