It is 4 June 2020. In the United States, protesters have risen up in all fifty states to protest the unjust police executions of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Many militarized police forces have responded with violence against peaceable protesters, news crews, and street medics on charges of “rioting” and “looting”—some of which have happened at the instigation of right-wing infiltrators. Yesterday, news broke that Keith Ellison, the Minnesota attorney general, will charge all four officers who participated in Floyd’s murder. It’s good news, but it’s not enough. Black lives matter.
With the COVID-19 epidemic ongoing, I’m trapped in my apartment due to my asthma, unable to protest. I’d written most of a post about martial arts training in Japan earlier this year, but it can wait. Instead, I want to share this interview with Tony Chatman, a fellow student of mine from Muzōsa Dōjō in New York City.
Tony Chatman smiles at the camera, wearing a tan sport jacket, a light-colored dress shirt, and a cool watch.
Tony is a good friend, one of the first people I contact when I run into a diversity, equity, or inclusion problem I can’t solve on my own. I’ve been to his presentations on topics like bias and inclusion, and I learned a lot from the way he addresses structural inequities and provides concrete solutions.
In many ways, Tony and I have similar outlooks on those kinds of problems. But I especially wanted to speak to Tony because he has extensive professional experience working with a group I view, especially now, with fear and mistrust: law enforcement.
My personal police experiences have been relatively benign. My skin is light. I pass sometimes (though other times I happen to look like whatever race they’re after that day). I’ve only gotten shoved up against a cop car once, and never physically harmed. Police still viscerally terrify me, and probably always will. Tony’s had far more close calls than I, but he never seems scared or hesitant to walk into law enforcement spaces and call out systemic problems. I wanted his insight on the weekend’s protests and backlash, but I also wanted to know: how does he do it?
This post, like my other blog posts, is Patreon-supported, but I’m donating all the proceeds this time to this nationwide network of bail funds. If you’re just here for this joint and you don’t feel like joining my Patreon, that’s cool; but if you like what you read, please throw them a few dollars.
Content Warning: Law Enforcement
For this interview’s purposes, I tried to set aside my natural attitudes, which tend to align with various rap song titles; and summoned up the best-faith, most hopeful and aspirational perspective I could muster toward what policing could be. Especially now, if you’re not feeling it, it’s okay to skip this one, or to wait until you feel steadier to read through it. But the interview’s assumption is that it is possible for police officers to be good people, because it delves into the psychology of how a “good person” can still commit atrocities.
This interview has been edited for concision and clarity. We originally recorded it in audio on 2 June 2020, a very stressful day, so it’s a little more off the cuff than usual. If we made any mistakes or got a fact wrong in the heat of the moment, let me know and I’ll add clarification.
Tony, thank you for being here. It’s a really hard day … week … month … year … year containing several decades for all of us, so thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to talk to me.
My pleasure.
So to start with, tell me a little about yourself. Can you introduce yourself to the five people who read my blog?
Hah! Sure. So, I’m Tony Chatman. I’m a speaker and I’m a corporate relationship specialist, and basically what that means is: I work with organizations to create a more healthy and inclusive culture. A lot of times, that revolves around three subjects: leadership, dealing with disruption and change, and then some type of unconscious bias or inclusion and equity; and I think that those second two topics are incredibly relevant right this second.
It feels like all three of them are eminently relevant right now—but yes, especially the second two. You’ve mentioned before that you sometimes work with governmental organizations as well?
Yes.
You ever worked with law enforcement?
Yes I have. Honestly, about 80% of my business is with federal government. Within that, I work with Homeland Security, I’ve done work with the Secret Service … there’s a number of federal agencies that have a law enforcement division, so I’m pretty well versed in the law enforcement space.
Cool. That’s really interesting. Also, like … any time we’ve talked about this in the past, I’ve always thought about being in that situation and … I imagine it must feel kinda intimidating.
In a weird way it doesn’t, because often what happens is, I’m brought in and introduced as an expert. I’m there to train and teach. People are very receptive to my presence there. They’re grateful that I’m there. I’m looked at not only as a resource, but as an equal and almost like a comrade. So it’s really fascinating—I would say in many ways, it’s actually easier to walk into a law enforcement space than maybe some other white-dominated spaces that I have to navigate. It’s fascinating.
That’s really interesting. I definitely want to circle back to that later in the interview, because I think that, having heard that from you, and juxtaposing that with some of the things we’re seeing on the news and in the streets in front of us … there’s some interesting content to be mined there.
Yes.
So let’s start with: how are you personally feeling right now, emotionally? How are you and your family doing?
I would say the best word to describe it is “exhausted.”
I’m physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausted. This has been an incredibly trying time. I am dealing with this, I’m trying to talk to as many people and organizations and podcasts as I possibly can. I don’t even feel like I’m fully in touch with my emotions, honestly, because on top of that I’m on social media really trying to correct so many of the narratives, and you can only ingest so much of that information before it starts to mess with your psyche.
And then on top of that … man, we been in quarantine for over two months. So I’ve got my wife, and myself, and my two college-aged sons, a dog and a cat in a two-bedroom condo in New York, you know, so we’re all cooped up, we’re dealing with personal tragedies as my wife last week lost an aunt and that aunt’s husband to COVID …
I’m so sorry.
I appreciate it. It’s just so much that it’s almost like … I don’t know that I have time to sit back and process it. I know, for example, that my wife’s in mourning dealing with all of this, and that’s very reasonable. I think I’m in one of the stages of mourning but I’m also incredibly energized because I feel like if I don’t say anything, then who else will?
My kids, they’re tired because they’ve been doing the same thing with their social network, they’ve been working their circle of influence making sure everybody’s cool. My older son’s been very involved in activism, my younger son’s been trying to keep all his friends to have a cool head and think strategically rather than emotionally. So I think all of us are just a bit drained, tired, exhausted … and somewhere under that, mourning continually.
I definitely feel that. I think it was some similar impulses that led me to reach out to you. So again, it makes it doubly important to me that you’re taking time to speak to me.
I actually had a question about your social media experience. What kind of responses are you seeing in your social circles to the current uprising, and to the police violence and so forth? How are people responding, and what kinds of conflicts have been coming across your screen?
It’s fascinating—I’m seeing a lot of people turn a corner, people that were good-hearted and had blind spots. I’m seeing them change. I’m seeing people who were just in complete denial of the existence of racism and inequities in this world turn a major corner. So that’s super encouraging. Many of them have reached out to have side conversations and some to just encourage me and some to tell me “hey, we’re in this fight together.”
On the other hand, you know, extreme conflict, whether it’s just out and out racism, whether it’s race-baiting … I was on a Facebook Live last week and I had, I’m pretty sure it was, an attempt to bait me from law enforcement.
Oh, wow.
So it’s been all across the spectrum. Fortunately I think I handled that well, but when we went back to look at the profile, it was either one of these groups that’s infiltrating a lot of the protests, or it is someone in law enforcement trying to bait me—and there’s no question about it that that’s what happens. I’m sure at this stage I’m on a lot of watch lists, as I’m sure you are too …
Yeah.
So I would say it’s been surprisingly positive. I think also part of that may be that I have really weaned my network down over the last year or so. There are people I just couldn’t deal with for a while.
But I also think it’s a headfake. I think that because of the algorithms that a lot of these social media platforms run, there’s a lot of people who I’m connected to, I just don’t see what they post. So if I go out of my way and then I correct them, and then I deal with their confirmation bias, then they have one of three responses: they make a turn, which is more rare; they get hostile, which is about a third of a time; or the vast majority of the time it turns into white guilt and “I can’t say anything without being judged” and blah blah blah. Then they shut down their post.
When you say “race-baiting,” what do you mean?
In general it’s using racially charged language, divisive language, unfair statements about race, just to try to influence people, you know? You’re trying to sway people and to move them, and during the Facebook Live that’s exactly what happened—“all white people are evil and all cops are evil and we need to take revenge”—which is part of why I think it was a law enforcement-type thing …
Yeah. Someone acting in bad faith.
Someone acting in very bad faith.
An animated .gif from Mad Max: Fury Road of Tom Hardy as Max Rockatansky saying, “That’s bait.”
Aside: Why did Mndz and Tony think this message was in bad faith?
Bad actors on the Internet like to draw people out and derail their conversations by using extreme rhetoric, hoping to bait them into making extreme statements (either affirmative or otherwise). A agitator or infiltrator might use an anonymous or burner account to make outlandish statements without accountability or recourse, making a statement that ostensibly agrees with Tony’s point but takes it a step further, hoping Tony feels encouraged to do the same and expresses something extreme and incriminating. However, familiarity with actual leftist rhetoric clued Tony and his audience in that the statement wasn’t legit. Even hardcore leftists tend to make blanket and extreme statements only when they’re feeling really emotional about something and blowing off steam. So a statement like “men are trash,” terse and sardonic—that might be a believable comment. An absurd expression of an absolutist ideology like “all _____ are evil” probably wouldn’t come without some signal of the individual’s emotional state—an emoji, a meme reference, an expression of vulnerability, some trace of personality.
Tony continues …
But when I think of race-baiting, I think of a lot of what media does. Media will make sure they over-report crimes committed by minorities and under-report crimes committed by the majority. Often when they’re reporting, they’ll come back and they’ll make sure that there are images, and really what that’s doing is beginning to program associations into our head. So really that’s what I mean in general when I say race-baiting. And what it’s to do, is to incite some kind of hatred or bias or something of that nature.
So, I know that as we talked over before, as you mentioned before, one of your main foci as a speaker and a trainer is bias. You know more about that subject than many of the people who I’ve ever talked to. So with regard to media images and how those influence our bias … can you introduce how that works, like, psychologically?
Sure! And let’s start from this idea that in general—and this is Daniel Kahneman’s work—that the brain has two primary thinking systems, right? You have the conscious mind, which is very rational, and you have the subconscious mind, which is very fast. That idea of the subconscious mind being fast is critical, because in life-or-death situations we use our subconscious to process information because it’s faster. It puts us in our fight-or-flight modes.
So what starts to happen is, when we start to see images—and this could honestly be images through media, it could be our experiences, it could be our parenting, it could be our religious experiences—we start to make associations on what does “safe” look like, what does “unsafe” look like, or “danger”; what does “smart” look like, what does “stupidity” look like; what does “attractive” look like, what does … you know, you start to break down all these things that form our first impressions. And what starts to happen is, our brain just makes the association. If we see over and over and over again, we see Black criminals on TV, then our brain starts to go, “So ‘criminal’ looks like a Black person.” If we see over and over and over again that a smart woman is a white, attractive, thin woman, then we start to make that association. We end up functioning on autopilot and our unconscious brain starts to make that assessment way before the conscious thinking part of our brain ever gets to going. And so now we’re actually playing catch-up.
Probably the best example is people who’ve been bitten by a dog. If you were attacked by a dog as a kid, you now have a reflexive response with dogs. And even if, when you get older and you decide I’m gonna overcome this, I love dogs, you work at a shelter and you overcome that, if you see a dog that reminds you of the one that attacked you, you have this reflexive response that’s hard to overcome. And that’s really the beginning of bias.
Huh. That’s really interesting.
Can I dig into that for one more second here?
Yeah, please do!
So we normally think of bias in terms of racism, homophobia, gender bias, xenophobia … we think of it in terms of prejudice. Here’s what I would like people to consider. Think of bias in terms of flaws in your decision-making process. So what biases are, they’re really algorithms that help us determine how we make decisions. So when you think of it that way, it takes all of this “prejudice” thing out of here, and so now what happens is: We gain information from a flawed source because, you know, we hang around people we like, we watch the news that makes the most sense to us. We get all of this information from a biased pool, so we’re drinking from a contaminated source.
Then we process it with a flawed system, because that system has biases and inconsistencies and subjectivity in its algorithm. Now we are assessing a flawed source with a flawed algorithm. That’s really what we have to think of when we think of bias. So you’ve gotta deal with both the source, and how you actually make the decision.
That’s really cool, ‘cause to relate it to your previous experiences on social media, it sounds like focusing the conversation on decision-making—which reads, I guess, to our impulses, our bias, as a neutral topic—than on prejudice, you’re able to talk about some of the same problems with a lower probability of the conversation getting derailed into white guilt and people shutting down.
Oh exactly! In fact, I’ll tell you—when I give a presentation, I never use words like “white guilt,” I never use the word “privilege” … you know what I mean? I know they’re triggers for people, and even though they may be accurate, I’m far more pragmatic. I want a result. I want people to turn a corner. Saying those words may make me feel better, but they won’t get the result that I want.
But if I can frame it from the standpoint of, let’s look at the algorithm with which you make decisions and the fact that it’s flawed and that causes blind spots … that takes a lot of the stigma away from the conversation, and now people are willing to be open and actually have a conversation without feeling like I’m calling them a racist.
That’s really relevant to a lot of the stuff I do in my work as a cultural consultant and that, I think, might be coming up in the conversations my five readers are having on their social media. So thank you—I mean, this is already actionable stuff to do in response, which is great.
It also sounds like the mental processes that end up creating bias are really similar to the ones that end up creating trauma, especially in your dog example. Like, that’s an incidence of childhood trauma which could be minor or it could be severe, but if it happens in your childhood it’s still going to loom large many decades later; and you end up having a trauma response to it.
Right. That’s a great point. That’s exactly what’s happening for a lot of our biases—and that’s the thing, that trauma response causes an emotional response that is faster than our intellectual response, and it ends up overriding our intellectual response.
So let’s talk about that same process, coming at it from a slightly different angle. I think one of the hardest things for me to explain to people who haven’t experienced the same thing is this kind of “flinch reaction” that I have when I see or when I experience racism in the world. And I think that for a lot of people of color, when we’re talking with each other about racist things that have happened, it’s relatively quick and easy for us to describe a situation just a little bit, and quickly get to a point where we’re looking at each other, we’re nodding our heads, and everyone just kind of … you feel like you Just Know what the person’s talking about.
But of course I can’t say those same things to a person who’s never experienced, for example, American-style racism and expect them to nod along. So, how do experiences being on the receiving end of racism—what kinds of biases or what kinds of programming in our decision-making can that stand to give us?
From those of us who’ve received it? Is that what you’re asking?
Mm-hm. How would you describe that to someone who’s having trouble internalizing it, because they haven’t experienced it?
You have a very different viewpoint of the world. You used the phrase “trauma response” before. I mean, there are studies that show that the vast majority of minority kids who grew up in projects—I should say, Black kids specifically who grew up in projects—suffer from PTSD. It’s just a statistical fact. I think what starts to happen is, you lose all the rose-colored glasses, become a little more skeptical … and you know, here’s a great example.
So I mentioned that I do a lot of work with law enforcement, and you asked me how comfortable I am in those situations. I’m like, “I’m great. I’m great in those situations.” But when I go back on the street and I have a police officer behind me, I’m literally scared for my life because of my previous experiences. Even though I can sit there and name fifty federal officers right off the top of my head, if that’s not who’s pulling me over … dude, I’m scared for my life. I’ve had situations I probably should not have lived through. That? That is a bias, and I’m very aware of that. I think that there are times where people say triggering words and you talk about that flinch response, that victims of bias will start to pick up on.
Now here’s the thing about it: statistically, that’s more likely to be right than people wanna give it credit for.
I think people wanna pretend that that response is often from, y’know, “It’s just a bias.” It is in part, but a lot of times it’s picking up those microexpressions that people have—they’re another warning sign. So it becomes so hard to unpack, because we literally live in two different worlds. People who’ve never experienced racism, they don’t even have a foundation to have the conversation from. It’s really hard.
What’s happening now, you know, as our world is going into civil unrest, Black people are re-experiencing all of their traumas. They’re very upset and angry. I think there’s something very visceral about George Floyd’s death. Watching that, and hearing him cry for his mother …. At the same time, white people are going through a huge trauma. It’s like they’ve just been unplugged from the Matrix and their whole world now is coming into question. They’re trying to figure that thing out and it’s … dude, it’s hard for everyone at this point to navigate.
I don’t even know if I answered your question, I just kinda went on a rant.
No, no, that was exactly what I was thinking about. And it’s the fact that this is visceral and programmed into us … I think that that’s one of the most poignant parts of this whole situation. There’s this feeling, there’s this fear, um … like, for me it’s less that I’m … you know, I ask myself, am I pro-cop? Am I anti-cop? And really for me it’s neither—it’s that I’m afraid of cops.
Yeah.
And like, I can’t even get to a point where it’s, like, policy or decisions or what I intellectually think cops should or shouldn’t be, because to get to that I have to dig through stratum after stratum of pure, raw fear.
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s hard because, for example, I know that that’s not true, that I should be afraid about cops, I absolutely know that. Friday, I spent time helping a law enforcement executive organization craft a response to all of this and publish it. You know, I been texting, on Sunday and yesterday, my friends who are local law enforcement. These are legitimate friends, so there’s an intellectual side of me, the conscious part of me, that knows it. But that fear response that I have when I’m in a situation and I am completely vulnerable and I am very aware that although statistically it is far more likely that the person stopping me is not a bad person or a bad cop, the fact that there is a percentage, that there is a chance that this could be my last moment, regardless of how I act or respond … that’s hard to overcome. And it’s almost a thing where, you know … dude, I think, I just feel like every Black person in this country needs therapy.
Yeah, frreal … I feel like everybody in this country needs therapy.
Yeah.
So, let’s talk about something a little bit less comfortable
Oh ho, less comfortable than police officers! Yay!
Haha, yes, this was the fun part of the conversation so far.
That was the warmup!
I’m already lookin around like where’d I put the whisky bottle.
This whole weekend, I’ve been watching images of cops, large numbers of cops, large organized numbers of cops, inflicting violence on people who weren’t posing them any threat. And this has just happened over and over and over again. I’m seeing and hearing about instances where they’re shooting reporters. We’ve all seen that post where a reporter lost her eye to a rubber bullet fired at her face.
Yes.
We’ve all seen the Black reporter get arrested, we’ve seen cameramen knocked over, and we’ve seen medics and healthcare providers who are out there on the street providing healthcare to not only protesters, but also to police—we’re seeing them being fired on and arrested. And I think that the vast majority, all these people we’re seeing, a lot of them are quote-unquote “good people.” Or we would think they were, if we were to interact with them on any other day.
How does this happen? Like, how can “good people,” if so many people are good, how can “good people” be doing this to other good people?
Oh, man, that’s a lot to unpack there.
So, first, I think we have to go back and look at bias, right? The one thing that we don’t often talk about when we talk about bias—and that’s any type of bias, but let’s talk about it now in terms of prejudice—is that it’s contextual, right? You can be a “good person,” but once the context of your circumstances change, your biases can be activated.
So that’s why you may have heard, and many of your five readers may have read, that there is a test called the Implicit Association Test, that was created by researchers at MIT and Harvard to measure our unconscious or our implicit associations. What’s fascinating is, you can manipulate the test! So for example, it’s been shown if you listen to a speech by Martin Luther King and then take the test right afterwards, you will score in a way that’s less biased because your mindset and your framework in that context has now been changed.
So the reverse can happen too. You know, I have friends who are police officers and we play basketball together. They all suck, but we play!
*laughter*
Heh, and you know what’s fascinating is: we play basketball and it’s one of the most multiracial—it’s, and you know, this is a reference that you will understand—it’s similar to our dōjō. We crack jokes on each other, we crack very nuanced jokes at each other, and it’s all good! But the minute they put on that uniform and walk into a different context and their roles change, then now they have a heightened sense of fear and their biases also change. So that context plays a big role in it.
Number two, I do believe that that context is also framed by their assignment. So if you’re told, “Go out and control a crowd,” you are now entering a situation using a lens in which “I am an authority, and my job is to get these people in order.” You will look at every situation now through that lens.
On top of that, you just have groupthink. There are things that people would never do if they were by themselves, but once they’re in a community where their social group is all doing that thing, even though consciously they may not feel any peer pressure, they will naturally acquiesce to what their social group is doing. And so there are times when you’ll see police officers and you’ll see two or three people do that, and then the rest will just assume subconsciously that this is the norm and they will follow suit. And that happens from the police side, that happens from the protester side, and it’s, y’know, that makes it a mess.
Content warning for this next bit: tear gas and chokeholds. If you want to skip the details, scroll down to the ink painting of a frog and then keep reading.
I think one other thing on the protester side that has to be considered … so, I was talking to a friend of mine this morning who is a Navy veteran. He was saying the worst way to break up a crowd is with tear gas. Tear gas is how you start a riot, because people think that tear gas is similar to pepper spray, and it’s not. He said, it’s not just that your eyes burn: your skin burns and you lose your sense of orientation. They had to go through this in their training, and he said, look, if my CO hadn’t been there guiding me and I hadn’t had that familiar voice leading me, I would have lost my mind in that moment, and that’s what people do when they’re tear gassed.
So you add that component when people think they’re controlling this group of people because they’ve never been tear gassed before, and now the people are responding in a different way and they assume, “Oh, they’re escalating it. I need to respond to that.” So that’s just, y’know the first four things we can unpack from that. I’m sure that if we talked long enough we could come up with another dozen.
One thing that that reminds me of—I’ve never experienced tear gas myself, but that fight-or-flight response that you’re describing … I guess another place where it’s come up is the way people react to being choked.
Yeah.
Like, I remember the first time in the dōjō when our teacher Jeff did a chokehold on me. I knew it was happening, the whole class was about chokeholds, but the first time that his arm went around my neck … you know, this person who I cared about, and had gone drinking with, and had been training with for so long, like, I could feel myself clawing at his arm trying to rip it away from my neck even though I knew exactly what was going on.
Yeah.
So I can only imagine how much worse it can be when you’re in an Eric Garner situation, where it’s these complete strangers who’ve already got your fight-or-flight biases up and running because of your own past experiences with racist cops … I can only imagine how much worse it would be in that situation.
Yeah, and so that’s the fascinating thing: in this situation, the victim is expected to act like the trained professional. And that’s part of the problem. You know, when I was talking to my friend who’s the Navy vet, he said it took about five or six times getting tear gassed for him to be able to gain his composure in that situation. Now, heh, that kinda sounds like it sucks, but it makes sense that you’re being trained under that type of duress. You can’t expect the average citizen to respond in a way that is naturally compliant when what you’re asking them to do is extremely unnatural.
I could think of a situation of a town in Michigan where part of the way that the police were baiting Black teenagers is, they would grab them by the wrist. Now your reflexive response is to pull away—well, the police would call that resisting arrest. So, you know, you really look into this thing holistically and it’s a mess, because it really goes back down to police training. If police aren’t really trained in how people act under duress, then that’s where you’re gonna have a problem.
That’s why the feds have a very different, y’know … certain federal agencies have a very different reputation than your local police force because of the type of training they’ve received. And that’s part of it: it’s just like we were talking, the National Guard is now coming and they’re just randomly shooting people. But the National Guard is one of the most untrained groups of people you can send out there. I mean, they’re weekend warriors. You know, not that I want it, but I would probably take the military over the National Guard because the military’s very unlikely to fire on US citizens. They’ve been trained a different way with a different ethos and different responses, and so that lack of training is also a big deal.
A Chinese-style ink painting of a Namaqua rain frog making a cute squeaky noise. Mendez painted it in graduate school. If you’re skipping past the tear gas and chokeholds you can start reading below.
It seems like it’s a terrible position also to put a guardsman in. They’re being thrown into this situation for which they have no training, where the only thing they have to rely on is their own biases and their own first impulses, these same first things that are over and over causing problems everywhere from our social media conversations up to the streets.
Yeah.
… and, y’know, it’s not … it’s not surprising that if you don’t train someone for something then you’re not going to get the response you trained for … because there wasn’t one.
Right. That’s exactly it.
So, it seems like there’s a thread that’s running through all of the things we’ve talked about so far this afternoon about, as far as action items go, our own responsibility to recognize bias so that we can take the first steps to act not entirely in its throes. When you’re training people for this situation, how do you get them started on transcending their own bias?
First is to make them aware that they have biases, and, in doing so, remove the stigma from it so that people can approach their biases more from a positive, constructive “I’m going to fix this” thing, than from a defensive “don’t call me a racist!” thing.
The second thing is to … y’know, I was gonna get into this, giving them the proper motivation. You’d think it would be natural, easy, but it’s not. There are people who just don’t intrinsically see the value in inclusion, and it’s because of all the programming that they’d had. That makes it very challenging to deal with but it’s something you have to overcome.
Third is just exposure. You know, part of what helps people to overcome biases is prolonged positive exposure to other groups. Now, for example, growing up in the Midwest in a very religious area and family, I had to come to grips with a lot of conscious and unconscious biases towards the LGBTQIA+ community. It’s built into the religion, and I had to start battling that.
So, what I realized at the time: in the work I was doing as a speaker, because I’ve been a speaker for a long time now, there are plenty of people who are gay, who are lesbian, who are trans, who are bi. What I did not do was go and find a gay friend—cuz I think, y’know, we can get into that whole “find a gay/find a Black friend!”—but what I did do is insert myself in these circles and just built relationships.
And by doing that, not knowing who was what, building sincere relationships, and—oh! finding out this person’s gay or this person’s lesbian—I had a relationship with them that countered the programming I had before. And so now I had a number of benchmarks that showed me, okay, clearly this is a stereotype just like there are stereotypes about Black people, Hispanic people, and everybody else. So that exposure is really important. And I think people miss that.
So, people think that they’re more well-rounded than they are, but you know what? Go look at your LinkedIn connection group and see how diverse that is. That’s a really good measure—way better than Facebook. And then really be tactical and strategic about building other relationships and getting into other circles and getting to know people for who they are. And when they share their expressions, to not be defensive about it. Because often we experience the wrong emotions, we get defensive, and we feel shame, versus just listening and becoming empathetic so that we could be helpful.
Finally, what I try to tell people is to set up some type of accountability. And that may be: if you and I are gonna go and hang out and you just know you have carte blanche, “hey, Tony, if I see something weird I can pull you aside and have a conversation with you.” I know you have good intentions, but I need that accountability to help me get through.
That’s really important. One of the things I look out for in my own circles, with my own friends, is how people react when someone tells them that they’re wrong. When you work with kids, kids are actually really good about this, about not getting defensive, ‘cause they spend most of their lives with people telling them, “You’re wrong, you gotta do this thing differently.” So if I’m running a role-playing game for a kid and they say something sexist and I say, “hey, that was kinda sexist,” they’re like “oh, okay, yeah, I see what you mean, sorry.” And that’s it! And then we’re done!
Right! Right!
Whereas with an adult that would be like a forty-five-minute denial-anger-bargaining conversation.
Hah!
So, I guess that brings us back to some of these conversations that we’re having online. I think that one thing I’ve been experiencing a lot … y’know, I have asthma, I’m cooped up in my apartment, I can’t go to any protests because I’m in a high-risk group for COVID-19, but I do find myself in a lot of conversations—sometimes with people like you where I feel like we have a lot of similar background in terms of our training on diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice.
Then I’m also having a lot of conversations with, oh, white folks I met in college who went to a lot of the same elite schools as I did. They see a lot of these discussions as these intellectual, political things without a lot of personal stake in them. And it’s in those conversations that I find myself talking about the thing I don’t wanna talk about, which is looting.
*laughter* okay.
Looking at social media—and I know it changes a lot based on what kinda social media and what kinda news sources you’re looking at—it seems like looting is going on everywhere, but no one wants to admit to looting. None of the actual protesters I’ve spoken to have said “I looted anything,” none of them said “the leadership that I was working with and the group that I was working with started looting anybody.” And then all too often I’m getting in these conversations where people are like “oh yeah George Floyd, that’s terrible, Breonna Taylor died, BUT THE LOOTING.”
It’s difficult for me to engage with those, because to me it seems like so much less of a big deal than the life of a human being. But I still find myself in a lot of conversations where it seems like people wanna talk about property damage first and foremost, like, before everything else. Like all this stuff that we’ve talked about in the conversation about bias and psychology and background and training and trauma … why are people so obsessed with, like, burning Targets?
It’s because it’s a distraction. I hate to say it this way, but it’s not a sincere question or sincere argument. It’s a way to stop the conversation. It’s not any different than, “well, what about Black-on-Black crime?” Cuz that’s coming up right now too.
Ugh.
What about Black on Black crime. Well, really? Let’s go to the Department of Justice statistics and see that although, yeah, it’s true that 90% of crimes committed against Black people are by Black people, that same statistic is pretty much there for white people! Because crime is a function of relationship and proximity, right? But it’s not a legitimate argument. It’s just like with Kaepernick, “he’s disrespecting the flag” … what they are, are defense mechanisms so they don’t have to actually get into the conversation.
And the thing is, they may not be aware that they’re actually using a defense mechanism. But what they’re really doing is self-preservation. I don’t want the discomfort of having to dig into this conversation and really unpack all of this, so this is low-hanging fruit that’s an excuse for me to kinda move away and get back into my cocoon of comfort.
Because I don’t really engage in it that often anymore, I don’t get into the “what about looting?” My question is, “So lemme ask you this: what’s more important, lives or looting? Lives or property?” Most sane people will say “lives,” so, okay, let’s do this. Let’s talk about lives first, and then looting second. Let’s just do it that way. Let’s not get distracted, because I don’t think we’re great multitaskers. So let’s hit that first one, then we’ll come back and we’ll address the second one. But I’m not willing to do both at the same time because in many ways they’re mutually exclusive. They’re not as related as we think they are. That’s become my methodology of dealing with it.
I mean, I could try to reason with people, and with most people it gets nowhere because it’s an emotional thing. You can show them all the statistics and all the reasoning in the world, and the answer’s gonna be, “Well, I just don’t agree with it. I wouldn’t do that.” Well, really? Well if you wouldn’t do that, let’s talk about the Boston Tea Party. Let’s talk about the American Revolution. Let’s talk about the Civil War. Let’s talk about women’s rights and how the suffragettes “were, in many ways, terrorists.” Let’s talk about how gays and lesbians, how they really began to earn and fight for their equality. I’m not saying that I’m validating it, but I’m saying I’m not just going to hold Black people to this standard when I haven’t done it for everyone else.
That makes a lot of sense. It sounds like, from the way that you’re describing that, there are some people who are out there rubbing their hands together like, “Oh, I’m gonna derail all these conversations on purpose and get them to talk about looting because I’m from 4chan and I hate everybody.” But it sounds like this is something that people might start doing not for a strategic reason, without realizing that they’re doing it—they’re just getting hung up on it.
It’s the same thing you described the first time you got choked. Right? You started scratching and clawing the arm, not even realizing you were doing it, and even though you knew this was for an example, it was a reflexive self-preservation response. I think that’s what it is.
So, you know, as hopeless as it is looking out the window or looking at the news right now, this conversation has been really comforting to me, because it seems like as I start to recognize how thoroughly bias pervades every aspect of this conversation, everything that’s going on out there, it seems like our action items—what we can all do, to start getting over it, and start reclaiming our own decision-making process—a lot of the first steps that apply to all these different situations are pretty similar.
Yeah. They’re pretty similar. Surprisingly, as bad as everything seems right now, what’s happening has actually motivated people to start taking the steps, even without being told. I’m getting reached out to by an inordinate number of people saying, “Hey, I wanna understand—” they weren’t saying this a month ago, but— “I wanna have the conversation, I wanna understand your perspective. I wanna I wanna understand why you have to talk to your two boys about how to survive an encounter with the police.” I mean … they’ve never asked that. Maybe they never knew it happened.
But now it’s actually starting to happen. Truthfully, as bad as it looks—and you and I are both in the New York metropolitan area, we’re both probably getting texts about curfews, heh—the truth is, I’m probably more hopeful than I’ve ever been in my life about change in this country. Because I see a wave of change starting to happen, I see a level of, y’know, “we’re not gonna take this anymore, it must change” starting to happen. I realize this thing’s going in one of two directions: complete catastrophe, or a rebuilt society. I think it’s pretty binary. I don’t think there’s another option. And that gives me a lot of hope, a hope that I honestly haven’t had in a long time.
That’s great. I wanna end on one more hopeful note: what music have you been listening to lately? You rightly chastised me the other week for sleeping on jazz musician Kamasi Washington until now—
Haha, I sure did!
—and he, I think, has given me a great deal of hope and comfort in these times. So what’s some music that you’re listening to right now that makes you feel hopeful?
I’m listening to Sly and the Family Stone. Are you familiar with their album There’s a Riot Goin’ On?
I’m not!
Okay, so that was the album that came after, y’know, they’re at the height of their career, it’s 1970-1971, there’s all sorts of turmoil going on within the band. Larry Graham is having problems with the brothers Stone, Sly is getting more and more influenced by the Black Panthers, you know, they don’t deliver on their album in time, and so Sly and the Family Stone’s Greatest Hits come out, and so they put together this album called There’s a Riot Goin’ On. It was so different from anything they had put out that Clive Davis didn’t wanna release it. I don’t think he even promoted it. It did horrible. It’s one of the dirtiest, funkiest, just … and the funny thing is, now, it’s on almost everybody’s list of greatest albums of all time. It’s just, it’s considered a masterpiece, but it was such a change in direction. But what I love about it is, in the middle of all of this, you know, kind of a Marvin Gaye “What’s Going On?” type feel of all the social injustices and everything, dead in the middle of it is this song “(It’s a) Family Affair.” It’s almost like a reminder that, y’know, as bad as all this really is, if we can just come together as a family, we’ll fix this thing. I think that album gives me a lot of hope.
Y’know I been listening to, I love Funkadelic and Parliament, so I’m listening to Maggot Brain and a couple other things. Tell you what I’ve really been doing is, I’ve been on Instagram listening to DJ Nice’s sets and to Jazzy Jeff’s sets, and they’ve both been … they done a phenomenal job of bringing heart and encouragement and hope. And that way I don’t have to choose the music, I can have a 2- to 4-hour set of music that is stuff I didn’t consider, stuff I forgot about, but it does an amazing job of lifting my spirits.
Awesome, that’s what’s up. Thank you so much for coming on. I feel so much better than I did, like, an hour ago, just having had this conversation.
So the last thing is: you wrote a book that I really like, so can you tell us a little bit about that? Cuz I think that, like, we didn’t have time to talk about that, but I think it’s actually relevant to some of the stuff that’s going on right now.
Okay! You know, honestly I didn’t talk about it because I’m here to address the situation, I’m not here to promote anything, and I appreciate you bringing that up. The book is called The Force Multiplier: How to Lead Teams Where Everyone Wins. It’s available pretty much everywhere you can get a book, and the audiobook just came out as well. Although I position it as a book about leadership, it’s really a book about: how do you relate to people? How do you connect with people? How do you deal with conflict? How do you talk to someone who has a different personality or even a different worldview from you, and how do you influence them? And that’s, to me, that’s really a critical component of what we need in our society.
We are severely lacking leadership at the top levels. And if we had people who could both lead authoritatively and yet win over people, and at the same time maintain a level of ethics and character, we would be in a different place right now. We would probably not be suffering through a pandemic, and our country certainly wouldn’t be on fire. But the other part of that is: I’ve had so many people who, after I’ve given a talk on this subject or have read the book, said, “You know, that was really good for work but what I now understand is, I understand my kids better. I understand my spouse better. I understand, you know, this friend that I’ve been having friction with.”
Because whether we’re talking about leadership or we’re talking about marriage or we’re talking about friendship, we’re really talking about “how do humans connect with each other?” And so that’s really the nature of the book. The Force Multiplier: How to Lead Teams Where Everyone Wins.
And I just wanna echo: I love this book. I picked it up to be polite and I thought it was gonna be just another corporate self-help book, but that book is so full—in addition to being witty and funny and entertaining and a quick, snappy read—it is full of action items. As soon as I read that book I could instantly see, okay, this is already made me a better Dungeon Master. If I run a game of D&D I’m gonna use all these principles and the game is gonna be so much better for it.
Tony, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks to all my Patreon backers for making this happen; we’re gonna be donating the proceeds from this post to bail funds across the nation. Everyone, stay strong out there. Black lives matter. Thank you, Tony!
Thanks Mendez! Stay safe, stay sane.