The Amy Cooper Party Tricks of Racism End With Narrative Intelligence
I had a wild imagination as a kid.
Give me a sandbox and some time, and I could come up with an entire narrative of characters beating intergalactic monsters and finding cures for diseases. I enjoyed playing with other kids, but could always rely on my own stories to entertain and accept me, especially when kids went out of their way to remind me why they couldn't play with me. One particular incident stood out, in first grade while playing during recess, a young white girl approached me, going out of her way to tell me that she could not play with me because I was black. A trick she learned from home clearly and enacted out on the playground proudly, unprompted.
Racism is narrative, built through laws like slavery and Jim Crow and Red Lining, and also passed on as crusty heirlooms through stories picked up at home, in church, on TV, in schools, and at work forming everyday behaviors, beliefs, and language that become what I've coined as racist party tricks.
Those racist party tricks a couple decades ago were party favors because it was socially acceptable and encouraged to flaunt them - like the practice of creating and sending postcards of a lynching. White people bragged about the tricks, told their kids and their friends and their peers how to use them, when to deploy them -- tricks like using police as a threat against a black person when inconvenienced or feeling any level of discomfort, feigning distress for institutional sympathy, feigning self-defense when enacting hate crimes, feeling entitled to people of color's ideas, bodies, and outputs with no credit or compensation in return, believing in base stereotypes about people of color's abilities, thoughts, and assumed threat.
Amy Cooper's recent incident of trying to leverage the police as a threat to a black man who asked her to leash her dog, a law she was breaking, is an example of overt racism and the oldest racist party trick - a practice passed down as a tactic of power that is not unconscious. She defiantly stated at the beginning of the video of this incident what she was going to do -- tell them an African American man is threatening her - a blatant lie -- because she knew she had an institution and history on her side to come potentially bring down the hammer of violence on a black person.
I've experienced this same racist party trick growing up in Utah. We were pretty much the only black family on our block in my hometown of Ogden, Utah. My family moved there from Memphis, TN in the 1950s and 1960s during the Great Migration. Black people make up less than 1% of the population in Utah and I grew up in a modest, single level, 4 bedroom home my mom proudly saved up for for many years and bought around the year 2000. My family are unknown racial trailblazers.
I lived there until I was 18 and most of our neighbors ignored us or were actually nice (shout outs to our next door neighbor who shoveled our sidewalk for us with those harsh winters). But we had one neighbor, a white woman who never introduced herself to us, across the street who really didn’t like us living there, especially because my mother's boyfriend at the time was white, which she had told other neighbors of ours of her dislike of that fact.
I ended up on the East Coast for college and went to Cornell University and would travel back home for the holidays. One holiday my mom picked me up from the airport. As we turned onto our block we noticed a police car sitting in front of our house and started to panic. We pulled up into our driveway and quickly found the officer who was sitting in his vehicle to ask what problem happened. We thought maybe someone broke in or worse.
“Ma’am your neighbor reported a disturbance of the peace and loud music coming from your home.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m coming here to address the issue.”
“Did you not...just see us pull up in the driveway??? No one has been home for hours because I was at the the airport in Salt Lake City an hour away picking up my daughter. No one is even in the house right now.”
I remember at least 2-3 other scenarios just like this where the police would be called on us for doing nothing and our neighbor would straight up lie. Claiming we were being loud or having parties or disturbing the neighborhood when none of us, my two sisters, myself, or mother, were even home. And better yet why can’t we do that because we pay taxes and live there too?
Many of these racist party tricks are no longer publicly and socially acceptable, but instead of a behavior change, we have a language and narrative problem. Instead of stopping or changing the racist tricks, people want to relabel the tricks so they can still be used without the social and political consequences, because the tricks are so ingrained they have become old habit.
I teach on the topic of narrative intelligence. Narrative intelligence is how human brains are wired to understand the world and our experiences by attaching narratives and stories to them. Narrative drives belief, memory, learning, and individual behavior, and influence our thinking patterns, habits, and biases more deeply than anything else on the planet can. We can improve our habits, biases, decision making, and communication by examining and shifting our narratives.
To stop racist tricks that fuel the violence and anti-blackness we see on a daily, minute to minute basis, we have to address historical amnesia as our first narrative intelligence problem. Historical amnesia around racism is a complete lack of knowledge of the stories and history on how race and racial policy was created and publicly crafted in society at large. Having historical amnesia while discussing or addressing racism is like trying to cure a disease without getting any sort of diagnostic tests and taking a guess that the cure is to pop some vitamin c and take an epsom salt bath, when you really need chemo. There's a reason our education system glosses over institutional racism, how it operates, how it was intentionally created in laws, practice, language and embedded into every aspect of society for centuries. It is not magic and it is not hard to understand. Without that knowledge, people can be comfortable with things staying status quo, even if they are limiting and toxic to everyone of every background.
To improve your narrative intelligence on racism, there's tomes of reading about white supremacy and racism available online, in the library, at the book store, I encourage you to google or to start here. It is your duty as a citizen to understand institutional racism if you want to live in a world that isn't run solely through fear, bigotry, and violence.
The next step to ending racist party tricks is narrative inquiry, a practice I teach in my unconscious bias trainings I facilitate for teams on unpacking of biased ideology and habit. Take the time write and reflect on a few questions like:
What is my relationship to power? What power do I have with the various identities I hold? How do I express that power on a daily basis through what I say, what I do, and what I believe I am entitled to?
What are my values? If I have values around equality how do I express those values? If I am not expressing them through action or intentional behavior, why not? Why is there a gap?
Who in my life do I give regular passes to when they bring up stereotyped, racist, harmful language and thinking? How often do I not engage in uncomfortable conversations and why? How often do I dismiss, minimize, rationalize away people of color's first hand accounts of their own experiences with racism and why?
What assumptions have I made or projected onto others based on my experiences of power? What beliefs do I hold about how the world works that are not applicable to people without the same identities that wield power?
Where are my points of view formed from? How often do I read the work of or follow, engage with, and have deep conversation or exchanges with people of color who are not only hired to be in specific roles in my life like my domestic help?
How diverse are my networks? What does my inner circle look like? If I have the power to hire and fire people, how many people of color have I helped hire/sponsor/develop into a position of genuine leadership and authority?
What anti-black beliefs, jokes, stereotypes, and media did I hear and learn growing up?
An additional question for a brown person of color -- how do I engage in assimilation and anti-blackness as a brown person? What negative beliefs and stereotypes exist in my immediate circle, community, family about black people?
Narratives form who we are, and what we will tolerate and pass onto the next generation. The more people can inquire of themselves and stop relabeling the bag of racist tricks and dusting racism under the rug, the better off we will all be, and the more likely we can find solutions to the human penchant to construct broken systems out of fear. White supremacy is not a genuine purpose or direction in life and never will be, and we all have the power to rewrite our collective story.