June 29, 2020 • 37 mins
You might detest bigotry and injustice, but have you done anything to address these problems? There are many reasons we stay silent and inactive when we know we should intervene to defend the rights of others. We look at the psychology underpinning our reluctance to act and the ways in which we can match our moral beliefs with concrete actions.
Featuring James Barr and Dan Hudson, co-hosts of the podcast 'A Gay and a Non-Gay'.
WARNING: This episode talks frankly about discrimination, hate crimes and sex.
For an even deeper dive into the research we talk about in the show visit happinesslab.fm
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. This episode is the last in our current season.
It's also been a difficult one to make. Like all
our shows, it tries to strike a cautiously hopeful tone
because I do believe that each and every one of
us can make positive changes that will make our lives happier.
(00:36):
But this episode isn't just about how to be happy
in your own life. It's about the need to fight
injustice and the structure is around us that prevent whole
groups of people from living happy lives. And that means
that this episode touches on some tough issues, things like
racism and homophobia, as well as stories about hate crimes.
We started work on this episode before the killing of
George Floyd and all the important conversations about anti black
(00:59):
violence that have followed. But I hope you'll still find
important evidence based tips for how you can personally fight injustice,
including tips that I hope will be especially useful for
listeners who are not themselves members of marginalized groups and
who want to learn how they can help. It was Sunday,
June twelfth, twenty sixteen, right in the middle of Pride Month.
(01:23):
More than three hundred people had gathered at a Latin
event at Pulse, a gay dance club in Orlando, Florida,
and just before closing time, a gunman walked in and
opened fire. Forty nine people were murdered and another fifty
(01:43):
three were wounded. It was one of the deadliest mass
shootings on US soil and one of the most vicious
attacks on LGBTQ people anywhere in the world. It left
the global community reeling. After the Pulse attack, I went
into work and I didn't think anyone mentioned it at all,
(02:07):
and obviously I was not in a place my mental
health had taken a real turn. That day has had
so many queer people and no one said anything. James
Barr is a comedian and podcaster living in London. Like
lots of queer people, on the Monday morning after the
Pulse shooting, James didn't get help pourings of sympathy from
his coworkers. No one asked how he was doing, and
(02:29):
no one even spoke out about the tragedy. And it
wasn't until seven pm that night. I went to my
improv comedy rehearsal and as I walked in, my friend
Amanda said, are you okay? And gave me a hug
out of nowhere. Had it really struck me? Because I
was like, Wow, no one has asked me that all
day today. You're the only person that realized I might
(02:51):
be affected by that, or that something had even happened.
Everyone else was just completely oblivious. Those co workers probably
weren't intending to cause James harm. Most of them would
probably say they believed in gay rights, and if asked directly,
that they were appalled by the Pulse attack. But despite
all these good intentions, there's silence that day sent a
(03:11):
different message that's really triggering because you feel alone. It
takes you back to being at your mum's house when
you realize you're gay and you can't tell anyone, and
you're like thirteen, and you're sat there like, oh my god,
I'm on my own. No one else is gay. If
you're a straight sis gender person like me listening to James,
(03:32):
you may remember not being sure what to say when
you heard about the Pulse tragedy. You may have known
that you needed to say something, but you weren't sure
what or how. Unfortunately, none of these good intentions matter
to James at the time that day, any comment, however awkward,
would have been better than silence, because at least then
I know they see me. Now, I'm guessing that every
(03:53):
person listening to this podcast right now thinks of themselves
as a good person, someone who's committed to justice and inclusivity,
and that you probably agree that society would be a
happier place if all people were treated equally, no matter
what their sexual, gender, racial, or ethnic identity. But as
James's story reveals, lots of us feel to act on
(04:14):
these feelings, not because we're bad people, but often because
we're not sure how. If we really want our societies
to be happier, we need to actively counter the bigotry
and violence that affects so many identities on a near
daily basis. But changing the deep seated structures that cause
all this injustice is going to take an all hands
(04:34):
on deck approach, which raises an important psychological question. Why
do well intentioned people who believe in justice often do nothing.
Are there lies of the mind that prevent good people
from speaking up and taking action? And if so, how
can we deal with these dumb parts of our psychology
so that we can create a happier and more just world.
(04:58):
Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to
be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What
if our minds are lying to us, leading us away
from or really make us happy. The good news is
that understanding the science of the mind can point us
all back in the right direction. You're listening to the
Happiness Lab the doctor Laurie Santos. A lot of people,
(05:24):
myself included, believe in adversity, believe in inclusion, believe in
equity like there is no doubt those are sincere beliefs.
Those beliefs, however, do not in any way change systems
or structures or biases. All they do is just sit
as beliefs. This is Dolly chug an NYU professor, an
author of The Person You Mean to Be, How good
(05:44):
people fight by us to go from believing something to
building something. To go from the belief to the action,
we have to build some skills, We need some tools.
Dolly argues that each of us need to go from
being a believer to becoming what she calls a builder,
someone who takes an active role. Dolly's builder idea is
similar to what historian and American University professor Abraham Kentdy
(06:08):
has called becoming an anti racist. The idea is that
it's not enough to simply not believe in bigoted stuff
or not be racist ourselves. We need to honestly confront
all the assumptions we've internalized simply by growing up in
an unjust society. The problem, though, is that our lying
minds make it super hard to see all the structural
inequalities around us, especially if we're lucky enough not to
(06:30):
experience that oppression directly. When little kids play with those
spy ink pens spy pens where when they write, you
don't see anything, and then there's a little blue ultraviolet
type light and then you can see what's written. You've
got to do that much work to see the systemic
stuff unless you're experiencing it directly. I mean sometimes even
when you're experiencing it directly, you don't see it. But
you have got to do the work of finding the
(06:52):
ultraviolet light, shining it, and actively looking for it. Dolly
has had to shine that same light on her own biases.
As a straight, sis gender woman of Indian descent. She
knows what it's like to experience discrimination based on her ethnicity,
but she also recognizes that her sexuality, race able bodied status,
and education level have given her a whole host of
(07:13):
amazing privileges. Writing The Person You Mean to Be was
her way of coming to terms with all her own
injustice blind spots. One of the reasons I love Dolly's
books so much is because she's super honest about the
fact that she's not perfect and that she too needs
to put in work to become a builder. I'm risk averse,
and I always want to say the right thing, and
I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. I don't love
(07:34):
conflicts like all these things will pull me into doing less,
not more. Ironically enough, this urge to be seen as
not being prejudiced can make us do stuff that's pretty
much the opposite. We are less likely to reach out
because we think we might say this wrong thing. We
are less likely to take an action, or to call
(07:55):
a legislator, or to introduce ourselves to a neighbor, or
to try to say someone's name who we don't know
how to pronounce. There's even work suggesting that our worries
about seeming prejudice take up a lot of mental bandwidth.
My colleague ye Jennifer Richison and Princeton psychologist Nicole Shelton
had white subjects chat about a controversial issue with either
(08:15):
a white or black stranger. Afterwards, participants did a tough
attentional task known as the Stroop test, in which you
read the names of colors as quickly as you can
despite the words being printed in the wrong colored font.
It's actually pretty hard to read blue when it's printed
in yellow. But Richison and Shelton found that white subjects
did significantly worse on that Stroop test after talking to
(08:39):
a black person. The researchers concluded that subjects left these
interracial interactions feeling more cognitively and emotionally drained than if
they chatted with someone of the same race, and later
work from Richson's lab shows that white subjects have an
even more pronounced performance dip when they're reminded to try
and not seem racist during the interaction. Our minds go
(08:59):
through a whole host of mental gymnastics when our self
image is a decent person is threatened. It's what psychologists
call motivated reasoning, and the process of motivated reasoning can
sometimes get so extreme that we even lie to ourselves
and reinvent our past. Let's do a little quiz. Shall
we I want you to rate how much you agree
(09:20):
with the following statement from one I strongly disagree to
seven I strongly agree. Ready, how much do you agree
with this statement my life has been full of hardships?
Got your answer? Great? Oh wait, actually I forgot. I
wanted to remind you of something before you answer the question.
Please remember that most social scientists agree that even today,
(09:42):
white Americans enjoy many privileges that Black Americans do not.
White Americans are advantaged in the domains of academics, housing, healthcare, jobs,
and more compared to Black Americans. Sor right back to
the question from one I strongly disagree to seven strongly agree?
How much do you agree with this statement my life
has been full of hardships? Psychologist Taylor Phillips and Brian
(10:07):
Lowry pose this same question to a group of white participants,
with half the subject's first hearing that statement about race
that I just read to you. You probably think that
once white subjects were reminded of the greater obstacles that
people of color face, that they'd be less likely to
claim that their own life had been filled with hardships.
But in fact, Phillips and Lowry found the exact opposite pattern.
(10:28):
On average, white people said their life was significantly harder
when they were reminded of their racial privilege. Phillips and
Lowry came up with a rather catchy name for the
striking example of motivated reasoning, borrowing from the musical Annie.
They called it the hard knock life effect. It's the
hard knock life for us. It's the hard knock life
for us. Satrio plea success when we think about all
(10:58):
the unseen gifts we get just from existing as a
non marginalized person. When we realized that all the bad
stuff in our life would probably be worse if we
weren't white, or straight, or sistent, or able bodied, or
middle class. That can make us feel kind of bad,
like we got some benefit that wasn't really fair, even
if we didn't intend to. Rather than experience all this discomfort,
(11:21):
our minds try to cook the facts. We search our
memory banks for the kinds of hardships that might make
our own lives look less easy and therefore less privilege
relative to a marginalized person. Despite writing an entire book
on fighting injustice, Dolly is the first to admit that
it's easy to fall under this way. Of motivated reasoning. Rationally,
(11:43):
Dolly knows that she's had a whole host of life
experiences that other people weren't lucky enough to have. When
I say I have privilege, it's not that I haven't
worked super hard for things. It's not that I haven't
had some really serious challenges in my life. And yet
if someone says to me, like, you know, you just
went to fancy schools, we'll hold on. You know, I
(12:05):
can feel my blood boiling in that moment. That is
an example of what it looks like to deny privilege.
But Dolly has found that there is a way to
stop all the mental gymnastics that lead decent people down
this not so good path. The solution involves dropping the
fiction that were good people in the first place. I've
been on this campaign to get people to let go
(12:27):
of being a good person and strive and said to
be a goodish person. We'll learn what it means to
be good ish when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. HI, welcome,
(12:47):
Welcome along, listeners. What's funny? I just say, that's a
really weird thing to say. It's kind of creepy. A
welcome listeners. James Barr and Dan Hudson are the duo
behind the award winning LGBTQ podcast A Gay in a
Non Gay? Should we kind of explain what this is? Dan?
Dad's girlfriend is is one of my best friends. But
(13:07):
it's also Dan's girlfriends, So it's awkward because we're not
really friends? Are we are? Not? This is news to me.
I thought, no, no, not, what do you mean? Ready?
Before it's launched in twenty fifteen, most of James's friends
were women or gay men. Dan, who was the show's
title suggests, is a non gay, wasn't the sort of
person that James usually hung out with. I wasn't really
(13:29):
interested in guys unless I was going to have their
number in my phone, and obviously Dan was not likely
to be in my phone. Dan loves metal music and
he can be quite angry. Sometimes he's got a beard.
Not that that's, you know, not gay, but I think
I'm quite firm and Dan's very mask Because of their
different identities and experiences, working together on the podcast meant
(13:52):
bridging a whole host of tricky issues. At the beginning,
I really didn't want to be there. Why do I
want to talk to a straight guy? Why do I
have to sit here and educate someone and explain what
it's like just ordering a drink at the bar and
being terrified that the barman will know I'm gay? Why
do I have to tell him like how scary it
(14:13):
is to hold hands with a boyfriend walking down the street,
And I just I guess I felt like happy in
my bubble of gay friends. And when I sat down
with Dan and had to explain all the things that
I've never really said out loud before, it was exhausting.
(14:33):
Part of the exhaustion comes from the fact that their
podcast doesn't shy away from controversial topics. This is so
personal awful. This podcast is not affiliated with any other
thing that Dan and I do in are other lives.
Most of their episodes are not safe for work because
no aspect of James's gay sex life is off limits.
Dan's often in the position of asking the cluelest question
(14:55):
that many straight people have. Answering what a douche was
was pretty awkward. So Dan and I have spent a
long time talking about the ins and outs of anal
cleaning and how that works, and also Dan just being
so confused by the entire thing, like you do what podcasting.
(15:15):
Conversations like these have turned James and Dan into LGBTQ
champions and unlikely friends. They're shared laughter has given them
the trust needed to talk about even more sensitive topics,
things like HIV, the unique mental health challenges faced by
the LGBTQ community, and the injustice and violence against queer
people that straights sis gender people often don't see. If
(15:37):
I'm honest, I feel glad that we have had all
those conversations because it will hopefully educate other people listening
so that they don't have to have the same conversations.
Dan admits that he hadn't thought much about LGBTQ issues
before starting the podcast. His learning curve has been steep.
We called it a gay and ann gay because we
(15:57):
had to call it something. You hated the title, didn't you,
because you didn't want to be You didn't want to
be marginalized as a non gay person, which was hysterical
to me because why should I have to be a
gay person? And now I think I'm out of being
a game more than they ever have. And Dan, you're
kind of I mean, proud would be the wrong word,
because we're going down a straight pride territory. But you
are happy to call yourself a non gay. Yeah. Well,
(16:20):
I mean it's what it is, isn't it? That is
what I am. Since co hosting this podcast, Dance had
to navigate a lot of the moral identity threat that
comes from recognizing his non gay privilege. But unlike other
straight people, Dance had to deal with all that discomfort
with thousands of people listening. Dan's been amazing, He's taken
a lot of that on board. And maybe, and I
(16:42):
think you've helped me just realized this. Now. Maybe the
way Dan is a good ally is because he's awkward.
He's awkward about asking these questions, He's awkward about learning
and speaking up for gay people. He feels awkward, And maybe,
as an ally for any marginalized community, you're meant to
just feel a bit awkward to kind of understand it
and make sure you're saying and doing the right things.
James is onto something important here, because the science suggests
(17:04):
that the path to becoming a better ally often involved
embracing just awkwardness. It comes from accepting that you're probably
going to screw up. As psychologist Dolly Chug explains, it's
not a matter of if a non virtualized person is
going to do or say something dumb. But when we
are going to screw up, period, we are, and when
we mess up, we need to immediately own the harm
(17:27):
we've caused. First of all, I am sorry. It's not
I am sorry if you were offended. Sorry if I
hurt your feelings, I'm sorry if you took it that way.
Those are all not what we want to say. It
is I am sorry, I have done harm, I have
messed up. I am going to do better. I am
going to learn that commitment to learn from our mistakes
(17:47):
and do better in the future is the first step
to accepting that we're not a good person yet. That's
why Dolly wants us to strive instead to be good
ish people. And by good ish, I'm not saying it's
like not quite good enough for a lower standard than good.
What I'm actually arguing is quite opposite. It's it's a
higher standard because as someone who never assumes their good
(18:09):
it's that I'm always looking for ways in which I
could learn, or where my blind spots are, or where
I could notice something I might have missed, or a
different perspective. It's obvious that making silly mistakes it's necessary
for learning almost anything in life, but we're often super
resistant to believing that we can improve, something that renowned
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has called having a fixed mindset.
(18:33):
Dolly thinks this rigid fixed mindset thinking is even more
pronounced in cases that involve are moral identities. I'm a
good person or I'm not. There's no working progress in there.
And where we know from the mindset research is that
when you're in a fixed mindset and you make a mistake,
your brain activation actually goes down. You actually withdraw attention
from the mistake. Why because there's no point looking a mistake.
(18:54):
You're fixed. You're not going to grow to become better allies.
We all need to switch to a different mindset. The
growth mindset is the one where, of course we still
care deeply about doing the right thing and being a
good person, but we acknowledge that it's going to take
lots of work and mistakes to get there. People with
a growth mindset are willing to embrace harder and harder
(19:15):
learning challenges. They even devote more neural resources to paying
attention to their mistakes. Why because a mistake means I
have an opportunity to get better. I'm mortified, but I
can get better. The idea is to own it, to
say it, and to act on it. Carol Dwek, along
with her Stanford colleague Jamil Zaki, have shown that our
mindsets can have a significant impact on how we approach
(19:36):
hard identity challenges. They found that white participants with a
growth mindset spent more time actually listening to a black
person describe personal challenges than white subjects with a fixed mindset.
The good news is that it's pretty easy to develop
a growth mindset. It can be as easy as reminding
yourself that you can change with a simple three letter
word yet, as in, I'm not a good person yet,
(19:59):
but I can be if I put in some work.
The simple act of reminding ourselves we can change can
have a huge effect on our willingness to engage with
tough racial situations, own our own mistakes when they inevitably
come up, and put in the work to make amends
and do better in the future. A growth mindset can
also help us break through the discomfort that often comes
(20:20):
with stepping in as an ally to fight the injustice
around us. Something non gay podcaster Dan Hudson had to
learn firsthand. So I wrote an article for the Metro newspaper,
which is the British equivalent of like USA today. To
be fair, it was James's idea. He said, you should
write an article about what it's like being an allied
to the LGBT community, and I was like, well, well,
(20:41):
if I'm not one, like, who's deciding that I am one?
Prepping the article was a tremendous amount of work for Dan,
and he spent the entire time fighting to keep that
old fixed mindset at bay God, I really want to
get this right and make the point correctly, and the
easiest things I can't do this. This is just like
too difficult. In the end, Dan was able to see
(21:03):
the difficulty as a way to learn rather than a
reason to run away. The result was a powerful article
entitled I'm a white middle class SIS straight mail and
this is how I learned to be an LGBTQ plus ally.
It was one of the first times Dan had publicly
applied the word ally to himself. It's it's a tricky
(21:23):
words because James refers to me as an ally and
that's great. It's one of those words that I think,
if you're going to declare yourself as one. You've really
got to be like manning the barricades. You've really got
to be fighting for that cause all day and every day.
And I'm not sure that I necessarily am, or maybe
(21:44):
should be, I think, and I might be wrong. Dan
call me out. That's because you're a straight, CIS white
guy with all the privilege, so to you having to
stand up for anything feels maybe insincere because it's not
his cause. But here's where that article started. I was
fed up of constantly having to stand up for gay
people all the time, and I just felt like maybe
(22:06):
it was time a straight person did it, because there's
only so much gay noise we can make, and sometimes
straight people are just going to ignore that. Yet again,
James is right here. Not only is it morally wrong
to always leave marginalized groups with the burden of speaking out,
but the science shows it's often more effective for a
non marginalized person to point out bigotry. We absolutely, when
(22:29):
we're not from the targeted group, have more influence and
standing than we assume. We don't feel that way in
the moment, but the data is really convincing. One study
found that white people who called someone out for using
a racist stereotype are judged less negatively than a black
person who does exactly the same thing using exactly the
same words in tone. The same study found that the
(22:50):
offender feels more guilty and it's more likely to apologize
if a white person steps in. Another study showed white
participants videos in which a white or black person called
someone out for a racist comment. Participants were more persuaded
by the argument and thought the interaction was less rude
when a white person was the one doing a calling out.
(23:11):
Dolly's book christened this phenomenon ordinary privilege. We're not speaking
instead of them, We're not centering ourselves over them. This
is not about our feelings. You know, when it might
comes to us, because it might come to us a
little more easily. We amplify what they were saying, We
pass it back, We create the space for them to
be heard, and then step aside. Okay, are you nervous?
(23:39):
Am I? Yeah? Dan has gotten better at knowing when
to use his ordinary privilege. Like the time the duo
we're making a show for the BBC, I'm openly going
into a room where a man is going to judge
me for being gay, and I don't want to be
judged for being gay. And I'll warn you the memory
of this incident still makes Dand so angry that he
can't help but curse. But I'll let James set the scene.
(24:02):
We did a documentary about gay conversion therapy and we
both sat there in front of this guy that performs
this pseudoscience on people, and that was really tough. I
want to talk about your journey and how you came
to this. I wanted to move away from the homosexual
(24:22):
feelings I experienced. Why did you want to stop those
feelings if you don't mind, I was not comfortable with them.
I got more annoyed by the gay conversion guy than
James did. I was livid that this man could come
out with this shit basically, and that plenty of impressionable
(24:43):
people from across the UK would fall for it. It
was amazing having Dan there to take over the mic
and shout this guy down and tell him he's wrong
from a kind of non emotional place, because obviously for
me to do that, it's a lot more raw. Dan
can come at it differently. The conversations James and Dan
(25:03):
have had about the importance of being an ally have
changed both of them and have helped them step into
social justice issues beyond the domain of queer rights. Being
white in the summer of twenty twenty has given both
of them an ordinary privilege that they can use to
speak out against anti black violence. Dan and I both
went to the Black Lives Matter protest in London, and
(25:23):
I really felt we needed to be there because you
can be nervous and uncomfortable and think it's not your issue,
it's not your plight. But as a gay person, I
know that I need allies, and so I wanted to
be there as an ally And there was a banner
there that said it all like, use your white privilege
(25:44):
to end white privilege. And I think if I've learned
anything throughout Black Lives Matter, it's that silence equals death
and that we need to stand up and say something.
And we're meant to feel uncomfortable. Right. If we want
to live in a society that's safe and fair for
all people, then each and every one of us needs
to embrace a bit more discomfort. Marginalized groups, of course,
(26:07):
don't really have a choice about this. They're forced to
be uncomfortable all the time. But the research shows that
individuals from non marginalized identities need to embrace their fair
share too, if we're ever going to build the kind
of world we want to live in. When we return
from the break, we'll see the power of this discomfort
embracing approach. We'll talk to a straight white ally who
(26:28):
spent the last seventy years feeling actively uncomfortable in the
fight for racial justice. We'll see that embracing the discomfort
that comes with this work, beyond simply being the right
thing to do, can also prove an unexpected path to
finding purpose and achieving happiness. The happiness Lap will be
right back. I was five years old being raised in
(26:56):
the town called Yonkers, New York, and looked outside my
bedom window one afternoon saw my father's image swing from
a tree with people under the tree picketing. Richard Lapchick
was introduced to the discomfort that comes from being a
white ally very early on in life. The crowd was
hanging in effigy of his dad. Some reports say they
even set fire to it. I had no idea what
(27:16):
it was about, except that they were angry. Richard's father,
Joe Lapchick, was head coach of the New York Knicks.
He had just signed Nat Sweetwater Clifton, one of the
first African American players in the NBA. To say that
his signing was wildly unpopular in nineteen fifty would be
an understatement. And for several years after that, I'd picked
up the extension phone in our house, my dad not
(27:38):
knowing I was listening, and it was racial epithets after
racial epithet being hurled at him. Before coaching for the Knicks,
Joe was a superstar in his own right. In the
nineteen twenties, he played center for the fabled Original Celtics.
Back then, basketball was segregated, but Joe's team chose to
play games against the New York Rends, the best African
(27:58):
American team of the day. There were race riots that
took place during the game. People stormed the court to
attack the players. The Celtics and the Wrens literally took
the court with knives packed in their socks to fend
themselves defend themselves if they were attacked by angry fans.
As the two teams traveled the country, Richard's dad saw
(28:18):
the racism that the Rents faced almost daily. The Celtics
stayed in fancy hotels that the Wrens weren't allowed to enter.
The Celtics could eat wherever they wanted, but the Rens
would rarely get served. There were even several occasions when
white cashiers refused to pump gas for the Wren's bus.
Joe decided he wanted to do something more than just
play on the court alongside the Wrens, so he developed
(28:40):
an opening game tradition that drew even more fire from
the fans. My dad and his opposing center, Tursann Cooper,
would not shake hands like people do at sporting events normally,
but would actually embrace each other and sometimes kiss each
other because they wanted fans in those stands to understand
that this game was about more than a great Hall
of Fame basketball game. It was about what their vision
(29:02):
was that America could someday become. As a teen, Richards
seems set on a career on the court, just like
his dad, I wanted nothing more than to be an
NBA player. I was six ft tall in the eighth
grade and one of the tallest players in the city,
and I was heavily recruited. Richard was accepted into a
prestigious basketball camp. It was there that he saw the
(29:22):
racism his father had witnessed a generation before was still
being directed at players of color. There were five other
white guys and a black guy at the camp, and
one of the white guys was hurling the N word
at the black guy for the first three days until
I finally challenged him. The kid knocked Richard out cool,
but as the science of ordinary privilege might suggest, Richard
(29:43):
thinks his challenge did at least help to prevent further
racist incidents. He also developed a lifelong friendship with the
black player. He helped a man who would later become
the basketball legend we know today as Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
As a fifteen year old white kid, I suddenly had
a young African American lens with which I could see
racism in America and what it was doing to communities
(30:05):
of color. And I decided, as a fifteen year old
that I was and the rest of my life working
in the area of civil rights. Richard is now a professor, author,
and human rights activist, someone the NCAA recently christened the
Racial Conscience of Sports. He campaigned for years and supported
the anti apartheid movement and worked to ban South African
(30:25):
teams from participating in international sports. I thought, maybe, for
the first time in my life, I'd done something Worthwhile
I was working late in my college office, there was
a knock on the door at ten forty five, and
I just assumed there was a campus security but when
I opened the door instead, it was two men wearing
stocking masks. The men beat Richard unconscious, causing extensive kidney
(30:47):
and liver damage, as well as a hernia and a concussion.
They also carved the N word into his stomach. With
a pair of officessors. Laying in the hospital that night,
I knew that I was going to spend the rest
of my life using the sports platform to address what
I thought at that time was just going to be racism,
but all social justice issues. I felt that if they
(31:08):
had people are to the length they did to try
to stop my father twenty eight years before, and to
the length they had just gone to try to stop
me that night, that they must have felt we were
having an impact on race relations in the United States
that they didn't want to see. Even though the beating
stiffened richards resolve, he never allowed the ordeal to undermine
the humility that, he argues all allies need to maintain
(31:29):
in the fight for justice. At the time of the attack,
people said to me, well, now you must understand what
it's like to be black, and I said, I don't
understand what it's like to be black. At any given point,
I could have walked away from the civil rights movement
and just rejoined that white middle class where all the
privileges that we have and not face what a person
of color phases every day when they go out of
their house. This is one of the reasons Richard is
(31:51):
so passionate that more allies need to step up, especially
when it comes to the fight against anti black violence.
Everybody can't be on the front lines, but everybody's got
to go off the sidelines. You've got to get involved
in some way. It might be picking whatever the issue
is you want to be part of, read about it,
study it under standard, find an organization that's doing something
(32:11):
about it, volunteer for it, and maybe then you might
become emboldened after that to do more. But at least
get involved with something. And we've had hundreds of years
of oppression in the United States that have created what
we're dealing with now, and it's going to take some
time and strong struggle and effort on the part of
everybody to address those issues. But even after reading and
(32:33):
listening and volunteering, don't be tempted to get a little
performative and show off what a woke good person you are.
To be a better ally, we need to refrain from
the so called cookie seeking behavior as activists refer to it.
Reward seeking doesn't help, and worse, it can yet again
create more emotional labor for the group you're allegedly trying
to help. This has to be a selfless act. I
(32:54):
mean it can be a rewarding act for you know,
everything that I've been involved with I feel incredibly rewarded by.
But I didn't get involved to get rewarded. And I
think that that's what people need to understand, and I
think most people get it when you hear it in
those terms. Simply put, allies, it's not about you. Caring
about justice means you've got to be willing to do
(33:14):
the work without a cookie at the end from the
group you're trying to help. But this doesn't mean the
allyship was without its sweet rewards. The good news, as
Richard has seen firsthand, is that putting in all this
hard work is worth it in the end, not just
for fixing society, but also for our own personal sense
of meaning and well being. I have an incredibly happy life.
(33:37):
There were definitely moments in my life that were difficult
to get through, but those moments all made me stronger
in the end, and being stronger makes me happier. As
we discuss so often in the Happiness Lab, doing good
for others makes us feel good, often in profound and
long lasting ways we don't even realize. Doing good for
(33:57):
the world also provides us with greater emotional resilience, which
I saw firsthand talking to Richard, because despite all the
anger and division we've seen in twenty twenty, Richard is
brimming with hope. I remember in nineteen seventy seven I
was in Luanda and Zambia with the person who was
my mentor. His name was George Hauser, and he had
founded the Anti Apartheid Movement, an anti colonial move in
(34:18):
the United States. And I said, George, do you think
that Kenney, Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, what was then Rhodesia,
and South Africa will be free in our lifetime? And
he said, rich I feel something's different. I feel that
there's going to be changed. Less than twenty years later,
Richards stood on the steps of the Union building in
South Africa and watched Nelson Mandela sworn in as president.
(34:41):
If that man who had been a political prisoner and
the most racist system of government on the face of
the earth and the second half of the twentieth century
could become its president, then anything and everything is possible
if we put our mind to it. As they said
at the top of the show, Making this episode has
been particularly tough for me. I'm a biracial woman, but
I'm also white passing, and that means I'm often in
(35:02):
the unique position of seeing some of the anti black
racism that my friends and colleagues experience all the time,
while simultaneously having the realization that my skin color protects
me from most of it. I don't always realize the
incredible privilege that comes with all that, and the responsibility
I have to be an ally to all identities that
are facing injustice. While working on this episode, I've spent
(35:25):
the entire time worried if I'm using the right language,
or if I'm choosing the right guests, or if I've
done the best job I could in raising these issues.
None of this was fun or comfortable, but it's exactly
the sort of discomfort that marginalize people and those that
don't have my skin privilege go through all the time.
They don't get to avoid it, and so honestly neither
should I. Plus, the science of allyships suggests that all
(35:49):
the discomfort I'm experiencing will ultimately make me happier because
it's necessary for becoming the anti racist builder that I
really want to be. But it's also worth validating that
all this is really hard, but there's no time like
the present. If each of us is willing to intentionally
take on a bit more discomfort to do our part
to fight system of injustice, then we might be able
(36:11):
to build a world that brings genuine happiness to all people.
Thanks so much for joining me for this second season
of The Happiness Lab. I hope it's taught you newde
tips you can use to make yourself and our world
a little bit happier. The Happiness Lab is co written
(36:36):
and produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed
by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by
Evan Viola, Pete Notaton also helped with production. Joseph Friedman
checked our facts and our editing was done by Sophie
Crane McKinnon. Special thanks to mail LaBelle, Carli Nigliori, Heather Faine,
Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, Jacob Weisberg, and my
(36:58):
agent Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you
by Pushkin Industries and me Doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin. This episode is the last in our current season.
It's also been a difficult one to make. Like all
our shows, it tries to strike a cautiously hopeful tone
because I do believe that each and every one of
us can make positive changes that will make our lives happier.
(00:36):
But this episode isn't just about how to be happy
in your own life. It's about the need to fight
injustice and the structure is around us that prevent whole
groups of people from living happy lives. And that means
that this episode touches on some tough issues, things like
racism and homophobia, as well as stories about hate crimes.
We started work on this episode before the killing of
George Floyd and all the important conversations about anti black
(00:59):
violence that have followed. But I hope you'll still find
important evidence based tips for how you can personally fight injustice,
including tips that I hope will be especially useful for
listeners who are not themselves members of marginalized groups and
who want to learn how they can help. It was Sunday,
June twelfth, twenty sixteen, right in the middle of Pride Month.
(01:23):
More than three hundred people had gathered at a Latin
event at Pulse, a gay dance club in Orlando, Florida,
and just before closing time, a gunman walked in and
opened fire. Forty nine people were murdered and another fifty
(01:43):
three were wounded. It was one of the deadliest mass
shootings on US soil and one of the most vicious
attacks on LGBTQ people anywhere in the world. It left
the global community reeling. After the Pulse attack, I went
into work and I didn't think anyone mentioned it at all,
(02:07):
and obviously I was not in a place my mental
health had taken a real turn. That day has had
so many queer people and no one said anything. James
Barr is a comedian and podcaster living in London. Like
lots of queer people, on the Monday morning after the
Pulse shooting, James didn't get help pourings of sympathy from
his coworkers. No one asked how he was doing, and
(02:29):
no one even spoke out about the tragedy. And it
wasn't until seven pm that night. I went to my
improv comedy rehearsal and as I walked in, my friend
Amanda said, are you okay? And gave me a hug
out of nowhere. Had it really struck me? Because I
was like, Wow, no one has asked me that all
day today. You're the only person that realized I might
(02:51):
be affected by that, or that something had even happened.
Everyone else was just completely oblivious. Those co workers probably
weren't intending to cause James harm. Most of them would
probably say they believed in gay rights, and if asked directly,
that they were appalled by the Pulse attack. But despite
all these good intentions, there's silence that day sent a
(03:11):
different message that's really triggering because you feel alone. It
takes you back to being at your mum's house when
you realize you're gay and you can't tell anyone, and
you're like thirteen, and you're sat there like, oh my god,
I'm on my own. No one else is gay. If
you're a straight sis gender person like me listening to James,
(03:32):
you may remember not being sure what to say when
you heard about the Pulse tragedy. You may have known
that you needed to say something, but you weren't sure
what or how. Unfortunately, none of these good intentions matter
to James at the time that day, any comment, however awkward,
would have been better than silence, because at least then
I know they see me. Now, I'm guessing that every
(03:53):
person listening to this podcast right now thinks of themselves
as a good person, someone who's committed to justice and inclusivity,
and that you probably agree that society would be a
happier place if all people were treated equally, no matter
what their sexual, gender, racial, or ethnic identity. But as
James's story reveals, lots of us feel to act on
(04:14):
these feelings, not because we're bad people, but often because
we're not sure how. If we really want our societies
to be happier, we need to actively counter the bigotry
and violence that affects so many identities on a near
daily basis. But changing the deep seated structures that cause
all this injustice is going to take an all hands
(04:34):
on deck approach, which raises an important psychological question. Why
do well intentioned people who believe in justice often do nothing.
Are there lies of the mind that prevent good people
from speaking up and taking action? And if so, how
can we deal with these dumb parts of our psychology
so that we can create a happier and more just world.
(04:58):
Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to
be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What
if our minds are lying to us, leading us away
from or really make us happy. The good news is
that understanding the science of the mind can point us
all back in the right direction. You're listening to the
Happiness Lab the doctor Laurie Santos. A lot of people,
(05:24):
myself included, believe in adversity, believe in inclusion, believe in
equity like there is no doubt those are sincere beliefs.
Those beliefs, however, do not in any way change systems
or structures or biases. All they do is just sit
as beliefs. This is Dolly chug an NYU professor, an
author of The Person You Mean to Be, How good
(05:44):
people fight by us to go from believing something to
building something. To go from the belief to the action,
we have to build some skills, We need some tools.
Dolly argues that each of us need to go from
being a believer to becoming what she calls a builder,
someone who takes an active role. Dolly's builder idea is
similar to what historian and American University professor Abraham Kentdy
(06:08):
has called becoming an anti racist. The idea is that
it's not enough to simply not believe in bigoted stuff
or not be racist ourselves. We need to honestly confront
all the assumptions we've internalized simply by growing up in
an unjust society. The problem, though, is that our lying
minds make it super hard to see all the structural
inequalities around us, especially if we're lucky enough not to
(06:30):
experience that oppression directly. When little kids play with those
spy ink pens spy pens where when they write, you
don't see anything, and then there's a little blue ultraviolet
type light and then you can see what's written. You've
got to do that much work to see the systemic
stuff unless you're experiencing it directly. I mean sometimes even
when you're experiencing it directly, you don't see it. But
you have got to do the work of finding the
(06:52):
ultraviolet light, shining it, and actively looking for it. Dolly
has had to shine that same light on her own biases.
As a straight, sis gender woman of Indian descent. She
knows what it's like to experience discrimination based on her ethnicity,
but she also recognizes that her sexuality, race able bodied status,
and education level have given her a whole host of
(07:13):
amazing privileges. Writing The Person You Mean to Be was
her way of coming to terms with all her own
injustice blind spots. One of the reasons I love Dolly's
books so much is because she's super honest about the
fact that she's not perfect and that she too needs
to put in work to become a builder. I'm risk averse,
and I always want to say the right thing, and
I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. I don't love
(07:34):
conflicts like all these things will pull me into doing less,
not more. Ironically enough, this urge to be seen as
not being prejudiced can make us do stuff that's pretty
much the opposite. We are less likely to reach out
because we think we might say this wrong thing. We
are less likely to take an action, or to call
(07:55):
a legislator, or to introduce ourselves to a neighbor, or
to try to say someone's name who we don't know
how to pronounce. There's even work suggesting that our worries
about seeming prejudice take up a lot of mental bandwidth.
My colleague ye Jennifer Richison and Princeton psychologist Nicole Shelton
had white subjects chat about a controversial issue with either
(08:15):
a white or black stranger. Afterwards, participants did a tough
attentional task known as the Stroop test, in which you
read the names of colors as quickly as you can
despite the words being printed in the wrong colored font.
It's actually pretty hard to read blue when it's printed
in yellow. But Richison and Shelton found that white subjects
did significantly worse on that Stroop test after talking to
(08:39):
a black person. The researchers concluded that subjects left these
interracial interactions feeling more cognitively and emotionally drained than if
they chatted with someone of the same race, and later
work from Richson's lab shows that white subjects have an
even more pronounced performance dip when they're reminded to try
and not seem racist during the interaction. Our minds go
(08:59):
through a whole host of mental gymnastics when our self
image is a decent person is threatened. It's what psychologists
call motivated reasoning, and the process of motivated reasoning can
sometimes get so extreme that we even lie to ourselves
and reinvent our past. Let's do a little quiz. Shall
we I want you to rate how much you agree
(09:20):
with the following statement from one I strongly disagree to
seven I strongly agree. Ready, how much do you agree
with this statement my life has been full of hardships?
Got your answer? Great? Oh wait, actually I forgot. I
wanted to remind you of something before you answer the question.
Please remember that most social scientists agree that even today,
(09:42):
white Americans enjoy many privileges that Black Americans do not.
White Americans are advantaged in the domains of academics, housing, healthcare, jobs,
and more compared to Black Americans. Sor right back to
the question from one I strongly disagree to seven strongly agree?
How much do you agree with this statement my life
has been full of hardships? Psychologist Taylor Phillips and Brian
(10:07):
Lowry pose this same question to a group of white participants,
with half the subject's first hearing that statement about race
that I just read to you. You probably think that
once white subjects were reminded of the greater obstacles that
people of color face, that they'd be less likely to
claim that their own life had been filled with hardships.
But in fact, Phillips and Lowry found the exact opposite pattern.
(10:28):
On average, white people said their life was significantly harder
when they were reminded of their racial privilege. Phillips and
Lowry came up with a rather catchy name for the
striking example of motivated reasoning, borrowing from the musical Annie.
They called it the hard knock life effect. It's the
hard knock life for us. It's the hard knock life
for us. Satrio plea success when we think about all
(10:58):
the unseen gifts we get just from existing as a
non marginalized person. When we realized that all the bad
stuff in our life would probably be worse if we
weren't white, or straight, or sistent, or able bodied, or
middle class. That can make us feel kind of bad,
like we got some benefit that wasn't really fair, even
if we didn't intend to. Rather than experience all this discomfort,
(11:21):
our minds try to cook the facts. We search our
memory banks for the kinds of hardships that might make
our own lives look less easy and therefore less privilege
relative to a marginalized person. Despite writing an entire book
on fighting injustice, Dolly is the first to admit that
it's easy to fall under this way. Of motivated reasoning. Rationally,
(11:43):
Dolly knows that she's had a whole host of life
experiences that other people weren't lucky enough to have. When
I say I have privilege, it's not that I haven't
worked super hard for things. It's not that I haven't
had some really serious challenges in my life. And yet
if someone says to me, like, you know, you just
went to fancy schools, we'll hold on. You know, I
(12:05):
can feel my blood boiling in that moment. That is
an example of what it looks like to deny privilege.
But Dolly has found that there is a way to
stop all the mental gymnastics that lead decent people down
this not so good path. The solution involves dropping the
fiction that were good people in the first place. I've
been on this campaign to get people to let go
(12:27):
of being a good person and strive and said to
be a goodish person. We'll learn what it means to
be good ish when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. HI, welcome,
(12:47):
Welcome along, listeners. What's funny? I just say, that's a
really weird thing to say. It's kind of creepy. A
welcome listeners. James Barr and Dan Hudson are the duo
behind the award winning LGBTQ podcast A Gay in a
Non Gay? Should we kind of explain what this is? Dan?
Dad's girlfriend is is one of my best friends. But
(13:07):
it's also Dan's girlfriends, So it's awkward because we're not
really friends? Are we are? Not? This is news to me.
I thought, no, no, not, what do you mean? Ready?
Before it's launched in twenty fifteen, most of James's friends
were women or gay men. Dan, who was the show's
title suggests, is a non gay, wasn't the sort of
person that James usually hung out with. I wasn't really
(13:29):
interested in guys unless I was going to have their
number in my phone, and obviously Dan was not likely
to be in my phone. Dan loves metal music and
he can be quite angry. Sometimes he's got a beard.
Not that that's, you know, not gay, but I think
I'm quite firm and Dan's very mask Because of their
different identities and experiences, working together on the podcast meant
(13:52):
bridging a whole host of tricky issues. At the beginning,
I really didn't want to be there. Why do I
want to talk to a straight guy? Why do I
have to sit here and educate someone and explain what
it's like just ordering a drink at the bar and
being terrified that the barman will know I'm gay? Why
do I have to tell him like how scary it
(14:13):
is to hold hands with a boyfriend walking down the street,
And I just I guess I felt like happy in
my bubble of gay friends. And when I sat down
with Dan and had to explain all the things that
I've never really said out loud before, it was exhausting.
(14:33):
Part of the exhaustion comes from the fact that their
podcast doesn't shy away from controversial topics. This is so
personal awful. This podcast is not affiliated with any other
thing that Dan and I do in are other lives.
Most of their episodes are not safe for work because
no aspect of James's gay sex life is off limits.
Dan's often in the position of asking the cluelest question
(14:55):
that many straight people have. Answering what a douche was
was pretty awkward. So Dan and I have spent a
long time talking about the ins and outs of anal
cleaning and how that works, and also Dan just being
so confused by the entire thing, like you do what podcasting.
(15:15):
Conversations like these have turned James and Dan into LGBTQ
champions and unlikely friends. They're shared laughter has given them
the trust needed to talk about even more sensitive topics,
things like HIV, the unique mental health challenges faced by
the LGBTQ community, and the injustice and violence against queer
people that straights sis gender people often don't see. If
(15:37):
I'm honest, I feel glad that we have had all
those conversations because it will hopefully educate other people listening
so that they don't have to have the same conversations.
Dan admits that he hadn't thought much about LGBTQ issues
before starting the podcast. His learning curve has been steep.
We called it a gay and ann gay because we
(15:57):
had to call it something. You hated the title, didn't you,
because you didn't want to be You didn't want to
be marginalized as a non gay person, which was hysterical
to me because why should I have to be a
gay person? And now I think I'm out of being
a game more than they ever have. And Dan, you're
kind of I mean, proud would be the wrong word,
because we're going down a straight pride territory. But you
are happy to call yourself a non gay. Yeah. Well,
(16:20):
I mean it's what it is, isn't it? That is
what I am. Since co hosting this podcast, Dance had
to navigate a lot of the moral identity threat that
comes from recognizing his non gay privilege. But unlike other
straight people, Dance had to deal with all that discomfort
with thousands of people listening. Dan's been amazing, He's taken
a lot of that on board. And maybe, and I
(16:42):
think you've helped me just realized this. Now. Maybe the
way Dan is a good ally is because he's awkward.
He's awkward about asking these questions, He's awkward about learning
and speaking up for gay people. He feels awkward, And maybe,
as an ally for any marginalized community, you're meant to
just feel a bit awkward to kind of understand it
and make sure you're saying and doing the right things.
James is onto something important here, because the science suggests
(17:04):
that the path to becoming a better ally often involved
embracing just awkwardness. It comes from accepting that you're probably
going to screw up. As psychologist Dolly Chug explains, it's
not a matter of if a non virtualized person is
going to do or say something dumb. But when we
are going to screw up, period, we are, and when
we mess up, we need to immediately own the harm
(17:27):
we've caused. First of all, I am sorry. It's not
I am sorry if you were offended. Sorry if I
hurt your feelings, I'm sorry if you took it that way.
Those are all not what we want to say. It
is I am sorry, I have done harm, I have
messed up. I am going to do better. I am
going to learn that commitment to learn from our mistakes
(17:47):
and do better in the future is the first step
to accepting that we're not a good person yet. That's
why Dolly wants us to strive instead to be good
ish people. And by good ish, I'm not saying it's
like not quite good enough for a lower standard than good.
What I'm actually arguing is quite opposite. It's it's a
higher standard because as someone who never assumes their good
(18:09):
it's that I'm always looking for ways in which I
could learn, or where my blind spots are, or where
I could notice something I might have missed, or a
different perspective. It's obvious that making silly mistakes it's necessary
for learning almost anything in life, but we're often super
resistant to believing that we can improve, something that renowned
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has called having a fixed mindset.
(18:33):
Dolly thinks this rigid fixed mindset thinking is even more
pronounced in cases that involve are moral identities. I'm a
good person or I'm not. There's no working progress in there.
And where we know from the mindset research is that
when you're in a fixed mindset and you make a mistake,
your brain activation actually goes down. You actually withdraw attention
from the mistake. Why because there's no point looking a mistake.
(18:54):
You're fixed. You're not going to grow to become better allies.
We all need to switch to a different mindset. The
growth mindset is the one where, of course we still
care deeply about doing the right thing and being a
good person, but we acknowledge that it's going to take
lots of work and mistakes to get there. People with
a growth mindset are willing to embrace harder and harder
(19:15):
learning challenges. They even devote more neural resources to paying
attention to their mistakes. Why because a mistake means I
have an opportunity to get better. I'm mortified, but I
can get better. The idea is to own it, to
say it, and to act on it. Carol Dwek, along
with her Stanford colleague Jamil Zaki, have shown that our
mindsets can have a significant impact on how we approach
(19:36):
hard identity challenges. They found that white participants with a
growth mindset spent more time actually listening to a black
person describe personal challenges than white subjects with a fixed mindset.
The good news is that it's pretty easy to develop
a growth mindset. It can be as easy as reminding
yourself that you can change with a simple three letter
word yet, as in, I'm not a good person yet,
(19:59):
but I can be if I put in some work.
The simple act of reminding ourselves we can change can
have a huge effect on our willingness to engage with
tough racial situations, own our own mistakes when they inevitably
come up, and put in the work to make amends
and do better in the future. A growth mindset can
also help us break through the discomfort that often comes
(20:20):
with stepping in as an ally to fight the injustice
around us. Something non gay podcaster Dan Hudson had to
learn firsthand. So I wrote an article for the Metro newspaper,
which is the British equivalent of like USA today. To
be fair, it was James's idea. He said, you should
write an article about what it's like being an allied
to the LGBT community, and I was like, well, well,
(20:41):
if I'm not one, like, who's deciding that I am one?
Prepping the article was a tremendous amount of work for Dan,
and he spent the entire time fighting to keep that
old fixed mindset at bay God, I really want to
get this right and make the point correctly, and the
easiest things I can't do this. This is just like
too difficult. In the end, Dan was able to see
(21:03):
the difficulty as a way to learn rather than a
reason to run away. The result was a powerful article
entitled I'm a white middle class SIS straight mail and
this is how I learned to be an LGBTQ plus ally.
It was one of the first times Dan had publicly
applied the word ally to himself. It's it's a tricky
(21:23):
words because James refers to me as an ally and
that's great. It's one of those words that I think,
if you're going to declare yourself as one. You've really
got to be like manning the barricades. You've really got
to be fighting for that cause all day and every day.
And I'm not sure that I necessarily am, or maybe
(21:44):
should be, I think, and I might be wrong. Dan
call me out. That's because you're a straight, CIS white
guy with all the privilege, so to you having to
stand up for anything feels maybe insincere because it's not
his cause. But here's where that article started. I was
fed up of constantly having to stand up for gay
people all the time, and I just felt like maybe
(22:06):
it was time a straight person did it, because there's
only so much gay noise we can make, and sometimes
straight people are just going to ignore that. Yet again,
James is right here. Not only is it morally wrong
to always leave marginalized groups with the burden of speaking out,
but the science shows it's often more effective for a
non marginalized person to point out bigotry. We absolutely, when
(22:29):
we're not from the targeted group, have more influence and
standing than we assume. We don't feel that way in
the moment, but the data is really convincing. One study
found that white people who called someone out for using
a racist stereotype are judged less negatively than a black
person who does exactly the same thing using exactly the
same words in tone. The same study found that the
(22:50):
offender feels more guilty and it's more likely to apologize
if a white person steps in. Another study showed white
participants videos in which a white or black person called
someone out for a racist comment. Participants were more persuaded
by the argument and thought the interaction was less rude
when a white person was the one doing a calling out.
(23:11):
Dolly's book christened this phenomenon ordinary privilege. We're not speaking
instead of them, We're not centering ourselves over them. This
is not about our feelings. You know, when it might
comes to us, because it might come to us a
little more easily. We amplify what they were saying, We
pass it back, We create the space for them to
be heard, and then step aside. Okay, are you nervous?
(23:39):
Am I? Yeah? Dan has gotten better at knowing when
to use his ordinary privilege. Like the time the duo
we're making a show for the BBC, I'm openly going
into a room where a man is going to judge
me for being gay, and I don't want to be
judged for being gay. And I'll warn you the memory
of this incident still makes Dand so angry that he
can't help but curse. But I'll let James set the scene.
(24:02):
We did a documentary about gay conversion therapy and we
both sat there in front of this guy that performs
this pseudoscience on people, and that was really tough. I
want to talk about your journey and how you came
to this. I wanted to move away from the homosexual
(24:22):
feelings I experienced. Why did you want to stop those
feelings if you don't mind, I was not comfortable with them.
I got more annoyed by the gay conversion guy than
James did. I was livid that this man could come
out with this shit basically, and that plenty of impressionable
(24:43):
people from across the UK would fall for it. It
was amazing having Dan there to take over the mic
and shout this guy down and tell him he's wrong
from a kind of non emotional place, because obviously for
me to do that, it's a lot more raw. Dan
can come at it differently. The conversations James and Dan
(25:03):
have had about the importance of being an ally have
changed both of them and have helped them step into
social justice issues beyond the domain of queer rights. Being
white in the summer of twenty twenty has given both
of them an ordinary privilege that they can use to
speak out against anti black violence. Dan and I both
went to the Black Lives Matter protest in London, and
(25:23):
I really felt we needed to be there because you
can be nervous and uncomfortable and think it's not your issue,
it's not your plight. But as a gay person, I
know that I need allies, and so I wanted to
be there as an ally And there was a banner
there that said it all like, use your white privilege
(25:44):
to end white privilege. And I think if I've learned
anything throughout Black Lives Matter, it's that silence equals death
and that we need to stand up and say something.
And we're meant to feel uncomfortable. Right. If we want
to live in a society that's safe and fair for
all people, then each and every one of us needs
to embrace a bit more discomfort. Marginalized groups, of course,
(26:07):
don't really have a choice about this. They're forced to
be uncomfortable all the time. But the research shows that
individuals from non marginalized identities need to embrace their fair
share too, if we're ever going to build the kind
of world we want to live in. When we return
from the break, we'll see the power of this discomfort
embracing approach. We'll talk to a straight white ally who
(26:28):
spent the last seventy years feeling actively uncomfortable in the
fight for racial justice. We'll see that embracing the discomfort
that comes with this work, beyond simply being the right
thing to do, can also prove an unexpected path to
finding purpose and achieving happiness. The happiness Lap will be
right back. I was five years old being raised in
(26:56):
the town called Yonkers, New York, and looked outside my
bedom window one afternoon saw my father's image swing from
a tree with people under the tree picketing. Richard Lapchick
was introduced to the discomfort that comes from being a
white ally very early on in life. The crowd was
hanging in effigy of his dad. Some reports say they
even set fire to it. I had no idea what
(27:16):
it was about, except that they were angry. Richard's father,
Joe Lapchick, was head coach of the New York Knicks.
He had just signed Nat Sweetwater Clifton, one of the
first African American players in the NBA. To say that
his signing was wildly unpopular in nineteen fifty would be
an understatement. And for several years after that, I'd picked
up the extension phone in our house, my dad not
(27:38):
knowing I was listening, and it was racial epithets after
racial epithet being hurled at him. Before coaching for the Knicks,
Joe was a superstar in his own right. In the
nineteen twenties, he played center for the fabled Original Celtics.
Back then, basketball was segregated, but Joe's team chose to
play games against the New York Rends, the best African
(27:58):
American team of the day. There were race riots that
took place during the game. People stormed the court to
attack the players. The Celtics and the Wrens literally took
the court with knives packed in their socks to fend
themselves defend themselves if they were attacked by angry fans.
As the two teams traveled the country, Richard's dad saw
(28:18):
the racism that the Rents faced almost daily. The Celtics
stayed in fancy hotels that the Wrens weren't allowed to enter.
The Celtics could eat wherever they wanted, but the Rens
would rarely get served. There were even several occasions when
white cashiers refused to pump gas for the Wren's bus.
Joe decided he wanted to do something more than just
play on the court alongside the Wrens, so he developed
(28:40):
an opening game tradition that drew even more fire from
the fans. My dad and his opposing center, Tursann Cooper,
would not shake hands like people do at sporting events normally,
but would actually embrace each other and sometimes kiss each
other because they wanted fans in those stands to understand
that this game was about more than a great Hall
of Fame basketball game. It was about what their vision
(29:02):
was that America could someday become. As a teen, Richards
seems set on a career on the court, just like
his dad, I wanted nothing more than to be an
NBA player. I was six ft tall in the eighth
grade and one of the tallest players in the city,
and I was heavily recruited. Richard was accepted into a
prestigious basketball camp. It was there that he saw the
(29:22):
racism his father had witnessed a generation before was still
being directed at players of color. There were five other
white guys and a black guy at the camp, and
one of the white guys was hurling the N word
at the black guy for the first three days until
I finally challenged him. The kid knocked Richard out cool,
but as the science of ordinary privilege might suggest, Richard
(29:43):
thinks his challenge did at least help to prevent further
racist incidents. He also developed a lifelong friendship with the
black player. He helped a man who would later become
the basketball legend we know today as Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
As a fifteen year old white kid, I suddenly had
a young African American lens with which I could see
racism in America and what it was doing to communities
(30:05):
of color. And I decided, as a fifteen year old
that I was and the rest of my life working
in the area of civil rights. Richard is now a professor, author,
and human rights activist, someone the NCAA recently christened the
Racial Conscience of Sports. He campaigned for years and supported
the anti apartheid movement and worked to ban South African
(30:25):
teams from participating in international sports. I thought, maybe, for
the first time in my life, I'd done something Worthwhile
I was working late in my college office, there was
a knock on the door at ten forty five, and
I just assumed there was a campus security but when
I opened the door instead, it was two men wearing
stocking masks. The men beat Richard unconscious, causing extensive kidney
(30:47):
and liver damage, as well as a hernia and a concussion.
They also carved the N word into his stomach. With
a pair of officessors. Laying in the hospital that night,
I knew that I was going to spend the rest
of my life using the sports platform to address what
I thought at that time was just going to be racism,
but all social justice issues. I felt that if they
(31:08):
had people are to the length they did to try
to stop my father twenty eight years before, and to
the length they had just gone to try to stop
me that night, that they must have felt we were
having an impact on race relations in the United States
that they didn't want to see. Even though the beating
stiffened richards resolve, he never allowed the ordeal to undermine
the humility that, he argues all allies need to maintain
(31:29):
in the fight for justice. At the time of the attack,
people said to me, well, now you must understand what
it's like to be black, and I said, I don't
understand what it's like to be black. At any given point,
I could have walked away from the civil rights movement
and just rejoined that white middle class where all the
privileges that we have and not face what a person
of color phases every day when they go out of
their house. This is one of the reasons Richard is
(31:51):
so passionate that more allies need to step up, especially
when it comes to the fight against anti black violence.
Everybody can't be on the front lines, but everybody's got
to go off the sidelines. You've got to get involved
in some way. It might be picking whatever the issue
is you want to be part of, read about it,
study it under standard, find an organization that's doing something
(32:11):
about it, volunteer for it, and maybe then you might
become emboldened after that to do more. But at least
get involved with something. And we've had hundreds of years
of oppression in the United States that have created what
we're dealing with now, and it's going to take some
time and strong struggle and effort on the part of
everybody to address those issues. But even after reading and
(32:33):
listening and volunteering, don't be tempted to get a little
performative and show off what a woke good person you are.
To be a better ally, we need to refrain from
the so called cookie seeking behavior as activists refer to it.
Reward seeking doesn't help, and worse, it can yet again
create more emotional labor for the group you're allegedly trying
to help. This has to be a selfless act. I
(32:54):
mean it can be a rewarding act for you know,
everything that I've been involved with I feel incredibly rewarded by.
But I didn't get involved to get rewarded. And I
think that that's what people need to understand, and I
think most people get it when you hear it in
those terms. Simply put, allies, it's not about you. Caring
about justice means you've got to be willing to do
(33:14):
the work without a cookie at the end from the
group you're trying to help. But this doesn't mean the
allyship was without its sweet rewards. The good news, as
Richard has seen firsthand, is that putting in all this
hard work is worth it in the end, not just
for fixing society, but also for our own personal sense
of meaning and well being. I have an incredibly happy life.
(33:37):
There were definitely moments in my life that were difficult
to get through, but those moments all made me stronger
in the end, and being stronger makes me happier. As
we discuss so often in the Happiness Lab, doing good
for others makes us feel good, often in profound and
long lasting ways we don't even realize. Doing good for
(33:57):
the world also provides us with greater emotional resilience, which
I saw firsthand talking to Richard, because despite all the
anger and division we've seen in twenty twenty, Richard is
brimming with hope. I remember in nineteen seventy seven I
was in Luanda and Zambia with the person who was
my mentor. His name was George Hauser, and he had
founded the Anti Apartheid Movement, an anti colonial move in
(34:18):
the United States. And I said, George, do you think
that Kenney, Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, what was then Rhodesia,
and South Africa will be free in our lifetime? And
he said, rich I feel something's different. I feel that
there's going to be changed. Less than twenty years later,
Richards stood on the steps of the Union building in
South Africa and watched Nelson Mandela sworn in as president.
(34:41):
If that man who had been a political prisoner and
the most racist system of government on the face of
the earth and the second half of the twentieth century
could become its president, then anything and everything is possible
if we put our mind to it. As they said
at the top of the show, Making this episode has
been particularly tough for me. I'm a biracial woman, but
I'm also white passing, and that means I'm often in
(35:02):
the unique position of seeing some of the anti black
racism that my friends and colleagues experience all the time,
while simultaneously having the realization that my skin color protects
me from most of it. I don't always realize the
incredible privilege that comes with all that, and the responsibility
I have to be an ally to all identities that
are facing injustice. While working on this episode, I've spent
(35:25):
the entire time worried if I'm using the right language,
or if I'm choosing the right guests, or if I've
done the best job I could in raising these issues.
None of this was fun or comfortable, but it's exactly
the sort of discomfort that marginalize people and those that
don't have my skin privilege go through all the time.
They don't get to avoid it, and so honestly neither
should I. Plus, the science of allyships suggests that all
(35:49):
the discomfort I'm experiencing will ultimately make me happier because
it's necessary for becoming the anti racist builder that I
really want to be. But it's also worth validating that
all this is really hard, but there's no time like
the present. If each of us is willing to intentionally
take on a bit more discomfort to do our part
to fight system of injustice, then we might be able
(36:11):
to build a world that brings genuine happiness to all people.
Thanks so much for joining me for this second season
of The Happiness Lab. I hope it's taught you newde
tips you can use to make yourself and our world
a little bit happier. The Happiness Lab is co written
(36:36):
and produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed
by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by
Evan Viola, Pete Notaton also helped with production. Joseph Friedman
checked our facts and our editing was done by Sophie
Crane McKinnon. Special thanks to mail LaBelle, Carli Nigliori, Heather Faine,
Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, Jacob Weisberg, and my
(36:58):
agent Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you
by Pushkin Industries and me Doctor Laurie Santos
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