Jordan Thierry, author of A Kids Book About Systemic Racism, talks about how systemic racism limited how he saw himself represented in film and career opportunities.
Jordan Thierry, author of A Kids Book About Systemic Racism, talks about how systemic racism limited how he saw himself represented in film and career opportunities.
A Kids Book About Systemic Racism (view book)
Full Book Description:
Systemic racism is incredibly difficult to understand—even for grownups! This book was made to help kids understand what systemic racism is and how it’s built into laws, schools, stories, and other institutions in a way that collectively makes life much harder for people of color.
About The Author:
Jordan Thierry is a documentary filmmaker, activist, and storyteller. He has worked for over a decade to highlight the stories of people of color and working to undo the ongoing legacy of systemic racism in the U.S.A.
*If you want to be on a future episode of A Kids Book About: The Podcast or if you have a question you’d like us to consider, have a grownup email us at listen@akidspodcastabout.com and we’ll send you the details.
A Kids Book About: The Podcast
S1 E03, Jordan Talks About Systemic Racism
[INTRODUCTION]
Matthew: What is systemic racism?
Noelle: When big groups of people or institutions are being racist. It’s when more than one person does it, like a company.
Layla: And I think systemic racism is things such as Jim Crow law.
Jordan: Systemic racism is when racist ideas and notions are embedded into laws and rules of our government or major institutions that have a lot of influence in our society.
Matthew: Welcome to A Kids Book About, the podcast! I’m Matthew, your host. The voices you heard at the top of our show were from Noelle, Layla, and Jordan.
Each week we talk about the big things going on in your world with a different author from our A Kids Book About series.
[MEET OUR GUEST]
Jordan: Hi, my name is Jordan Thierry and I'm the author of A Kids Book About Systemic Racism.
I am a 37 year old African-American male, born and raised in Portland, Oregon. And I'm a filmmaker and social change activist.
Matthew: You may have already listened to the first episode of this podcast, where A Kids Book About founder Jelani Memory talked about what racism is, what it can look like, and how you can identify and disrupt it when you see it.
Jelani and Jordan have known one another since high school. Jordan will talk about that later in the episode, not to mention Jelani’s amazing 3-pointer skills. But first, let’s hear how A Kids Book About Systemic Racism came to be.
Jordan: When A Kids Book About wanting to take a deeper dive into the issue of racism, Jelani reached out to me, and this is right around the time that George Floyd was murdered last summer. And he asked if doing a book on systemic racism or institutional racism was something that I was comfortable doing. And I think he already knew the answer was definitely yes because a lot of my work has been to dismantle a lot of these laws that have some racist ideas and then change them to make them better and more fair for everyone.
And given the timing of the George Floyd murder, we knew that a lot of people were going to be wanting to talk with what was happening all around the country with their kids. And so we, we really wanted to put some urgency around finishing the book and making sure that parents and teachers had it available as a tool to have those discussions.
[TOPIC FOUNDATION]
Matthew: Jordan defines systemic racism as “racist ideas and notions that are embedded into laws and rules of government or major institutions that have a lot of influence in our society.
These systems or institutions already have a great influence on your life. The education system, for example, is the institution that provides schooling for children from preschool through college. It’s made up of rules and guidelines that determine what public school you attend, how many days make up a school year, what things you learn in a given school year, and what skills you need to master in order to move on to the next grade.
Jordan: Systemic racism can hurt people, uh, in similar ways that individual racism can hurt people. The difference is that sometimes you're being hurt by systemic racism and you can't necessarily point your finger at a person to blame because it is a lot of different factors and rules that may have existed for a long time before you were even born.
Matthew: Does everyone in your city or state have access to the same quality education that you have? Are there some schools that have more resources or better teachers or a nicer building? Maybe your family enrolled you in a private school? Can anyone attend that school? What factors might be keeping some people out while giving others an easier chance to attend?
These are not easy questions to answer, but they are questions that you have a right to ask. And sometimes the answer to what is keeping some people out or giving some people less is an issue of systemic racism.
Here’s Jordan.
Jordan: I have been pulled over by police much more than my white friends have. Many police officers that I've interacted with I feel like had a bias against African-American black people and were more likely to pull them over because they thought that they were committing a crime or were likely to go and commit a crime.
Bias is when someone has an idea or a preference for one thing over another. And sometimes they have biases that are based on ideas that are unfair or untrue about other people.
And so that's one way systemic racism has impacted me in my many interactions with police in the past.
Another way that has impacted me, and I've talked about this in the book as well, is just growing up there wasn't a lot of representation of African-American males on television and in film
That was anything different than an athlete, a musician, or a dancer, or a comedian. Those were sort of the main roles that I saw represented in the media for an African or African-American male. And those were the things that I sort of aspired to because that's what I thought was possible for me.
I didn't necessarily think that I could be an astronaut or an architect or an engineer because I didn't necessarily see those representations of people that looked like me in the media. And systemic racism has unfortunately limited the type of people that are represented in the media in the past.
And so a lot of the people that were in those positions on TV and film were white men and I didn't see myself as a white man, and so I didn't see myself as being able to be an astronaut, engineer, or an architect.
Matthew: Okay, listeners. Time for a quick check in. Systemic racism and individual racism are related, but they can look different. Can you describe how they’re the same? Can you describe how they’re different? Pause the episode and talk to a grownup if you have one nearby.
Ask them these questions, too.
How is systemic racism the same or different from individual racism?
Layla: I think systemic racism is different from regular racism because it’s the laws, like, racist laws. And racism is when someone says something mean to someone just because of the color of their skin.
Jordan: Individual racism might be, you know, me saying to you, “Hey, I don't like who you are because your skin is brown.” And I think that's ugly. And that's racism. And that's unfair.
Systemic racism can make you feel ugly without anyone necessarily telling you that you're ugly. It can make you feel like you're worse than that because of all of the rules that may make it harder for you to be successful, that may put people who look different than you on a pedestal and say, “this is what beauty looks like.”
Right? And if you're the opposite of that, then what are you inferring about yourself? You think that you might be ugly? Do you understand? Systemic racism is hard to point the finger at any one person. It's invisible in many ways until you see it, and then you see it everywhere, unfortunately.
Matthew: We’ll hear more from Jordan - including the answer to one of the questions you submitted - right after this quick break.
[BREAK]
Matthew: Welcome back to A Kids Book About: The Podcast. On today’s episode we’re talking about system racism, what it shares in common with individual racism, and how it affects all of us.
Now that we have a better idea of what systemic racism is and what it looks like, I’m turning to Jordan to help us better understand why systemic racism exists in the first place.
Jordan: When,settlers came over from Europe, they had the idea that they were a superior group of people then people who already lived on that land, Indigineous people, Native Americans and people from Africa that were brought over as slaves into the United States and to the rest of the Americas.
And so a lot of those rules and laws have been passed down and they've been changed a little bit over generations, but the idea that white people are superior still exists in a lot of people's minds.
Sometimes they're aware that they have that bias, but oftentimes they're not aware that they have that bias. And so both those rules and those laws that are still affecting our society as well as the people who live in our society, having that idea that they're better than others, is why systemic racism still exists.
Matthew: Systemic racism exists and it affects the people around you. Some people benefit from systemic racism. They have privilege and opportunity where others do not. Systemic racism makes access to that opportunity harder, sometimes even impossible, for others, namely people of color or those not considered white.
I asked Jordan how systemic racism affected him and his childhood.
Jordan: So as a young person, um, I didn't believe that I was smart. I was not someone that took school seriously because I didn't see myself as being an academic achiever. I saw myself as being someone that was supposed to be good at basketball, someone that was supposed to be very entertaining to my classmates. And that's what I sort of embraced: that idea and that image of myself.
That impacted my life in a way where, you know, I didn't necessarily go to the college where I wanted to go to I struggled when I got to college because I didn't take my middle school and high school classes very seriously because I didn't see myself as an academic achiever.
So, Jelani Memory and I met in high school at what is now the YMCA. He was a very, very talented basketball player and when we played each other in high school, he scored like 30 points on us, mostly three pointers. So, a very talented basketball player, Jelani.
And we've been able to stay in touch over the years. He actually supported some of my work with my film, the Black Fatherhood Project, which was really powerful as well to get to work with him.
When A Kids Book About wanted to take a deeper dive into the issue of racism. He asked if doing a book on systemic racism or institutional racism was something that I was comfortable doing. And I think he already knew the answer was definitely yes.
Matthew: Jordan did and does confront systemic racism on almost a daily basis, but he has no doubt about what helped him to change the way he saw himself.
Jordan: I had a very loving family and they were very encouraging and very supportive of me, um, throughout my life. And I wouldn't have been able to achieve the things I have achieved if it weren't for such a loving family that I have.
[LISTENER QUESTION]
Matthew: We received a number of questions from listeners like you about systemic racism and most of them came down to a question of “Why”, that’s what Noelle in Maryland wanted to know.
Noelle: Like, why people are racist? Because we’re all human. It’s not like someone else is an alien.
Matthew: ...So I asked Jordan if he had any suggestions on how we can help disrupt systemic racism.
Jordan: You can help end systemic racism by speaking up when you see that something may be harder for a person of color than it is for a white person. When you see someone being treated unfairly because of the rules or because of the laws, speak up and speak out against those things and say, “this isn't fair.”
It's very helpful when white people speak up on some of these issues to call out the unfairness and the injustice, especially because sometimes if you're the only person of color in the room, it can be really difficult and scary to speak up on those issues. Supporting people and speaking up about those injustices and those unfair rules is going to be really helpful.
And I think that's one thing that people can do to help end systemic racism.
[CLOSING]
Matthew: Thank you to Jordan Thierry, author of A Kids Book About Systemic Racism, for joining us today, and to our two very special kid voices for helping make this episode what it is.
Layla: Hi. My name is Layla. I am 10 years old and I live in Maryland. My favorite things are art and my cat.
Noelle: My name is Noelle. I am 9 years old and live in Maryland. I like to do art and science.
Matthew: Thanks, Layla! Thanks, Noelle! If you want to be on a future episode of A Kids Book About: The Podcast or if you have a question you’d like us to consider, have a grownup email us at listen@akidspodcastabout.com and we’ll send you the details.
A Kids Book About: the Podcast is written, edited, and produced by me, Matthew Winner, with help from Chad Michael Snavely and the team at Sound On Studios. Our executive producer is Jelani Memory. And this show was brought to you by A Kids Podcast About!
Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and wherever podcasts are found, and if you liked this episode, consider sharing it with a friend, teacher, or grownup.
Join us next week for a conversation about divorce with A Kids Book About author Ashley Simpo.