Exploring Pedagogy and Teaching for a Post-Racist Imagination

00:00 Adam 

Welcome back fellow thinkers and curious minds to another captivating episode of This Anthro Life. I'm your host Adam Gamwell and we're here to explore the fascinating intersection of anthropology, culture, and the human experience. So brace yourself for a thought-provoking discussion that's going to challenge your perspectives and leave you with a deeper understanding of the world around us. Now we're diving into the topic of teaching towards a post-racist imagination with the brilliant Janine de Novais. And in a world that constantly grapples with issues of race, especially in the United States, imagining a future where racism no longer holds us back, it's not just a dream but it's a vital necessity. Janine is an expert in the field and she'll guide us through the process of dismantling racist attitudes and creating a more inclusive society. So here's the question to ponder. What does it mean to teach towards a post-racist imagination? How can we foster conversations that challenge our perspectives about race while creating a safe space for learning and growth? It's a question that every person regardless of their background should be asking themselves. And the great thing is we're about to get some of those answers. So joining us today is the incredible Janine de Novais, whose expertise in teaching complex subjects with both empathy and bravery has garnered widespread acclaim. Janine will share her insights, experiences, and practical strategies for engaging in productive conversations about race in both professional and personal settings. We'll explore how Janine sets the stage for meaningful discussions and when and how race matters in those conversations. We're going to dig into her concept of a brave community and how to create a safe and empathetic space for discussing challenging topics. Janine will also share her method of grounding for learning and how it can empower individuals to be intellectually brave and open to change. But that's not all. We're also going to look into the power of empathy, the importance of respectful conversations across different racial perspectives, and how to navigate the complexities of discussing race in today's world. Janine's insights and practical strategies will leave you feeling inspired and equipped to have more meaningful conversations about race and racism. So grab a pen and paper or prepare to highlight with your headphones or however, you take notes because Janine's wisdom is about to ignite your imagination and challenge the status quo. So whether you're a seasoned advocate for social justice or simply curious about fostering a more inclusive world, this episode is for you. Now, right before we jump in, make sure to hit that subscribe button so that you never miss an episode of This Anthro Life. And if you enjoy what we do, be forever grateful if you could leave us a review, and share the podcast with friends and family or other folks that you believe would get something out of this as well. Together, let's spread the knowledge, insight, and inspiration that This Ampere Life has to offer. So let's dive into this journey right after the break. Janine, so excited to have you back in the program. It's been a little while since we've talked on the podcast. We've obviously talked numerous times in the intervening years and months since then, but you know, so excited to have you back here on the pod for the community. Thank you. I'm excited to be here. It's been, I don't know, seven years. Something crazy like that. It's been a while, yeah, which is also just kind of crazy to think about too. Yeah, we last met in person at Harvard University, which has a different ring to it now that, I mean, we're in post-2020 at this point. So we went through a pandemic and so meeting in person sounds different, even though we can say it was way, way before. In those days, we met regularly in person. It was nothing. Go figure, right? Yeah, go figure. Crazy world. So we're trying to bring that back, but if you're listening, we're talking remotely. So this is the fun irony of this. So one thing I'm excited to kind of bring into conversation and something that I always appreciate about our conversations, is something that like when I was a graduate student and you were finishing your doctoral work too, that really helped me get real about was this idea that we can actually bring pedagogy, which is just a fancy way of saying teaching and teaching methodologies into quote unquote real life outside of the classroom. And this is a piece of conversation we discussed originally just in terms of what does it mean to have certain kinds of conversations in and outside of the classroom? I think what's really, really cool and exciting about your work and your new publication on Brave Community is helping us actually see what it means to bring these kinds of ways of methodologies into the classroom, but then also kind of beyond it also. So I'm curious just to kind of open our conversation in this arena, right? I want to get into the content of Brave Community itself and teaching for a post-racist imagination and the idea of imagination there too, but I think that the idea of teaching and pedagogy as both a method and something that informs your work, I want to kind of open us up here and think about this idea of how does pedagogy play into the kind of work that you're doing as an educator of students in classrooms, but then obviously beyond that as well

04:28 Janine  

Yeah, thank you. That's a great starting point because I think the fact that Brave Community as method is a teaching method. It's a teaching and learning method that is crucial to its value. And what I mean by that is that it's two things. It has to do with how it came to me, right? And also what it does. So how it came to me is that it came out of my doctoral work, as you know, and I was interested at that point to see how people who taught about race and racism in racially diverse classrooms and higher education succeeded in doing that and succeeded in doing something that when that topic was being broached outside of those contexts, a lot of things weren't happening, right? So outside of the classroom, the successful classroom talking about race was about emotion. There was a sense of ungroundedness in history that you really couldn't rely on what has occurred or a sense of reality. There was low trust among people. Things would blow up all the time. And as we all experienced that and observed that, my thought was like, well, when this happens in classrooms, that doesn't seem to be happening. So what is it about a classroom setting that makes this feasible, not only, but also profoundly moving and transforming for learners? And so I went and studied two successful thought race courses, courses on race and racism, so slavery in one case and African-American political thought in another to watch what they were doing. So I won't bore the audience with the details of the research, but what the answer to that study, to that question, was this method. And so that's the first piece of it. So then in telling you what the method does, I'll tell you what's cool about the pedagogy. The community has to do with leveraging what I call grounding for learning, which is what the classroom is basically made of in order to empower people. In this case, the first instance, it was college students, but we can talk about how that's anyone, to be more empathetic towards one another and to be more intellectually brave. So both the sort of mechanism is a pedagogical mechanism, but also the advantage that it gives you is that it helps you to look at one another as learners. So accept that one another can change, can grow, that we can find common ground if we have the same content that we're dealing with, and that we can sort of be solid in our interaction with each other if we make some agreements about how we're going to interact. It's about what is special about a learning environment that makes it more suitable than Twitter and Facebook. 

07:03 Adam 

It's funny too because if we hop online, to kind of draw up the other side here in terms of conversations like Twitter, Facebook, social media, the kind of other quote-unquote public arenas or platforms, it's really interesting because there's been this kind of pervasive narrative that from the tech elite, we might say, from the very business forward folks that you don't need to go to college, you don't need to get a college education, you just need to figure out a coding skill and then hop into a startup and develop some nice product that somebody needs, then you can get rich and then everybody worships you. It's funny because, on the one idea, that points us towards an anxiety people have about developing careers, pathways, and livelihoods. It totally ignores this side also, which is the fundamental side of what it is that classrooms and educational apparatuses and spaces can do for us. Beyond the training of a skill like this is how I read the American novel, which is still valuable too. But I think that's a really important piece that you don't necessarily right now see on a college curriculum or even at a faculty meeting. You may not see this forward idea of we're actually intentionally framing engagement with one another in a specific way that allows us to both see each other as learners able to change. That's right. I think this is really important. Even as we're going to dive into a brave community itself, even this framework, to your point, as you said, we're going to look at how we're addressing the challenges of racist thinking, racist thought, and how do we address these emotionally charged spaces in conversations in empathetic and open ways. But then on top of that too, I think there's a huge value here too in terms of how we articulate the value of a pedagogical approach to challenges like this. Just an extra high five for like, there's another piece I think that we could also bring into giving colleges like, hey guys, this is the way to think about this. 

09:33 Janine

Absolutely. I will also say that I think this exits into the idea of the foundation of the brave community being what I call grounding for learning. I'll touch on that next, but what you're talking about is reminding me of a much older controversy that we have in this country about the usefulness of things like general education requirements, humanities, and the humanities, right? The humanities are just like, I like to say a fancy word for human culture, expressions of human culture. And we just tend to think they're very remote and for all kinds of issues having to do with the choices that higher education institutions have made to be not inclusive, right? So that's a whole different podcast and a different soapbox that I can get on. But the fundamental issue that you're raising is that those kinds of educational endeavors, which were core to American Higher ed when it was founded when American Higher ed was founded, there wasn't a real understanding that, look, people just don't wake up knowing how to be in a multiracial democracy, right? We're going to need to practice this. And at first, they weren't even trying to be a multiracial democracy, right? This was like 50 years of that. But still, there was a sense that this needs to be practiced, both from the get-go, people don't have that skill, but also you got to keep flexing that muscle, the muscle of having evidence-based, text-based and text, I mean that in a broad possible sense, but content-based interact and engagement with one another around these norms of empathy and accommodation and negotiation of terms and sort of like, your experience are entangled with another person's experience and you're sort of in, we're all in this together. We've done a really horrible job of getting rid of that. And so we end up having to, we now have these masters of the universe who lack basic ethical humanistic orientations, whether we're talking about the tech people that everybody's thinking about or the Supreme Court's justices who have a seemingly less ethical point of view than like a 12-year-old, where they can be taking a bribe and be like, I didn't know I was taking a bribe. Anyway, big digression as you and I want to have, but yes, back to grounding for learning. Yes.

12:12 Adam

No, but I think it's an important point though. I mean, I think it's a useful rabbit hole too, because it is also just giving us a sense of when we're thinking about the usefulness of pedagogy, the idea of us discussing this right now is to show a little bit about what it's up against. Listeners of this podcast may or may not be anti-education, hopefully not, or anti-going to higher ed. I doubt it, but I just like this idea too, that there is that narrative out there in terms of what is the use value of a higher education in this case. And I think what you're raising there is this fundamental point that there are aspects to our humanity that we take for granted and part of it comes to us a lot through an education system that like, yes, has its own problems. That's what we're going to kind of dive into it in the brave community format. But then this other idea of how do we counter some of these other, these larger prevailing narratives. And so I think there is also, again, there's room even as we think about brave community too, like if we have to also then say, this is why this kind of education is valuable, right? We have to, I like the way you said, we don't just wake up knowing how to operate functionally and appropriately in a multiracial democracy. That's not a given as much as we tell ourselves it is.

13:18 Janine 

Yeah. And you know, as a sociologist of culture too, like, and you would know this too, the society itself is one big giant classroom, right? It is a pedagogical force unlike any other. And it is actually teaching us a script and teaching us a way to think about ourselves and our condition. And so you do want to have like a kind of obvious counter to the prevailing lesson that the society is teaching you. So it's kind of like, yes, I have a pedagogical approach, but also why wouldn't you have a pedagogical approach? The whole thing is a pedagogical approach, right? I'm not here to say everybody needs to go to college at all. Like my kid didn't go to college, but I will say everybody needs to be learned at all times, how to negotiate to become a person in a way that allows other people around you to become people too versus something quite the opposite, which is what we're up against, right? So yeah. Okay. Grounding for learning. Yeah. 

14:24 Adam 

Let's dive in. So there is this like, one of the, I mean, we may have the ground level, right? It's kind of like the basis you found. So in the case studies that you did, and then also in what you find yourself, you kind of talk about this as grounding is what the classroom is made of, what it helps us do. So it's kind of like to me, I'm thinking about if I'm in a garden, this is the dirt that we have to stick our roots into. So how do we set the soil the proper way? How do we make it fertile for these kinds of engagements?

14:47 Janine 

Yes. So big ideas would vary. I love these very big ideas. I think this is true for all throughout the book, very simple execution. So huge return on investment. So grounding for learning is the foundational brave community. And it is exactly that. It's the dirt that allows two kinds of plants to grow. Now you're going to have to remind us of this metaphor because you and I tend to have a metaphor, metaphor bloat problem, but we're doing gardens. We're doing, we're doing garden. We're doing garden. So it's the dirt that allows two kinds of plants to grow that we really like that bravery and that empathy. And how does it do that? Grounding for learning is a combination of two things, both content for learning and culture of learning. They need to be together. So when you are approaching a group of people, and then I'll give a very specific example, you want to have both things. So content for learning is everything, but everything that is content, that is evidence, that is data, that is not unfounded opinion. So in the book, there's literally a parenthesis that says not unfounded opinion. And it's a very 2022 thing to have to say, you know, that you can't just say this is what content is. I literally had to say, not your vibes and feelings. It's not your vibes and feelings, that are content. What are we using to learn and think about and work on this issue of race and racism combined with attention to how we're going to approach this content and one another? So there you have things that are about the norms of the discussion, the ways of being that are going to support a learner to be engaged and to push themselves, but also receive that when someone else is being engaged and pushing themselves. So when you have both of those things together, that is what allows people the highest likelihood to have this kind of bravery and this empathy. Why? Because they then get two things. They get clear about what we're talking about. So we're not talking about the broadest strokes of white supremacy. Now let's talk about something very specific. So think about a classroom. And obviously, you think about the curriculum, and obviously, you think about the reading for that week, let's say. But then you think about a school having a DEI meeting. And yeah, they're not thinking about white supremacy in schools. They are going to think about the racial disparity in the discipline records of girls and boys or some version like that, something very concrete. So that's content. The second thing is the subject matter is hard. We know it, but we're going to deal with it. And so how do we need to be with one another and with this content? So those considerations can range from how we're going to treat each other, but also what we're not going to do. So you can make agreements in advance about we're not going to go off content. We're not going to go off-topic. We're not going to have a conversation about going back to that school. We're here to discuss the racial disparity in the discipline. We're not going to have a conversation about how you don't like Black Lives Matter signs on the principal's door. That's neither here nor there for what we're talking about. When those two things are together, folks know what we're here to talk about, and they have expectations about how we're going to treat each other. That's what allows you to lean into that bravery and into that empathy. 

18:23 Adam 

And I think that that's such an important piece too, of how do we set the stage of the conversation. Or basically, we'll keep our garden metaphors. How are we watering the soil the right way so that certain plants can grow? And this idea, I think, is really important too, because one thing that you talk about in the book too is understanding… When you were setting the framework up, you have a section that's both about when race matters and when it doesn't matter. And this is, again, how we're talking about race and when and why we might capitalize white and Black and when we don't need to. And also this other idea that who is the method for? And part of this too, because a lot of the conversations that we've seen in classrooms and obviously in the political realm and online too, this is the other grounding piece. When we're in the classroom, we can then point toward these other areas if we need to. We're just noting that as a contrast to how we might set this up in the classroom when we're talking about political discourse or diatribe online, we see things like who's allowed to talk about race and what parts of race and who can be part of the conversation and parts of what conversation. And so we see inklings of what it means to set boundaries, but then oftentimes we see transgressions of those boundaries because either they're not fully defined or someone doesn't respect them. Or on top of that, then we just lump in more and more and more stuff because he said, race, let me pick the other five things that come to mind versus our actual substantive content because we did a reading on one piece. So part of it, I mean, I'm curious about this too, thinking about it, as folks are kind of wrapping their minds around how do we set the stage. So part of it too, in the work that you saw both in classrooms, then if we're bringing this into other kinds of meetings too, it is important to have some level of content to engage with together. Was I reading that properly? Like you want to have readings, podcasts, videos, and some content that you build together.

20:05 Janine

Yeah. So in the book, this is a great question because I did want to say the most important thing is like, okay, let me help you, your audience think about, okay, what does this look like? So in the book, I have the steps. I have a really wonderful chapter that is like step by step. You go and you do this and get back to me. So let's think of an example. Give me an example. You're someone in a tech company and you're going to have a discussion about the lack of racial diversity in your recruitment of engineers. Okay. Yep. So that's your problem. You're the brave community gardener and that's the situation you're trying to set up. Okay. What I would want you to do, according to the method, what we do is first take inventory of the situation with this grounding idea. So we do a grounding inventory. So I'm that person, I'm going in, I'm maybe the DEI professional at that tech company and I'm going to have this meeting and there's going to be all hands, like all staff are there and I'm going to lead this conversation. So I literally write down on one side of a piece of paper content and on the other side of the piece of paper culture. And that's my inventory. It's very analogous. So I'm sitting there with my pen or I'm talking into my voice note, whatever, whatever you prefer. And I'm thinking in terms of content, okay, assuming I have some content expertise and we're going to break that down. But given, you know, that this is going to happen on a Tuesday, that we have two hours to do it, what material am I going to bring for the team to get their heads around this problem? So that's on my content column. And I'm writing down like our recruitment data, our racial demographics, maybe there's some climate data that we took where people, you know, in that particular subset of engineers are in the larger organization are flagging this issue and they're frustrated. We said we're going to fix it in 2020 and we have it, right? Some versions of limited content, are very targeted to the organization and to the question at hand that people can either look at during the time or briefly before. So you're not giving, you're not sending, you're not in a position, most of us, I don't know about other people, to send people to get PhDs like real quick before I talk to you. So this is what you've been doing. So you're writing that down, content. And then for culture, have there been training about, I don't know, inter-staff discussion? Do you have protocols that you usually do that work really well for talking about hard things? If you don't, what are you going to do about that? Also under culture, is this a group that gels well together and can have hard conversations or is this a literal powder cake? So you sit there and you have to think about this context before you go to the Brave Community thing, right? This is like your pre-work. In the chapter, I call it pre-work. A couple of things are true that get to your question. If your culture column is not looking very good, there are things in the book that I tell you that you can do to get that fixed in real-time. You know, generate more empathy. There are some norm exercises that I suggest that you can do if you know that you're in a room that's kind of cold to the issue, right? Sometimes you are, sometimes you're not. We could do something on that day. Then I'm very clear that if you do your inventory and there is a blank content column and you don't have any content, the book is like, I am like, don't do it. Stop, stop, go get some. I don't know it. Go fit, go, go know it, go get some. Why? Because that's the line. The grounding is the difference. You're doing grounding and then you're doing Brave Community. If you're not grounded, you're not doing Brave Community. You might be doing good things. Things might still go well for you, of course, but that content piece needs to be there to exactly your point, to give us parameters and solid soil under our feet to stand on so we're not all over the place. In the case of this example, to make it very context specific. What would that be? Maybe there's a really cool short article, podcast, or video presentation about the egregious patterns of racial disparity in tech engineering, which we have. At that point, the last thing I'll say, you can be smart about your selection. What kind of material is going to be the most open, the appear the most neutral for that content? Is it going to be an op-ed for politics? No, probably not. That's probably not your best content. But also you don't need to be, I don't know, depending on the organization you're in, maybe an academic journal on the disparities in the field is not ideal. So you're going to be able to pitch it. But yes, something that people are going to get their heads around together in real-time. 

25:10 Adam

That's such an important piece and I appreciate you breaking that down in a very concrete way because I think at one level it opens up the reality that if we're approaching these kinds of conversations in organizations, whether they're an academic institution, whether they're our tech company, whether they're our DEI group within an organization, that we don't want to show up just blank saying, let's have a conversation. The goal is to build dialogue, but unless you have a foundation with which to build on. And again, this sets again, this kind of question of boundaries of like how, what are the questions at hand to that? I guess there's something else that you said that stood out to me there too. It's more like, how do we even decide the content to bring? It has to address the question that we are interested in. So in this case, if it's like, how do we think about and address the racial disparity in the hiring practices of engineers in our organization in this case? Or how do we address, I mean, that's a great example for all organizations, in an academic institution, the racial disparity and hiring practices amongst junior faculty and senior faculty and among the student body in terms of acceptance rates in high school classrooms? So it's like, it's an important piece. And then also, again, I appreciate this idea that doesn't get the first CNN article or Politico or BBC article you find and say, this is it, here's our story, right? Like we have to be intentional about the kind of content that we also curate there. It's like a third C I'm thinking about there too, right? It's curated.

26:31 Janine

The curation. That's like a big C in the beginning. The other thing that I want to say about the content that I mentioned in the book is like the question then becomes, well, how much content? Yeah. And people get very paralyzed. So the first thing I want listeners to know is don't get paralyzed. Literally, knowledge is infinite. The idea that you could actually have some kind of foresight omniscience to know exactly what, it's not possible. So this is why the last, I think the last sentence is the book is a practice manual. That's the last words I wrote. I mean that. I mean that. So this is about what can you practice. And so I say very specific. It's like you said, it's content that will help solve the problem and it's bound to be limited. So it says, in the book of the phrase the content is bounded and that's okay for two reasons. One, we will be doing this over time. You don't have to hit it all at once. And two, it's not possible to not have bounded content, right? So for example, in my practice, I ended up doing, I've landed on through like, you know, trial and error, some combination of my content usually has two dimensions to it without being overwhelmingly too much. I do a little bit of history of the problem and then I do something very specific to the context. So if I'm into an organization, that's what I'm thinking about, right? So if I'm talking to a museum in the 2020 era and their headline was like, museums are racist, white supremacist organizations, stop and be anti-racist organizations, what those folks needed was both content about the specific institutions, what's going on there, but then also a little bit of a primer on what is the relationship between like racial capitalism writ large and am I a museum expert? I am not. So when I did my inventory, I was like, Oh, I got to go research, find some, a really good piece, you know, and I found a really good chapter in a really good book. I didn't write it. And the people I was with knew that I didn't pretend to know. I was like, Hey, I'm not a museum professional, but I have this method, but my method is not content. Yeah. My method is a way to get content. And this is what we're doing. And again, that went worked out really well. They could have not liked the book. They could have not liked the chapter, but we did it and it worked out. But the idea was the method directed me, the inventory and the content side were blank because that's not an area of my expertise. No one's an expert in everything. And I was like, Oh, I got to go get that before I show up with these folks.

29:15 Adam

That's an important piece. And I think that you're right that helping folks realize too when they're, I mean, pointing towards how this kind of method is applicable, kind of writ large in different institutions and organizations is this, it's like, it's not about the specific content itself, but it's like, I think the helpful piece here too, for me, as I think about this is that if I was doing, working on practicing this method too, and again, in a tech organization, then I would, in this case, maybe think about like, if there's a book chapter, social science, that like helps us get a sense of hiring practices and tech organizations, right? And then find some news stories that were recently from this year that point out here's, here's some examples or some stats we have from Pew Research or whatever of hiring practices that we're seeing. And so again, it's not this like, I have to go do it. I have to go do a deep, deep literature review. I could, if I really wanted to, right? If I'm into really getting into tech hiring practices, which if that's my job, it should be, but if I'm also coming in as a consultant who's thinking about applying this, then it's like, I can do enough to get a series of neutral pieces of content. In this case, it could be like your point too, right? It's a book chapter and a news story. That just gives us that, that parameters from which we're going to build this discussion because it's addressing the specific question we want to figure out of, you know, lack of diverse hiring practices and what's, what's fueling that. How do we, how do we kind of overcome that?

30:28 Janine 

Yeah. And if you set up that way, yeah, if you set up that way, if you think about it for the audience, right, let's think about that, that what you just described, if I'm going into that meeting, it's taking care of a few things for me. I'm not anxious about whether or not I can say certain things. I'm not anxious about whether or not I am allowed to speak on certain things. I'm not anxious about whether or not the conversation is going to veer off to something else, right? It's going to help me come in more inclined, because I do feel grounded to be learning deeply, to be intellectually brave, to ask things that are hard. Because again, I have this container that you've set up for me with this like pure research and this article. And, you know, I basically, you know, you the teacher, you're outside in the wild, but you're basically the teacher, you assign, you assign the reading. And I know that I can come in and talk about the reading. Yeah. Right. It's very different than like, let's have a conversation about racism in our organization. And then everybody white is quiet, and they kind of like surreptitiously look at the two people of color from the corner of their eyes. That's a very different setup, just that we just described the grounding.

31:36 Adam

Yeah, no, totally. I think that's such an important piece. And so we have the grounding of our soil set in place. And so then the idea here is that we want to use this again to help facilitate a sense of empathy and bravery. So let's break down these two as our next. Yeah. I don't know what their next steps are, but these are the plants that we're kind of growing here, right?

31:57 Janine

They're the plants. Yeah, they're the plants. And they're like, they're a vine. They are a vine. They're entangled together. Our metaphor is working. All right. Yeah, so far so good. The vine has bravery interwoven with resilient empathy. So let's take them one at a time. The bravery is essentially what you think it is in your gut when you hear me say it. It's that courage to ask these questions. And that's right. That's right. But okay, most learning has that demand, the discomfort, the threshold, which is what propels your learning forward is the gap in what you understand. And you say, okay, wait, I look, I used to think of it this way. And now I have this looming, looming flashlight suggesting to me that I am not thinking about this the right way. And what happens to you in public or in the community, there are two things that could happen. You embrace that, you try to close that gap by growing up, growing your thoughts, and learning more, or you retract because you're scared. So bravery is about not retracting and having the fortitude to push your thought process, to push your fellow learners or colleagues. I always say like, we all know, I tell people this story, because I think it's vivid in our minds, you're learning about something you're in, you're in a dialogue, you're in a process. And then you come to that fork in the road. And it sounds like, man, I really wish I could ask this question. But I don't think so. It's only Monday, or I don't trust these people. We want you to be able to ask that question. That which arises naturally in your process of inquiry needs to be asked. So that's what that bravery is. However, to do that, you have to be received in good faith. So my friend, my friend, Jake, I think I give him a shout-out in the book for telling me for forgiving me this language like that's his expertise like he'll just give me the perfect. He said, I mean, with empathy, what you mean is listening bravely, that there's a bravery, and yeah, right. He's good. He's good. Shout to Jake. So that there's a bravery in expressing what you need for your learning. And there's a way that your community can hear you with bravery. And that means opening the space for it, counting the 10 when you're driving them a little bit crazy, and just extending grace and good faith. So that's the other piece. So spoiler alert, everybody loves the bravery plant. The resilient empathy plant. People have a lot of problems with it. Yeah.

34:28 Adam 

I mean, I can, well, I'm cheating. I've read the book, but I'm also like, okay, I'm thinking about this. If we haven't read the book yet, what I would speculate, is that sounds weird to do this since I've already read it, but like, this idea in terms of that, I would either get mad when somebody says something that offends me or I may say, I'm afraid I'm going to say something that's going to offend somebody else. And so either of those feels like I'm either not going to be treated empathetically or that I'm not going to extend empathy to somebody else if they approach something in a way I feel uncomfortable. Is that how I could think about that?

35:07 Janine

Yes, exactly. And so what I talk about in the book, and I want to say like, there's deep gratitude in the entirety of this trajectory. So this is almost like not quite a decade, but like seven years of work for all the people who have been in community with me in workshops and classrooms, who've taught me so much what the nuance and texture of the method is through practice. And so there was a lot of stuff that needed to happen in terms of how you boost people to have these qualities and sustain them that I didn't really know until people were letting me know that they needed these boosts. So yes, grounding for learning and setting that up gets you along a lot of the way, almost all the way, but people do struggle along the way. So for the bravery, the boost is just to acknowledge when it's happening, right? To be like, to see you. So I'm in dialogue with you. We're in the Brave Community bubble and you say something like, I'm not sure I want to say this. And I say to you, no, you definitely should say it then. So that's a way for me to say, I know what you're, I'm sure your heart, your pulse is racing a little bit too fast and stuff. That's exactly what you need to be doing. So I do this in the room all the time. I'll tell people, me too, my hands just got cold. I know exactly what's going on, but didn't we say that we were going to lean in and be brave? Right? Didn't we agree when we were setting up culture that this was going to happen? So this is a crucial time for us to push, or you can bounce it around. You can say, okay, if people are really quiet, a lot of people are really quiet. Is there anybody here that feels like they can push us? We feel a little stuck. So that's one version of that boost. For the empathy boost, it's a little bit more subtle. And so what you might want to do is think about ways to do things that you usually do in a group like icebreakers or introductions in a way that is warming, in a way that really signals everybody's humanity before the discussion. And I don't mean this in a corny way, but certain very simple adjustments, right? Instead of everybody saying their name and their favorite color or what they ate today, everybody says their name and where they work and when the last time you felt content. What's a question that we can all answer briefly that has a modicum of humanity and vulnerability and authenticity to it that everybody can answer that they are not likely to have a prepackaged answer to? You do something like that before any discussion. Throw out Brave Community before any discussion. It changes the quality of the discussion. 

37:56 Adam

Yeah. I really like that too. It is good advice for life and also, yeah, just human engagement and value in terms of this, of how do we ask questions in a way that both generate a set of being together, inquiring together, but then also, yeah, we'll generate the human response. And it's funny because that's something else that, I mean, I'm thinking about like the, one of the challenges that have arisen on this end of life on the podcast over the past few episodes, it's been interesting that, I mean, I've done a lot of episodes recently on technology development and artificial intelligence. And again, as an adjacent set of conversations, it's interesting because this idea of forgetting our humanity is actually one of the subtexts of the problems that we find ourselves running into because we're so interested in getting the numbers and the ordinals right that we don't pause and think about it. Is this the world that I want to create? Is this the kind of like, what are the, basically what are the norms that we're actually, what's the grounding that we're setting that we're putting out here with this technology versus saying, let's start from this point of humanity and ask ourselves, like, what does contentment look like to you? Or was the last time you were content, yeah, a shorter answer, right? Yeah.

39:09 Janine 

Because like, I think this is such an interesting thing that you brought it up because as you may know, the book, the next nonfiction book I'm working on is on that, is on the digital implications for society. And part of what this revolution or, I don't know, I mean, the stopian thing that we're dealing with, with both social media and now even more so with AI, and we will not go down this rabbit hole, but is that they are taking away our ability to have these fundamental resources. These are fundamental resources for a host of human practices of problem-solving, sustainability, the democratic practice. A host of things are required, like depending on the same soil that learning depends on. And we're getting rid, we're playing with getting rid of them. And empathy is one and a sense of our common humanity or the experience of humanity is one. Yeah. Yeah. A reverence for that stuff, that stuff seriously, as opposed to rolling your eyes at it. Like, who cares? Like what? It's like, no, that stuff if you get rid of that stuff, work nowhere. Yeah. No, I think you're 100% right. So resilient empathy, I call it that because, to your previous point, you don't tend to want to extend it in the context of the brave community. 

40:34: Adam

And that's a really interesting idea of resilience there, right? 

It's that it's the capacity to withstand the desire to not put out. 

40:44: Janine

To not be nice.Yeah, that's a really nice translation. Thank you, Adam. Like, yeah, in the book, it has an eloquent definition, but it's something like the ability to put yourself in someone else's, even when they're learning, is challenging you. But yeah, what you said is like your ability to be resilient to the fact that you don't want to be nice to this person. You don't want to extend trust to this person. You don't want to count to 10. Yeah. And in the book, I go deeply into, of course, the fact that in our world, that is a skewed world where there's a hierarchy of power in terms of race and racism that is abhorrent and we need to work against over, I'm being very general here, people of color would be well within their rights to have a deficit of empathy for white people. And white people would be well within not their rights, but their reality to have fear that people of color will not extend that empathy to them. That's just real. So what the method allows us to do is create these where we can engineer those conditions for all, including cross racially. And that's what the grounding does. So when I come into a room to be very concrete, when I come into a room and I'm applying the method and I do what I call establishing grounding, I do something like back landing norms to first move people into this idea of how we're going to be together. And basically myself and the community that I'm in, we construct our norms together. And I solicit this from the group. I don't tell them what it is. They tell me what it is. What are we going to need? What do you go around the room? What do you need for this to go well and not be another disaster, not DEI from hell? How do we make sure this is not DEI from hell? And consistently over seven years, consistently, regardless of who's in the room, what do they say? Open minded, honesty, different versions of the word, but basically empathy, the ability to ask questions. And then they'll say things that really speak to our culture. They'll be like applicability and not waste my time. Like you get a lot of like, you get a lot of feelings, but those key things, like for me to learn, I need to be able to do it. And I need people to treat me well when I'm doing it. Jason Isbell, which is a very random thing to think about, but he is on a podcast with Adia Victoria that people should listen to. And one of the things he says as a Southern white man in that podcast, they're in this beautiful cross-racial conversation. And he says that people, something to the effect that like people should have the ability to change their minds without losing love, self-respect, and self-love something like that. Yeah. That's beautiful, that's beautiful, but that's also entirely what pedagogy that's worth its name is about. That's all it is. Like people call distinguished critical pedagogy. I'm like, if the pedagogy is not critical, it's not pedagogy, but that's just not, I'm just being territorial. Yeah, it's all whatever. You call yourself teaching, but if your learner doesn't have the ability to change and grow without losing self-respect and self-love, you're not a teacher. You're doing something, but you're not a teacher. So that's important too. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard, but we can do it. Like that's the thing about resilient empathy. And again, why can we do it? Because the grounding provides a  resource.

44:14 Adam

And one thing I'll say too, like for listeners, if you're getting curious about the method, but also again, in the book too, like you go through a number of examples, verbatim conversations you have with people in these classrooms, in these meetings with museum staff, with faculty that where people ask both tough questions to kind of say either I'm uncomfortable or like you see somebody getting heated, right? And as you talk about how I, as the facilitator, have to then be assessed, I have to stay authentic and I have to understand how I feel about it. I have to then pull out these, again, these tactics from my pocket that say, all right, you know, I want to check, are you okay right now? You seem really heated about this. Let's take a minute and think about that. And like even these, like again, if I'm saying this as I'm reflecting, I'm reflecting as I'm saying this, that's just actually you're extending humanity to somebody, but you're saying, Hey, are you okay right now? I know this seems like you feel your pulse is up, and your voice is getting shaky. I just want to check if you're okay first, then we can move on to the next question from there. So even extending these spaces of space, right? To be human, to feel, to think, and to, I mean, to model the idea that both we could ask the questions that come out of our gut, but then also we have room to feel uncomfortable or excited or confused or whatever it is, right? We can have those and have room to express that also. So again, it isn't about shutting people down. So I think so much of the fear that we have around conversations around race, racism in the United States, and especially in professional settings too, is that I'm going to get shut down, right? I'm going to get yelled at. I'm going to be called racist for saying something I'm going to either be called combative if I don't. So depending on what it is. And so there is like such fear around the conversations. And so I think like bringing this idea of grounding is actually just saying, I'm recognizing that emotions are fine. They're part of these conversations. And this is hard work, right? Like the U.S. and so much of the Western world, we've been conditioned to not talk about race. And if we do talk about it, we get told that we're either making something up or perpetuating a bad idea. You talk about this in the latter part of the book too, of just why we need to post racist imagination in general, because so much of the broader narrative, right, is that we don't talk about race. It's not a thing. It doesn't exist in the way that we're talking about critical race theory and questions of how do we talk about structural racism and these like bigger sounding ideas, institutional racism, are terms that are quote-unquote, we're not supposed to talk about in this broader political context but are very real for actually what shape, how we even approach the conversation in the first place.

46:35 Janine

Yeah, I think you reminded me of two things with that. One is this idea that you want to be able to in the room sort of do what you're expecting people to do. So the book talks about this post-racist imagination and we can talk about what I mean by that. But ultimately, what I think I want people to understand is that as a brave community practitioner, which I hope everybody that gets the book becomes one, this is possible. We all need to be doing this. You model for a group of people how to do this. Now, in my experience, I don't always have to model when things get hard. Other people in the room are happy to do that and they show up for me, but I think they're showing up for me as the facilitator because we've connected as humans. They're like, oh, she's like, she's having to deal with a tough moment right now and she's asking, can somebody jump in and I will raise my hand and jump in. So that happens, right? But just like with everything in the model, there are two go-to moves. I always brag about this. I'm like, not 10, not 15. This is not a martial arts course. Two things that you do when it gets tough. When you've done everything right and you're like, I did everything Janine told me to do. I ground it. It's been going well and then something occurs. If someone says something bad, it blows up. Two things and it's quiet. It's that awkward silence. Two things. You model the bravery that you all were doing before and then you hold that community accountable to the grounding. So modeling bravery just means you name what's going on. Like you said, are you okay? Because you sound really tense. You're kind of talking in a real, I just want you to know that you can take a break, but I just want to check. Or we're really quiet. The room just got really quiet. I can't sit here and talk to myself. We don't have all day. The meeting is almost over. So I'm wondering if someone who's not feeling overwhelmed can say what they think is going on right now. So that's modeling bravery. It is not to take over the work. You know, people don't do people's work for them. This is not about that. This is about how you push learning, keep learning, and keep learning through the hard stuff. That's one. And that the whole community accountable is again, just to explicitly say, wait a minute. We said we were going to be brave when it got hard. So how do we restore that? The idea is this is a method that understands how humans actually act. And then we can still be human through the bumpy parts. And that's really where it wins, if we have a moment and it's hard and we follow these very basic steps and it helps, then you're golden. And here's something that brings us back to the beginning question about why a learning model, why a learning approach to this particular topic. I always say to people, we keep saying we need to have conversations and we don't. We've had plenty of conversations and quite frankly, they're terrible and they suck and people hate them. They don't want to have them. That's in my introduction. I say something like that. Right? We don't want to have conversations about race. We've had too many. It's been hundreds of years, 500 years by some counts. Like, come on. But what we want is to learn about racism that will become transformative and allow people to improve the conditions of their existence. So that's a different thing because what I'm after is learning about this issue, not talking about it. Talk as an instructor, everything and anything goes. I'm not the boss of you. You're not the boss of me. We just talk. Learning has like goals. It has parameters. It has grounding. It has agreements that we can come to because we look at each other as learning people and how we treat each other when we learn. And I can identify myself as a learner, what I need. It makes me recognize what you need. Your version of empathy might be different than mine. Right? If you're a white person, what's bravery for you in this context is not the same as what's bravery for me. It may be sometimes. Sometimes it may not depend on where you were born, where you were raised, et cetera, et cetera. We don't have to get into that, but the substance of the mindset of the state is the same. Similarly, for empathy, the substance of the state is the same. What it looks like is different. Like we were joking before recording that for me, empathy might be not rolling my eyes at you. For you, empathy might be not feeling like why does she think she gets to talk just because it's about race? She talks all the time. Whatever version of that, but the substance is the same. It's a gesture of extension. And on the bravery side, it's a gesture of risk-taking. And that's all that's happening. It's because we're thinking about learning. We're thinking pedagogy. And this makes me want to extend learning to everything now. Like this is a great- Well, like all things told, like in my worldview, learning culture is learning. Yeah. Like the fundamental human, like the homo sapiens of it all. It's not organic, right? Yeah. It's not just, we're not born with it, right? Yeah. It's learning and it's practice. So it's like human culture ultimately is that. It is a pedagogical phenomenon. We just don't see it as that, but it is. And so like ultimately change and improvement and what I call post-racist practice and imagination is a learning endeavor for sure.

52:10 Adam

Yeah. I think that's great. And it's such an important piece too. I guess one thing I would ask with that too like I'm channeling my inner listener here. And one thing I'm curious about is like, what's one of the things that people really struggle with here? Like what do people tend to push back on if they're in the sessions or thinking about these that make it hard for them to participate or kind of walk away?

52:36 Janine

There are two things. One is they really struggle with the idea that I say in the front of the book that the book, method is the same regardless of the racial composition of who I'm talking to, who we are speaking with. And people really struggle with that for obvious reasons. We live in a racialized society. People's experiences diverge. Of course, they are individualized, but there are some grand, consistent experiences that people who are white have, that people who are not white broadly don't have, et cetera. And so we tend to think very comfortably in racialized terms. And so I say off from the very beginning of the introduction, that's not what this method is. This method is the same regardless of who's in the room and people really struggle with that. The reason I don't struggle with that is that to do it any other way would be practically and ethically impossible. Practically, I could never iterate enough versions of this method to fit every identity experiential category. I could do it, but I would be lying to you if I were like, the brave community for white people, the brave community for Brazilians. I mean, come on. So practically I couldn't do it. And then above and beyond, in terms of my ethical commitment, I could not do it. Why? Again, this is a learning model. It is unethical to try to forward project growth of someone based on a few identity markers, even race. So it would be unethical for me to predetermine in advance what quote-unquote abstract people of color need. Black people need this version of it. White people need this version of it. No. People learning about this difficult subject matter, research has shown me and practice has shown me need X, Y, and Z thing. They need grounding. Basically, they just need grounding. And when the grounding fails, they need to be put back on the path. That I can say for everybody. But folks really, really don't want to hear that. The second thing that people kind of don't want to hear is this post-racist imagination idea. I mean, some people do, but some don't because they think I'm being like Obama-era post-racial. And I'm not. I'm not talking about that stuff. I'm not talking about we're all going to turn beige and have babies with each other and poof, the thing's going to get fixed. That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that racism is a structural condition of most of the Western world, but it has an origin. It is practiced and learned. Therefore, logically, it can be unlearned and it can be not practiced to the same extent. And so in our own lives, communities, classrooms, organizations, churches, and libraries, there are things that we can do to limit the reproduction of racist experiences day to day. They don't eradicate them, but they limit them. So in a racist world, of course, leadership positions and positions that pay more go to white people more than they go to people of color. There are things that people in decision-making roles can do to change that in their organizations, period, point blank. That is what I call post-racist practice. And so the imagination piece is how do you think about a future where racism is not present while structural racism persists? How do you both engender that in people and sustain it so that they can keep thinking that? Because that's how that world is going to be partly produced. Not entirely. Again, this is not a structure versus culture argument because that argument I find silly, but it's about what we need, there is a racist imagination that's 500 years strong and it is very, very healthy. It's having a resurgence. Yeah. And I love a fair with fascism. It's my favorite. So it's like, we're really, so what do we do? What are we doing? Because we don't have the power that they have. So what are we doing to sustain ourselves and to practice in a way that helps both like that practice thing where you're thinking post-racist and you're practicing and then you're going back to thinking it and you're in this different loop? Yeah. People think I'm selling out and thinking small and they don't like that because I'm not going like structure or busts. And I'm like, no, man, our problems are big and they're historic, but we are really working 24 hours at a time, human scale.

57:17 Adam 

And that's such a powerful point too, that like reminding us that racism is practiced and learned, therefore it can be unpracticed and unlearned. It's not a given format. And like the simplest epithet that we hear people say children are not born racist. And it's like, well, yeah, that's a good example, right? They have to be taught to have racial thinking. Yes, it can happen very early in their lives, but they have to be taught to value one human form over another in one way of being over another. And people don't argue that, but I think it's a really interesting point. And I think it's such a key area for folks to remember too as they're thinking about practicing rave community or like what would it mean to try to implement it. Like being aware of what obstacles, or mental obstacles you may run into as we begin to facilitate these kinds of conversations. And that's such an important one too, because really what it is, it's also coming up against, because I mean, another part of racism is that like there's no way out of it, right? Like a racial imagination is like it's boxed in and there's no, anything that we do is not going to matter,  right? There's no actual action we can do to make people not racist. 

58:26 Janine

Yeah. And most racist imagination is standing outside of that box that racism has you in that actually is dictating what you think is possible, who you think you can trust, what you think winning is, what you think losing is, all kinds of really problematic things are in that racist box that we are by default living in unless we're doing something very deliberate and consistent to live outside of it. So there is no neutral stance, which is another problem that the Western world suffers from. Western European-descended white supremacist democracy suffers from that delusion that you could have such a monster as white supremacy out of the box and that you ever have a status quo. I'm not really actually being right. I'm just okay. I'm not really like supporting the cause of racism. I know, yes, you are, unless you're active in reflective mode, thinking differently all the time about it. Yes, you are supporting something that people will tell you all the time. They have horror. They don't support it. It's like, okay, well, this is a way to practice that

59:34 Adam. 

Yeah. And that's an important point too, like when it comes down to it, because it's like it, that I can, I'm putting my listener hat on here too, or getting where it's like, it gets really big really quickly when we start talking about the idea of a post-racist racist imagination. And so then suddenly I begin to feel paralyzed. Like, okay, well, what do I actually do? And it's actually like, again, coming back to this learning model, coming back to the literal grounding as a human, let's have a conversation together. Let's set the parameters of how we're engaging when we're talking about a topic of need at the time in our organization, amongst our friend groups, whatever it is, right? Amongst two friends, right? Just having this conversation about something tough by saying, here's our grounding. I'm going to extend my empathy to you. I'm going to ask questions as they come up. I want you to do the same. Let's call each other out and reset the conversation if things feel like they're getting a little off the rails and recognizing that it's tough. But I think that's actually the power here too of the method in taking me away from this conversation too is that we're able to really draw on our humanity, right? We know how to set the rules of engagement to help push learning. We know how to do that. And we can, right? When things get big, it's okay. We just need to come back to remember what are we here to do. We're here to push learning together.

01:00:40 Janine

If I think about what I've learned the most practicing this, I've learned actually believing that exact thing. I still go in a lot of rooms with that little voice in my head that's like, this is crazy. You don't know what you're talking about. It cannot work. It will not work. And it does work. It does work. And so every time I myself, that is how I practice my own post-racist imagining. And I'm thankful for those opportunities because again, they are not widespread in my life. I'm not having a brave community experience 24 seven, 365 at all. I'm just a regular person and a black woman in America. And I'm off a lot of the time. And my empathy is at sub-zero a lot of the time. And how dare you ask me for more. And my indignation is very righteous. I need it. I need my own version of the practice so that I can be in democratic and with people who are different than myself. It's not second nature for me. And we shouldn't expect it to be second nature for anybody. And so I think that's what I keep learning..

01:01:48 Adam

I love that. And I think that's a wonderful place to wrap this conversation. So Janine, thank you so much. It's been so great to talk with you again. I'm really excited to get the book out to the community and have folks check it out. It is out now. So we're definitely checking it out. Yes.

01:01:58 Janine

And let me know how it goes people. Yes. Thank you. It was a pleasure.

01:02:3 Adam

Right on. Cheers. And that's a wrap of today's episode of This Anthro Life. Now we've had an incredibly insightful conversation with Janine de Noves, exploring the importance of teaching as opposed to race's imagination. So a huge thank you to Janine for joining me on the podcast today. Throughout the episode, we've dived into the crucial notion of setting the stage for conversations on race, exploring when race matters and when it doesn't, and even delving into the impact of terms and language choices. Janine has provided us with practical tools such as connecting a grounding inventory and embracing the concept of brave community to navigate these discussions more effectively. So I invite you to take a moment to reflect on what we've learned today. How does this conversation on teaching towards a post-racist imagination resonate with you? How might these insights apply to your own life or in the broader society that we live in? At This Anthro Life, we believe that knowledge is most important when shared and engaged with. So let's keep this conversation going. I encourage you to connect on social media, leave a comment on the website and share your thoughts and experiences and any questions that you might have. I really, really value your perspective and the diversity of voices within our community. And if you're hungry for more on this topic, I recommend checking out Janine's book on brave community, and the website and show notes will give you more information on how to do that. The resources provided across that book will give a ton of great understanding and content of what we've covered today and allow you to continue your own journey towards teaching and a post-racist imagination. And as always, just want to say a huge heartfelt thank you to you, our listeners, and our viewers, your support, enthusiasm, and encouragement mean the world to me. And it's your continued commitment that inspires me and all of us here at TAL to keep bringing you thought-provoking conversations. So as always, make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform, video, audio, whatever it is. And if you enjoyed what you hear, again, it would mean a lot to me if you could either leave a review or share the episode with someone who you think would love it too. And if you're into more topics like this and want to just dive deeper, you can check out the Anthro Curious Substack blog. It's the writing version of this podcast. So we're going to dive even deeper into the fascinating world of anthropology and many topics there as well. So thank you so much for being a part of this Anthro Life. And until next time, keep questioning, keep exploring, and keep embracing the power of anthropology. I'm your host Adam Gamwell. We'll see you next time.