I first read Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria by Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum in 2000 as part of required reading for a course in graduate school. The book had come out just a few years earlier in 1997 and it was still groundbreaking scholarship on the psychology of racism and discrepancies experienced by significant groups of people in America. As a young professional, it was also the first exposure to the rigorous exercise of academically understanding and unpacking the role that racism has played in creating our social experiences with each other and what we could do about it.

It’s over twenty years later and Dr. Tatum’s work is still needed and hearing her in this week’s AdvancingOklahoma session reinforced how essential it is that we talk about race and racism. She asked us to remember our earliest race related memory – how old were we – and what emotion was attached to that memory for us? And then she asked, who did you talk to about that?

For me, it was no one. And for many of us, that’s the same answer. It costs us something to be silent. If we’re not talking about the reality that we have created a hierarchical structure for society in our family, in our work places, and with our friends, then we are compromising relationships and reducing workplace productivity. Being a leader in an organization, or our community, means to serve people – and we can’t serve them if we don’t know them, which includes understanding their cultural backgrounds. How much less productive is the employee who goes by “Hey you” because no one has taken the time to learn how to pronounce their name? How much more involved, engaged, and equipped are we when everyone on the team feels like they are contributing, seen, and understood?

For me, the benefit of having programs like Advancing Oklahoma is that we’re making space to have a conversation that we learned a long time ago wasn’t safe to talk about. And, the sponsorship of this programs by businesses like Paycom, tell us that inclusion and diversity is good for business and the economy of Oklahoma.

Having a conversation about race isn’t about converting people to “my” way of thinking, or asking everyone around me to agree with me so that we reduce all the conflict and differences on the topic of race or racism to the few points we can all agree on. Having a conversation about race is an acknowledgement that we can all experience the system of racism because it is the “smog we breathe” as Dr. Tatum said, and we all experience those realities in different ways. We have different histories and are a part of different groups of people and come from different generations where attitudes and opinions reflected the social construction of that time -- and talking about our experiences builds connections between people – not the other way around.

There is no one view on race because no one person can speak for everyone, even a person who belongs to the same group as another. We’ve all had different experiences with this system and only through dialogue will we begin to understand the many shapes and sizes and forms that racism can take. For me that means that as a white/Caucasian person I can talk about my experience with racism because I’ve breathed the smog in our air. I am not immune to the toxins and the dis-ease that result. I also believe, however, that the best filter for cleaning out our social constructs is the illumination that occurs when our experiences are exposed to the light of day in conversation. And for that, I’m personally excited to be talking about race and racism in Oklahoma.