racism Archives - Lori Reising

A Critical Conversation About Racial Profiling and Police Reform

Episode Summary

This is an intimate conversation from the perspective of Todd Davis, a Black Man in the United States of America who shares the racial profiling he has experienced from police and Dave Smith, a White Man who served as a Captain in the LA Police Division and who fought for accountability and reform within the department. I am extremely grateful to both of these men for their honesty, transparency and vulnerability at a critical time in systemic change for racial justice.

Show Notes:

Consent
A normalized conversation on police interaction for BIPOC
Practicing servant leadership in the LAPD
Dave’s involvement with the Rodney King investigation
Living with the boogie man
A mental prison – work, relationships, nighttime
The Warren Christopher Report
Police misconduct and lack of accountability
“Everything we see today, we’ve seen before”
Use of tactics in the police system
Us against them mentality
Unprovoked police interactions – stop and frisk era
Loss of self in racial profiling
The power of partnership with community leaders
Loyalty to your crew
What is leadership?
A growing distrust for the police
Defunding and re-allocating funds for social systems
Transparency in complicity
Same cops, same stories
Toxic police culture
If internal affairs works, it’s too late
“We need this moment”
“I started profiling myself”
Trauma re-triggered today
Community over currency
“This is life and death”
“We need to bear witness to what is right”

Links Mentioned:

Todd Davis
https://www.facebook.com/ToddSocial
Warren Christopher Report
https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports98/police/uspo73.htm
Up First, Bonus: American Police
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/06/871447408/bonus-american-police
Trevor Noah – Goods Cops and Bad cops
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpXXUC623ow&feature=youtu.be
Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop
https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759
National Police Accountability Project
https://www.nlg-npap.org
Campaign Zero
https://www.joincampaignzero.org
Color of Change
https://colorofchange.org
Justice for George Floyd
https://www.change.org/p/mayor-jacob-frey-justice-for-george-floyd
Fight for Breonna
https://www.change.org/p/andy-beshear-justice-for-breonna-taylor
Thoughtful Conversations About Whiteness with Good Friends and Cats
https://therawandwildhearts.com/2020/02/09/thoughtful-conversations-about-whiteness-with-good-friends-and-cats/

Episode Summary

My guest today is the divine Devi Ward. She is the Founder of the Institute of Authentic Tantra Education, is the host of the podcast Sex is Medicine, is an author and has been featured as a Tantra and Female Sexuality Expert in countless articles and over 30 different radio and television networks world-wide. We will be exploring what it means to look at the white race in relation to racism, why it is uncomfortable for white people to talk about race and how we are mostly uninformed and uneducated when it comes to discussions about race, even with the best of intentions. It is my hope to open up a conversation about this to normalize it so more conversations start happening, which will affect bigger change. I want to bridge the taboo gap by sharing experiences and truths to help us all discover where we may have been misled or misplaced in our own upbringing or experience. The cats are there because as Devi has said previously when engaging in these conversations, cats make everything better.

Show Notes:

This episode was the most vulnerable I’ve been and that is exactly what drives me to share it with the world. We as white people need to push past those feelings of vulnerability in regard to race and seek out the very best ways that we can implement change in a system entrenched in extreme bias and privilege. My guest shares very deep wounds as a result of racial trauma and I’m so grateful to her for opening up in such a public platform to share her experience with us about the very real impact it has had on her life. Thank you for holding the space for her to put a voice to these wounds. Please do check out the very valuable resources listed below. I will tell you right not that since doing my own research for this interview I have had several conversations that have led to others discovering the importance of becoming educated and talking with their children early on. I just returned from a powerful retreat experience where I offered my Awakening Your Life Force workshop and surfing lessons as a piece to the whole movement. What we talked about most is how the reaction we may feel listening to another’s experience can be a very helpful tool as a mirror or reflection of ourselves to explore. I encourage you to listen with an open mind and heart that is really willing to look past your personal experience and into the much deeper wound racism has inflicted on our entire culture.

Our history, how we met
The system is broken
Receiving the message that I was defective, “If I would have been born 5 years earlier I would have been illegal”
Childhood education, deep-seeded beliefs
Exploring the belief that if you talk about race, you are racist
Color blindness and the destructive outcome in that school of thought
Dominant culture sets the values of that culture
Generational trauma of racism
Racial trauma, family trauma, growing up bi-racial in an affluent white neighborhood
The almost fatal result of the accumulative trauma of being a person of color in America
The danger of the binary assumption the a bad person is racist and a good person is not.
Racism if the air we breathe, it’s not personal
Test your implicit bias
Systemic barriers demonstrated in a bird cage analogy
The structure is a reflection of the mind, change starts within
Who is your dream guest and why?