This is Democracy – Episode 69: Inequality in Higher Education

Female Speaker: This.

Male Speaker: Is Democracy.

Female Speaker: A podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational, and intersectional unheard voices living in the world’s.

Male Speaker: Most influential democracy.

Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today, we have another very special guest. We have my colleague and friend and distinguished scholar and teacher, Dr. Richard Reddick with us. He’s an award-winning Associate Professor of Education, Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas, where he serves in about 7,000 different roles. I don’t think there’s a role on campus that Rich has not served.

Dr. Richard Reddick: All unpaid.

Jeremi Suri: All unpaid. He works for food.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Yeah, pretty much.

Jeremi Suri: He serves as Coordinator of the Program in Higher Education Leadership. He has appointments in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies and the Warfield Center for African and African-American Studies. He’s also the Assistant Director of our really wonderful Plan II Honors Program. That’s a setting in which I often work with, Rich. He serves as a fellow at the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis. He’s been very active also in city affairs. He grew up in Austin and he served on the steering committee for the education working group of the task force that the Mayor created to look at institutional racism and structural inequality in the city of Austin and that’s, of course, an ongoing discussion that Rich is very much a contributor to. Rich, it’s great to have you here.

Dr. Richard Reddick: It’s good to be here Jeremy and Zachary. Thank you for inviting me. Quick addendum. So I’m no longer the Coordinator of the Master’s and Doctoral Program, but I’m now the Associate Dean for Equity Community Engagement and Outreach.

Jeremi Suri: I should have mentioned that, I’m sorry.

Dr. Richard Reddick: That’s because I didn’t update my bio, clearly.

Jeremi Suri: No.

Dr. Richard Reddick: That’s on me.

Jeremi Suri: Once again, you are getting asked to do more and more and we’re fortunate that you’re doing all these things.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Well, I’m fortunate to do it and also I’m compensated for doing it. But it’s all good. This is fun stuff and I’m trying to keep up with your exploits as well.

Jeremi Suri: It’s a mutual admiration society, Rich.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Is definitely is.

Jeremi Suri: So before we get into our discussion of these very difficult questions of inequality, institutional racism, and structural challenges in higher education. We have our scene setting poem from Zachary Suri. What is your poem about today’s Zachary?

Zachary Suri: Well, my poem is entitled “Protagonist’s Perspective.”

Jeremi Suri: Let’s hear it.

Zachary Suri: It must be strange for you to walk through the doors that first morning, peeling paint, walking up the stairs. The way you are constantly walking between low ceiling hallways that resound in Spanish and endless n words around the endless, overwhelming bends of the passageways and equally frustrating triangle hallways that sounds so clearly like English. Sounds so clearly like the right side of town, strange and foreign, how we all seem to know each other already. The way we can program robots at 15, the way you feel like you are the only one who spends midnights cramming for biology quizzes, and it’s weird how you’re never the protagonist, the Latino girl with the long bangs floating in silence through classrooms. How you’re always the one who got in because of the color of your skin. You’re never the hero, the popular kid, the jock, the Valedictorian and it feels so strange to you to see it in her eyes and your white friends from the right side. The way we see someone like you walking through the halls and assume you are not like us, like you could never be the hero. The little snippets you can see leftover on our tongues, the bad schools, the good schools, the bad neighborhoods, the good ones. It is as if the bedrock of these floors is somehow beyond your reach though you walk the same superficial tile each day. It’s strange the way you are never the protagonist, never the hero, never the one who saves the day or admits they know the answer to some trick math question on one of those droning afternoons, cast away since kindergarten, losing the battle since birth. You must feel in a strange way like you don’t have a fighting chance to ever be that hero. Ever be the protagonist of your own story, the main plot line, you, not the system that surrounds your cast away streets and dark side of the tracks every day.

Jeremi Suri: That’s a particularly deep poem this week Zachary. What’s your key message here?

Zachary Suri: Well, my poem is really about what I imagine it must be like for someone of a minority background to attend a school as I do which is a magnet school that is majority white above a neighborhood school that in many ways is majority African-American and Hispanic and suffers from major institutional problems. And it’s really trying to imagine how hard it is even for those who make it to institutions like my school to even feel like they can be ambitious and can have a voice.

Jeremi Suri: This is something you witness every day?

Zachary Suri: Yeah. It’s something that I don’t personally feel. This is very much how I imagine it must feel for someone. But you can see it simply in the fact that so many of us at my school, unintentionally, recognize someone who’s African-American or Hispanic and immediately associate them with the other school because it’s right beneath us.

Jeremi Suri: Right. Rich, why do we find ourselves in these circumstances? They seem like not a good situation.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Wow. Zachary, props for that because as you were talking, I was reliving my high school experience, my undergraduate experience, and my graduate school experience, which mirror a lot of what you were talking about. One thing I think about is in my own work, I’ve theorized on a concept of the proximal experiences of being authored. In my work of mentoring, one thing I discovered, my advisor Bridget Terry Long, is an economist, and I went to her and told her I want to do a study on Black faculty mentors of Black students. She said, “That’s wonderful. What’s your comparison group?” I’m like, “Huh?” And… [LAUGHS] I’m like, “Well, I’m a critical race theorist and I’m in a phenomenologist.” She’s like, “You need a comparison group.” So I went out and doubled my sample and found white faculty mentors of Black students. What I discovered is that each of these people, as a phenomenologist. I dig into the lived experience, like what shaped your experience? How did you get to this place? People do the work they do. They don’t think about why they do it all the time. They just do it because it’s important, they like it. One thing that comes up with all the white faculty mentors was something in their lives. It could be historical. So it’s not coincidental that several of them were Jewish and said, “Look, I understand oppression. That is something my family knows a lot about.” I had a participant whose brother was gay and said, “I was a support system when he was in high school. I was the person who looked out for my parents were not very open.” I had a participant who was born in Scandinavia but grew up in Germany and that’s the difference and he dealt with being on the periphery as a kid. So they had a spite-y sense about being marginalized.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Dr. Richard Reddick: They would often not just inquire with other students, they care about all their students. But they would say, particularly when I look into a classroom of 25 students and there’s one African-American student, one Latinx student. I’d stick with that student to see how they are doing and it has to be done multiple times because I don’t want to make it sound like I’m expecting them to have problems, but I also know just by the experience of being one of the few, you must be carrying a burden and that they do is very deftly and very tactfully. So when you were talking, I was like, that’s exactly what it’s like. It’s like having the empathy to understand that that person’s lived experience is little different than the majority of folks. Doesn’t mean other folks don’t have problems and challenges and doesn’t mean this person is deficient. But it does mean that sometimes you need somebody to say like, “Man, this has just been hard. Like I notice I’m the only person.” I’ll just give you a quick anecdote from that dissertation study. Part of being a phenomenologist or qualitative researcher is building rapport. So I’m known for talking to people longer than the actual interview is just getting them to break the ice and this gentleman I was telling you about who was Scandinavian said, “Explain to me this thing about fraternities you have here. The Black fraternities and the white, I don’t understand it.” I happen to belong to a fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Incorporated and I explained to him like historically why they exist. It’s funny because previously the history of fraternities, sororities is about exclusion. A group was not involved, therefore the group was founded. So Zeta Beta Tau was founded in 1898 at CCNY because Jews kids couldn’t get into the fraternities that already existed. Alpha Phi Alpha was established 1906 because the Black guys couldn’t be part of the white literary societies. So I explained it to him. He says, “Well, recently I went to a party in Dorchester,” and he said, “With a friend of mine who was invited me and I didn’t realize this, but I went to the party. I was the only white person there.” I was like “Wow, what was that like? “He says, “It was fine.” But I did notice was that one white person there. He’s like,” Everybody was great, was friendly, I enjoyed myself, but I did notice.” So again, even when it’s benign, even when it’s a welcoming environment, you do notice the hyper visibility and the invisibility that happens at the same time when you’re in that kind of group. So I thought it really captured that really well and what we have not done well as a societies really figuring out ways to broaden access in a way that doesn’t feel so specific and hyper visible because we don’t ever say, let’s bring in a critical mass. So my mentor at Harvard, Charles Willie, often talked about in desegregation plans, creating a critical mass.

Jeremi Suri: Yes.

Dr. Richard Reddick: How do you get to a point where you know that they’re not the only ones and what’s interesting about that is when you get to a critical mass, it’s often a tipping point and leads to white flight. Just when there’s enough people to say, okay, there’s subtlest and the class then it’s like, wait a minute, this is getting a little too an insert your pejorative of choice, dangerous, overcrowded, whatever the term is and then white folks leave. Nikole Hannah-Jones chronicled it so well in her own work about what happens when integrated spaces become truly integrated and that is you bring in critical numbers of people from different backgrounds and then often the response from whites is to get the hell out of there, right?

Jeremi Suri: Right. Why have we not found better solutions to this. This is an old problem, this is new research, but in a sense, it’s new research explicating something we’ve known for a long time. So why has it been so hard to deal with this, Rich?

Dr. Richard Reddick: I love the fact you just go to the easy questions right away. So as a historian, you can appreciate this and something that you and I and Peniel Joseph, our good colleague has talked about is the Reconstruction and how the Reconstruction was never completed and that is when you come to terms and you actually militarily defeat white supremacy, allegedly, do you come to terms with the manifestations of that? The inequities, the lack of resources, the reparations. All those  things that need to be dealt with, that was never done in this country and so we’ve had this trickling, I think, of some progress and retrenchment.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Dr. Richard Reddick: It’s always a little progress and a whole lot of retrenchment. I think it’s because we haven’t had honest conversations and also, as a historian you can appreciate this, we have very incomplete data. Generally, we don’t know those stories and I point to myself. As a military kid, I grew up everywhere, but I did high school here in Austin, in Texas. Of course, the historical record that I understood was whitewashed. I grew up, Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, those are great guys. Instead of understanding the complexity of who they were and also the complexity of living in a state that basically subjugated native and Black people and Latinx people throughout its whole history. We don’t have the ability to critically say, “This is what happened, and I’ll give you a quick example of how to be different.” I’m not saying that things are perfectly done in the UK, they’re not. Clearly what’s happening politically there is quite interesting. But I did a maymester last year in Cambridge, and so we visited sixth form college, which is a prep school for higher education. The topic we visited, the day we were in the lecture, was British history from 1066 to 2019.

Jeremi Suri: That’s a long time.

Dr. Richard Reddick: To examine critically what’s happened, talking about Henry VIII , you talk about Henry VIII in the kindest, passionate way. Look, these things happen and it moved British society forward in this way. But these things happen and they’re pretty got awful. I don’t know if we are mature as a nation enough to have that conversation about the things that we’ve experienced. Because it’s hard to have nuance and say, okay, this is Thomas Jefferson. Here is a towering figure in American history with a lot of flaws. Can we talk about both of those things at the same time?

Jeremi Suri: Sure, we must.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Versus putting him in the good category, the bad category. I think part of this is unreconciled reconstructions that has not yet happened. I have some friends who are from South Africa and talk about truth and reconciliation as a concept, and there’s a lot of critique of that. But the fact that you had discourse and you spent time examining, “Okay, here are the things, here are the outcomes, here are the things that took place that we need to talk critically about. I think we have to continue the reconstruction.” I’m R.E.M. fan, and the third album was Fables of the Reconstruction or Reconstruction of the Fables, how are you want to read the album cover. But I think we do have a fabled reconstruction that we have not really critically examined and the work that you do and Peniel does and so many other of our colleagues here at UT do is really about really having a more accurate understanding of what took place. Because when we have accurate information we can actually start talking about what do we do next. I do some my public scholarship and you it as well, and Zachary you just starting in this area of public scholarship, you’re doing it too.

Jeremi Suri: He’s already doing.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Yeah. I think we’re really trying to get people to understand there is a discourse, there is a story here, and you may not have all information you think you need to have. What has me walking away from the work saying, “I didn’t know that,” that’s the most gratifying thing when people say, “Hey, I read you out there. I don’t agree with what you’re saying, but I didn’t know this thing took place.”

Jeremi Suri: Sure.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Great.

Jeremi Suri: That’s right. You’ve opened up the space.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Mission accomplished.

Jeremi Suri: How do you respond to those who take the other side of this argument? There are some very thoughtful people who say, “Well, we’ve gone too far in this degree.” There were many who were critical of the New York Times publishing a whole series of articles saying, United States began in 1619 with the first slave ship.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Yeah.

Jeremi Suri: What’s your response to that?

Dr. Richard Reddick: Well, as a educational researcher, one of the things in the College of Education we have is a concept called reimagining education. We have the symmetry impacts and one of them is reconciling inequities in health and education. Let’s go look at data: Census Bureau data, workforce data… And I can show you inequities by race. I think the argument would be, if in fact we have gone too far, you would see parody. You would start seeing these gaps close, but they don’t. When it comes to things, educational attainment, educational progress, workforce participation, incarceration, infant mortality, you might remember and the data was somewhat flawed, but the shocking disparities in infant mortality by race in the State of Texas. Of course, I want to make it clear that we know that there were data issues, but the fact that these are persistent inequities is something we should look at. I always say, bring me the data. The data reports that we’ve reached parity. Actually, this thing you’re complaining about or saying things about, look at our outcomes. The kids are actually doing equally well regards to their racial background or economic background, then I would agree with you, but I’m data-driven. The sad reality is, as long as I’ve been on this earth, we don’t have that happening and I will make one acknowledgment. The NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. There is a persistent top of the pile educational system that always does really well. That’s the Department Defense Educational Activity, which I’m an alum. I was air force brat, so I spent pretty much all my educational experience into high school in Department Defense Educational Activity schools. They have very narrow gaps, racially and socioeconomically, and we’re talking about a high mobility space, military families move a lot, low-income military families don’t make a lot of money. But I could speak to a number of experiences I had as a young person where I really felt that my teachers believed I could do anything, they held me to a very high standard. It was an incredible ecosystem of support and that’s just not the way that things work in the most other school systems, and so there’s something you said about it being very small, that’s true. But I do think that there are examples that exist out there that we can look at. For those folks, I always say, just show me the data. If the data, and I mean all the data, not just, let’s try pick one outcome or one finding. Let’s look at it holistically. First of all, let’s find out what’s happening in those spaces that make that happen, right?

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Then when day comes, I’ll find some other work to work on happily.

Jeremi Suri: I think you’re safe in your work for the near future.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Sadly, yes.

Jeremi Suri: Zachary, you had a question.

Zachary Suri: Yeah. How and why do we begin to see people who would consider themselves progressive falling into this trap of leaving schools because they become too Black or wanting to get criminals off the streets and contributing to these issues?

Dr. Richard Reddick: Oh, wow. Once again, the Suri family comes with the easy questions. So Zach, I think a couple of things come to mind. The first is the work that Mica Pollock, who was one of my professors in grad school. She wrote a great book called Colormute. She talks about how do we talk about race without talking about race. American society are great at this.

Jeremi Suri: Yes.

Dr. Richard Reddick: We can talk about low-income, we can talk about at risk, we can talk about urban, we have all these proxies for race. I’ll also mention another book that’s really powerful, which is Amanda Lewis and John Diamond’s, Despite the Best Intentions. It’s a brilliant ethnographic examination of a school, presumably in the Midwest somewhere that is the legacy of Brown. It is a school that has got so equal presentation of Black and Brown and White kids, and it’s got all this things going on. What Diamond and Lewis find is like actually when you go inside the classroom processes, you look at curricula, you look at access to honors and so on and so forth, replicating disparities and privilege and disadvantage continue. For instance, one thing that you read about is that a lot of the White families have access to social networks like, okay, I know people in the school board, I know people working in administration, and they’re able to leverage that to get their kids into the AP system, sections of the classes and so on and so forth. A lot of the Black and Latinx families don’t have that access and so they’re equally as interested, equally pushing their kids, but not having those networks that edge things forward. Once again, I’ll mention the Nikole Hannah-Jones’s great work she’s done and one thing and you mentioned earlier was 1619, she was very involved in that. One of the most powerful pieces of media I’ve ever heard is her piece on This American Life where she goes to what is essentially the place where Michael Brown was killed, Ferguson, thank you. In that community and they’re talking about a busing program, and keep in mind, this is a voluntary busing program. What you’re actually getting is what we call creaming. You’re getting the absolute most invested parents who want to put their kids in the bus for several hours a day. I could critique that approach as being a creaming approach. But nevertheless, but you hear people talk about there’s the risk of crime and drugs and all these terrible things that they are proxying having more Black and Brown kids in the school meaning. I think it goes back to this innate fear and anti blackness. Fear of blackness and expectation that blackness equals all these other things. They’re so embedded in our media, in our education. Beverly Daniel Tatum, the great sociologist, former president of Spelman, my colleague at the Institute of Educational Management at Harvard, Bev talks about racism as smog. We’ve all inhaled the stuff. The discourses, the stereotypes, the mental shortcuts we take, we all take them in, including people of color. Many times those are ideas that are resonant. Like, oh my gosh, crime is up, and I did notice a couple more Black kids walking around. Of course, you look at any statistical analysis of crime, crime’s pretty much evenly distributed. In fact, we know, for instance, that white kids are more likely to take drugs than Black kids. But we rarely think of that as the group that we should be worried about when it comes to drug use.

Jeremi Suri: Black kids are more likely to go to jail for taking drugs, even though they’re less likely to use them.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Absolutely. Because it goes back to this issue of bias, both explicit and implicit biases. I think it’s really about examining our prejudices. I was just talking to some friends about the IAT, which is that test that people have often talked about where you have these images of Black people and White people. You have to at the same time hit buttons on the keyboard with positive words, negative words, and estimate its diversity education. People say, “Well, Dr. Reddick, clearly you scored off the charts as a person who has absolutely no bias.” I said the first part of the test, I had a preference for White people. This is from a guy who’s clearly Black, likes being Black, studied African-American studies in college and so forth. But the smog is something that I also… Of course one of the things we know about implicit bias is that you can’t fix it. What you can do is become more aware of it.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Immerse yourself in situations where you’re forced to challenge those biases. Now, I tend to score in a way that says either I slightly prefer Black people or I’m neutral. But I think it’s important people understand that we’ve all taken that in. You hear these anti-Black, anti-Latinx discourses from white people and people of color. I think also me being, I have an identity where my dad is African-American from the US, my mom is from Jamaica, an immigrant, so I also understand how immigrants see the racial dynamics in this country. When you have people who are Black immigrants, who’s saying, “I don’t think I’m really part of that group,” because they’ve also understood these stereotypes and these images. I think the anti-blackness that resides in our social imagination and realities is what drives that.

Zachary Suri: Yeah. For a long time, this term busing, which is five percent of actual desegregation efforts, has been a code word to get us to think forced desegregation in a way that isn’t realistic.

Dr. Richard Reddick: That’s a great point, Zachary. Because you think about what Brown was intended to do and you think about Millikan in 1974. You’ve had all these and the Charlotte case later on, all these chipping away at that mechanism we had in place. The funny thing, I was bused, I had to make that point very clear. I was a graduate seminar at Harvard reading a book about Houston’s integration efforts. There was a paragraph that said, well, Houston was having some success more than Austin, which was not declared unitary until 1988. I was in high school and in the Austin in 1988. That’s when I moved from going to Travis High School to Johnston High School in the east side of the city. In the schools at that golden time where we had kids bus from West Austin, so people think about Eastside Memorial or Johnston High School as a school that’s always been filled with mostly Brown and Black kids. When I went to school there, it was predominantly students of color. But we had a lot of White kids, a lot of Asian kids there, and that was their space too. The funny thing is you would think you have a bunch of Black and Brown kids and they have a couple of white kids held in a corner. My best friends in high school, Ryan. Shout out to Ryan Scarborough. Ryan was the only white kid in the basketball team. I think about the fact that he had this amazing exposure to this idea of being proximately othered in a way that you can’t replicate it. The great thing about folks your age, Zachary, is that I think you all figure it out. If we put you in spaces together and we tell you you’re interested in art, do this. You’re interested in band, go do this. You’re interested in football, go do this. You come together and you figure it out. Once the adults get out of the way, oftentimes you start building these connections and these friendships and these allegiances that defy these. Often when the adults get involved, it’s like, “Well, you shouldn’t hang out with that person or you shouldn’t date that person.”

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Dr. Richard Reddick: It goes south.

Jeremi Suri: So Rich, why hasn’t this worked at the University? You would think we have at large universities, public and private, we would have an ideal laboratory. We bring these talented kids and as you put it, we can cream off the most talented kids and we can put them together in classrooms and in dormitories. Why doesn’t that seem to work?

Dr. Richard Reddick: I think there’s a number of reasons why. Let’s assume that all the mechanisms, all the preparation, entry exams, and all those kinds of things. That’s why so many schools, I think, are thinking about being test optional.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Dr. Richard Reddick: So we know the enduring social science statistic is that SAT scores correlate to parental income. That’s what they predict. It’s very difficult to supersede or overcome an income gap. Think about how it manifests itself. It means that you can pay for prep courses and so on and so forth.

Jeremi Suri: Of course.

Dr. Richard Reddick: I’ll give a shout out again to busing. Because when I was at Johnston, one of my friends said, “Hey, the PSAT is coming up.” I’m like, “PSAT?” I know what the SAT is. I’m a first-generation college student. I’m like, “Is that a practice SAT? What is that?” I don’t know what it is. I went to this test. I was in the test and I was 16 or 17-year-old, quite exuberant. I was cautioned several times, almost thrown out. I finished the test and I scored well enough to get a national merit recognition or whatever. Of course, that shifted my college going trajectory.

Jeremi Suri: Sure.

Dr. Richard Reddick: I had no idea what the hell that was.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Nor did my parents. So all the ways that income and access to social networks prevent us from having full knowledge. Let’s take that aside. Let’s figure out a way to get an equitable group of kids of color and white kids to come to the institution. What is happening here structurally and culturally that makes students feel this is a place they can be a part of? So as a graduate student, I worked on something called the National Campus Diversity project. We went to about 30 institutions across the country looking for the place that was getting it done. Of course, there is no place.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Dr. Richard Reddick: There are programs, there are things that are happening, but nobody’s got it figured out. I remember being at a school inside of Texas, not here, and talking to this idealized group, it was racially diverse. We had first gen students there. We had queer students there. Asian, African-American, Black, Latino, white, everybody was there. We were sitting in this conference room and one of the students said, well, look around this room and on the walls of the room were a bunch of old white guys. Institutional founder, big donor here, president here. They were saying like, look, even though I’m in the space, it doesn’t feel like a space that is meant for me. That does not mean that you have to have a color wheel that makes sure you have people on the walls all the time. But when you have this explicit expression of whiteness at best and at worst, white supremacy. Statues don’t help. Buildings don’t help, they are named after people who have actually profited or promulgated white supremacy. So I think how the culture and the space feels is really important. So in my classes, I often take my students to visit Huston-Tillotson University, which is our sister institution across the highway. It’s less than two miles from here. I always remind my students that HTU and UT are linked because the integration at UT, Heman Sweatt, everybody knows his story. But almost all the students that came after Mr. Sweatt were Huston-Tillotson alums. They graduated from their undergrad and came to UT to get their-

Jeremi Suri: Some went to the African-American college and then came to UT.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Yeah. I always talk about the fact that this environment, so my students go there and they go to a predominant institution [inaudible] like UT, and they’re like, “Oh my God, this place is so small.” We walk around for a while and the students are like, “Oh my God, they all know each other,” and the faculty know the students and they speak to them. They’re like, “I want to go to HTU.” It’s amazing. So I’ll have students who thought Black colleges were deficient or not as good and there’s like, “How do I get that experience?” Every so often we’ll have a student on the panel who is white or Latino. They’re like, “Wait. They have students who aren’t  here?” I was like, “Those HBCUs are actually predominately white. Do you know that?” They’re like, I didn’t know that. But all is to say is that they immediately see a difference in the culture. We’re working really hard at UT, I think in pockets, to create cultures that are supportive. But unless we critically examine and really point the finger inward and say, how are we representing the identities that we have present? How are we sometimes passively replicating and reinforcing and reifying white supremacy or whiteness generally is a problem. It doesn’t mean you erase white people. It means you make space for people of color who have been equally invested. One of the wonderful things during our time at the university is the film When I Rise, which was the documentary about Barbara Smith Conrad. She was in the class of the first African-American undergraduates in 1956. When she came to UT, the very first semester she was here, she was elected to be a member of the annual opera. When they found, the legislature, they had her removed because she was appearing opposite a white man. Basically, the story of how she dealt with that at the age of 18 and had an amazing career. Then over time in 1980, she comes back to UT as a distinguished alum to the point she comes back and is teaching here. It’s a reconciliation story between one person and an institution. It was revelatory for our students to see that because they can’t imagine a time when that was the case. There are people alive who wrote the letters who said these negro girl should not be in this, as well as people who said you people in Texas are crazy, she absolutely does not deserve all that. It’s always been a complicated story, but it’s such a powerful thing to see that happen at your institution.

Jeremi Suri: You’ve given us so much here, Rich, to chew on and think about before we turn, as we always do, to what we can do about this, I do want to ask one of the question because it comes up for me all the time. In fact, it came up at a talk I gave the other day in another part of the country.

Dr. Richard Reddick: So that I do work for you.

Jeremi Suri: There you go. Exactly, tell me what to say. The question’s often asked this way. What’s wrong with universities today? You don’t have fair, open discussions of these issues. You don’t allow people to come who have a different point of view. Why don’t you let people come and make offensive white supremacist arguments and defend that? What’s your response to that?

Dr. Richard Reddick: It reminds me of the time I went to a meeting and one of the sponsors was Koch, and I thought was Coca-Cola, it is actually the Koch industries. They’re very interested in talking about issues of free speech. What I’ve often had to support or augment is let’s think about this in a way that supports students well-being. I’ve always said to my students, I encourage discourse, I want to have you all talk about things. But first of all, we have to build a sense of trust and community. That’s the first thing we have to do. The second thing is anything that denigrates somebody’s worth or well-being or a sense of belonging is problematic to me. I was a student here in the 1990’s and when I told them I was a Plan II major, immediately, “What was your SAT score?” When I told them they’re like, “Oh, well, you’re not a liar,” but I know that people have lower scores and they got into the Plan II program and there’s always this asterisk. You led us in your poem, Zachary, by saying this idea that test scores somehow equate intelligence. Again, I’m the person who actually scores well on tests. So guess what? You’re wrong. But nevertheless, I also realize that’s not enough to simply say, “Well, I got mine, deal with it.” I really think that one thing we have to really think about is when people say, your identity doesn’t matter. “You’re a transgender person, therefore, you shouldn’t count as much as a person who identifies as male or female.” That’s hugely problematic. I know all the case law and how we talk about free speech. There is no protections about people’s humanity. There are some prohibitions on free speech, like you can’t say fire in a crowded place.

Jeremi Suri: You can’t provoke violence.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Right. Fighting words, all that good stuff. But I do think that there is this huge lack of empathy for what it’s like to be denigrated. I think I lived that experience and I remember going to spaces when I was 18,19, 20 years old, and I’m 47 now. So obviously I feel differently about it.

Jeremi Suri: We’re still young, Rich, we’re the same age.

Dr. Richard Reddick: We’re still young. But I can walk past the affirmative action bake sale and say, “That’s stupid and doesn’t make any sense,” but I know it provokes students.

Jeremi Suri: I’m glad you said that.

Dr. Richard Reddick: I need to make that point. I actually had this thing where I would tell students, don’t get excited about that. But I said, I’ve had life experiences and I have a reservoir of things I can lean on. But when you’re 18, that’s actually challenging your worth. There’s ways to have discourse that are respectful. The inter-group dialogues which started at Michigan there’s a whole body of research that supports. That’s how you have engaged discussions. You’d set up situations where students have a chance to get to know each other and you do it over time. So if Rich, and Zach, and Jeremy are sitting together and we’ve known each other for a while, we can go a little deeper. Also, I don’t think we’ve done a good job of modeling that discourse.

Jeremi Suri: I agree with you.

Dr. Richard Reddick: I think there are very few places. I look at the Intelligence Squared shows on PBS which I love because the whole point of that is that you’re supposed to make an argument and convince people to change their minds. Not to have more people on the crowd who like what you’re saying, but how do you change minds? It’s done in a debate-type format with times and so on and so forth, but I just think that we’ve failed as a generation to really model what it means to engage in discourse in a way that can challenge assumptions but also empathize. Let’s suppose you don’t agree with the policy position. You can make that argument in a way that does not dismiss the humanity and the value of people who may have benefited from that policy decision.

Jeremi Suri: I agree. Rather than shouting at someone.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Not only that. Let’s also be honest about the fact that we often talk about, say, simply affirmative action. We’ll talk about the race-based affirmative action, which we will prefer to call holistic admissions processes because affirmative action hasn’t existed since 1976. The Bakke case outlawed any quota system. So we always know that race is a plus factor. But we know from the Harvard cases that just was adjudicated that there are a lot of white kids walking around who are legacies, who have athletic affirmative action in place, but we never talk about that as well. So if we want to talk about, hey, there should be a standard for admissions that doesn’t include anything extraneous to your academic work and how you perform. If that’s what’s going to be, let’s be consistent about that. I’ve always said to people, I support holistic admissions. I support legacies. I think it’s important to have some people on the campus who have connections to the institution. As a first gen student that was important to me to have friends who were at UT, who’s parents went to UT and knew all the traditions. I didn’t know that stuff. So I just want us to be consistent in that thing. Of course, the Varsity Blues scandal blew that whole thing open because you realize there’s a whole culture of advantage that’s being employed that people don’t have a major problem with until it’s egregious. Because as bad as Varsity Blues was, there are smaller, less egregious versions of that happening every single day.

Jeremi Suri: Absolutely. So we always close, Rich, with using this rich historical knowledge. Using the range of perspectives that you’ve offered us so brilliantly here, with trying to think about how we move forward, especially for our young listeners. What can we do? If we’re now better-informed and we certainly are listening to you. What do we do now? Especially those who care and a part of institutions of higher education, who are sending their kids there, but aren’t in the position to actually be running these institutions, how do we make a difference?

Dr. Richard Reddick: Once again, the easy question comes. It’s funny because as academics, we’re really good at identifying problems. So once somebody’s like, “How do you solve this?” “Oh we [inaudible] .” I have a number of thoughts about that. I think one thing I’ve just recently written about, and you know about this, but what’s our public investment in higher education? I talked about it from a perspective of how do we support it financially in our policy decisions, but also how we invest in higher education as a society. I think asking my colleagues here at UT, Kathleen and Anthony Brown, I think about who’ve been doing this great work on teaching slavery [inaudible] , our colleague, who does incredible work. There’s such a reservoir of information that’s available here and people are actively doing a scholarship. A good colleague Kevin Cokley in IUPRA, Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis has been working so adeptly and putting out policy briefs accessible to the public. This is the real story. In fact, one of the most powerful things that I think IUPRA did was the work that Eric Tang and some of our colleagues worked on about Austin’s history of racism from the 1929 plan to the whole situation with, I’m forgetting the term now, restricted covenants and all the things that were done to reify, redlining, and legislate it.

Jeremi Suri: To prevent people from buying homes in particular neighborhoods.

Dr. Richard Reddick: I teach a class on the history of higher education, but also a class on social, cultural, contents of education. Jennifer Holme, my colleague in the College of Ed and I taught a class together. I find it’s amazing that when we read [inaudible] work, people talk deeply about these issues and about Redlining. I can’t remember the name of the author now, it’s going to come to me. But anyway, the [inaudible] book called Redlining just came out a little while ago. My students often don’t know that history. We assume that Levittown and suburbs and Terrytown just look that way because they look that way because people don’t want to live there, like they couldn’t live there. They were actually efforts and the things that were done, like hiring Black people to walk on the streets to dissuade white people from moving those neighborhoods. That was something that was done. We really didn’t have legislation to prohibit that kind of thing until the late ’60s. So really understanding the complexity of our racial mess in United States. Not sugar-coating it, but just saying directly, this is what happened, but also not acting as if because it happened in insert year here, the effects are not present today. I have found talking to folks who often don’t agree with me politically. We actually have a lot of agreement about past historical events. But then there’s this sort of, “well, that was then and this is now.” We had a couple of things coming up. We have laws now, problem solved. Things like inter-generational transfer of wealth. How education, for instance, is transmitted. This is what’s so important about being a first-generation college student, if you go to college, the propensity for your kids to go to college is exponentially higher, and you are transforming your family’s trajectory economically, socially, network wise. If we can get to a point of understanding historical record as what it is, but history is not a book-closed kind of thing, there are events that continue today, there are processes. I was talking to a middle school recently and a young man asked a great question. He’s like, “Dr Reddick, you’re telling me these stories about these slave owners and it’s awful. I think it’s horrible. But that was in 1860 whatever. Why’s it still happening?” It’s a great question. I said, “Well, let’s talk about what it means to have not had the transfer of wealth and property over generations, and how, even after slavery, those things were prohibited.” All those things equal to us having a landscape that’s very uneven, and you can find outliers. Yes, you can find somebody who is phenotypically white, whose parents grew up in Eastern Europe, I actually know somebody like this, and came up with nothing and now are present in the space doing great. But they’re not considering the fact that whiteness affords you advantages, at least eliminates barriers in some regards. We can play it either way from advantage or just eliminating disparities and barriers that exist. People of color still confront those and, of course, people of color fight through them, they overcome. My God, wouldn’t it be great if people could simply… This is what– Back to this whole issue about how we see ourselves in the space, I grew up thinking that, yes, hard work gets you where you’re going. Horatio Alger’s story that was– I kind of bought– I grew up overseas.

Jeremi Suri: Yeah, of course.

Dr. Richard Reddick: So I was like, “This is how it works.”

Jeremi Suri: You were promoting that to the rest of the world.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Right. Exactly. Imperialism, it’s what we do. When I got here and I started being in spaces like University of Texas or Emory University, Harvard University, I realized the normal distribution of intelligence, effort, attitude. I knew people in all spaces who were brilliant, people who were slackers in all those spaces, and I was just, “Wait, there’s nothing special about the people. They’re special, but they’re not extraordinarily special in that regard that they’re better.” That was revelatory to me because I thought, “Well, if you’re in an elite institution of education, you must be a better person in some way. But there are slackers here.”

Jeremi Suri: Sure.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Once you understand that, you start understanding how advantage works and how privilege works, and how if you come from a certain socioeconomic background, racial background, you name the networks you have, being mediocre, and I mean this in a very broad, terrible sense, I apologize for using that word, but being average can get you into elite institutions of higher education. Whereas being average in the community I grew up in, I don’t know what it gets you. It doesn’t get you necessarily in higher education, it might get you into the criminal justice system. So really understanding how that process works is important. I really think spending more time in each other’s experiences matter. I saw a great documentary a few days ago on PBS about incarcerated people who are getting degrees at Bard.

Jeremi Suri: Bard College.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Bard College, yeah. It walks through their experiences. So these kids who, when they were kids, made terrible decisions, did terrible things, and they’re now spending 20 years compensating. You’re like, “Wow, if this young man at the age of 15, 16 had access to this intriguing curriculum, these exciting things, then who knows where they would’ve ended up?” Of course, this goes back to the issue of culturally relevant pedagogy and curriculum. If you tell people constantly we’re going to learn about history, we’re going to learn about social science, we’re going to learn about, you name the topic, but you’re not a part of this conversation. It’s not people like you, nobody like you is involved in this versus, you know what? We’re going to learn about the history of Mexican Americans in the state, and you’re going to learn about the people in your community who did amazing things. I always tell people I had ethnic studies in my school before it actually was a thing because in East Austin and Johnston High School, Tony Castillo would tell you about the activists in the community who went to school here. My school has a very strong tradition of the people who led the city, who were involved with city council or whatever, who went to our school in our community. So Angela Valenzuela, my colleague in the College of Education, has done this great work on ethnic studies, and we know when you tell Latinx kids and you teach them about the history and the indigenous contributions, they are eager to learn more. So we have, to use her words, subtractive educational experiences, where they’re constantly being canceled out versus you’re a central part of this. Your grandparents, what they did, your parents, what they did, this is critical. That’s how you get people excited about things.

Jeremi Suri: Right. So Zachary, does this resonate with you? What Rich has laid out for us, I think, is actually a very powerful and optimistic view, which is to say that by understanding our history, warts and all, we can actually empower more people and we can all feel part of a larger community, not because we all share the same heroic narrative, but because we all share the same narrative. A narrative of different kinds of experiences, and by talking about that we actually have something in common. What do you think?

Zachary Suri: Yeah. I think that the struggle with getting young people to care about these issues it’s not, do they care about equality, do they care about integration? I think almost all young people I know today care about those issues, even those who would be on completely opposite sides of the political spectrum. I think the issue is educating people about this. So many of my friends think segregation and inequality ended in 1964, and I think talking about the lasting inequalities in the criminal justice system and in education is what we need to do, conversations like this, in order to get young people involved in these issues. It’s crazy to me. Before I started a research project for school, I had no idea that Austin only became integrated in 1986 and from there pretty much resegregated.

Jeremi Suri: Well, I think, Zachary and Rich, you’ve given us actually a very optimistic path forward, a path forward where informing ourselves allows us to address these issues and really get beyond the name-calling to see that we’re all part of a story. A story where we all inherit certain roles and understanding those roles gives us something to talk about, something we can work toward.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I think Zachary, you’ve nailed it. I think this issue of empathy and really understanding with experiences. When I was in graduate school, obviously in Boston, METCO, that’s a big story about integration. Here are the narratives of kids who went to the METCO program, who got up at 5:00 in the morning, who were socially isolated from friends like theirs. One of my former students, Dorado Kinney, who’s now a dean at the Austin Community College, was a kid who went to school in Cleveland and inner city, got to go to a prep school, ended at Columbia. He did a great dissertation talking about, what is it like to be that person 40 years on, when you are an adult, my age? Most of those participants said, “You know what? I had a great educational experience. I’m a doctor, I’m a lawyer, I have these great attributes, but the social cost for me was profound.” I think people really gravitate towards hearing stories. So even understanding that the process of integration or process of busing, you had these incredible upsides, but also had these negative aspects too. I think the more we understand that, the more we actually talk to each other, the better we are. We’ve gotten to a point, like you said, where we’re just very surface. To end with this quick anecdote, I was watching Rick Steves.

Jeremi Suri: Travel guy.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Yeah, but he’s woke because he did this travel guide on fascism, and so he’s going to Germany, he’s going to visit Berlin, he’s going to Auschwitz in Poland. He’s going his things and he’s not making these points, but he makes the point subtly that you don’t have these things happening one day. It’s a small trickling. “Well, these people are a problem. They are causing this. You know what? Let’s actually create laws.” It goes and goes and goes. I think when I look at this country right now and I see rallies, conducted by a certain political figure, where you can mention some of these names and the booing happens, and the screaming happenings, it reminds me of the pictures you see during integration, where you see the Little Rock Nine walking on the street, and there are these contorted faces of 16-year-olds screaming at these people. I always wonder, what does that person feel like now? Maybe they feel the same way. But they also were probably brought up in a social milieu where these people are subhuman, they’re not like us, they’re not worth blah, blah, blah. But I think some of these people probably have had a change of heart. And I really want us to think about– That’s why history’s such a great guide because we can look back and see these things. I use that picture a lot to show to my students as look, what do you think’s going on through the eyes of the Ruby Bridges, the Little Rock Nine, the students who are just walking, looking straight ahead with military discipline almost?

Jeremi Suri: Military escort. The 101st Airborne had to escort them to school.

Dr. Richard Reddick: Yeah, the Norman Rockwell painting we all know. So seeing that and feeling empathy, but also looking at the people, what’s going through their minds? One of the sad things, I think, Zachary, you’re making this point, when you don’t know history, hate to hit a cliche, you’re doomed to repeat it, you do the same things.

Jeremi Suri: I think your central point, that you made so well, Rich, and you make this so well in your scholarship and in so many of the things you’ve cited as well, is it’s very easy when you detach these issues from a historical framework to dehumanize certain actors. It’s us versus them, it’s good versus evil. That can happen on both sides of the issue. What a larger narrative, knowledge of these issues, as you’ve said, awareness does, even if we’re in different positions in that narrative, it allows us to see ourselves as part of a common narrative and to talk about how we can all find a place in it. I think that’s what Zachary’s poem was doing, that you’re just struggling to figure out in school, and that is the work of democracy. Thank you for joining us for this episode of This is Democracy.

Male Speaker: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke and you can find his music at harrisonlemke.com.

Female Speaker: Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday featuring new perspectives on democracy.