Beverly Daniel Tatum, psychologist and author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, provides a metaphor for racism that captures the feeling of being part of a larger system: the moving walkways that are found in many airports. Once you step onto the moving walkway, its motion carries you along. Even standing completely still, you continue to move.
Similarly, long-standing structures and institutions and policies move us all along toward racialized outcomes. This happens even though many of us are not trying to make those outcomes happen. Things just seem to be set up that way. Systemic racism is like that moving walkway.
Tatum uses the moving walkway metaphor to alert us to what antiracism calls for, which is not simply standing still but turning around and starting to walk against the direction in which the walkway is taking us.
I appreciate the way Tatum uses a familiar experience to invite each of us into using our individual agency to resist passivity, to resist “going with the flow,” to resist systemic racism.
I appreciate the way Tatum invites us into antiracism – drawing attention to how systemic racism operates on and through all of us and sparking an intention to move in a different direction, to take counter-action.
But once I turn around on the moving walkway, once I start heading upstream, I realize that antiracism only warns me where not to go. Antiracism alone isn’t enough to chart a course to where I do want to go.
The socially-constructed difference that is race has been used for centuries to channel interactions between people designated white and people designated not-white into patterns of domination and oppression. These interactions are interactions of exploitation and enrichment, of violence that is both “fast” and “slow.” These interactions have created a system in which advantage and disadvantage are distributed based on race.
Antiracism condemns those interactions, condemns that advantage and disadvantage, condemns that system.
Civity offers an alternative way of interacting: intentionally building and strengthening relationships of respect and empathy. Respect means seeing people as fellow human beings; empathy means listening to their stories and seeing our shared humanity as those stories resonate with our own. Respect and empathy bring people into relationship in a way that is fundamentally inconsistent with racism. In this way, civity is antiracist.
The civity vision and action of engaging in relationships of respect and empathy with people who are different also provides an affirmative direction. Once we have turned around and begun moving against the moving walkway, against systemic racism, our commitment to antiracism keeps pushing us; civity pulls us.
Civity relationships pull us toward creating a different kind of system. With antiracism, we begin to reject routine acceptance of inequities and unequal outcomes based on race. With civity, we can build a relational infrastructure that scaffolds us toward equity.
As Chenjerai Kumanyika in the “Seeing White” podcast says, “we’re going to actually have to redistribute some things, at least some rights, resources, and representation.” Relationships of respect and empathy across difference – relationships that grow from a root value of human connection and belonging – are the foundation for embracing a common good that reaches everyone.
In the project of dismantling systemic racism, it’s essential to understand the destination that the moving walkway keeps moving us toward. Antiracism represents our repudiation of that destination.
In the project of creating an alternative system – a system of solidarity and justice, it’s essential to envision the destination that we want to move toward. Civity represents our embracing that alternative destination.
Antiracism knocks us off the walkway; civity help us to chart a new course. Push and pull together catalyze us to create a new system, a new culture, in which we all belong.