This month we are highlighting the TEDx talk ‘I’m Tired of Talking About Race’ by educator, writer, and strategic communication professional, Jasmine Roberts who delves deeper into the emotional fatigue experienced by people of color when discussing race with their white counterparts. While creating an assumption that people of colour are automatically experts on the topic of race, she questions “what does it mean to be white?”, how people struggle to critically think about how their race affects their life, and how people do not view themselves in a racial context.
Jasmine readdresses “racism” as an umbrella term that addresses the everyday racist culture in society, but also, as a system of advantages and disadvantages, highly influenced by race. Due to structural institutional racism, coupled with solutions to this growing concern, she touches upon her personal experience through examples such as the racial wealth gap, turning to people from the Global Majority to educate them on racism, and white fragility.
“There is indeed a growing sentiment in communities of colour. Some of us are getting tired of talking about race because of some of the responses we receive that range from dismissiveness to colour blind rhetoric that’s used to trivialise our experiences.” – Jasmine Roberts
Jasmine goes beyond the ever-present prejudicial attitudes towards racism and provides examples of the disparity of wealth faced by Black, Hispanic and other Global Majority communities in ethnically diverse areas, such as her grandparents who moved in predominantly white areas in American during the 1950s.
Moreover, Jasmine makes an interesting point about how people from the Global Majority are being put in positions of power/leadership within institutions to lead diversity and inclusion programmes:
“It takes the responsibility of white people to engage in these issues and places it mostly upon people of colour who are actually dealing with racism every single day.” – Jasmine Roberts
We encourage you to take 10 minutes to listen to Jasmine’s Ted talk and explore how you can improve conversations and approaches in your own workplace!