S11E11 – Lies and Moral Deficiencies: Greg Jarrell on Whiteness

S11E11 - Lies and Moral Deficiencies: Greg Jarell on Whiteness

Andrew: Welcome to the Integrated Schools Podcast. I'm Andrew White dad from Denver.

Dr. Val: And I am Val, a Black mom from North Carolina.

Andrew: And this is Lies and Moral Deficiencies. Greg Jarrell on Whiteness.

Dr. Val: My goodness, sir. We're coming in hot today.

Andrew: Coming in hot. Our guest today. Greg Jarrell is a community organizer, an ordained minister, and has been doing racial justice work for quite some time. He's in fact our 10th White guy ever as a guest on the podcast, 142 episodes. And, our 10th White guy but, brings a really powerful perspective on housing, on integration, on the church. And he recently wrote a book called Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods. A story that follows one Black family over many generations. A piece of land in a small neighborhood in Charlotte, and then a White First Baptist Church.

Dr. Val: I actually had an opportunity to hear him speak live, and I convinced him to come onto the podcast.

Andrew: You are stingy with your invites on the podcast, but you, you have, you have not yet missed. Only top-notch guests so far.

Dr. Val: That's right. So for this conversation, I had a feeling it was gonna be honest and forthright. What I did not expect is for Mr. Greg to bring the fire like he did, I think it's an important conversation for all of our listeners, but especially our White and privileged listeners.

Andrew: It was certainly a powerful conversation for me. I felt very fortunate to be part of it. We have touched on Whiteness. We had an episode a while back playing some clips from the Seeing White Podcast series from Scene on Radio that got at some of the origins of Whiteness .

We haven't talked about it so much lately, and we certainly haven't had somebody with such a clear understanding of both the creation of Whiteness and then the role that it continues to play, both in the structures of our country and the way government works and has worked historically and then continues to work, but then also the ways that Whiteness shows up in the moral and the cultural understandings that we have.

Dr. Val: Yeah, we knew going in that he was gonna have conversations around housing and neighborhoods, and I think that's important for our continued conversation because, we know that our schools are made up primarily because of the ways our neighborhoods are made up and the choices that people are making about where they stay in the communities they live in. And so it was really good to see that connection as well and understand that how we show up as neighbors in our communities is directly related to how we show up as neighbors and community members in our schools.

Andrew: Absolutely.

Dr. Val: We're trying to prep y'all. If you need tea or whatever, to just relax you during this conversation. Because it's heavy and I think it's important to have heavy conversations sometimes.

Andrew:It got me in, in my feelings for sure. And yeah, excited for everyone to take a listen.

Dr. Val: All right, let's do it.

Andrew: Alright,

[THEME MUSIC]

Greg Jarrell: Greg Jarrell, I am a community and cultural organizer in Charlotte, North Carolina. Background as an ordained minister and theologian, and my writing is about faith and place and race. And I've been in Charlotte for about 20 years, have two teenagers. They're 16 and 14.

Dr. Val: That's the age of my teenagers.

Greg Jarrell: Oh yeah.

Andrew: You work for an organization called QC Family Tree in Charlotte.

Greg Jarrell: That's right. I’m one of the founders of QC Family Tree. I'm not on the staff anymore, though I'm still very involved and my wife continues to work for QC Family Tree. I now work as a community organizer on housing justice issues with a group called the Redress Movement.

Andrew: Collective liberation seems to be at the heart of a lot of you know how you spend your time. Why? What brought you to that?

Greg Jarrell: It's mostly been through kind of personal, lived experiences that uh really kind of turned me around. I grew up in a tobacco town that's now a suburb outside of Raleigh, North Carolina. As a college student I spent a couple of summers in the city of East St Louis, Illinois. Which is right across the river from St Louis Missouri. One of the poorest and most over extracted cities in the country. Uh all my neighbors there were Black and it was a transformative experience for me. This kind of White kid in this White environment. And so those relationships and trying to understand the place that I was in and how I might come to be of… both how I might like to be of service maybe, but also how I can understand myself. As the product of the environment that created those situations that became really important to me. So I started there. I moved to a neighborhood in Charlotte after I graduated in seminary where uh my wife and I and some other friends were one of the only handful of White folks around and sort of continued to try to deepen that journey of solidarity and hospitality.

Andrew: Relationships and place. I love that.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm

Greg Jarrell: Yeah. And I think one of the, part of what's important about those relationships, I mean, they don't solve everything, right? I mean, like proximity is not necessarily an answer. It's certainly not neutral. No one was closer to the enslaved than the overseer.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Greg Jarrell: But that kind of proximity alongside like intentional anti-racist education, unlearning the kinds of things that we've soaked in is really important I think. And among the things that I've learned is that I've got something at stake as well…

Andrew: Hmmm

Greg Jarrell: …in the good of my neighborhood. And the good of my neighbors. It's not, it's not one directional. I'm not a savior or a social worker or anything like that, um but instead it's relational. It works in multiple directions all at once.

Dr. Val: Can you talk a little bit more about the stake that you have?

Greg Jarrell: So to be White is, is to be raised on lies. Lies that are passed down, generationally that you know a lot of White folks don't always know that they're passing down. And so I, I think it's important not to live by lies, to begin to encounter the truth of the way that our society has been put together, the way that race and, uh the way that Capitalism, through race has destroyed certain people's material wellbeing, and has destroyed the souls of us White folks along the way. So we have to, we have to face that squarely so that we can be humans. Um, I think that's just part of the journey. And so, in some sense. you wind up putting at stake some of your material well being along the way and that's the cost of history. Nobody gets out unscathed at the end of this life you know, so you have to be willing to risk something but when you love your neighbors then the risk doesn't seem all that costly.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: That's beautiful

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: This led you recently to write the book Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods. It's a beautiful book. It's a book that the thing that kept coming up to me was this idea of kind of universality through specificity. It is a very specific book, you know it is deeply rooted in place. It's in North Carolina, it's in Charlotte, it's in the Brooklyn neighborhood, but it really is like, kind of the key character of the book is this plot of land that belonged to the North family, the plot feels like a character throughout the book. Can you tell us just sort of like the the CliffNotes version of the the journey of this this small plot of land in Charlotte

Greg Jarrell: Yeah. So the book traces the intertwined stories of the Black North family, whose ancestors were born enslaved and became some of the early Black property owners in Charlotte. And the all White, uh, First Baptist Church of Charlotte, a Southern Baptist Congregation.

The CliffNotes version is that in the quick attempt to try to reinvent the slavery economy, uh Abram North, that ancestor winds up working at First Baptist Church living in the home of one of its wealthiest members. A hundred years later during the state of North Carolina's first urban renewal project here in Charlotte, in a neighborhood called Brooklyn, um Abram’s and his wife Annie's descendants were the first Black family forced to sell their property to the city for this urban renewal project. And a few years later, the city of Charlotte rigged the auction to sell that land and about 50 other lots alongside it to First Baptist church, which then built their sanctuary on top of the former North House. So the book tries to explore in close detail the stories of those families and of that institution and then to suggest the material and the cultural changes or repairs that are necessary to adequately deal with that history.

Andrew: One of the themes that comes out throughout the book is this idea of urban renewal. I certainly had heard the term urban renewal but I wasn't fully aware of the history of the kind of direct policies of urban renewal. We've had the Rothsteins on, we've talked about redlining, we've talked about the Homeowners Loan Corporation. But I'm wondering if you can give us the history of urban renewal as a kind of government policy that you say is sort of the continuation of slavery, Jim Crow, you know other forms of racial subjugation how they show up as urban renewal.

Greg Jarrell: So the program was formalized by the Housing Act of 1949. The federal government would pay two thirds of the cost for a municipality to plan a program that they called “slum clearance”. And then to use eminent domain to take, sometimes hundreds of acres, and to plow all of the structures to the ground and then to resell the land. And so I think one of the ways you can interpret it and I've tried to write about this a bit is that the aftermath of Jim Crow, which continues to go on for another decade or more and redlining and all of those kind of racist housing policies, is that you deprive Black communities in particular, but also poor communities all around the country of the capital that they need to continue to make improvements.

And then with urban renewal beginning in 1949 you begin to punish those neighborhoods for having substandard areas, much of this racially driven. So Black neighborhoods in particular were targeted, whether they had lots of substandard housing or not. Often well to do Black neighborhoods still faced the bulldozers. That's how the program worked in small sketch. It lasted 25 years. It destroyed 568 square miles of American built environment. That is half the size of the state of Rhode Island. That's the island of Manhattan, 25 times over. So you can imagine tearing down all of Manhattan once a year for 25 years.

Dr. Val: Wow.

Greg Jarrell: So it made a massive, massive impact across, not just big cities but also small towns, many many small towns accessed those funds as well.

Andrew: And the idea was these places that you they that as you said were quote unquote derelict in some way that suffered from the built environment not being up to standards as a result of disinvestment from the government in the first place, but saying okay we're gonna take that and use that as an excuse to force people off. It wasn't like, ‘Hey do you want to leave?’ But we're using eminent domain, you are forced to leave. We're gonna bulldoze this whole place and we're going to renew it.

Greg Jarrell: Yeah. That's mostly right. So, often the disinvestment was directed by, and caused by landlords, not necessarily by the government or hand in hand with sort of depriving certain areas of the infrastructure investments that they needed. And so one of the problems with the program from the outset was that the slum conditions where they did exist, and there were rough housing conditions in many many American cities, and many of those places were torn down, but the program never aimed to fix exploitation by landlords. It simply aimed to tear down the slums and to move people to other places. Or even to tear down middle class Black neighborhoods, and move those folks to other places. So the program never really aimed to create a solution. It aimed to kind of move what was deemed problem spots around to open up spots for new development.

Dr. Val: You wrote this book connecting it to the role church has played. Can you talk a little bit about that? What can people learn?

Greg Jarrell: So every, every tragedy, every kind of human rights travesty like this requires a story to go along with it.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm .

Greg Jarrell: You have to be able to tell some sort of story to help convince yourself that this thing that you know is clearly wrong is actually okay. And so I was already kind of looking around at churches and the ways that they had participated in the program, but as I got further and further into the archives what I noticed was that often the language even from government officials or written in government documents would have kind of theological echoes to them. Even the term ‘renewal’ itself sort of has some theological echoes. So they would talk about cities being resurrected or being regenerated. So all these things kind of have theological frames to them. Part of what's important about that to me is that it speaks to the cultural story that's going on inside this program, that's allowing for the massive displacement of probably millions of poor Americans with very little recompense.

Andrew: Right.

Greg Jarrell: Simply for the purpose of what were supposed to be tall towers, and often turned out just to be parking lots in the end.

Dr. Val: Yes. Literally.

Greg Jarrell: So what I wanted to track was, what's the story that's going along there. And here in Charlotte you know again I wrote about the particular rather than the universal. It’s Christians who are making this program happen.

So I found their church memberships, I found sermons and hymns, I found you know as much of this kind of theological, which is another way for me of saying cultural legacy that they were living inside. And so at a really important moment, in the story the people at First Baptist Church sing this old hymn of Christendom that goes ‘lead on Old King Eternal, The day of march has come, henceforth and fields of conquest your tents will be our home.’

Andrew: Wow.

Greg Jarrell: And, and so they sing the Conquest Hymn and then they vote to conquer the land, right. And those things all go hand in hand. And you know, all this is personal too, when I found that hymn, in the archives like I, I knew the hymn. I didn't have to go chase down a hymnal to be able to sing it, right. So this is still the water that we swim in. This still has a lot of cultural influence in the ways that we talk about our cities and the redevelopment of neighborhoods and that kind of thing.

Andrew: There were sort of like two stories throughout. One of them was the kind of government policies, this idea of urban renewal, the redlining. But then this sort of other story of the moral justifications for it, the ways that we tell stories, the ways that we look at what is clearly unjust and convince ourselves that we're not seeing it.

That's something that I had not seen written out so explicitly as you do it, and you get at it through the church which is a very convenient vehicle for it because the church is based around this idea of morality, but I think we see it showing up in all sorts of ways that White people have to come to terms with this injustice in some way, and so there are these stories that get told. These justifications, these moral justifications for it.

Greg Jarrell: Yeah absolutely. You can see this kind of get teased out sometimes in the language of colorblind racism.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm

Greg Jarrell: And then sometimes just by like the obvious neglect of simple statements that erase people's institutions, their lives. So, one of the precursors to this national policy was the work of a planner, famous now named Robert Moses, in New York City. Much has been written about Moses. He and the city of Chicago had pioneered the methods that basically became urban renewal, uh and federal slum clearance.

And so in 1944, Baltimore was kind of experimenting with some of these ideas so they brought him in and he told the people of Baltimore, "the more of these neighborhoods that are wiped out the healthier Baltimore will be in the long run. We do not propose to tear down familiar and cherished landmarks. Nothing which we propose to remove will constitute any loss to Baltimore."

Dr. Val: Mmmmmm.

Andrew: Wow.

Greg Jarrell: Right. So that's the, that's the kind of, just like complete and total erasure. If you're poor, if you're Black, if you're Brown, then what's familiar and cherished to you has no meaning to the powers of your city right.

Dr. Val: Hmm.

Andrew: You, you, have this quote from your seminary professor about White churches in apartheid South Africa, that they had learned to let the institutions do their sinning for them. Talk about the ways that, that, we push off the moral implications of it onto institutions.

Greg Jarrell: Yeah. Yeah that quote comes from Peter Story, who was a White Methodist bishop, I believe in South Africa, and what he is pointing to is that when religion gets individualized, which is one of the hallmarks in particular of the evangelical Christianity, the White evangelical christianity that I grew up with and broadly of American Whiteness generally, then you become unable to see how institutions work for you or on your behalf.

And so then morality or sin in theological terms is just about being nice to people. About, about kind, of your own um citizenship or neighborliness towards the people that you encounter. And so it can't take into account the accumulated advantage that you and your family, that you're institutions that support you have accumulated along the way. Uh it's unable to see why the neighborhoods that suffer the worst consequences of policy level violence have the worst street level violence. So our institutions really render us morally and intellectually incapable of understanding the world that we have created and that we profit from. Charles Mills, by the way if your listeners are interested, Charles Mills’ work The Racial Contract…

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm

Greg Jarrell: …really digs into this intellectual deficiency that most White folks experience being unable to understand the world that we've created.

Andrew: Just on the Charles Mills point because I think this quote you have from him in the book about the racial contract, that all Whites are beneficiaries of the contract even if we're not signatories to it. You don't opt into it. It is there whether you want it or not. You are a beneficiary of it whether you choose to be or not.

Greg Jarrell: That's right. And some of the existential questions that were at the heart of this work for me were about that. Mills dedicates that book to in part to the White race traders and renegades he says who have refused the racial contract. And yet like even when you refuse it or you rebel against it or you become a renegade to it uh you still can't escape it.

And so in my neighborhood which turned over after White flight in the mid sixties to become a Black neighborhood. I've been living here for 20 years. We've done our best to dig into solidarity right. We've started all these housing initiatives aimed at keeping things affordable for folks. And a couple years ago all of a sudden the housing prices jumped from like $150,000 very quickly to $450,000 at which point affordable housing for working class people is impossible. So if you're a renter it's bad news. If you're like me and you own your home there's at least the idea of some equity. It's very hard to realize that equity because you still gotta live somewhere right. Um so…

Dr. Val: Right, right.

Greg Jarrell: …so some of it's just kind of on paper. But at the same time we're kind of asking these existential questions like ‘Where did all this paper wealth come from?’ We've tried to work against this, you know we've tried to prevent it in a way that some people would say was acting against their own self-interest And yet, it seems that we're stuck inside this contract that we don't want to be party to. So that is part of the work that I've been trying to do you know in an, on an existential level is figuring out how to sleep with that.

Dr. Val: I imagine a scenario where your White evangelical friends see you coming… Here comes Greg. But I do know that you're a part of some coalitions. Can you talk a little bit about the coalitions that you're a part of who are working toward the same ends?

Greg Jarrell: Yeah. So uh I mean, Redress Movement, uh, who's my employer, we do multiracial broad-based organizing around housing justice issues. And part of what I point to some of the history in the book the North Family, there are key moments in American history where multiracial organizing is, as organizers say, what gets the goods. The moments in United States history where we've actually achieved some of the promise of multiracial democracy have happened because of broad-based coalition building.

Andrew: Right.

Greg Jarrell: So one of the ways that's happened here is that we worked across neighborhoods to start a Community Land Trust on our side of town that has grown extremely quickly, and over the course of less than a decade has, developed a couple of hundred housing units now, which is kind of unheard of growth for, a community land trust. There are clergy coalitions and there are community benefits coalitions, a variety of kind of housing oriented works that we've been involved in to try to shape not just specific housing projects, but the policies. more generally.

Andrew: Talk a little more about the ‘what do we do’. This is you know, one piece is building multiracial coalitions to fight for housing equity, what other things come to mind. As you said we can't step out of the racial contract but we can work to undermine it. What other places does that work show up?

Greg Jarrell: So one of the ways that I've tried to frame this for folks is to say that we can use Whiteness against itself. So the easy example for me in the creation of this book and the organizing around it was that just Whiteness creates opportunities for access sometimes, oftentimes. And so it was easy for me to get inside institutions that other historians had tried to get into and that the archives weren't open for them. But I had the connections and the Southern Baptist you know assumed solidarity kind of background that would allow me to get in.

And the long term result of this is trying to tell a story to do the sort of historical and cultural work that might break some of the long-term results of urban renewal. So I think you know listeners could consider, like if I've got this thing, whether I want it or not, how can I use the accumulated advantages to help break it down. It’s not necessarily easy to answer that question but I think folk can use their imaginations to dig in. Even to work against like that assumed solidarity, never be the safe White person in the room. I also think that, um, that we’ll always be working kind of on two simultaneous paths. One of them about material repairs, and part of what I did in the book was to try to track in detail the accumulated advantage to the White institution, to the church and the lack of that same material advantage to the Black family. But then, beside those material repairs we're always gonna have to be working on cultural repairs. The stories that we've told have poisoned us and the ways that we've justified the decision making that we've had over the past 250 years now or more. And so we're always gonna have to be working on learning new stories, telling new stories, retraining ourselves about what's meaningful to us, and what kind of trajectory we want to offer to our children.

Dr. Val: You mentioned that college opened up some things for you and here we're obviously advocating that we have these integrated spaces that aren't just bodies sitting next to each other, but meaningful relationships, between people and students and communities, et cetera. So, one, talk a little bit about your own experience that did that for you. And two, help us make the connection for audiences around neighborhoods, schools, and why this work matters on all of these fronts.

Greg Jarrell: So I went to Wake County North Carolina Public Schools. I graduated from high school in 1997. So around that time Wake County was really highlighted as a national leader in a lot of stuff education-wise. I still lived in a very White world and it takes effort and it takes intention to kind of break these things down. So what made a difference for me I guess as a college student was not just the experience that I had but having strong mentors who could help me to unpack and figure out what was happening to me. Some of those were teachers. Some were like campus ministers or other kinds of religious or spiritual figures. And some of it was just going to class and wrestling with some hard questions under the guidance of, you know a professor who didn't necessarily know what was going on with me, but I was forced through the class material to figure the world out a little more, with a little more clarity you know.

I think on the policy level a lot of housing and education advocates work together often and will say something like housing policy and education policy are two sides of the same coin. And I think that's in large part because of the way districting works and the apportionment of resources that goes along with districting.

In many American cities suburbanization and the changing nature of American cities was in large part a response to Brown vs Board of Education around the south. Not only because of that I mean there were lots of things that were changing, but um part of the response to Brown was to create communities that were so segregated by distance that overcoming the distance was impractical. You know it just couldn't be done. And we still live inside that legacy like that's the dominant shape of most of our cities today. And so undoing that is gonna require for us to not only to reimagine our neighborhoods but that necessarily requires reimagining who our kids go to school with. So I think you know all that kind of neighborhood building zoning districting like all those things are gonna go hand in hand together fundamentally about who's gonna be in the classroom, who's gonna be sitting next to you.

Andrew: Yeah certainly like Val and I believe the the reason that, you know truly well integrated schools are important is because it gives that chance for the relationships, you know the the relationships that you formed when you were living in East St. Louis, the relationships that you've formed with professors with mentors, the people who helped you figure out as you said like what was happening to me. First you had to realize that something was happening to you. And I feel like the, you know the institutions are designed to convince White people that nothing is happening to us. That this is all the way things are supposed to be and that we are not losing anything by witnessing this injustice that's happening around us.

You come to realize that there is something wrong, and then it is through relationships, I think back we had season five a guy named Albert who also sort of came to uh integration work through faith, and he talks about um love comes close. I think John Perkins wrote about this that like you can't love from a distance that love is about proximity, love is about being close. And there is this opportunity in schools, you know, if we can do it right to bring people close to like, have love in a school environment. And I think similarly with neighborhoods, we have to look at the history that made the neighborhoods the way they are, but it is through proximity, it's through being close that we can actually find love that then can lead to something better.

Greg Jarrell: I 100% agree that proximity, it really is key. And also I would just add that again proximity still has to be mediated and interpreted.

Andrew: It's not sufficient. It's a, it's a prerequisite but it's not sufficient.

Greg Jarrell: Yeah And for those who continue to live in segregated environments, I mean there are some places where there just aren't that many minority communities around, and those people can't be off the hook either. Like they're they're responsible for deepening their imaginations and there are all manner of ways of doing that right. So personal relationships are invaluable but they're not the only way into solidarity.

Andrew: Yeah. You write in chapter 12, in the last chapter of the book, "The actual earth below us had been reformed by a series of events that forever altered the landscape and the people who called it home. Yet the ones who opportunistically planted themselves in it had not dug down into any particularity about the place, what it is, who was there, what came before, how the scars on the land might be acknowledged and addressed."

And in some ways back to this idea of kind of universality through specificity, you're specifically talking about this one plot of land in one neighborhood, in one city, in one state, but in so many ways this feels like to me at least a universal challenge for our country. We have scars strewn across the land and we have to figure out how to acknowledge and address them. How do we do it? Give us some hope here.

Greg Jarrell: So you have to face it and thinking about that, this idea of kind of particularity versus universality, I have often started my talks with this little passage from James Baldwin from an essay in 1962 where he talks about utilizing our particulars even though he says "ours are not very attractive but we must use them. They will not go away because we pretend they are not there." And that line is followed by one of his most famous sentences where he says, "Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced." So I think the like the good news or the hope sort of lies in digging into our own places.

Dr. Val: Hmmmm.

Greg Jarrell: I wrote this book in the way that I did and I do the work that I do in the way that I do it because I just, I don't find like, big general sweeping proclamations to be all that helpful. I don't find it useful to give people like big typologies that have universal answers. Like I think you ought to dig into your own corner and your own family, and your own institution, and your own neighborhood, and learn the story of it. And especially if you're White, learn how somebody else might tell the story of it. And I think that those particulars that you will find would probably suggest some paths forward for healing or for righting wrongs. So I guess that's my universal rule, like dig into the particular and see what's there and see how you might use what's there to help create some sense of healing in the world.

Andrew: You talked about the housing equity that you have gained. Now all of a sudden there is this paper money at least that is associated with you. You write that you have “seen the costs imposed on others to create that equity and would gladly give it up but whether I want it or not is irrelevant, I have it. It comes attached to me. The material benefits of Whiteness even as they are unevenly distributed cloud the thinking and the moral judgment of White people.”

Talk about that sort of clouding of the moral judgment of White people that comes along with this racial contract.

Greg Jarrell: Somebody I guess I think of as a mentor, Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes at Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta, and I talked extensively about Whiteness as a moral injury. And this language comes from people who study war and moral injury is the idea that you wind up doing something that you know to be wrong but you do it anyway. We, sort of have this basic solidarity with every other human, where we agree not to kill them right, but war making goes against that. And so this is where philosophers who think about moral injury enter into that conversation.

But it, you know the same is true for uh good little White Christian boys like me. Like, I know that I'm supposed to do unto others as I want them to do unto me, and so the image on the cover of the book is of a Sunday school teacher driving a bulldozer into a house for one of Charlotte's urban renewal programs. Clearly not what he would want done to him. And in fact he was a liberal, he had agitated for the end of Jim Crow. And still is recorded several years later wearing a suit driving a bulldozer into a house.

So, that's moral injury. The notion that we know what is right, uh, Paul says this somewhere in the epistles in the back of the New testament. I know the thing that is right but I do not do it, and so that's moral injury. And I think our judgment gets clouded especially when there's money or power that's involved. All of a sudden the things that we thought we would not do, or we would not be capable of doing become somewhat more attractive to us, or at least somewhat more palatable to us. And then all of a sudden we don't speak up, we don't get in the streets, we don't put an end to a war, and now Gaza is gonna become the new Riviera. The displacement of millions of people right, for a real estate project. Or you know, name your great moral crisis and this always precedes it. The Holocaust is obviously one easy kind of way of pointing to that. So Whiteness creates that kind of clouded judgment. And it has from the invention of Whiteness.

The idea of Whiteness came about as a way of theologians and politicians together saying we'd like to enslave these Africans so they will work for us for free, but we cannot justify it unless we create this new category that heretofore has not existed. That's how Whiteness gets invented. And we still live in the bleak moral world that that created. And unfortunately part of what Whiteness has done is to make itself seem inevitable, as though we cannot get out of that. We can get out of that but it requires a different kind of moral vision of the world.

Dr. Val: I don't think we've ever talked about Whiteness with a White person as clearly as, as we're doing it right now. So I just wanna thank you...

Greg Jarrell: Hmmmm. Yeah.

Dr. Val: …for that. I think it will challenge our listeners in a positive way.

Greg Jarrell: Good. Good.

Dr. Val: Yeah, for sure. It feels important to hear some things named that I have felt like this, like this can't feel right, right? Like what is happening can't feel good to the soul. Like there has to be something missing in order to take these steps and to be okay with it and to turn your head away from it.

Andrew: You know, tying this into schools, this idea of moral injury feels really powerful to me because it's not like there was a moral injury but it, it's ongoing it's constant. It's always being renewed. We are constantly injuring ourselves by looking away, by knowing these things that are wrong and then seeing them and I think it shows up in schools so often by the ways that we divorce our choices about where we send our kids to school, how we show up in our school communities, what we think we, we are supposed to do in terms of you know getting the quote unquote best for our kids, and our views about racial justice, our views about the society we want. And we separate those things. And I think that is a result of that ongoing moral injury. It doesn't heal it but maybe it goes back to this idea of kind of like pushing our sin off onto the institutions, that the system is here this is what we're supposed to do and if I look at it everything's gonna come crumbling down. And so there are so many systems and structures and conversations both from a policy standpoint the way that like schools work, in the ways that boundaries get drawn from kind of a governmental level, but also in the culture in the way that we talk about school, and the ways that we talk about parenting that allow us to not look at those things.

Greg Jarrell: So here's the challenge of like anti-racist education, not like school-based education necessarily, but sort of general, um is that it has to be really clever and It has to be oftentimes like painfully patient.

Andrew: Hmmm.

Dr. Val: Yes.

Greg Jarrell: And I think about this in like in my own family of origin for instance or you know the Sunday school teachers that I had for instance. Like they legitimately don't get it.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Val: Right.

Greg Jarrell: They don't understand. And it's easy for me to be like judgmental of that and to forget that there was a time when I also did not understand.

Dr. Val: Right.

Greg Jarrell: Because I had not been intellectually or spiritually formed in such a way that would allow for me to understand. That intellectual deficiency is part of Whiteness. That spiritual deficiency is. So it, I mean it takes a certain kind of stubbornness and patience to walk folks through the lies that they've been told.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Greg Jarrell: William Barber of the, the Poor People's Campaign…

Dr. Val: Love him. Love him.

Greg Jarrell: He tells this great story. He started as a labor organizer in Danville, Virginia, which is a rabidly anti-labor kind of place, and he'd go in the factory, working as this organizer and White folks and Black folks would tell him what he wanted to hear, right, they got the importance, of organizing, but then they would have an organizing meeting at night and only the Black folks would show up and the White folks wouldn't. And so he's talking to them about the importance of like, joining together this broad-based coalition, this multiracial fusion organizing, that he talks about all the time, uh but when it came down to it, White folks weren't willing to participate.

So he goes to one of the older deacons at his church complaining about this trying to understand it and the deacon says Brother Barber you have to understand that White folks aren't trying to figure out whether the cause is right or just. They understand that it is. They're trying to figure out whether their mama lied to them.

Dr. Val: Hmmmm.

Greg Jarrell: And that's the, like that's the thing right there.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Greg Jarrell: Because when we enter into this territory we're challenging long held assumptions that have been passed to us. We're asking people to see the world quite differently than they've been trained to see it. And one of the questions that begins to bubble up to the surface very quickly is, if this is true how come nobody told me.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Greg Jarrell: Why did they tell me something else? Who lied to me along the way?

Andrew: Right.

Greg Jarrell: You know?

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm

Greg Jarrell: And it's one kind of moral resolve to say I was wrong, I apologize. I'm gonna move in a different direction. It's a totally different level of moral resolve to say, my daddy was wrong. I apologize. I'm gonna move in a different direction. That's way harder.

Dr. Val: Hmmmm. Well, I just wanna thank the community in East St. Louis who raised you.

Greg Jarrell: Okay.

Andrew: Well, I was gonna, I was gonna ask about that. Because you have to give up not just this story you've been told, not just the lies that you've been told that so much rest upon, but also the community, the family, the church, whatever it is that is also holding you up. What was the soft place that you landed that made it feel, you know, safe enough to abandon those things?

Greg Jarrell: For one it was, uh a mentor who was wise and listened very carefully. It was a then girlfriend and now wife of 23 or so years, who was on a similar journey. And then it was books and music.

Andrew: Hmmmm.

Greg Jarrell: I went to college in Boone, North Carolina at Appalachian State University which is a very White place. So there weren't a lot of places that I knew of to unpack all this. But I was a jazz music student, that was my major, and so I was immersed in Freedom music. And I started reading as widely as I could and so without the books and music I don't… even that mentorship you know would've been I mean it it would've been fine but it… the books and the music sped the the process along.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: That's powerful. Thank you. Thank you for this book. Thank you for this conversation. Thank you for looking so squarely at the scars on the land and helping us all start to think about how we might address them, how we might acknowledge them, and how we might move forward to something better. Really appreciate it.

Greg Jarrell: Yeah. Thanks y'all. It's been a joy.

Dr. Val: Thank you.

Greg Jarrell: This has been a fun conversation.

[THEME MUSIC]

Dr. Val: So Andrew, what'd you think?

Andrew: The tables are turned.

Dr. Val: I've been waiting to do that for three seasons.

Andrew: That's fair. Um, yeah, the intellectual and spiritual deficiency as sort of baked into Whiteness, really got me in my feels. You know, in the very beginning he says that he realized that he has a stake in the work around dismantling White supremacy and I know that to be true, but I think, really felt it throughout the conversation, but especially near the end there, as we were talking about the harm that Whiteness causes. And it’s similar to the racial contract that Charles Mills talks about. You can't opt out. You know, those things are baked in and so you can be aware of it, you can face it, you can try to compensate where you can, but that spiritual and intellectual deficiency is unavoidable I think.

Dr. Val: So I think you're brilliant. I know you read a lot, but I feel like this is the first time we talked about being in your feels around one of these conversations. Right. Are you able to name that a little more?

Andrew: Hmm... I didn't know I had therapy booked today.

Dr. Val: You do. You do today. Right now, right here with me. [Andrew laughing].

Andrew: Yeah. I mean I was surprised by it. Like I didn't, I wasn't expecting, I always try to sort of be present in the conversation and see where it goes, but I'm also often thinking about the flow of the conversation and, and what points we need to hit and that sort of thing. So it did sort of sneak up on me and I think, I think it's mostly just like a, a kind of profound sadness, both that, and he talks about this like the, we have to come to terms with the world that we have created and our own role in, in the creation of it.

And, you know, I'm sad on my own behalf 'cause I suffer from that. And I'm sad that more people don't recognize that, that they are suffering from it. And all the ways that that gets sort of channeled into harmful behavior that tries to drive us apart. Um, and I think the other piece of it is like missing out on the potential for so much better.

Dr. Val: Hmm. I grieve that regularly.

Andrew: I recognize that that is all true and still firmly believe that there is something better out there. That we could do better, and that that better is about healing from these wounds. And so it's a lost opportunity. It's not just past harm that we have to address, but harm that keeps getting repeated over and over and over again. That, that then leaves us like further in the hole. It's like instead of, instead of digging our way out, we keep digging deeper and deeper because of this refusal to, to recognize the, the truth of the harm that Whiteness is causing.

Dr. Val: Yeah, I'm, I'm thinking back to what he said around Whiteness as a moral injury. Like, you know it to be wrong, but you do it anyway and there's justifications around that. What he named, felt like things I was trying to make sense of before, because there's some things that I just, I've sat here with you and I'm genuinely confused. You know, I'm like, I don't understand what people don't get. So it felt affirming to hear someone name like, no, there's actually some things that are off, you know, and we have to do real work to get alignment with ourselves and our community. And it's hard because many of the things that White folks have been taught, either intentionally, unintentionally, you know, out of ignorance in the most generous sense of the word. You just don't know.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: They become truth and they're actually lies. And when that is all that you know, it's very possible to walk through life and assume that just what you know to be true is true. I can't, this is a very silly example, but I don't remember what grade I was in elementary school, but when I learned that there were negative numbers, I was pissed because in the beginning they told me it started at zero. Why would you tell me it started at zero when there are negative numbers? That's a very silly example. But there are things that we have not been told for whatever reason, we think we are protecting the people that we care about. It's what we know to be true. And it takes a lot of courage to not only seek different answers, and internalize those different answers as multiple truths.

Andrew: Yeah. What he said, right was, was to be White, is to be raised on lies. Lies that are passed down generationally, that a lot of White folks don't even know they're passing down.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm

Andrew: And it's one step to recognize that, and it's another step, like you're saying, to internalize that, to let that shape your behavior, to let that shape your understanding of the world to, to grapple with being a beneficiary of the racial contract, even if you're not a signatory to it.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm. I left that conversation really grateful for his mentors and teachers, especially those folks he, I will say, grew up with in East St. Louis, and I've, I've said this before. It's really important when you're asking people to make such dramatic shifts in what they believe and how they act, they have a safe place to land, right? That there is a community, like we have to create spaces of community where people can land and feel like they have a new family or someone that will accept them and nurture them and be honest with them about what they don't know. But in a way that's loving and caring and, and sees the potential in them. Because if not, then we'll lose potential allies in the work.

Andrew: Yeah. Like he said, right. Anti-racist teaching has to be clever and painfully patient.

Dr. Val: Mmmm. I felt, I felt seen in that.

Andrew: Yeah. I certainly am, am grateful for all the places that I felt seen and able to show up, starting with my parents, starting with my school community growing up, certainly this podcast, this space with you that I get to share feels like a space where I can show up and be seen and try to let go of things that I thought were true, of stories that I was told, of history that has been passed down to me.

Dr. Val: That makes me think about what he said around proximity. And so I've always had issues with the idea that proximity by itself is enough.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Val: And so I'm really glad he named that. It's proximity and intentional anti-racist education and action. Right, because if you were just here and we were close and everything I said just went over your head or you dismissed it, or it didn't matter, then that wouldn't, that would not help me certainly. You might get to know a dope Black woman, but I would not wanna hang around you very often, you know?

Andrew: It wouldn't help me. Right. It wouldn't help address any of the intellectual and spiritual deficiencies that Whiteness has left me with. Right.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm

Andrew: It is in the relationship. It is in how we show up together. It is in the proximity, combined with the curiosity, combined with the respect, combined with the love that then creates the space where we can start to unpack some of those things.

Dr. Val: And I, I think this, this joint space is important. Like you can do all the work on your own as much as you want, but you will not know the impact of that work until you start to do it in community. And so I can assume, you know, as a Black woman, that I'm patient enough to have this conversation and I'm ready to team up with White folks who are ready to team up with me. But then I get in there and I realize, oh, this is harder than I thought because…

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Val: …folks aren't necessarily ready, or where I am, or they might make mistakes.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: And I have to be willing to stay in that as well. Right? If we have both agreed to stay in it for the long haul, for the larger goal, then that's gonna be a bumpy road, right? There are gonna be things that you say that offend me and things that I say that offend you and because we have that relationship that is not just about being in the same space together, but our own journeys of being better people and being better people together. It's worth trying to figure that out.

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I, I am incredibly grateful for that space and for the loving nature of it that feels like a place to land. And I've, I'm feeling very acutely, in this moment, like grateful for your willingness to join me in looking at the harm that Whiteness causes to White people and not wanting to lose sight of the harm that Whiteness causes to everyone else, because it is true that that White people are harmed by it. It is true that there is moral injury in the way that Whiteness shows up, that, uh, that impacts White people. And obviously the biggest impact, the most harm that has been caused by Whiteness has not been to White people.

Dr. Val: Um, I appreciate that. Thank you. I think the damage that Whiteness causes to our soulful selves, to our heart self, to the center of our being, is equal to all people. And I recognize that Whiteness causes material harm…

Andrew: Yes.

Dr. Val: …to folks all over who are not White or subscribe to Whiteness.

Andrew: And I mean, racism hurts Black and Brown folks first and worst, and it hurts everybody, right? Like it also causes material harm to White folks. It causes material harm because we could all… Heather McGee, right? It's not zero sum. We could actually all be better off. And I think coming back to the intellectual and spiritual deficiency part that, that, that sort of hit me so hard is, is that hope, that, dream that possibility of something that is so much better.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: That, that I believe we could have, that would be obviously better for Black and Brown folks, but would also be better for White folks.

Dr. Val: Absolutely. And that's been like part of our argument.

Andrew: Right. Right.

Dr. Val: We can have a better country. That's right. We can have a better country, we can have a better neighborhood. We, we like... The collective. Right. And so I think that's why I struggle with like, not understanding how that is not enough of a draw that we can all be better off. But he touched on it a little bit when he talked about material well being, and I think I see that all the time when we talk about schools, right?

Andrew: For sure.

Dr. Val: So we assume that if we put our kid in this school, then they will have the best and our material wellbeing is taken care of and thus we fall into the individualistic choices that I think are ruining our society.

Andrew: Yeah. It was a heavy conversation and there was still some hope in it and some, you know, path forward. You know, he's talking about the idea of Whiteness and where Whiteness came and all it's done to make itself seem inevitable that we can't get out of it. But, he says we can get out of it. It just requires a different kind of moral vision of the world.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: I feel like that. That moral vision of the world. I don't know exactly what that looks like, but I feel like that's what we're digging to uncover here. Every episode that's what people like him are working to do. That is what is possible to create in a school environment with kids who come to see each others’ shared humanity is a new moral vision of the world.

Dr. Val: Yeah. There were two other things that felt super helpful. One, I really appreciated him talking about, digging in on the particulars, like digging into your own family, your own community. That feels much more attainable than just going, waking up and saying, I'm gonna fix racism today. And so digging into what is close to home for you, if we all take those steps, I think that feels like something that we can accomplish.

Andrew: Yeah, it's so easy, particularly nowadays I think, to get caught up in the national, in the, the, what is the hot topic of the moment? What is the conversation that's going on, across the social media world. But I do think that local, you know, and that's why we've done a couple of, of different local stories of desegregation here is why we're trying to find, you know, individual people stories to tell. Because there is power in that.

And, what kept coming up in the episode right, was that this book is universal through specificity. It is incredibly specific about this very small piece of the American story, and yet it has this universal relevance to everybody in the country. And I think everybody has the opportunity to find that in their own local neighborhoods. In their own local schools. What is the history of your neighborhood, who lives where and why. What is the history of enrollment at your school and how has that changed and why? Who are the people who have been in your community for a long time and what stories do they have to tell? And, if you find those people and you ask them to tell their stories, particularly the people who've been around a long time. I don't know. I've never met an elder who is not excited to tell you the story of how they came to be where they are or why it's important to them or what's, what it's meant to them.

And the more we dig into those, the more we, I mean, it's interesting, you know, he talks about the need for new stories and, and also the need to go back and uncover the old stories and that doesn't feel contradictory in my mind. It is in uncovering those old stories, it is going deep on and understanding the history that we can conceive of new stories.

Dr. Val: That's right. There was the second thing that he said that I wanna leave people as hopeful and it's using that accumulated advantage.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: And so when he talked about accessing archives that other people can’t access or you know.

Andrew: Not being the safe White ally.

Dr. Val: Right. I think that's really important, right? To know that you do have some power that you can leverage for the greater good. And that's everyone who's listening to this, because if you have time to listen to a podcast, you got time to do something good in your community. Let's just be real.

And that, that includes me, you know, and we're talking about all of our places of advantage that other people might not have. And it includes people who might not see themselves as having advantage, but if you are rooted in community, Black or Brown person who knows your community. And you have those social connections that no one else has, that's power. Right. And so recognizing that we all have some of it to use for this greater good.

Andrew: Yeah. Well, I'm incredibly grateful for Mr. Jarrell and for his book for him coming on for, uh, really dragging me maybe somewhat unwillingly into my fields in this conversation. Listeners should definitely get the book. There'll be a link to the book in the show notes. You can buy it through our bookshop.org affiliate link, which supports local bookshops and also sends a portion of the proceeds back to Integrated Schools. We'd be grateful for that.

Dr. Val: And as you're grappling with your feels, we want you to leave us your story. It does not have to be perfect. In fact, if it's human, that's exactly what we're looking for. So you can leave us a voice memo at speakpipe.com/integrated schools. That's S-P-E-A-K-P-I-P-E.com/integrated schools.

Andrew: Yes, we want to hear from you. You can also go to our website integratedschools.org and click on the ‘Leave us a voicemail’ button. How did this conversation impact you? How have you thought about Whiteness in your life? How have you thought about the stories we tell and the lies that you were maybe told? How have you let go of them? We want to hear from you.

Dr. Val: Also on our website, you can find a donate button, because we like to keep this ship sailing. And so if you have the means and the opportunity to hit that donate button, we'd really appreciate it.

Andrew: Or join our patreon, patreon.com/integratedschools. You get show notes and some facilitation questions uh, happy hour sometimes with Val and I, where we get to have some conversations. We would be grateful for your support there as well.

Dr. Val: Please, after you listen to this episode, share it, listen to it again, engage others in conversation. That's how this work grows and continues.

Andrew: Yes. Val, I always feel grateful, but I feel especially grateful for this space, for these conversations with you today as I try to know better and do better.

Dr. Val: Until next time.