How can we build a culture of antiracist accountability through the use of intentional data?
“Antiracism tells us relationship is always going to come before the methodology. In fact, it's required for it.” On this episode of Untying Knots Theo Miller and Erika Bernabi share the foundations of their organization, Equity and Results, and reflections from their related workshop at IARA’s 2022 Truth and Transformation convening.
Equity and Results is grounded in the model of Antiracist Results-Based Accountability, coupled with the antiracist organizing principles of the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. Their work strives to support organizations’ efforts in building a culture of accountability to advance racial justice through the use of praxis and intentional data use. In our discussion, Erika and Theo share key insights from their work with institutions throughout the US—including how they actively center the lived experiences of those most impacted at every stage of facilitation and program design. The results that Black, Indigenous, and communities of color need, must always come first, in healing-centered, antiracist, and liberatory spaces designed to shift power.
Notes:
Untying Knots, co-hosted by Nikhil Raghuveera and Erica Licht, explores how people and organizations are untying knots of systemic oppression and working towards a more equitable future. Each episode features special guests and a focus on thematic areas across society.
This podcast is published by the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project in collaboration with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center.
Music:
Beauty Flow by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5025-beauty-flow
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
About the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project
The Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project believes in working at the intersection of community, academia, and policy to address intellectual and practical questions as they relate to antiracism policy, practice, and institutional change. In order to create and sustain change, the goal of this project is to promote antiracism as a core value for organizations by critically evaluating structures and policies within institutions. The project aims to analytically examine the current field of antiracism with a lens on research and innovation, policy, dialogue, and community involvement.
Our vision is to be a leader in institutional antiracism research, policy, and advocacy, and propose structural change in institutions and media centered on antiracism work in the public, private, non-profit sectors and digital space. This work will focus on researching existing organizations that conduct antiracism training and development while analyzing their effectiveness and promoting best practices in the field. Additionally, we will study the implementation of antiracism work among institutions that self-identify as antiracist and promote accountability structures in order for them to achieve their goals.
About the Ash Center
The Ash Center is a research center and think tank at Harvard Kennedy School focused on democracy, government innovation, and Asia public policy. AshCast, the Center's podcast series, is a collection of conversations, including events and Q&As with experts, from around the Center on pressing issues, forward-looking solutions, and more.
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Theo: Every room we're in, folks have good intentions, not about the intentions, but it's about the impact, it's about the way in which our pedagogy and our conversation, our strategies, our organizing is either in service of the status quo or is pushing, disrupting the status quo.
Nikhil: This is Untying Knots, I'm Nikhil Raghuveera.
Erica L: And I'm Erica Licht.
Nikhil: We talk a lot about working for racial justice on our show and the challenges of measuring change. Trainers and consultants, Theo Miller and Erica Bernabei have a strategy, Equity and Results.
Erica L: We had a chance to sit down with them in the fall after IARA's Truth and Transformation convening. They're both co-founders of a consulting practice of the same name, and we wanted to learn more about their model operating at the intersection of both Racial Equity and Results-based accountability frameworks.
Nikhil: And with their own professional backgrounds in education, housing, policy and law, and grounding the principles of the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, their model is both innovative and sits on the foundation of decades long community organizing. Let's jump right in, Erica.
Erica L: Sounds good. And thanks for listening everyone.
Nikhil: It's great to have you, Erika and Theo, thanks so much for joining us today. I know we had the pleasure of hosting you for a workshop a few weeks ago to kick off the truth of transformation last week. So thank you so much for taking some more time and joining us today.
Erika B: It's great to be here.
Theo: Great to be here, pleasure.
Nikhil: To kick things off and to get us started, could you first start by giving us a sense of who you are and what brings you to work on racial justice and really at the end of the day, what grounds your work?
Erika B: Sure. Theo, do you want to get started or do you want me to start first?
Theo: No, you take it first, B.
Erika B: At the end of the day, I am the child of a social worker and an anti-racist organizer, my mother. It's a special thing, especially as a White person to have that as your background, so it really is a unique privilege to be able to say that I grew up this way. I grew up in the suburbs of New York City to a single mom who is a social worker who came into her own around racial equity and anti-racism when I was a teenager. I have that background, but I also am a researcher, I'm an organizer, and I'm a co-lead of a small organization, I live in upstate New York after escaping New York City, I got older and tireder.
But at the end of the day, after doing a lot of work in nonprofits and trying to really dig deeply into what we needed to do as a nonprofit to support place-based work, especially place-based work where People of Color were at the center of the work. I realized that there were methodologies and tools out there that were meant to do some good, but really they weren't benefiting Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in the way we wanted them to.
Through my own research and through my practice, I began to reach out for other hands to hold like Theo's and to build up our methodology collectively so that we could orient impact driven work toward anti-racist principles. So that's really what grounds my work. I'll also just say I love people, I love them so much that I am committed to transforming our world so that all people, but especially People of Color can benefit from our collective humanity. So that's me.
Theo: I love that, I love that reaching out for hands to hold. For me, I feel like I've been in this racial justice work, this search for a beloved community for the better part of my life, almost 40 years. I, born and raised in Los Angeles, and I think when I was a young buck, as they say, and I saw the beating of Rodney King, I was amidst the LA riots, as James Baldwin said, my own personal dungeon shook. I'm the son of parents who raised me to appreciate all of my privileges and blessings, but also to serve and to call injustice what it is. And so my journey has really been from college to law school, to organizing, to real estate, to public housing, organizing to Equity and Results, it's really been a journey to try to find that beloved community and to try to do whatever part I can to try to play my role in disrupting this system.
We often start our work with quotes from great thinkers, whether it's Howard Zinn who reminds us that you can't be neutral on a moving train. Or whether it's Martin Luther King who always reminds me about the role of love in the search for power and in the search for justice. And so that's how I come to this work, I think I persist, whether I've been a practitioner or whether now I help facilitate spaces and support other organizations, is because I'm in search for this more beloved community that I think is our rightful inheritance as opposed to some of the horrors that we witness daily.
Nikhil: I love that, thanks so much for sharing. I think talking about this aspect around reaching out to hands to hold and finding that beloved community, as you mentioned, Theo, and really disrupting the system, I think that's really meaningful. And these values and foundations are absolutely critical for organizing and professional work, especially in the work as it relates to working towards racial justice.
Erica L: I want to build on that and also say, as you both talked about this point of we're not doing this work alone, which is so critical, and being in relationship with others, working to dismantle systems that are harming us and our communities, and also, as you said, Theo, not serving us. I love the quote, 'you can't be silent on a moving train,' and also reminds me of the really Tatum of doing the intentional work to turn around and walk in the opposite direction [inaudible].
And thinking about even what it takes to turn around and walk in the opposite direction, a lot of what comes up in our conversations at IARA and on the podcast with Nikhil and I is accountability and where or when is it missing or where or when is it present? But I think right now we'd love to pose a question of, why is accountability important for you both in racial equity and justice work?
Theo: I'm happy to start this one. I would say we often start our work in public spaces with this question, Erica, to whom are you accountable? And folks immediately will say, to the future generations, to Black and brown people, to my children, to the earth, to the future. And yet, and then we push them and we say, well, no, that sounds nice, but really in your day-to-day, to whom are you accountable? And then they'll say, well, honestly, the city council or my boss or the board or the taxpayers or the donors. And so we've just learned that we talk the talk, whether it's the nonprofit industrial complex, and this is multiracial, this is cross-racial, this is a cross race, folks will talk the talk and claim that they are in community with or accountable to those most marginalized, those closest in proximity to injustice.
And yet when you look at the behaviors and the actions and the budgets and the decisions, I'm exhausted, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired of this false accountability. So I think we, or I'll speak to myself, come to the work with a sense of commitment and vigor and rigor to say, if we actually were holding both at the same time, that accountability would not be the same as compliance. That actually, our actions, our decisions, our behaviors would be more in proximity to those who we say we want to be accountable to. That's what moves me to keep pushing and keep actually calling folks out, to whom are you actually accountable?
Erika B: And I would add that when it comes to racial equity work, racial justice work, it's like a slippery fish where it's good enough, people say it's good enough, and if you could see me, I'd be putting it into quotes, 'to just do anything,' to just say, we care about racial equity, racial justice. But there's no mechanism to track whether that commitment, which is usually verbal or written, is actually translating into all of the work that people do. Not just did they put out that report or did they do some 'community engagement'? But did they actually embed it into, to Theo's point, their procurement, did they actually embed it into how they pay people? Did they embed it into their organizational cultural norms in a way that People of Color can feel it?
And so accountability is about specificity, and it's about continuous learning, and it's about holding one's self feet to the fire on racial equity the same way we hold our feet to the fire on any other thing we care about, on any other thing that we're committed to. And I just think that it's a slippery fish in so far as, as soon as you hold it in most organizations and you take that snapshot, the slippery fish jumps back into the water. But you have that snapshot, I'm not a fisher person, but I know I've seen those pictures online. So again, for you to be accountable, it stays, it has a sticking power and it's something you can point to on an everyday basis and show that you're changing, you're creating that equity.
Nikhil: This point that you've described, Theo, about talking the talk versus walking the walk in work beyond claims of racial justice, that absolutely rings true, and that slippery fish metaphor, Erika, as well. Behavior budgets and decisions often don't reflect accountability to Black, Indigenous, and communities of color and, to your point, Erika, it's moving beyond racial justice work beyond just saying that it's just good enough.
And as you've described, one of the biggest challenges in working to advance racial equity in this lack of accountability, and that's both conceptually and in organizational mechanisms. So in your work at Equity and Results, you both work a lot with results-based accountability, or as you say, it's also called RBA. How does RBA address accountability? And could you describe to us the relationship between RBA and racial equity and justice?
Erika B: Results-based accountability, it started about 25 years ago or so by Mark Friedman, he was a budget director in the state of Maryland, in government. At the end of the day, it is a tool that helps us answer the simple question, is anyone better off as a result of our work? Now, Theo and I and our colleagues have had to transform this methodology into an anti-racist form of results-based accountability. So the first thing to note is that, it is a trick to imagine that a tool that was created in a race neutral or a race blind colorblind way can do the work of racial justice. So we've spent the past, it's really been 13 years now, doing research and literally ourselves and in our communities as well as now as teachers and facilitators transforming that methodology to make it work for the work that we care about.
Again, if you've done results-based accountability in the past, this is not your mama's RBA. The second thing I'll just note and then I'll pass it over to Theo, is that when we do center a set of racial equity principles or anti-racist principles, and we embed it or sew it into the methodology as opposed to doing it as a add-on, what happens is, it changes the pace, the flavor, and the feeling of using an impact methodology. And there's two core components that are really different, one is, what is the baseline set of information or education or personal transformation people need to have before they use something like results-based accountability so that when they use it, they're not unintentionally causing harm? What do I mean by that? If you're not clear about what structural racism is and then you go ahead and try to do racial justice work regardless of the tool, you're going to produce situations and strategies and cultures that are causing harm.
The second thing I'll just say is, we overemphasize over and over again, maybe not overemphasize, but we emphasize root cause analysis as part of the methodology. And that's not just a simple factor analysis where we talk about the top 10 things that contribute to why we see racial disparities in health or racial disparities in community development. But instead, we take our time and at the institutional level as well as at the community level, we ask that important question, why is it so? And we dig down deeply so that as we design our strategies, we have a deep understanding of what's causing it.
And so results-based accountability, like most impact methodologies, has a linear form and asks you a series of questions, but without that baseline knowledge of racial equity ahead of time, and that lived experience for folks of color, of course, is a huge contributor to that baseline knowledge. But especially for White folks needing that formal education as well as the transformation of the methodology to focus on the roots of the problem, we would end up in a really sticky situation. Theo, any thoughts on that?
Theo: I love that. And there's nothing I would add to it other than in the context of racial justice work, of liberatory work, of community organizing work, of collective impact work, we've learned and we know that data has been enacted on top of communities of color. The horrors of Tuskegee Syphilis or forced eugenics, or even what we saw with COVID in some cases, Black, Indigenous communities of colors have a rifle distrust, mistrust of data and of impact. And so how we use our anti-racist RBA, our liberatory results-based accountability approach is to try to decolonize that data and it's to try to center the lived experiences of those most impacted to center that at every stage of our impact, of our design, of our data collection, of our strategy exploration, of our performance measurement.
And so you have all of these methods, all of these approaches throughout the country, this DEI world that purports to be about justice and yet you find the lived experiences, the truth, the stories of those most impacted are at the margins actually and we're doing things on those communities. And so what we've tried to do and what we try to do at Equity Results is actually say, no, we're going to facilitate first a healing centered and anti-racist, a liberatory space where power can be shifted. And we're going to do that in a way that has us focus on results that communities want to see. And then you can go through the steps, you can have any kind of methodology. But if you don't have those principles and that methodological approach, as Erika says, you're just actually going to create more harm, and it's not racial justice what you're doing.
Erica L: Is anyone better off because of our work, why is it so? And in these questions that you're both talking about are so critical to the work and to substantiating the claims or commitments to racial justice that we were talking about a minute ago as well? And I really appreciate learning as you were describing, Erika, that RBA was a tool created in a race neutral or race blind way, and also the ways that you both are actively re-imagining and also backing with the rigorous research to both understand and then implement them in ways that are beneficial and that serve the work of racial justice.
The question of why is it so, for me, I'm also just thinking about, it's like naming the elephant in the room of systemic oppression and White supremacy, and that the elephant is also is the room itself that all of this is happening in the container of White supremacy and systemic oppression in the US and also globally. Can you give us a sense, the principles that are grounding your work? I know we've talked about RBA, but I also know that the People's Institute, for one, has been really integral to the anti-racist principles that your work is grounded in. Can you give us a little bit of a sense of what principles or strategies or foundations are grounding or also lending themselves to the pedagogy and the way in which you're thinking about the change we're talking about?
Theo: Sure. I'm happy to start and then hand it to you. When you mentioned, Erica, you closed your question with that word pedagogy, and I'm immediately taken to Paolo Freire's work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. And we often say this as we get started with the work, we say, nothing you hear is Theo, Erika, we have not created this, this is on the shoulders and on the backs of our elders, of our ancestors in a particular foray whose pedagogy of the oppressed introduces this concept of a dialogic pedagogy, of a praxis, if you will. And I love that frame that you just gave there, Erica, that it's, and sometimes the elephant is the room itself, is how the room is set up and not just the structures, the systems, the air that we breathe outside of the room. We take this approach that learning, that our facilitation, that our pedagogy is about a dialogic exchange with those in the room about power.
My late great law professor Lani Guinier, who wrote a book with Gerald Torres called, The Miner's Canary, reminds us the canary in the coal mine, teaches us about the oxygen, about the air that we all breathe. And so as you come to the work with good intentions, every room we're in, folks have good intentions, not about the intentions, but it's about the impact and it's about the way in which our pedagogy and our conversation, our strategies, our organizing is either in service of the status quo or is pushing, disrupting the status quo. And so that's what that the opressed and that dialogic pedagogy sets up for us as a foundation for what our principles do with results-based accountability.
Erika B: I'll also just add that we have a set of seven principles, it's probably really more like a hundred, but we've tried to condense them so that as we do work with communities, we can make it digestible. But some of the most important in there are to Theo's point about centering the voice and decision making of People of Color within an organization as well as on the outside of an organization. We have some that are really about that meaningful, authentic relationship when we're talking about impact driven work, where we can have conflict, where we can tolerate difficult feelings, difficult conversations and still get the work done and not just unravel at the seams. We have some that are really about recognizing that not using data, and we include qualitative data, stories, things that can't be captured by numbers, as well as things that are quantitative and statistically significant. So we think of all information that's critical to the conversation as part of data, but really if we're not using that data that we have to assume we're causing harm because the system has been structured the way it has been.
We think about data culture, not just how we collect data, but the environment inside of which we have data. So sometimes it can be really punitive, actually, most times data is used in punitive ways as opposed to learning methodology where we are really tracking whether that culture is producing the impacts we want to see. And a couple of others that have to do with stop pointing the finger out there, but really start to point the finger in at the institutional discrepancies, the institutional inconsistencies, the institutional harms. And we do community work, we do work inside of collective impact, which means when you have a backbone organization, but we're working in a place, but we also do work within institutions themselves, government institutions, nonprofit institutions.
And oftentimes, even in the best case scenario, there's always this undergird of what's wrong with, and I'm putting this in quotes, 'those folks out there'? As opposed to that's a little bit more of that introspective, noticing White supremacy culture, noticing how we see those retention rates for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color going down and are not noticing why it is within our culture that that's happening. And so, again, we have intentionally chosen to work with institutions, and so therefore these principles are really critical so that as they take on a methodology like RBA, they're not pretending or we're not letting them at least pretend even if they sometimes revert back to thinking that it's just about following 14 steps of results-based accountability, but it really is about this shift.
Nikhil: And I really appreciate you talking about the use of dialogical pedagogy and dialogical exchange and that relationship to power, Theo, as well as the use of data as you mentioned. And this is particularly important as a counter to the punitive ways data has been, as we think of, historically used to harm or exploit people. And as you said, Theo, this connects so deeply to strategy to push or disrupt the status quo.
We know that not all of our listeners were lucky enough to attend your workshop last week, which was a wonderful workshop for the truth and transformation convening, could you give us a sense of what the workshop was like, what your goals as facilitators are? What themes did you explore, and what do you hope participants were able to walk away with?
Erika B: What are we like as facilitators? What was the workshop like? Theo and I are usually talking over each other, we're extremely, I wouldn't say casual, but we're conversational. And what we want to build is relationship in a space, we want people to laugh a little bit or feel emotion, we're not afraid of showing how important cross-racial facilitation is. And so Theo will call me in for times when I need to be reaching out to White folks and sharing with them some of my lived experience or knowledge. So we are very intentional about a conversational relaxed environment inside of which serious and important things are being shared.
And our last session with you all, we really did an overview more than anything else of those principles that we were discussing, the seven principles. And we talked a little bit about the overarching results-based methodology, but we really also dug into something that's critical to our practice, which is that root cause analysis. Speaking to distinctions between usual methodologies that focus on strategy before the group is really ready to talk about strategy because the roots haven't been lifted out.
I'll just say Theo and I have both been practitioners as well as, like Theo said, he was a lawyer, I got my PhD, we have a lot of touchpoints with the group, but also we see ourselves as organizers. And so our style is more of that of an organizer where we're attempting to get folks to participate, and it's really important in work that relates to data. Anti-racism has to come first, and anti-racism tells us that relationship is always going to come before the methodology, in fact, it's required for it. And so even in an hour, we attempted to make that the center of our work.
I'll also just say that generally speaking, just for your listeners, our work takes a year or more to work with an organization. So folks were just getting a little flavor flaved, but they weren't necessarily getting something they could operationalize right away. But what we hoped was that their whistles were wet or they got a little sparks flying, things that they already knew and different ways of framing things that they didn't yet think through in the exact way we offered it up to them. Theo, any other thoughts about the workshop and the way we work together?
Theo: I would say things that I would say in the post pandemic world, folks feel really isolated, folks feel really disconnected in some ways from the humanity of this work. And it has been since the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the racial reckoning of 2020 and 2021, it has been a real up and down movement. And in some spaces, folks really feel like they're in quite a dark place right now, there is a lot happening across the country in terms of anti-Blackness and the connection of all those things. And so when we get to come into a space like yours, truth, reconciliation, restitution, reparations, we see ourselves in service of a broader movement to remind folks that the arc of history, it is long, but it does bend towards justice. And so even in the midst of that session, as we use the chat, as we ask people to come on video, as we see who's in the room, there's energy and there's disruption at the same time.
There were disruptors in that space, there were folks who don't have foundational knowledge, and then there's folks there who you can tell have been laboring for decades and in some cases for generations. And so while we are 'expert' in an impact-driven methodology, anti-racist RBA, and that's what we do for organizations, a part of what Erika is underlying, is that we are trying to be in service of a broader movement and to give folks energy and to give folks a sense that we can keep on keeping on, and that the movement is going in a direction where joy is on the other side, I would say.
My friend Michael McAfee from PolicyLink always reminds me, he says, Theo, you keep doing it, you keep pushing because there is joy in getting clear about our contribution. And so that's part of what we tried to bring, we just took the simple components of our methodology, tried to have some conversation with some beautiful people, over a hundred folks, and in the end, folks hopefully leave a little bit clearer on what their contributions can be.
Erica L: It's so beautiful too, is everything you just described is so directly tied to how we envisioned the conference theme as a whole and around truth and transformation itself, and particularly how reparative practices, truth commissions, institutional reckoning, historical reckoning, how that provides pathways forward for equitable change, which was, just direct quote, 'the tagline of the conference itself.'.
I think it's really helpful also for you to frame your work in that way, because people, when I say people, Americans, public, discourse conversations, I think that the terminology around reparative practices or truth commissions, for instance, doesn't necessarily include what you've just described in this public conversation. And yet it's so important for us to be reminded that, yes, this work is about working on very specific micro or community or organizational levels, and it's about embedding the principles and the process of accountability and also asking what's behind the curtain, behind the line, and behind the historical backdrop, or there's a better word I'm trying to think of, the mirage behind the curtain as well.
I think one of the things that stuck out to me too, was the fields that you both come from in law, educational leadership, as well as the various think tank nonprofit work that you both have done and the touchpoints that this has offered with people in various sectors and professions. You've described this a little bit already, but we'd love to know, what are you both noticing right now in the landscape of racial justice work? And maybe that's something or things that are unique or different than the last few years, even 2020 to now, pre-2020, the decades you've been doing this work, where are things operating? Similarly, where have you seen shifts? What are you both noticing and seeing right now?
Theo: Such a good question.
Erika B: Yes, it is, I know.
Theo: You want to start? You start, and I'll come after you.
Erika B: Man, having been raised inside of an anti-racist culture and watching the pushback forever and ever, especially as a White person who lives in a majority of White family and has White privilege, I'll just say that while there are blips of moments of excitement and hope as we've seen when young people and People of Color especially bring us to movement, which happens often and requires us to respond, I have not seen huge changes. And what do I mean by that? There is a deep-rooted resistance by White culture and White people to meaningful change, and when we see cross racial or BIPOC led movement building happening, there hasn't been enough White people disrupting Whiteness and White institutional culture from the inside out. There hasn't been enough of a commitment to that for me to say, I see huge change.
I will say I get excited by the generation that comes after us, and especially the generation that comes after that, folks who are now high schoolers or college-aged students and young people getting their professional lives or their careers off right out of high school, that age group feels like there's some generative juices flowing, and that gets me super pumped. But I still am looking to contribute to and lead on and mess with White people doing the work that we need to do, and I just haven't seen that much of a shift in that, I've seen a lot of lip service and I've seen organizations trying. And so what I'm hoping we'll see into the future, is this chipping away of White people on our own edifices that we've constructed in such a way that we can take part in the collective humanity that People of Color are leading on. I just haven't seen that much difference.
Theo, we can talk about nuances, the things that have happened since the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter Movement, which I think really started in earnest in 2013 or 2014, so there's been a lot of shift in regards to that. But I'm, as a White person, tasked with, and Marjorie Freeman from the People's Institute reminds us White folks that, it's not our job to just be in alignment with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, the other task on our table is to be working on ourselves and with White people. And that part is a little trickier, and I hate to sound like a Debbie Downer, but that's just how I see it.
Theo: I love this and I love, Erika, how you call it what it is. The racial justice work on some level has been commodified and seized by non-anti-racist in ways that really shouldn't be surprising, knowing what we know about resources and capital and the desire for organizations to have cover. But there's a way in which since the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the rush for folks to do things and the dismissal of longtime anti-racist organizers that folks have become squeezed. So in some ways, we were optimistic that it could lead in a new period of real transformation, and in some spaces and places we've seen that, we've seen incredible conversations and incredible organizations shift, and we've talked about that.
But in other ways, the commodification of the work has created a situation where folks are exhausted, where folks, particularly BIPOC leaders who were so eager and energized and hopeful that we could move the work and our livelihoods would be sustained, have been cast aside and have been disappointed. And so I think the challenge is that, the urgency is still the same, the issues and the structures are similar, and the beauty in community is still there, but there's a way in which the commodification of this landscape has created really unique pressures and forced us to be that much more strategic about what we do and what we don't do, what we say, yes, to, and what we say, no, to.
Erika B: Yeah, I'd agree with Theo 100%. And just to say that last piece about really being able to gauge the difference between interests that come from a place of readiness, come from a place of not having so much risk aversion to change or to losses, and I don't even mean financial losses or loss of job, but really losses of ego, losses of power. The time that we've just gone through from 2020 until now has allowed us to get better at noticing when folks are ready for this work and when they're not. And I do think we've seen a big drop-off of what I would say is a relatively phase one interest, excited, interested, to some extent ethically committed to change. But what we've been able to do now is to hone back in on folks who are really at that phase two part where it's about giving something up sometimes or shifting culture, shifting power.
And so sometimes it can feel disappointing, but the good thing about being an anti-racist, there's generations of people that came before us who remind us that this is not new, and yet there are things that we can contribute now that previous generations did not crack yet, those nuts have not yet been cracked and so there's a real contribution we can continue to make. But I will say an assertive slightly more skeptical than, there's a lot of people, to Theo's point, jumping on what they see as a market as opposed to a system's transformation, and we just have to keep our eyes peeled, we have to make sure that we're not seduced into short term solutions and flashy objects.
Erica L: Thank you both so much. Thinking about both that disruption piece, but also the younger generation, if there's anything you wanted to add there?
Theo: I'm happy to at least add my perspective on that. I would say I live in a city and in a region even in a Oakland that is decreasingly Black, increasingly White. And we have Black Lives Matter posters and boards everywhere in the city, and yet the actual structures of racial inequality, the ways in which gentrification and capital is hoarded in the ways in which it's racialized persist. And so on the one hand, this racial reckoning that we've been referencing over the last couple of years, really did a new moment of hope where you saw large numbers of White folks marching and active and in solidarity.
And yet not 48 months later, not 24 months later, as we look at the data, as we look at foreclosures, as we look at mass incarceration, as we look at business starts for BIPOC owners, I have no reason to be optimistic other than I know the history and the tradition and that line that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. And so that what keeps me hopeful, even as I see decreasing numbers of White folks, even in the communities where I live, taking the risk that we need taken.
Erika B: And I'd agree with Theo and just add that, while we can see so much hope in the younger generations of mostly BIPOC led small movements, but alongside of some really righteous White folks that are willing to put themselves out there, it's about, to Theo's point, noticing those moments of opportunity and possibility that come inside of this long journey. And so each generation has what I think are moments of possibility, and then they have these swing backs. And so the question will be, can we use the lessons from the past? Can we use methodologies like we're using to interrupt the swing back? I wouldn't say I'm optimistic, but I'm certainly hopeful, which is a distinction. I don't know if it's going to happen, but damn, I'm going to hold on to the possibility that it's possible.
And we come from a long tradition of Black people and women who have thought about the world beyond the scope of what we can imagine today. Things like science fiction and all forms of art that allow us to think outside the box, and so that's also where I get some hope, is inside of young people and the creativity out there that persist despite what every day brings us, which can be sometimes a little bedraggled and a little depressing.
Even for our own selves, we had to learn as anti-racist, as liberatory organizers, and I won't speak for Theo, but I'll just say, if we're not doing this work for ourselves and we're not doing it with the groups we work with, there's so much heaviness and exhaustion and disembodiedness that will happen in this work. So I'll just say that as a White person, I've had to do so much work outside of my day job, in affinity, in my body, in all of the different ways that our jobs tell us aren't important to our day job, to be able to do this work in my day job.
And I think it is true that our institutions don't produce the embodied spaces, they don't produce things that are more qualitative, that are vibe oriented so that we can be humanized inside of our institutional spaces. It's like, that's not what you do at work, right, Theo? It's like, no, the union's going to be mad about that, or it wasn't in the job description. But what we're learning is, there's no way to sustain this work without that in between space. And as a queer person too, it's like the queer space that's inside of anti-racism, it's the things we don't know, it's the things the White institutional culture has told us is not what will produce results. And results are people, results aren't a number, results aren't a statistic, results aren't the thing we can write a report about. We might try, but results are lived in people's bodies, and so how do we reconnect to that? And it's just been imperative, I would say to both of us.
Erica L: Well, we asked you what you were noticing in the field, that was a lot of noticing for sure, and really is giving me a lot to chew on and to think about, and I'm sure for folks listening as well really appreciating both the insight and also just the observations that you both are sharing with us. And again, from the perspective that you are interfacing or interacting with a lot of people in different professional and sectoral spaces just based on your work.
I'm also loving the important reminder of the Creole Eyes, the space of hybridity and also disequilibrium and masquerade and all of the generative spaces that create some of the most important disruptions to how we do things and how we carry ourselves in normalized and socialized ways. And I was just saying to someone last night, many religions and many cultural groups have their own masquerade holiday for this specific celebration or carving out the time to be in masquerade and to play with notions of identity and disruption and acting out historical stories for the purposes of either continuing legacy or changing or shifting them in important ways. So in Judaism, we have Purim, and last night obviously, we're recording November 1st today, we had Halloween as well. I want to kick it over to you, Nikhil, to close us out.
Nikhil: And I think as you were talking about this, one thing that really hit me was what you talked about as it relates to this deep-rooted resistance by White people to engage in meaningful change and these edifices that essentially had to be chipped away. And the resistance that's very apparent, it's very in your face at this point, I think it always was, but it still remains very in your face.
And then one other thing I was reflecting on as you're talking about was the generation that's coming up and having those generative juices flowing. I have a younger sister actually who directly fits within that cheese of that younger generation who is doing that type of work, I didn't want to say it. On that note, thanks so much for joining us and for all the work that you're doing, I've absolutely loved having a conversation with you all hearing about how you're thinking about your work and how your work relates to a broader movement for racial justice.
Erica L: Yeah, thank you both so much.
Erika B: Thank you both. Theo, I don't know about you, but getting to talk about this is healing and it feels like we're in it together, so I just want to honor and thank you both as well.
Theo: Indeed, in community with you, blessings.
Nikhil: And with that, this has been another episode of Untying Knots, thanks for listening.
Erica L: Untying Knots is hosted by Nikhil Raghuveera and Erica Licht. It is a collaboration with the institutional anti-racism and accountability project, and supported by the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center. We would like to thank Theo Miller and Erika Bernabei for their time in speaking with us.
Nikhil: Music is Beauty Flow by Kevin McLeod.