I’m an Antiracism Trainer and Trump Cancelled Me. Here’s Why I’m “Dangerous”… But Hopeful
Dr. Taharee A. Jackson, Ph.D.
Antiracism Educator, Trainer, and Speaker
DrTaharee Consulting
October 3, 2020
As an antiracism educator, trainer, and speaker for nearly two decades now, I am exhausted in the best way possible.
I have been aggressively recruited and actively interviewing for consulting contracts within the federal government for months.
Recently I made it to the final round of the hiring process for a federal agency dedicated to international development and humanitarian aid.
After preparing a fully-developed mock antiracism training session for the agency, I received the following notice:
“Dr. Jackson, I hope this email finds you well. Unfortunately at this time we have been asked to pause on all recruitment for racial and social justice positions as a result of the OMB memo released from the White House. We will…come back to you if and when we are able to pick this back up again. Thanks so much, [Deeply Disappointed Federal Agency Liaison].”
I was grateful for the update but sick to my stomach.
Last year after my government contract as an Expert Consultant and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Program Manager ended, I decided to pursue diversity consulting full-time. As a professor and urban teacher educator for years, I always had a concurrent career helping all sorts of organizations achieve their diversity, equity, and antiracism goals. In January I had back-to-back, face-to-face professional learning sessions, antiracism trainings, and keynote speeches scheduled until November 2020. But COVID-19, the original “Canceler,” meant each of on-ground gigs were, well…cancelled.
But then something happened.
Ahmaud Arbery was chased down by two White gunmen who shot him on a South Georgia street in plain daylight. I was so sickened an incredulous, I wrote an article about it: “I’m White and I’m Outraged by Ahmaud Arbery’s Murder. Now What? A Practical Guide for White Allies and Accomplices.” That piece was viewed over 150,000 times and I instantly began receiving podcast invitations, speaking requests, and antiracism training contracts.
Virulent racism soldiered on, not just against Black people, but against Asian-Americans who were being spat upon, assaulted, and discriminated against based on the Chinese origins of the Coronavirus, or the Kung Flu, as Donald Trump refers to it. Once again, my calendar jumped with invitations to address both anti-Black and anti-Asian racism given my own “Blasian” multiraciality and my seamless ability to straddle both worlds.
Following that, we officially entered the Summer of George Floyd. If White people were outraged by the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in his own neighborhood, they were incensed by the slow killing and blatant disregard for human life in the case of George Floyd. Antiracism protests erupted in every state, rendering this summer’s series of demonstrations the largest Civil Rights movement in American history.
I have been trying to put myself out of business for nearly 2 decades, but my phone was ringing off the hook after that. I led an antiracism training almost EVERY day in September, including a 3-hour training for a group of physicians on the Sunday of Yom Kippur. I work with a boarding school in New England to offer SATURDAY antiracism trainings for faculty, students, trustees, and parents.
I have received copious invitations for training and speaking engagements from one of the world’s largest manufacturers of computers and tech, a large accounting firm, the most respected hospital in New England, a sprawling school district in New York, and arguably the most prestigious university in the world. Just to name a few.
Most notably, no fewer than FIVE federal agencies contacted me directly to inquire about my consulting services. Could you speak to us about race relations? Could you assemble our African-American employees to gauge their response to the protests and help us understand how to respond? Could you address the lack of diversity and Black employees at the Department of ____ and assist us in developing a racially sensitive strategic plan? Could you serve as a long-term partner for us as a federal agency with some African American employees…but none of whom hold positions of power?
I was well on my way to scheduling meetings, advising high-ranking government officials, booking speaking engagements, and placing firm dates on my calendar for leading antiracism training in some of the most private government offices.
And then Donald Trump “cancelled” me.
As of September 5, 2020, the president issued a federal ban on antiracism training, citing it as “unpatriotic,” and “anti-American.” In the first presidential debate, he referred to what we ask participants to do in such trainings as “insane” and even “sick.”
WOW.
Like so many of his tone-deaf declarations, this indicates to me that Donald Trump neither understands what antiracism training IS and is NOT. Either way, he has deemed me dangerous, deleterious to his “pro-American” crusade, and downright unwelcome in the federal space. To be clear, this is why my colleagues and I who do the arduous work of diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism training are such a threat to his government:
1. High-Quality Antiracism Work Dismantles Racism at Every Level
Having worked with myriad federal agencies, private corporations, school districts, universities, nonprofit organizations, and even the armed forces, I can tell you that previous iterations of diversity training have fallen far short of their effectiveness. Why? A good bit of diversity work over the last several decades has focused almost exclusively on changing interpersonal relations. I cannot tell you how many workshops and seminars I have led on implicit bias, unconscious racism, and race relations in the workplace. These are all laudable for fomenting professional learning moments, but they do not address the totality of how racism functions.
When I was interviewing Peggy McIntosh — coiner of the term “White privilege” — for my research on antiracism, she quite candidly stated: “Racism is more than just the mere collection of individual acts of meanness.”
Focusing on “kind campaigns,” or improving management-employee relations, or training people to treat one another more delicately is helpful, but it only succeeds in addressing the lowest level of racism: individual and interpersonal racism.
What people often fail to recognize is that yes, racism is embedded in microaggressions and the everyday degradation of People of Color in interpersonal interactions, but it is ALSO imbued in institutions like law enforcement, in American culture by way of widely-accepted stereotypes, and throughout our sociohistorical understandings of what Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) know and can do according to the “science” of the day.
Racism is embedded across time, space, and structures, to the point that you have to dismantle it at every possible level in order to eradicate it. We must address racism in our everyday interactions, but also in our schools, in law and in the media for instance, in our organizational policies and practices, and in our research on People of Color, which has a longstanding history of being tainted by White racial dominance at every turn.
High-quality antiracism work DOES NOT ALLOW organizations to focus on racism as mere “individual acts of meanness.” Rather, it forces us to consider how racism is a multi-headed hydra that rears its multiple heads in our relationships, hiring practices, discriminatory lending laws, policing, justice, and even in our “science du jour,” which influences what we think we know and can predict from People of Color.
High-quality antiracism work fully interrogates American racism and global racism at every level. High-quality antiracism work does NOT allow us to loiter in the “feel good” arena of training our way out of daily unpleasantries, individual insults, and mere meanness.
2. Antiracism Training Rightly Reshifts the Work AWAY from People of Color
In my own practice, I use a framework that rightly reshifts the work of antiracism FROM People of Color — who are often both exhausted and traumatized by racial dialogue — and TOWARD people who have the most power to create both racist and antiracist conditions: White people.
I have seen, far too many times, how schools, organizations, and federal agencies place the work of antiracism squarely on the shoulders of the very people who are victimized by racism. We are excellent at forming diversity committees and councils rife with already overworked Black and Brown people. We are quick to form affinity groups, employee resource groups, and networking groups comprised of the very minoritized groups that are being fully underpaid for their labor, yet asked to do even MORE labor as free internal diversity consultants.
We seek out our “diverse” employees for their likeness on our outward-facing pamphlets, and we seek their “stories” to highlight during heritage month celebrations. Yet as soon as those campaigns have concluded, we go right back to ignoring their plight, to being completely content with their pay inequity, and to casually (or aggressively) overlooking them for meaningful promotions and impactful leadership roles.
We then have the audacity to ask People of Color for readings, resources, and materials that will educate the rest of our mostly White organizations while White people…do what? In academia for instance, we assemble our faculty of color, task them with developing a diversity strategic plan, and consume their teaching and writing time by asking them to fix the very universities that exclude and discriminate against them. Meanwhile, White professors are in their offices, with the doors closed, publishing, flourishing, gaining tenure, and becoming even more powerful.
…All while the People of Color are serving “double duty” and slipping even further behind professionally.
In my antiracism work, I urge organizations to reshift their gazes upward. I assist them in focusing their anti-homophobia work on straight people. Their anti-sexism and anti-sexual harassment work on men. And most importantly, I educate them about how to successfully shift their antiracism work to White people, who can become powerful allies and accomplices for People of Color.
In other words, I teach organizations to stop overworking, double-tasking, overburdening, and burning out their members of color. Rather, I inspire them to focus on the very groups that have the most power to create antiracist conditions. And we go from there.
3. Racism is a Form of Bondage, and Antiracism Sets You Free
If we have learned nothing else from watching with our own eyes the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the host of unarmed Black victims who came before them, we have learned that racism TAKES lives.
And if racism TAKES lives, then antiracism SAVES lives.
Antiracism training is vitally important because we know, without a doubt, that when your color ALONE is a threat, you can be murdered on the street, almost without consequence, based solely on what someone thought you might do.
We know that an unarmed Michael Brown is far more threatening than a fully-armed, murderous Dylann Roof. We know that an unarmed George Floyd is infinitely more menacing than an assault rifle-wielding, murderous Kyle Rittenhouse. And we know that a SLEEPING Breonna Taylor is exponentially more dangerous than any of the White, gun-brandishing, assault-rifle-wielding, yelling-in-the-faces-of-on-duty-police-officers “protestors” who turned up at the Michigan House of Representatives in defiance of the pandemic stay-at-home orders.
How are we more dangerous?
As long as we are far quicker to assume the criminality and danger of Black people and shoot them dead in the street without consequence, we need antiracism training.
And as long as a small, multiracial diversity consultant is more threatening and dangerous than the gun-toting, law-defying “protestors” invading government buildings, we need antiracism training. Now more than ever.
Learning about the multiple levels on which racism functions is not unpatriotic. It is forcing this country to live up to its ideals that we are created equally, we should be treated fairly under the law, and we are capable of constantly refining our country to forge a more perfect union.
Asking White people to contribute their fair share to the struggles for racial equity and social justice is not un-American. In fact, it is the consummate extension of an inclusive hand so that White people do not feel excluded from a conversation that is inherently about them.
As an antiracism educator, trainer, and speaker, I am not a threat to America. I am not a threat to patriotism. And given my own station as a multiracial-mixed with Black woman, I am most certainly not a threat to White people.
I specialize in empowering people to conscientiously co-opt their racial power for good. To embrace their whiteness not as a badge of shame or guilt, but as one of usable racial power and great potential.
I may have been “cancelled” by Trump’s most recent attempt to suppress our truths, but if I know what I know, as a powerful White man, he should have been the first to sign up for my training.
We could learn and unlearn an awful lot together, and we could work toward justice, truth, and peace together.
My favorite invitation this summer was from a federal agency in the supersecret intelligence community.
They know where to find me, Mr. Trump. I’ll be ready when they call.
Dr. Taharee Jackson, Ph.D. is Founder and Tonesetter-in-Chief of DrTaharee Consulting. She has served as a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Expert Consultant and antiracism educator, trainer, and speaker for nearly two decades. Dr. Jackson was a professor of Minority and Urban Education for 17 years and continues to guest lecture at Harvard and other institutions. She is deeply passionate about inspiring members of empowered groups to become allies and accomplices for those who are minoritized. She is also passionate about voting in the November 2020 election and witnessing the ban on the ban on antiracism training.