EP 875 Is It Racist? Is It Sexist?

These are tricky waters to navigate, but two scholars, Jessi Streib and Betsy Leondar-Wright, have co-authored a book called “Is It Racist? Is It Sexist?: Why Red and Blue White People Disagree, and How to Decide in the Gray Areas,” wade through it in their new book.  It’s based on interviews with 125 white interviewees from many parts of the country and the result is a new way of understanding how inequalities persist by focusing on the individual judgment calls that lead us to decide what’s racist, what’s sexist, and what’s not.  While they found a tendency to describe some people as ‘convictors’ and others as ‘acquitters’, as in a jury setting, they offer a very interesting metaphor of being more of a surveyor in determining what a set of facts, put in context, may tell us about situations we can all imagine happening, but may come to different conclusions as to ‘why.’ Our guest, Betsy Leondar-Wright, was somewhat heartened in this exploration to find that few people harbored explicit racial hostility toward people of color, but perceptions about the role of our history and that which is embedded in our institutions may not always rise to the surface when contemplating how certain actions toward ‘others’ occur.

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