Disciple: Changing the Narrative

By Christine McTaggart

---

 

The Racial Equity Institute (REI) is a nonprofit organization based in Greensboro, North Carolina. Founded by Deena Hayes-Greene and Suzanne Plihcik, they are an “alliance of trainers, organizers and institutional leaders who devote themselves to the work of creating racially equitable organizations and systems,” and “help individuals and organizations develop tools to challenge patterns of power and grow equity.” Hayes-Greene developed REI’s content and approach as a journey, and at the start of the journey are workshops that provide a foundation of information from which participants can continue to research, learn and explore.

The racial equity training REI provides is unique. It does not accuse. It enlightens. It does not ask for guilt, but rather understanding. It imparts hard truths that could easily drive participants away, but instead finds them leaning in to learn more.

Perhaps this is because rather than focusing on individual bigotry and bias, the training presents the systemic foundation of racism. It explains how racism is a result of decisions made centuries ago that created ripple effects still felt today. It demonstrates that at its core, the creation of racism was—and is—ultimately about and the result of economic superiority and power.

And it reveals one of the most devastating results of those decisions was the creation of a narrative that became so deeply embedded in our cultural collective, most don’t even realize how they have accepted it. The narrative has become invisible, yet it continues to control the systems that provide benefits to some and do great harm to others.

The narrative runs too deep to detail in this small space, but its essence puts the blame on individuals unable to make it in the “land of opportunity,” obfuscating or outright ignoring the fact that many are still forced to navigate and deal with the consequences of centuries-old systems designed to oppress some and elevate others.

If it seeks to do nothing else, REI works to change the narrative and make the invisible visible. Until all of society can see what has long been hidden, we cannot begin to do meaningful work toward true racial equity.

Plihcik and Capt. Pete Davis are two of the organizers and trainers who travel the country leading two-day workshops designed to provide a foundation for those seeking to understand the roots of our country’s social problems. Every member of diocesan staff is in the process of taking the REI training, and a few have been fortunate to attend sessions co-led by Plihcik or Davis. As we shared the work being done in the Diocese around racial equity and reconciliation, they agreed to speak with us about the importance of changing the narrative.

Christine McTaggart: Why is it important to talk about the narrative?

Suzanne Plihcik: It’s the narrative we lift up and hold in common across this nation. It says some people are better than others, and those people have rights the others don’t. It’s a powerful narrative, and we’ve all bought into it. Even when we consciously don’t believe we’re doing it, the narrative is in us because it goes so deep. It’s a narrative about race and poverty and the poor that’s been a part of this country from the start, but we’ve taken it to a new place. Our founder, Deena Hayes-Greene, says it’s now rotating on its own axis, bringing the same outcomes over and over again, and we’ve institutionalized it to the point it no longer requires intent.

CM: Why is changing it so crucial?

Pete Davis: The narrative is about why people are situated the way they’re situated. We need to change it so we can have conversations with people about how this nation was shaped and what transpired to cause people to be situated differently.
For example, there is a narrative in this country about why people are poor, and it blames them and says it’s their fault. Yes, personal responsibility and having drive, grit and determination are all important, but when it’s all said and done, people are poor because of social and economic policies. We think it’s important for folks to be informed about the structure and effects of those policies so we can have a conversation of facts.

CM: How do people typically respond to hearing about the narrative and your analysis of its roots?

PD: Mixed responses. Many people reassess how they’ve been processing information. People tend to be very opinionated about things without having factual information. We make snap judgments without knowing any of the details, and we don’t let a lack of information keep us from adhering to the narrative we’ve embraced. And it’s not that people are mean-spirited, it’s just that’s the way we function. It’s the way our brain fills in the blanks unless we interrupt that.

CM: Do you see differences in reactions across geographical or age boundaries?

SP: Reactions are so much the same, you wouldn’t believe it.

PD: Some people come to the workshops because they’re intellectually curious and want to know the information so they can do a self-assessment and make adjustments. There are others there because they were mandated to come, and those are two totally different audiences. One group is definitely more receptive than the other.

We do find there are certain trigger words or phrases we can use to start a lot of rich discussions about poverty and why people are situated the way they are.

The Welfare Queen is a good example. She was a real person, one person, until the media got a hold of it and she came to represent every poor person of color, and the narrative became poor people of color take advantage of the system. But the facts are that more white people receive some kind of assistance from government agencies than any other color group, but that’s not the narrative.

Poor people being unemployed is another example. The narrative says they’re poor because they don’t work, but the facts say they do, often more than one job.

CM: The flow of information can clearly affect the narrative. How does today’s access to mass communication continue to shape it?

SP: We don’t need many [to control the flow] anymore, because we’ve all bought into it. At some level of our consciousness, we’ve all bought it. It’s hard to see and recognize it, but it’s there.

PD: Social media in and of itself is good. It means we can be privy to a lot of good, rich and meaningful information. But the thing about it is who’s telling the story and what type of spin are they putting on it, and that’s always been true. It takes an intellectual curiosity to do some digging and find out what the actual facts are.

CM: A lot of good and well-intentioned people have a hard time as this narrative becomes visible. How do you help them past that?

SP: Our intent is not to make people feel accused. We’re talking about a system that’s been in place for hundreds of years. We’re each a cog in a machine.

PD: Our workshop process brings a person to a point where they can make an informed decision. The two days in and of themselves are not going to cause a paradigm shift in a person’s thinking, but it can be the beginning of a process.

I find one of the best ways to get people to be receptive is to tell your own story. It’s why I like to tell mine: I spent 28 years with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. I wanted to be a positive role model, particularly for young, black males. Yet I would find myself making snap judgements about people without knowing the factual information. I knew my heart was in the right place, and yet it happened. I fell into the narrative hook, line and sinker, and I’m a black male. You would think I’d have been more compassionate, but I bought in to the “bootstrap” model of how to make it in America.

SP: Our way of thinking is very dichotomous—we live in the binary. That makes it hard to look at what’s been done throughout history, what’s been done by the white collective and what we’ve been complicit in, and simultaneously say we are good and decent human beings. If you live in either/or logic, you are looking at those things as a choice. We’ve got to challenge that way of thinking as much as we challenge what we think.
We’ve got to be able to say to people when we point out these things have happened and continue to happen today, our complicity is not because of intention or mean-spiritedness or anything else, but because [white people] are beneficiaries of a system set up hundreds of years ago. We need to be able to say, “I am a good person. You are a good person. AND we have got to do something about our complicity.”

Another thing is—and this is big—white people need to understand we have a dog in this fight, that we are being harmed. It is spiritually impoverishing to be the dominant culture in a supremist culture.

CM: Tell us about the REI approach.

SP: The goal of our approach is not to straighten people out or beat up on anybody, it’s to reach people. We push, but we don’t blame. It’s not the fault of anyone who might be sitting in the room, but we do put out a lot of information. We need to face what is going on. We’re optimistic, but we’re honest about the facts. We want people to believe things can change, we want them to believe they can be a part of that change, and we want them to know what they’re up against.

CM: Do you get asked a lot about “what do I do?” when folks start to learn the facts behind the narrative?

PD: We get that all the time. It’s a natural response because we’re doers, we’re fixers. We have a problem, so let’s fix the problem. It doesn’t make a difference who we’re talking to, we get the same response: “What do I do?” We want to fix it, and we want to fix it as quickly as possible.

That’s why at the beginning of the workshop we tell people that we’re not going to give solutions to these problems. A two-day workshop is not enough time for that kind of transformation, but we do encourage people to continue the journey. Read. Do research. Have conversations. Get involved with organizations who have been working to address racial inequities. In those groups you can continue to grow, to learn, to get a better understanding and be more effective.

We discourage people from going out and being Lone Rangers; this is a group effort, and we believe in the group movement and model to affect real change. This situation was not created in a day, a week, a month or even years. We’ve had this particular [systemic] arrangement for about four centuries, so it’s not going to be fixed overnight. It’s not a sprint, it’s not a marathon, it’s a relay marathon.