5 Lessons I've Learned about Racism

2020-06-05 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 16:18 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Other · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Lesson from a book

Ali sets aside a planned keyboard review to share five lessons about racism: not being an expert is no reason to stay silent, what is obvious to you can be new to others, educating yourself is your own job, tone policing, and white centering — most drawn from Me and White Supremacy.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Why this video is not the mechanical keyboard review

★ Ali had planned this upload as a big review of a mechanical keyboard he uses, but it felt weird, so he shares five lessons he has learned about racism instead. — 00:00:00

00:00:20 — Lesson one: perfectionism and not being an expert

★★ Ali says many people, him included, feel weird talking about racism and other political or humanitarian issues because they feel unqualified; this nearly stopped him making the video. — 00:00:28
★★ Ali says Me and White Supremacy, which he is reading, describes perfectionism as a very standard excuse for people not doing anything about racism and white supremacy. — 00:01:07
★★★ Ali calls the feeling that he must become an expert on race before talking about it "kind of BS", like researching all of nutrition before ever going to the gym; he makes videos on topics he is no expert in. — 00:01:34 · show your work
★★ Ali says many friends and people he knows online have not talked about racism for fear of getting it wrong, offending someone, being cancelled or not being experts. — 00:02:03

00:02:26 — Lesson two: what is obvious to you can be amazing to others; racism as prejudice plus power

★★★ Ali's long-held philosophy: what is obvious to you can be amazing to others; after a decade of reading about productivity, ideas like Parkinson's law seem obvious to him but can change a newcomer's life. — 00:02:26

“what's obvious to you can be amazing to others”
★★ Around 2014, in his third year of university, Ali often talked race and gender with friends deep in Black and ethnic-minority activism, and told them their disparaging comments about white people were racist. — 00:02:53
★★★ Ali explains that racism is prejudice plus a systemic power imbalance, so in most societies people can be prejudiced towards white people but not racist towards them. — 00:03:36
★★ When a friend first explained the prejudice-plus-power idea to Ali in 2014, it made many things make sense; he stayed uneasy about the comments but understood they were not racism. — 00:03:36
★★ On 4 June 2020 a doctor friend from an ethnic-minority background asked Ali whether Black and Asian people are racist against white people; Ali explained the racism-prejudice distinction and sent a book quote, and the friend agreed. — 00:04:18
★★ Ali says part of his reason for the video is that some viewers may never have met the idea that one cannot be racist towards white people. — 00:04:45
★★ Ali says he, like many, feared people would think he was virtue signalling by posting about Black Lives Matter, since he had never talked about it and says he has not experienced overt racism himself. — 00:05:12
★★★ Ali says the fear of looking like a virtue-signaller does not matter: if sharing about Black Lives Matter or race changes even one person's mind or prompts them to learn more, it is worth it. — 00:05:37

00:06:06 — Lesson three: educate yourself

★★ At university Ali got annoyed when friends checked out of conversations about race and gender and declined to explain them to him, though he felt he was "one of the good guys" wanting to understand. — 00:06:06
★★★ Ali says it is not other people's job to educate us about racism: those who live through racism and sexism daily already carry enough emotional baggage without explaining it to sceptics. — 00:06:49
★★ Ali says he is embarrassed that until quite recently his stance was the sceptic's, asking whether something was really racism or would have been said to a man too. — 00:07:17
★★★ Ali says he benefits from male, cis and straight privilege, can pass as white in some settings and sounds "like a posh white boy", so educating himself about racism is his job, not his Black friends'. — 00:07:57
★★ Ali says he readily reads books on productivity, stoicism and Greek philosophy to learn, yet with racism and sexism he assumed it was someone else's job to educate him. — 00:08:24
★★★ Ali recommends educating yourself about racism through videos and Instagram posts instead of relying on friends who experience systemic oppression to teach you, because it is not their job. — 00:08:53
★★ A few days before the video Ali began Layla Saad's Me and White Supremacy, which he calls very good; next on his list is Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race. — 00:08:53

00:09:21 — Lesson four: tone policing

★★ At university Ali was annoyed when friends got angry, shouted or cried about racism they experienced, and asked for a logical, dispassionate analysis instead. — 00:09:21
★★★ Ali says that, without malice, he was tone policing: telling people the content of what they say matters less than their tone, and engaging only if the tone is inoffensive to him. — 00:09:50
★★ Layla Saad (quoted): Me and White Supremacy lists examples of tone policing, such as asking people to say it more nicely, calling their tone too aggressive, or saying you would listen if they calmed down. — 00:10:39
★★★ Layla Saad (quoted): Layla Saad writes that to be human is to feel: insisting that Black and Indigenous people of colour describe racism without pain, rage or grief asks them to dehumanise themselves. — 00:11:24
★★ Reading the tone-policing chapter (day three of 30 in Me and White Supremacy), Ali recognised the many examples of tone policing he had used with friends over the years. — 00:12:07

00:12:31 — Lesson five: white centering

★★ Ali advises anyone who finds themselves tone policing to stop and read more about it, to see how often it comes up in daily life. — 00:12:31
★★★ Ali describes white centering: white is treated as the default without a thought, as #OscarsSoWhite and the under-representation of Black and minority ethnic groups in Hollywood, business and media show. — 00:12:31
★★ Ali, after Me and White Supremacy: people wonder whether a podcast with mostly Black or minority guests is for them, but even ethnic minorities never ask that of a mostly white podcast. — 00:13:00
★★ Ali says minority readers of a book with a white lead such as Harry Potter never wonder whether it is for them, while white readers of a book with a Black lead do. — 00:13:57 · Harry Potter
★★ Ali retells an example from Me and White Supremacy: an author of books about Black characters, asked when she will stop writing about race, answers that white authors like Leo Tolstoy wrote about race too. — 00:14:25
★★★ Ali says society does not see white as a race: books centred on whiteness are not considered to be about race, only non-white things are. — 00:14:51
★★ Ali is trying to be more mindful of white centering in what he reads, watches and listens to, as his podcast subscriptions are basically all white men talking to white men. — 00:14:51

00:15:19 — Recap, resources and return to regular videos

★★ Ali says he has no real answers; the aim of the video is met if even one person picks up a book about racism or anti-racism they would not have read before. — 00:15:48

In the description and comments

★★ Ali Abdaal (channel): The video's description lists resources on racism: Me and White Supremacy, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Black Lives Matter resources and Emmanuel Acho's Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man. — video description
★ The description asks viewers to support UK petitions, among them BAME representation in clinical teaching at medical schools, and links donations to Black Lives Matter and Black Minds Matter UK. — video description
★★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked whether prejudice against white people becomes racism in countries where white people are minorities, the channel replies that in those countries it does. — creator comment
★ Replying to a viewer who said his comment was deleted, Ali says he does not delete comments and it must have been caught by YouTube's flags. — creator comment

Threads in this video

restate · How do you get past perfectionism and the fear of starting? — Ali calls the feeling that he must become an expert on race before talking about it "kind of BS", like researching all of nutrition before ever going to the gym; he makes videos on topics he is no expert in. (00:01:34)

Mentioned

Harry Potter · show your work

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