What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Academic Life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the show's producer and your host, Dr. Christina Gessler. And today I am so pleased to be joined by Professor Sue Stern, who is the author of What Might Be? Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions. Welcome to the show, Professor Stern. Thank you for having me.

I am so glad that you're here and that we get to learn from you today. Before we do that, will you please tell us about yourself? Sure. I am a professor at Columbia Law School, and I am the director of the Center for Institutional and Social Change. And I've spent really my entire adult life working on how to help students

and institutional leaders and change agents and people directly impacted by racism and incarceration to create settings that enable them to thrive and to contribute to the thriving of others. And in the process, I have really learned the importance of

collaborating with my students as well as with other people that I'm working with. So it is really thrilling to be part of a podcast series that's set up to support people who are on that academic journey. The book would seem to be a logical thing for you to write.

based on your job and your career and all the work that you've done. But you tell us early on in the book, when you had the idea, there wasn't immediate enthusiasm from some of your colleagues. And that was specifically because you are a white professor and you're going to be talking about confronting racism.

That is absolutely true. As I describe in the author's note at the beginning of the book, I early on in the process described to a dean of another institution what I was doing, writing a book that was intended to be helpful to people who are working, studying in predominantly white institutions about how to address racism and to do that as part of advancing full participation in

And he said to me, you're doing what? You shouldn't be writing that book. You're only going to get yourself in trouble. And I actually spoke with other colleagues who also didn't tell me not to write the book, but said, wow, you know, that's a really risky undertaking. I think the counter narrative to that was largely from my students and former students' experiences.

Who had had the opportunity to really work through these questions of like, how do I become a change agent from whatever position I'm in? How can I use my position now to push for change? And how do I use my position as a student to develop?

my capacity and my relationships so that I can pursue a long-term goal of being an effective change agent in collaboration with other people. And so those students said, yes, please do this because we want people who are not actually in the classroom with you to have the benefit of these kinds of insights.

and particularly insights from someone who is willing to reveal the struggles, the challenges, the mistakes, the ways in which I have had to grow and learn over the years and how that process has been so critical to my becoming someone that could participate in and build multiracial collaborations. And one of the things that you do in the book is encourage families

everyone to figure out where they are in this situation, to do perspective taking, to see themselves in it. And you can't sidestep that if you're white and say, well, racism doesn't affect me. What you show again and again is that it's systemic. It's affecting all of us.

Yes, it is. And you're also inviting the insight that is really a critically important foundation to the book, which is that there is no way, no matter what your race is, to avoid these contradictions that are built in to addressing the issues that connect to racism. So if you

someone who is white and you don't name these issues, then you make it difficult to, number one, build trust with people who understand that these issues are operating and don't believe that you're addressing them in ways that affect their participation. And number two, you make it difficult to actually see and make visible and to address the dynamics that are specific to

to the patterns of racial exclusion. But if you only focus on race...

and you don't articulate the problems and the issues in ways that speak to a broader group, that speak to the underlying structural issues that race and racism are connected to, you push out people who are not going to come to the table for a conversation that's only organized around race and racism. And you might also fail to include people

the other types of margins of exclusion that affect people. And you might also fail to address some of the structural challenges, the structural dynamics that are now built into institutions so that they're no longer named in terms of race or

but are having profound impact on whether people of all races can fully participate. So this is a challenge of, you know, someone being white. You know, how do I both address race and racism and step up to that challenge and,

And also not hog the limelight, not push out the people or try to speak for or over the voices of the people who have firsthand experience of the kinds of injustices or the kinds of exclusions or the kinds of violence.

of harms or problems that are affecting our institutions and that are compromising our ability to achieve our goals more generally. So we have to both lean in and step back as people in positions of power who see the world from the vantage point of someone who's white. We have to both

identify race and racism as part of the problem, but not only talk in terms of race and racism and also frame things in more general terms that will speak to the full range of people who need to be part of solving problems and addressing issues in ways that can advance the full participation. So these are paradoxes

mutually exclusive truths that both have to be navigated, that we have to learn how to hold rather than running away from the conflict or trying to pick one side or the other when in fact we need to do both.

In Chapter 5, you invite us more closely to meet Lani, who you talk about in the acknowledgments and in many places in the book as someone who really is very important to you, and she had a profound impact. And you two were working on the Critical Perspectives course. Can you talk about how your work with Lani has been transformational for you?

Yes, and Lonnie Guinier, who died before her time, was really the person who helped me to become a kind of –

person who can advance multiracial collaborations without actually reproducing the very challenges that I'm trying to address. So as I talk about in the book, Lonnie and I came together both around shared goals and aspirations, but also very different histories. Lonnie was the daughter of a black academic and activist and a white activist.

Jewish, also activist, who raised her to both identify very strongly with

her identity as a black woman, and also to be able to understand and communicate across these lines that were built into her family and built into her history and built into her goals and aspirations. So she learned from a very young age how to be that kind of what I call organizational catalyst spanning across those lines.

I grew up in a family of, you know, white Jewish liberals. My father was in Dachau. My father had experienced the kind of state imposed violence and my parents were very committed to social justice and.

And at the same time, my parents grew up at a time when racism was actually widespread and even legal. And my parents had really reflected some of those stereotypes and patterns, even as they were saying the opposite. And so I grew up in a family that had these contradictions built into them around race and also around family. And so...

Before I worked with Lonnie, I think I had the idea that I could work primarily with whoever was there and work on race and figure out what the problems were of people of color and then try to solve them. So until I started working with Lonnie, I had never been in an environment that wasn't set up by and run by white people. And I worked for a court where everyone working for the court

Who was monitoring compliance with the prison degree was white. I worked for law firms that were doing employment discrimination and housing discrimination. And everyone who was doing this work on behalf of people of color were white. And I worked in legal work.

educational setting where I was teaching people about race and racism and social change without really collaborating closely with or setting up an environment that was fully participatory for people of all different racial identities.

When I had the chance to work with Lonnie, it was the first time I had been in an environment that was set up by and led by people of color as well as by white people. And I learned all of the ways in which I worked.

was imposing ways of interacting that I didn't even realize were from the limited world that I grew up with and from the vantage point of people who have held that kind of power. And so I had to really learn that.

how to step back and understand the ways in which my way of working might in fact be specific rather than universal, and that how to create this space that would allow multiracial collaboration. And we also learned how to build an environment that was critical to

and also very supportive of people's learning and growth that was experimental, that allowed people to try things, to do things and change.

And that was very, very committedly multiracial and multidimensional in its perspective. And that process translated to the students who became teachers as well as learners, who became leaders as well as people who were in the process of working with and learning from other people. And so...

That work with Lonnie fundamentally changed my own sense of myself.

as a person with a race and with a set of responsibilities that go along with my social position, and also the way in which I set up environments that would enable people to take up their own power, to share power, to bring their resources to the table, but also to exercise a kind of humility along with a kind of drive to have an impact.

The book is about exploring how to navigate the contradictions built into our racialized history, relationships, and institutions. And the term built there is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I think it names what is hidden in plain sight and what many people assume is what is, or that they can find a more comfortable way to navigate within it. Um,

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Yes. And this contradiction really, I think, hit me in the face when I first went to law school. And I re-experienced that kind of deer in headlights or smack in the face or punch in the gut that many law students experience when they first come to law school.

I went to law school because I cared about social justice. I was a kind of envying child of the 60s, went to law school in the 70s, and really thought that the law would be the partner to the civil rights movement, to the racial justice movement, to the movement against mass incarceration, which was not a term that was

in use so much then. And when I got to law school and started learning the way law is taught, especially in the first year, what I experienced was that in fact, legal institutions and courts were critical partners in sustaining the status quo, in upholding a system that excluded law

people of color that legitimated the power of people who had benefited from white supremacist times and institutions. And that, you know, enslavement could not have continued without the participation of judges willing to enforce those contracts. And that that practice of having law, which is

to and claims the mantle of justice was so often the instrument of injustice and that the practices that preserve that role

of injustice continue to this day? Who gets to be the ones defining the rules? How do we count the actual impact of laws that look like they're neutral on their face but are put in place and practiced in ways that so clearly exclude and marginalize those who are not currently part of the power structure? So those...

contradictions are built in to our constitution. They're built in to our court system. They're built in to our educational system, which is simultaneously supposed to be this mobilizer of social mobility, this creator of possibility at the same time that income is the greatest predictor of who's going to get to go to the most exclusive colleges and universities in our country.

And so whether it's higher education, whether it's the media, whether it is courts and legislatures, the very institutions that we have to rely on to push for justice, to push for change, themselves have the dynamics of.

of exclusion and of racial hierarchy that lock in the status quo. So those are ways in which the contradictions are built into the structure. And then we can also think about change itself as something that...

inherently paradoxical, that we need order and we need structure to enable people to get to the point where they can make change. But that very order and structure is what we're pushing against as change agents. We want to work in groups because groups are the ways in which we develop our identity and they are ways in which we actually can have an impact when groups are also a way of

actually can be a practice of limiting our individuality and even dehumanizing our humanity. So...

Yes, these contradictions are built into the structure. If we try to avoid them, we will only get stuck in a vicious cycle. We can't change the world around us without changing law. We cannot use law in that way without challenging and tackling the very institutions that we're using to change the world around us. You wrote the book in part to talk about

How we can close the gap between the unacceptable is and the desired vision. I say in part because there's so much in this book and I hope that listeners will pick it up and find themselves in it and see where they can get started.

The goal is to bring people to full participation, and that can sound exhausting or impossible. So you invite us into real-world ways we can do this. One of this is to create microspaces. Can you give examples of what that means? Yes.

I'm also very moved by your absorbing and so effectively translating some of the core ideas of the book. So this idea of microspaces of justice or what Adrienne Marie Brown calls fractals in emergent strategy is a very important idea because if we are in an institution as we

I would say almost all of us are if we're in an institution that is currently unfair, unjust, not fully participatory in significant ways. And we try to take on the whole institution, especially in situations where we do not have partnership with people who are leading those institutions. We can feel overwhelmed.

And even if we can change the institution, when we look at the larger system, the system so often cuts against the sustainability of that change, because especially now the larger landscape, the federal government, some of the politics are pushing against transformative change. So we can easily say, what can I do?

And I think it's really important to understand that change happens by connecting the local with the national and the global. That's how change can happen in a transformative way. And we have to be engaged in order to push forward with that process. So if we start

Where we live, where we work, by building with others what I call a microspace of justice, it can be a project, a community, an institution, depending on the level that you can actually work at.

And that micro space of justice actually has built into it the features, the values, the practices that are what we want to see in the larger world. And then we connect with others in both within our institutions and across institutions that are trying to do the same thing.

That's how we can build out a larger movement towards more national or global change. So what is an example of that? I have two examples just to put out there. One of them is from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, originally launched by Freeman Hrabowski, who was the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County for over 25 years.

And Freeman Hrabowski started his transformational work with a small program, the Meyerhoff Program, which initially was focused on increasing the participation and success in the STEM field, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, by black boys.

taking the framework that the reason they weren't succeeding up to that point was about the environment that had failed them rather than about something that was a deficit for them. And so built a community that would support them

the successful participation of those individuals. And doing that required looking at how people were being taught science, period, and creating ways of learning that supported people's success. And that dealt with some of the barriers, financial and other types of barriers that could otherwise stand in the way.

This microspace of justice was very successful. It ended up producing people of color, initially black boys and then black girls, people of color, who became the most successful students in these fields. And then when the practice of targeting primarily people of color was challenged,

The program was opened up to include anyone who was really interested in advancing full participation in the sciences and in the STEM fields. And so that program became one that was number one, open to everyone, but also all of the strategies that...

were so effective for the original beneficiaries of these programs were taken up by other programs that were focusing on first-generation students, on women in STEM, on people who had experienced incarceration, on people who were in the sciences more generally. So those micro spaces of justice were

were recreated all around the university and in the larger community. And those microspaces of justice then became joined with scaffolding and structure that supported them, not only in their program, but more generally in their participation

And that led to a culture change such that UMBC became a place as an institution that could advance full participation for everyone, not just for the people who were originally in those micro spaces of justice.

So this is an example. And then UMBC became a driver of this type of transformation in other institutions, which adopted their own processes and practices of developing microspaces of justice, informed by and supported by what happened at UMBC. So that's one very powerful example. Let me stop there and see if you want me to give another example or you want to move on to another question.

I would like another example, and then we'll move on to another question. Wonderful. So another example comes from work that I have been doing, both with the Broadway Advocacy Coalition and with the Jailhouse Lawyers Manual at Columbia Law School. In both of those spaces, there was a goal of

Increasing the voice and participation and leadership of people who are directly affected by mass incarceration and by racism as part of transforming both the higher education space, but transforming the capacity of legal institutions to claim the mantle of justice and to advance justice in communities.

Again, these are huge goals. How do you enable people affected by incarceration to genuinely be able to exercise their legal rights? How do you enable, to take an example, people who are being tracked from the school to prison pipeline from their communities into the carceral state? How do you shift that?

systemic problem. These are huge, overwhelming problems. And if you take them on full force, the feelings of despair can easily descend. So you use this process of zooming in and zooming out. So we zoom into a space by creating a...

workshop in a course called the theater of change, which brings together performing artists, people directly impacted by incarceration and racism who are advocating for change and law students and building a space that has in it, all of these qualities of sharing expertise of learning with and from each other of making sure people directly impacted are centrally part of the process of defining the

what the future looks like for them. And then building activism strategies and performances that really enable the creation of spaces that can actually drive change.

and that can build both relationships and capacities that enable everyone who goes through this process to sustain this work going forward. And then we're doing the same kind of thing with the Jailhouse Lawyers Manual by building partnerships with people directly impacted by incarceration with law students to reimagine this manual, which has already been so helpful,

so that it can actually be accessed by people who have experienced incarceration and those supporting them.

The process of doing that rewriting is itself a micro space of justice, bringing people in to work shoulder to shoulder who are affected by incarceration with law students who are planning to do work in a system that they find to be unjust and oppressive often, that that kind of building of that space is

transforms everyone who's involved in the process, builds a short-term community that is having a profound impact on the law school itself,

and is set up to actually make it possible for people who are incarcerated or were incarcerated to become a really integral part of redefining what law looks like. So that is a microspace of justice that is both small and a step forward, but builds the platform for taking the next step and the next step and the next step so that we can, over time, ratchet up justice

the scope of the impact by involving more and more people who are situated in places where they can have a real impact on the structure of institutions and the nature of policy and law. As I'm listening to you, I'm thinking of a couple of guiding phrases. One is nothing for us without us.

And another is, to paraphrase, it's not your job to complete the work, nor is it your job to abandon it. Those are two really powerful thoughts that I learned about before I started writing this book.

And that have been created and articulated by the people who are directly impacted by racism and incarceration, as well as by disability and mental health issues and racism.

I think if we could actually make good on those two sayings, nothing about us without us, and that it's not our job either to complete the work or to abandon it, if we could really make that happen, these are...

These are goals that require structural change. These are goals that require rethinking what we mean by expertise. These are goals that would require us to redesign how democracy is practiced. Those all sound like really huge systemic challenges, and they are, but they're also things that we can begin right where we live and work, and that only by learning what it actually looks like to do this in

in the day-to-day work, will we be able to realize these goals on a more systemic and global level? I was thinking about a course I taught a while ago, and it was a history course, so it was incredibly dense, how much we had to do in a semester.

It was a women's history course. And at one point, the student said, Dr. Gessler, I have learned so much here. I don't know how I'm going to remember all this after the course. And I said, oh, I don't expect you to, and I don't need you to. You've gotten to the point where you can't unsee it. And I think that was kind of a moment for them to just sit with that we don't have the expectation when we

teach or when we're in community to see ourselves as the change agent, but to see the people going forward as the change agents.

That is so powerful. There's so much built into what you just said. First of all, I'm hearing this different idea of education moving away from, as Paolo Freire would have said, the banking theory of education, that education is all about information and knowledge, that you're just kind of pouring into somebody's heads, as opposed to education as a way of, as you say it,

seeing the world, perceiving the world, understanding the world in a way that allow you to continually learn and make change and that help you understand the ways in which your own way of seeing could limit you if you don't actually continually rethink. So that's built into what you said, which is really powerful. And the other thing that's built into what you said that is so important is

not only for teachers, but also for anyone in a position of leadership or power, is that our biggest job is to equip the people who are going to have to take this work forward. That is what we need to be focusing our energies on. And the people who are in those positions of stepping into positions of responsibility

should be holding us accountable to be playing that role and should be thinking of themselves not passively as how do I jump through the hoops that this professor or this leader is telling me that they expect, and instead saying, how do I build the capacity, the relationships, the will to take on this really hard work that's going to be mine

and ours to push forward. It's a very transformative and I think enabling idea of what education is about.

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Students don't just stay in the classroom and neither do professors. So I really appreciated one of your examples, which has

Far outside academia, it was the Mall of America in Chapter 6 where you talk about repurposing power to shift the dynamic from power over to power with. Can you tell us about this story from the Mall of America? Sure. This was a story that I actually was turned on to by a former student of mine who was from Minnesota originally.

And there was this looking looked like a very exciting, transformative project going on at the Mall of America. The mall had been experiencing some challenges with young people coming to the mall on the weekends.

Because it was freezing out, there was no other place to gather. And so large groups of young people from the city would take the bus to the Mall of America, which was intended to be a place to attract young people as purchasers and as frequenters of the mall.

But these young people would be traveling in large groups. They would be, you know, do what young people do. They'd be loud and rowdy and they would sometimes block the entrances to stores. And so there was a concern about this. And the initial response of the mall was to put in place mall security. This is going to sound very familiar with our current situation.

reality, who would police young people and if they didn't follow the rules, arrest them or push them out of the mall. This

practice, sometimes using police dogs and some of the more violent forms of policing, produced accusations of racism because most of the young people who were involved in this and who were the ones who were targeted were black and brown people from the city.

It also produced arrests and violence and a lot of protest from the civil rights community and the larger community. And so a group of people came together and said, what do we do? And there was a realization that, number one, there was an underlying problem, which was that young people didn't have enough to do or places to go on the weekend. And number two, that the

strategy of using power over young people force, if necessary, was backfiring. And number three, that there was a kind of expertise needed that the mall did not have.

That included relationships with young people that would help change the dynamic. And so they came up with this idea of Mighty Moms, of having people, women from the community who were teachers and parents and bus drivers and social workers working.

work in collaborative, basically walk the mall with the mall security and build relationships with young people, many of whom they already knew. And when look, when things look like they were going to erupt into a conflict that they would be able to

um, basically, uh, avoid that conflict while also supporting young people in getting what they needed to pursue their education, to enjoy themselves, to have recreation and educating them all security on, um, the fact that just because someone wears baggy pants doesn't mean they're part of a gang. Uh,

and learning how to communicate effectively in ways that would build relationships among people who were in positions of authority for the security force and young people. So that would be shifting from power over to power with, sharing responsibility and power with community-based organizations that understood this dynamic and were setting up the Mighty Moms.

And also not using force, but rather using learning and collaboration as ways to avoid these kinds of disruptive behavior that would make it difficult for them all to function while also supporting the interests and needs of young people.

That practice was not sustained when there was a fight or an altercation that broke out where a visitor felt threatened.

threatened, the mall immediately jumped in, introduced a curfew, and moved away from these community leaders as people who were going to help create different opportunities and different forms of relationships with young people to moving them into positions of basically being the voice of

of security and of the interest of the mall in just protecting against any kind of disruption, even if that meant, you know, abdicating their responsibility to young people and pushing them out of the mall. Right.

So this was something that I learned about through collaborating with and learning with and from. And this is an example of something that Derrick Bell would call interest convergence, where people in predominantly white institutions or white people only advocate for or share in the interests that affect people of color when it serves their short-term interest.

And I talk about in chapter four, the importance of linked fate and,

which is really exploring in ways that others in the power chapter, the rethinking, repurposing power chapter do, rethinking and understanding how people of all different races, long-term well-beings, prosperity, and survival depends upon our understanding of the ways in which our long-term interests are interdependent.

Our concerns about the failures of our democratic institutions are landing hard on people of color and immigrants, but are issues that affect all of us who care about democracy. And similarly, in the chapter talking about the interests of FISC,

a historically black college and university in having access to long-term educational opportunities around for students who want to pursue a PhD, whereas Vanderbilt, which is a research university, predominantly white, has an interest in learning how better to teach and reach

people of all different backgrounds and races and learning from Fisk, which might not be resource rich, but calls, as it says about itself, is resourceful. They had a long-term mutual set of interests and

that they discovered through exploring their linked fate, where they changed the way they were allocating their power. It's something that also the Newark mayor, Raz Baraka, was able to support in Newark around the ways in which

and public safety was going to be defined and redefined that would really center the knowledge about what safety means in the lives and in the experiences and the expertise of people who live in these communities and understand how violence is operating and what safety really entails, which is not using guns to enforce the interests only of people who have the ear,

the police. So these are all ways in which power can be repurposed and that we have to learn how to start doing right when we're in school. That is how we begin to understand how to exercise power so that full participation becomes a reality. And the understanding of our linked fate is

is threaded throughout the book and the chapters that you were referencing talk about how we better understand our linked fate when we uplift undervalued knowledge, particularly local in community knowledge. We're starting to come to the close of our time together. So I'd like to talk about some of the lessons from chapter seven, which is anti-racism over the long haul, which

is one of the takeaways of the book is not just to know that we are all part of the work, but how we keep doing it without burning out or becoming defeated and discouraged. I think that challenge is even more profound and felt in our bodies now than certainly in my lifetime. So

I think no one has silver bullets answers. If we look for silver bullets, we're going to get defeated. There is no easy answer to this. I think building, first of all, a community of people who share an interest in making change and are willing to learn with and from each other, building those kind of multiracial collaborations, starting small and connecting. I think that's a really important piece of this conversation.

I think building, and I've been experiencing this as I've been talking about the book with people who care about each other, that building that concern for each other's well-being, the possibility of experiencing joy amidst struggle, of understanding that we have to remain centered even as we are experiencing despair. All of that is really important. I think...

Asking questions, who am I in this work? There are so many important roles to play in this transformative process that's needed. I'm a weaver and like to use vision and ideas to help support work. That is a very important role, but it is not a sufficient role. I know I need to partner with people who are disruptors or people who are the ones who actually like disrupt

Like the detail work of getting things done. So part of what I think we need to do is join with people who bring different strengths and different perspectives and who want to work together on Linked Fate and start with something small and real and urgent.

and recognize that we actually do have the power to do that, even if we don't have the power to change in the first instance, the institutional policies or the larger public policies. So that's the second thing, figure out your role and figure out how your role

connects with other roles that are equally important. Are you a lover? Are you a dreamer? Are you a thinker? Are you a warrior? You might be some combination. And what do you need to bring to the table so that you can be fully effective? I think this idea of

Zooming in and zooming out is really important. Build that space, that small micro space that you do have control over, exercising your influence and power where you can, and then zooming out and understanding where you cannot go.

on your own or in that space actually fully advance your goals and figuring out how to build that larger connective tissue those larger networks those that larger architecture and figuring out how that can the small spaces can be brought into the spaces that need to be transformed so

Seeing ourselves all as people who can and are responsible for making change, understanding our roles, connecting with communities of other people in our spaces and across other spaces where we can make change, and figuring out how to be wisely courageous. When is it appropriate and safe, given the position that we're in, to take risks?

how to create environments that enable people to make mistakes and recover, and how to recognize when we're in environments where that is not the case so that what we need to do is care for each other and each other's safety as we build community for the long haul.

And we need to be thinking both immediate and long run. We cannot allow the reactivity to the moment to shape everything that we do. And that will enable us to build communities that allow us to be in joyful struggle, to build microspaces of justice, to become the lifelong learners of how change happens so that we can narrow the gap.

between the is and the ought. And we can make the what might be not what might be if we don't act, but the what might be that happens when we come together in these ways and do what we can and engage with others who can do what we cannot.

Thank you so much for being here today, Professor Susan Stern, telling us about your book, What Might Be? Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions. You've been listening to The Academic Life. I'm Dr. Christina Gessler, inviting you to please join us again.