www.montereycountynow.com july 11-17, 2024 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 15 Dirrick Williams is all too familiar with racism. As a Black man and native of majority-white Pacific Grove, he knows what it feels like to look different and be treated horribly for it. In 2018, he was accosted and physically attacked by a white couple outside of a Monterey bowling alley; she called him the n-word, and he punched Williams’ jaw, breaking it in three places. More recently, while attending a fundraiser in Carmel, he met a white man and they began to make small talk. When Williams said he had five children, the man responded with a racist trope: “Oh, by the same mother?” It’s hard to imagine anyone would utter the n-word or punch someone in the face at such an affair. But that the casual utterance reveals something else—that racism is indeed still here, pernicious if subtle. “Just because nobody is getting hung doesn’t mean the effects of racism aren’t continuing,” Williams says. “Microaggression—what a euphemism for acts of hatred. We have to understand there is no such thing as a microaggression—it’s macro. It always digs deep. There is always pain associated with it.” Williams feels that pain, and he invites you to join him in exploring it. As the founder of the Black Leaders and Allies Collaborative (BLAAC) in 2021, Williams—a minister, an Air Force veteran, a life coach, a rehab counselor and an activist—has built a nonprofit dedicated to advancing racial equity. And for Williams, a lot of that happens through expanding people’s awareness of the fact that yes, racism is still with us, even if it’s portrayed as micro. “The scope of our work revolves around the idea of people not understanding what racism is,” he says. One opportunity to begin that work is at the second annual Race Relations Summit hosted by BLAAC on July 12, a day-long conversation about race and racism. (Event tagline: Race is fiction, racism is not.) The summit will explore the institutional and workplace scale when it comes to addressing bias and racism, with guest speakers including Linda McKenzie, CEO of Global Empathy Training Academy, and Khuram Hussain, vice president for Equity & Inclusion at Middlebury College. But even at the institutional scale, the practice of deconstructing the fiction of race and the reality of racism leads Williams back again and again to what might be the most basic possible solution: investing in relationships. “Everything happens in relationship. If we fix relationships, racism goes away,” he says. His vision for graduates of BLAAC’s intensive 14-week course, Euro-Centric Cultural Reflectionism, is for people to probe their own feelings and experience with race and racism—and then to get to a point where they can look at people of different races as whole people. Or as Williams puts it, “People who look at people who don’t look like them with a sense of curiosity, rather than disdain.” That sounds simple, but Williams knows it’s not. He sees and lives his own identity as a Black man as something less than simple. In moments of relationship—when someone at a fundraiser invokes a racist trope about infidelity—what is his response? In another recent incident, Williams was dining at The Club at Pasadera, when he ran into a friend who introduced him to another guest. They made small talk about their lives for a couple of minutes. After Williams told the new acquaintance about his work in race relations, the man raised the same insulting, racist stereotype: What are you going to do about all the Black fathers that don’t take care of their kids? Williams turned the question into a mini lesson—about socioeconomic disparities, mass incarceration, what it means to be Black in America, and despite all of those structural inequities, statistics and examples to reveal how much Black men are thriving in spite of it all. “What do you think we should do about all of these things?” Williams asked. There’s not an easy answer to that question other than ending racism in schools, prisons and institutions. But perhaps the place to start addressing any of those big, unwieldy things is by talking to people who look different than you do. The Race Relations Summit takes place from 9am-3:30pm Friday, July 12 at Embassy Suites, 1441 Canyon Del Rey Blvd., Seaside. $75; includes lunch. 337-8995, blaac.org/events. Sara Rubin is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@montereycountynow.com. Truth and Fiction A summit aims to help people recognize myths and realities around race. By Sara Rubin Measure Up…As a college student, young Squid excelled at penmanship—thanks to that self-replenishing ink supply. But Squid’s undersea alma mater (and Squid’s excellent handwriting skills) did not help Squid’s lair when it came to WalletHub’s 2024 rankings of the most and least educated cities in America. Out of 150 metro areas, Squid found Salinas near the bottom, 142 out of 150 (Visalia was last). Squid knows more than a few people who moved to the region specifically for educational purposes, whether to study or as educators, or both, so Squid decided to read up on the methodology. WalletHub took into account the percentage of adults with at least a high school diploma, a college degree or graduate degree. It also took into account the percentage of students enrolled in a top university—by referring to WalletHub’s own ranking report on colleges and universities. That list starts with Yale, MIT and Princeton—and ignores most of Monterey County’s educational institutions, including two community colleges and plethora of graduate-level institutions (Naval Postgraduate School, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories of San Jose State, Middlebury Institute of International Studies, Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, Hastings Natural History Reservation of the UC system, etc.) Squid did not attend a top 10 school or even top 500, but Squid’s educational attainment is enough to give Squid the skills to read through WalletHub’s methodology and raise Squid’s eyebrows. Beggars and Choosers…Of all the dysfunction Squid has witnessed from elected officials on local councils and boards, the members of the Monterey Peninsula Community College District Board of Trustees might just take the crab cake. They have been squabbling during meetings for months—even a professional mediator couldn’t help. Recently three complaints were filed by trustees against other trustees, the details of which have not been disclosed to the public. In November three seats are up for grabs, which means voters have an opportunity to clean house. Just to make sure everyone knows, MPC sent out a press release on July 2, advertising that three of five seats are open, providing info on the candidate filing period (July 15-Aug. 19). The seats available are currently held by Chair Libby Downey and trustees Loren Steck and Debbie Anthony. Downey and Steck have recently resisted attempts to follow board policy to resolve the outstanding complaints. Anthony has been argumentative with the rest of the board since she was elected in 2020. Elections matter, and while it isn’t democracy in the balance, the MPCCD election could restore peace to the district, tentacles crossed. the local spin SQUID FRY THE MISSION OF MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY IS TO INSPIRE INDEPENDENT THINKING AND CONSCIOUS ACTION, ETC. “There is always pain associated with it.” Send Squid a tip: squid@montereycountynow.com
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