Colin Seale || Tangible Equity in Education

to his passion for educational equity. Using lessons from his experience as a math teacher, attorney, and keynote speaker, he helps educators teach critical thinking to all students, regardless of race or achievement through his award winning organization Think Law. Colin is also the author of Thinking Like a Lawyer, and his latest book, which is the topic of our chat today, is called Tangible Equity. In this episode, I

talked to Colin about tangible equity and education. For Colin, real equity work should help reduce the predictive power of demographics on outcomes. In order to do that, he argues, we need to teach kids how to think for themselves so that they can learn to question instead of comply with unfair systems. Colin shares concrete actions that educators can take took a tribute towards tangible equity. We also touch on the topics of privilege, race bias, and gifted education.

It's always a great time chatting with Colin. He's a really thoughtful and passionate guy, and I think he's making some really important changes in the education system. So, without further ado, I bring you Colin Seal. How are you, man, I'm great. It's been a while. Yeah, yeah, yeah, man, Man, I really I really, really really enjoyed reading through your book. Man. I read it back in July, like full thing first, I just kind of read a couple of chapters whatever.

But man, I'm being so inspired after reading that book. Man, Yeah, transcend Yeah, it's so good. I mean, what do you think about what I think about for my children? Right when I think about like for the world and the teachers we work with, whatever. It's like, man, who just setting a higher bar? Setting a higher bar? I mean, I love it so. I mean it's the hugest breath of fresh air I've had in a long time. Wow, that made my day. Thank you talk about setting a

higher bar in this discourse. I loved your new book, Tangible Equity. Congratulations, congratulations in the publication a lot leading up to that book. It brings together lots of your prior ideas. I mean, we e've been on this podcast before. This is a repeat performer on the podcast. But in our last discussion we talk about a lot of these issues as well, which are in this book. But this book brings together lots more threads and lots more a

lot more of your thinking since then. The subtitle of your book is a guide for leveraging student identity, culture, and power to unlock excellence in and beyond the classroom. I think like this idea of equity. I'd love to get your thoughts on your latest thinking about how you define that term, maybe how it differs from how some

other people define it. I love it. I love it, So I think it's important to start by saying, like when we first spoke, my first book wasn't even out right, This Thinking like a Lawyer book hadn't even come out yet before, and a lot of the work that I've been leading in the last seven years since I started this organization Think law was how do we close the critical thinking gap in education? How do we make sure

that all kids have access to critical thinking? Because of my firm belief that when our kids learn how to lead, how to innovate, how to break what needs to be broken, it's a very different level of consuming education and living and not just surviving but thriving in our world. So that's the work we've been doing with you know, districts and school systems all over the nation. And when it comes to equity, I'm so glad that we're starting with this question because we are in a really weird space.

People can say whatever and call it equity. Right, we can say, hey, I am going to you. Saw this so often during COVID. We got to make sure we keep schools closed because equity. Oh don't we have to really make sure we reopen schools because of equity. Oh, let's make sure we shut down I get to the talented program equity. Let's make sure we expand opportunity to

advance academics equity. So let's be really clear. When I say equity work, I think about the work that we do that reduces the predictive power that demographics have on outcomes. So for doing equity work, we're doing the kinds of things that are resulting in reducing the predictive power that

demographics have on outcomes. This means that no matter where you're listening from, if you live in the community where you can say things like the other side of the tracks, south of the inter state, north of the interstate, if you've got this thing where oh there's that trail apart community over there is that community where most people speak that language, the community where most people are that skin color, those kids in your school that have that little thing

on their record that said that they're this type of student. If it's no longer the case that so many of those demographic markers can lead to see sorts of predictive outcomes, we're doing the type of disruptive equity work that I mean when we say equity. So what I like about that definition is it is really inclusive. I've never met an educator in any community who's felt like, oh, yeah,

we don't do that here. Of course you do. We're all trying to reduce predictive capacity that demographics tend to have on outcomes. No matter where we work. This has been your mission for years. I mean, you've said right in your mission statement, I remember like what five six years ago like, regardless of your zip code, regardless of you know what side of the tracks you're on, I believe you said that at one point this has been in your heart and mind for a really long time.

Do you feel like the past couple of years it's you've gotten even more like passionate about it or more real because you're fired up right now. I look at you, I love it. You know, are you even more fired up right now than you were before? Like other world events things that have You're like, this is the time

for me to really get this message out there. If you haven't been in a reflective space in the last two years, it's really surprising to me, right, because there's so many things about the last two years that that

kind of forces that reflection. But one of the things that I've learned to really really question over the last two years is this idea around what success looks like, what success actually means Because for me, growing up, how I grew up, growing up in a struggle, growing up on free of reduced lunch, having a bad and cars rate for selling drugs, growing up with some of the behavior challenges I had when I was in my primary grades, the idea that I'm doing what I do now can

seem like this miraculous success, right, And I see these stories all the time, and I'm like, yeah, you know, we really got to work hard. We really got to push towards outcomes, because, as I've argued before, the outcome is part of the opportunity. Right when we make sure that that destructive work it's focused on those outcomes, those outcomes lead to more opportunities for populations whose lives can be transformed by those outcomes that lead to those opportunities.

But then part of what I started to buckle up against, and I have a piece that I wrote for the seventy four that explained, like why I wrote Tangible equity. I started to feel like, there's a cost to this work. There's a cost to this model that says, hey, depending on where you are in our world, you might have to work twice as hard to get half as far in certain kinds of constraints. Right, maybe because of gender

or ability issues, or you know, racial injustice issues. You've got this two tiered system that requires extraordinary effort from some folks to get what would normally be looked at as ordinary results, and honestly, Scott, I started to feel it. I started to feel this level of exhaustion. I started to question, why did I stop going ball at twenty one years old. It doesn't even run in my family. Why is my prostate as an almost forty year old person where it should be when I'm in my mid sixties.

Why is my blood pressure spiking up to this level of height? And I start looking at this thing. Doctor Charles Coal has a book that's called Beyond Grit and Resilience, and he talked about this idea of the black achievement trauma tacks. And when I read this book and I started looking at it, and I heard him speak at our conference once. He talked about when he experiences a failure, when he has a small setback, he starts to smell

the homeless shelter. He can still smell it. This man has his doctorate, right, and he can still smell it. And I think about, what is the cost of creating this space, of telling you your answer to the injustice in front of you is to just put your head down and grit and resilience your way through it. That was kind of what I had been on for a long time. But if I think about tangible equity, I think about my two kids, Roseen Oliver, and I think about a world where I don't tell them anymore that

they've got to work twice as hard. It could happen as far because we've created something better, We've created something that's more fair, more equitable. They were part of that creation as well. So this idea that we don't need to just simply settle for navigating a system, what if we work to kind of dismantle the parts of this And that didn't really work. As an immigrant kid, all of my life was about playing the game. But what if we transcended the game altogether. What if we said

we need to slay the game. And that's kind of where we really get to a point where our kids are part of being part of that just world change that we're looking for. Yeah, why has this word equity been becomes such a bad word in certain circles? Though, I mean it sounds like you're trying to really put it on a really rigorous foundation and inclusive, a really truly inclusive foundation. Are there instances where you agree with some of the criticisms that have been leveraged against the

use of that word. Yes, And I think part of the challenge is whether you want to call it performative equity or cosmetic equity. There's a lot of people that just talk about equity, and when you talk about equity in certain ways that are not actually guided in that disruption, right, things that are going to actually make a tangible difference in disrupting that pattern between demographics and outcomes. We can get into a world where people just start doing pretty

weird stuff. But if you think about it, what systemic change is happening When we decide to take a group of third graders, have them stand in line and move forward and backwards on that line based off of whether or not they have a certain privilege or don't have a certain privilege. Right, that's called the privilege walk, right, And what I think about a privilege walk is it is a showcase. It is the kind of thing that can maybe make me feel like I am doing something

that's equity work. But again, what actual work is happening. And sometimes part of what we do is we say, oh, but no, we really got to address mindsets, right, We got to have like courageous conversations about race because we got to have mindsets. But how courageous is your conversation if it never leads to actual action? And actually, how much can I do with mindset if I never have

a skill set to go with it? Right? So, a lot of times, from a K twelve perspective, what this looks like is there's some teachers that look at certain types of kids and say these kids can't, these kids can't, these kids can't. And a lot of times educators would be like, Oh, that's a mindset issue, that's a belief issue. But I'm like, well, what if there was a concession that when I say these kids can't, I'm saying I don't have any idea how to create the learning environments

such that all kids can. It's not an issue of will, but an issue of skill. I can actually do something about that. I can work on and change that. I get it. Like when you just said that sentence, I'm like, ah, that's why you call it tangible equity. I get it. I got it now, I get it. No, that's so true because so much of it is performative. You're right, it doesn't translate into tangible anything. Not only is it

not even tangible. We've got this massive phrase that's used in equity work that it's almost like I don't even have control over it. And I think that's where it starts to become really funky. I cannot stand the term implicit bias. I believe that it exists, right, I get

cognitively what I could be a thing. But I also think it's a very education thing for us to do, because in education we love letting folks off the hook, Like I'd rather instead of thinking about all these secret biases that I may have and may be kind of perpetrating on on kids unknowingly, I haven't focused on the explicit biases that I do have, because we all have

explicit bias. Part of why equity is so hard for folks to kind of grapple around is because we are in the world where it's like bias equals bad, bias equals reality. I remember being at a party with you once, Scott, and you ended up in a really bad conversation for a really long time, and I was biased against being in that conversation, right, And I'm like, I don't want

no parts of this. I'm out right, that's what I do, right, I peace out I'm like, I'm not dealing with this, right, Like when we talk about bias from a real kind of like cognitive level. Any teacher who's ever had an opportunity to name a child, right, name a child when you start going through those potential names. Left, not David,

I had David last year. Not going to happen. Oh, And we look at these things and we kind of joke and smile about it, But clearly bias exists when equity has been sort of weaponized to this idea that like equity makes people feel bad, it changes things if we already presume that bias was present, but we actually have to grapple with and deal with it. I want to name one last part about why equity has become a challenge. I think the way things have always been

done has an incredible amount of momentum. Right, the status quo has an incredible amount of momentum where even after the massive disruption of a pandemic, we can still see a lot of things reverting back to that as that norm. One of the things that are super important to be able to preface anytime we're doing equity work. That's reducing a predictive power the demographics have on outcomes is that

it's not always going to feel good. It's sometimes going to be a little bit uncomfortable, and in fact, even personally, anytime you are personally experiencing something where rare growth is happening, it's often growing pains associated with that. We're not honest about that. Often enough, if we were honest about it, we'd realize, like, this work we're about to embark upon

is not going to always feel great. There's gonna be a lot of personal accountability, a lot of personal responsibility involved in this, and it's gonna feel kind of funky, not to say that it's bad. We get to acknowledge the feeling of stuff. This is not an academic exercise. It's a very personal, real growth experience that has to happen. Yeah, oh yeah. The trauma, loss, and uncertainty of our world have led many of us to ask life's biggest questions,

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Barnes and Noble, Indie Bound and all major retailers. If you're in the UK and Commonwealth, you can pre order now at bookshop dot org dot UK. We truly hope this book helps you grow and thrive and become your best self. Okay, now back to the show. Well, what do you think is the biggest challenge our young people? You know, we'll face as adults, and how can this

notion of tangible equity prepare them for that? It seems like a cop out to talk about like pressure, you know, like peer pressure, Like, oh, there's so much pressure, there's so much pressure. But there's something about the definition of success that I start to grapple with a lot. I'll go around the country a lot and a lot of the uh. We do a lot of parent workshops, and oftentimes our parent workshops tend to lean towards parents of kids that are and they get then in town to

programs or whatever throughout the country. And it's interesting because when I ask parents and families how do you define success for your children? The kind of answers we get are the kind of answers Scott that I think you really look at when you think about success like want

them to be like kind. I want them to feel like they've got like a good set of friends and have positive relationships in their lives, and like are you know they've got a job and care about that, they're active in their community, all these things, right, But then I ask them another question. I'm like, all right, if you or your children answering this question, what would your

kids say? Was your answer? How you define success? And they're like all high test scores, really good report card grades, really high GPAs, checking up all the boxes for community service, getting into the good colleges. Like, so there's a disconnect. There's a disconnect where even the energy we spend living our lives do not connect with what our actual values are. What I worry about for our kids is how much will they go about their merried way accepting the unacceptable,

because that's what you're supposed to do. We're in a system that breeds compliance. We're in the system of people who like are really good at compliance, who become part of these systems. So to what extent are our kids going to be the ones that can be like, what

are there was a better way to do this? What if there's a different way to approach this, and my biggest worry is that there's not enough happening on a day to day basis, and I k the twelve education system that's preparing kids to ask these kinds of questions. That's really sad. Well, Like just tangibly, you're thinking, are some of the biggest problems in education? Like what are we concretely getting wrong? Can you enumerate this a little bit so one of them I can name for a fact.

I think this whole conversation we've see nationally around critical race theory CRT, anti CRT, critical race theory, whatever you want to call it, and it's become this boogey man. It's become this thing, and there's a range of concerns from the outrageous to the sincere. And when I start looking at this, my approach is a little bit different. My approach is to say, Okay, let's step back for a second. Why are people, particularly the ones that are

sincerely having a challenge with this? Why are people feeling this way? Why are people kind of get into this space? And what I've come to realize is we wouldn't have anywhere near the challenge around to see RT conversation if we felt super confident that we were doing our job when it came to our ct raising critical thinkers, and our response to that was to say, we actually created a platform for families, like an actual thing for families

that they can kind of purchase directly. That's called raising critical thinkers. I've raising Critical Thinkers at us and it's an English and Spanish and the idea is, I can use this platform to engage my kids, my children and critical thinking at home, because maybe, just maybe, if I was confident my kids knew how to think, I really wouldn't care if they could potentially be kind of indoctionate about what to think, because you know how to think, you can't be told what to think. Wait, this is

such a good point. Let me just pause you a second. This is such a good point. And sometimes some of the ideas coming from critical race theory are actually inversely correlated with good critical thinking. I hear some stuff and I'm like, well that doesn't make sense, you know, so not all of it, not all of critical race theory, just because the word criticals in there means that involves

critical thinking. So I think if you can give people the skills, so I'm going to say this critical often for the purposes of academia, means like scholarly and pretty deep. And what happens when we try to take something that scholarly and pretty deep and reduce it to an infographic or reduce it to something that I can deliver in third grade? Is things sound really weird and terrible? Okay, I'll give you a concrete example. That's a good point.

Literacy is white supremacy. What what are you talking about? Oh? Like, okay, Like reading and writing is white supremacy? Like that doesn't even make any sense? How do you get there? Right? And I can look at this from two ways. I can look at it by saying, like, you know, when they excavated the Jefferson compound in Montoicello, they found two hundred and thirty seven unidentified to lights and all these like pencils and things, and it was clear that there

was a secret school happening with these enslaved people. After a day of toiling in these fields, risk life and limb to learn how to read and write. So miss me on reading and writing is right supremacy? How do we get to that point? Though? How does it even happen? It happens because of a legal case. There's a case here in Arizona about fifty sixty years ago where there was a girl teenage mom who had a kid, was going to give up the kid for adoption, and in

the contract it said there was a six month finalization period. Okay, six month finalization period. About three weeks later she decided, you know what, I changed my mind. I don't want to go do the adoption. And the court said, okay, change your mind, it's whatever, it's fine. But then what they realized was the actual document said six months with the finalization period, but she only had two weeks to

change her mind. She was past that period. It didn't matter that she understood it that she had six months to change her mind. It mattered that the document said that this was the case, a document that she probably didn't really know how to read, a document that she

clearly did not actually understand. So what we say in contracts law is is this level of like force right where sometimes this law can force people in thro these kinds of outcomes where it's like you're saying that what it says on paper matters more than what I actually believe and understand. So in that way, you can say we have an injustice that's called a baked into it, where we said that what's on words matters more than

what's actually in my mind and in my heart. But that's a big jump between that and reading and writing is white supremacy. So there's a level of nuance and understanding that it's hard to translate when you start taking really complex ideas and putting them in the classroom, Which is why I'd rather use your own curriculum. I'd rather use what you're already learning. If you're learning circles in school, A circle is a set of all points equidis from

a single point. That single point is an elementary school in your school system. And we got to find how far we got to walk in each direction and find a healthy grocery store. That's not a circle anymore. But that idea of food desert excise me a why of why to even care about our radius? Why to care about us a coumference, right, So that's kind of the distinction. Will give me more examples of what falls within the purview of critical thinking, you know what kind of skills?

Give me some concrete skills that you think should be taught. Let's say I'm a history teacher, and my kids are learning about the Revolutionary War. Right, the way that I learned, the way that you probably learned, was to memorize all the fact, states, and figures of the Revolutionary War. But what if we were to ask our kids, what was the most important date of the Revolutionary War? Who's the most significant person in the Revolutionary War, what was the

most significant event of the Revolutionary War? We can clearly see that we've got some kids who can sit there and by rote memorization tell you every fact there is to know about the Revolutionary War, but struggle to make an independent argument as to what the most significant date

was and why. And what's cool about this idea, the tangible equity model is it presumes that your identity is a really important part of getting there, but in a different way than most of the time we talk about identity. When I think about identity from a learning framework, my question is, who's the most significant person in your household, what is this most significant store in your community? What has been the most significant date of your life? Now

it's about you. Now you're able to read significance from a lens that you can relate to because it's literally you, Well, I think there's just this very interesting idea of should critical thinking be taught in schools? And then the question I want to know is like how much do you think things should be taught through the lens of race?

I mean, don't you think there is some valid criticism against infusing the curriculum too much, with drawing it into drawing people's and children's attention to the racial differences in

the classroom. I do think that there's a level of understanding the world, and definitely understanding the United States of America where you can't say that you understand the history, you understand the present, or that you will understand the future if you don't understand the way that racial injustice has actually kind of played in to where we're at. The question is always the how, like how do we

get there? How do we get to the point where we understand kind of where we're at and how things work and what it means today, what it means today? So I think about this and talk about this a lot. In the Tangible Equity book, the phrase white privilege is a very unfortunate phrase. Okay, if that was a phrase that like the concept was being generated by a black person. I don't think they would have used the words white

privilege inherently confrontational. If you tell me white privilege, I'm in a fourth generation of a trailer park in Kentucky. I'm not necessarily gonna feel like there's a whole lot of privileges that come with my whiteness right now, right, So what are we even saying that for? Yeah? Was that idea created by DiAngelo? Oh? That was Peggy Macintosh back in like nineteen eighty nine, right, a white person.

She's a white woman. That is a woman's studies scholar who decided to kind of take the idea of concept of male privilege and see how that might be applied if we talked about it from a racial issue. I didn't even know that, So thanks for that, Thanks for that history. Yeah, I didn't know who, like who coined that term. Yeah, And my problem with privilege is that, like what we ignore, we just talk about white privilege or whatever is we ignore the rally that everybody has privileges,

every single person has youse said of privileges. And in fact, you know, one of the most revolutionary things I did when I was in undergrad at Syracuse is I took a woman's studies course. We had to keep a privileged lodge, a privilege log, and what it was was we just noted things that were something that we had, that was someone at an advantage that we didn't earn. We didn't earn this advantage. Like one of the things I realized.

I was back home one a weekend in New York because I'm from Brooklyn, and I'm on a train station and I'm realizing there was a man in a wheelchair who's really studying the subway map. And I'm an expert at subways, right, I know all the things there is about the New York subway. And I was like, hey, do you need some help geting where you need to go? I can give you some advice whatever. He's like, no, I'm just trying to confirm that this station has an elevator.

I said, crap, that's a privilege. I never have to plan my route along like which station will have an elevator that I can get out? And I ended up getting off at the same stop list and guess what, the elevator didn't work, and now me and one of the person had to help bring him up the stairs and I'm like, I never have to worry about if I go to a place that's not working, they's somebody

be able to help me up the stairs. So when I start thinking about these things, it's like I'm living in the world where I have a conscious of where I'm at. I have a conscious of like why my world and my worldview might be different than others. If you do it's instructionally, it could be like I'm in the classroom and I'm looking at three blind mice. Three blind mice, See how they run? They all right after the farmer's wife. She cut off their tails with a

carving knife. And I'm asking these kids, like, what's hard about being a blind mouse? What are some of the challenges you might encounter as a blind mouse? Maybe it's harder to get to food, Maybe you're more susceptible to pray. Well, what are some alternative reasons as to why you might have been running after the farmer's wife if you weren't trying to scare her. Maybe she's smelt like cheese. It's

not always about you, lady. These are the kinds of things that if our kids start to adopt that kind of thinking earlier, it builds the empathy. So when I think about the pathway to understanding the way that race kind of plays out in different things, it's more about building empathetic folks who can relate, understand, be persuaded like, oh, shoot, people have different struggles than I have. That's good to know. Yeah, that's a really nice definition of privilege. I wrote this

down advantage you didn't earn. It's simply that, isn't it. It's simply that, And sometimes you could say you earned it, right, But like it matters that I went to Syracuse and then I bleed orange, and if I'm out of barb Syracuse people, I'm gonna be able to get some free drinks in those folks over there, right, because we've got that commonality. Maybe being a part of your community for three four generations comes with its own set of advantages.

Being a part of a particular church or religious practice comes with its own set of privileges. So like when we start looking at privilege as something that's not just exclusive and restrictive, but something that's expansive that can be

leveraged to help or out of privilege. As a new teacher, because new teachers are stupid, New teachers are all about hope and optimism, so people let you do dumb stuff when you're a new teacher, right, So, like I really want to have a much more open understanding of like these things that bind us together, I could putey agree. Do you ever feel though sometimes people talk about throw that word privilege around in cases where it doesn't really apply to a person, and that person can rightfully so

get upset. So for instance, what about someone who let's say there's a white person who came from a really really poor background and the they really did have to work their ass off to earn what they did, so that doesn't fit within your definition or privilege, and then someone comes up to them and they're like you privileged?

Full you know, like doesn't that person have a right then to say, Well, first of all, they could say like, technically, according to Colin's definition, I'm not that wasn't a privilege, So you're incorrect in that way. Well, I can get the feeling, which is why I don't like the phrasing of it. I don't like the way that that's kind of determined, right, I don't like the way that that's

out there. But at his experience, once where I was a keynote speaker at a conference and I was like at the top of the world, super excited and like talking to all these people afterwards of like, oh man, that was a great talk. I was really inspired by this message. Awesome. And then a guy that came a little bit later, you know, he saw my banner for Think Law and saw all my stuff to Think Law. They're at this boot and he's like, oh man, I was running late, but I heard amazing things about the

keynote this morning. I'm like, yeah, yeah, it was a great, great impact whatever. He's like, yeah, so is that Colin Seal guy gonna be back here later? And I'm looking at him and I'm like, what what do you mean? And I went from being top of the world feeling super super small and whatever the case is, whatever the

case is, right. I think that when I talk about that exhaustion Scott, when I think about like what it's done to my psyche over time, it's like, it would be awesome if all the reasons I could think that he could look at me and just know I wasn't the keynote speaker, that the color of my skin wasn't one of them. I wish I had the privilege to know that the color of my skin was not the reason or a reason that he didn't see that I

could have been the keynote speaker. You don't know for a fact that it was through the lens of race, though. I don't know for a fact. But even the idea that I can live my life and not have to think that that is a part of why this happened could really change things. Well, hold on, let me play, Let me play Devil's advocate. Let me just because you're all about you're all about critical thinking. I mean, what if,

like someone has a we have stereotypes about everything. What if someone has a stereotype about the name of Colin and they look at me, you know, like a Jewish guy or whatever, and they're like, when's Colin coming back? Because I don't look like a Colin either. Now would I get upset over that? Probably not? Now, Like, how can you give the most charitable interpretation of people while also recognizing that racism does truly exist? I guess this

is my question. So my thing is this, Emotions matter. Feelings matter. As much as I care about critical thinking, I care about the emotions of people experiencing them, and those emotions having power right, so like I can give them the most charitable interpretation of what happened and go through this right, and it's fine, and I'll live my life. But I'll never forget how small I felt in that moment when I realized that, like, it's a possibility that my race has something to do with this. When I

was in law school. When I was in law school, we had a thing called bar review, which sounds like academic but it's not. We just went to different bars every week. Okay, And one time I'm at this thing and I was at law school in Las Vegas. There weren't a whole lot of black students there, and I was there and I was asking a question about the specials that they had for the drinks, and a law student that was there it was like, oh, oh, the

specials are only for law students. Now. Sure he could have just thought that I wasn't in the law school because he didn't know me personally, or because I was black and in this space, and he was like, oh yeah, Like it was an easy way for him to be like, Oh, this guy's probably not with the group. Right. Again, I don't know for a fact. But the feeling of it matters. And I'm a grown man who's been through some stuff. Right, Our kids experienced stuff like this, and it might not

have the same kind of capacity. My kids went to a school where in a Montessori pre K program, a girl said, Oh, I didn't invite you to my party because we don't have brown people at our house. Yeah. Well, that's explicit racism. That's explicit, right, and that's out there a lot of them. You see racism, We see that

in your face kind of thing. What I'm trying to get towards, what I'm trying to push towards, is a space where the way we sow to move is to understand that, Like I want to be brave enough Scott to be in that same moment with that guy that conference and say, hey, question though, why why didn't you think I was a keynote speaker? Yeah? I would. I want to know. I want to know too. Yeah, I want to be brave you enough to be able to

do that. Right, But in that moment, I'm embarrassed for both of us, right because it is because of the race. Then that's really hurtful. It's really hurtful. That's actually the case. There's a really profound point here that I just feel like generalizes, and I'm trying to see how I can articulate it, because, first of all, I want to completely

honor your experience in that moment. Nothing I'm saying and even just having critical thinking discussion with you about it takes away from the fact that you know, I really want to honor how that felt and how small you felt in that moment. And I felt that too in certain aspects of my life, and it's a terrible feeling. But I think there's something that just generalizes about this

idea of privilege. And we raised this earlier. You said we all have our privileges, which it means that we all lack something that someone else has a privilege for you can even think of it. I try to think of just examples, like zoom out from race. I just want to zoom out from race for a second. Let's say you're short and ugly. You know, like you go through your whole life, do you maybe you'll think, like every time a girl rejects you. Let's say you're a

short and ugly guy. Every time a girl rejects you, you might think it's probably is it because I'm short

and ugly? You know, Like there's like I'm trying to apply the same logical principles you're applying to African Americans, which is a very valid point, but just generalizing it into something a little bit, a little bit more general about how just to have more empathy for our fellow humanity in recognizing and we all have our privileges, but we also lack something that someone else has as well.

We all do, right, I think that introspection is really important, especially since I talk about like identity is a real part of seeing the world, like, because obviously who we are informs a lot of how we see the world. You know, our values, our expertise, our education in school, education out of school, all these things are really credible. And if we start to see the assets that we carry, it changes the way we move about the universe, Like

it definitely does when I think about privilege. Just kind of one more point on this, It's that sometimes when I'm looking to get something done, right, I got this whole thing about like what happens we actually want to do something about equity? Right, there's this power I know I have power even if I feel like I'm just a teacher. I'm just a low level employee. Like I have power. I've got decisions that I'm trusted with to make every single day. I've got things within the scope

of that power that are in my purview. And then I can leverage my relative privileges to increase the likelihood that this thing actually happens, to increase the likelihood that this thing is going to be successful. Right, Like I think I give you the example in the book of You know, I was doing this algebra boot camp thing when I was in DC, but I had done the National Society for Black Engineers when I was a Computer science graduate at Syracuse. So that NESVY chapter National Society

of Black Engineers. I know, they had a big one at Howard. My tutors are gonna come from them because they've got the privilege of being even younger than I am and being kind of cool math kids, cool black engineers to work with my I don't do math kids, right because some of my kids who said I don't do math, now they see really cool, well dressed, super cool college kids. They're like, this guy's so much more

cool than mister Seal. And now they're rocking out and getting all this stuff because I realized I had privilege and I leveraged it. And my point at the end of the day is we be in a better place if people acknowledge the privileges that we did have and doubled down on that when it came to making things happen towards this tangible equity goal. So I completely agree with that. And I just got chills. I just got

drills when you said that. Okay, I love that, and this is what I'm trying to grasp for as well. And thanks for you know. I get better at articulating my point through conversation with you, so thank you. So the word privilege is such a loaded word, and in a way, it would be better if we deloaded it, so we we didn't just view it like oh, you can never have you know, so black people can't have

any privileges. You know, you hear white people saying that too sometimes, right like, oh, you're saying no black people can have any privileges. It's like, okay, calm down. First of all, it's a very loaded word. It's not used to divide people. I would love if we could start using this word in a way to unite people and for us to see we all have our vulnerabilities, and we also all have our unearned privilege. We all have

our unearned advantages, all of us. And there's some way that as I'm grasping for something here that's more humanitarian, more humanistic than the way that this word is used in our public discourse. And I think a way to get there is to go all the way back down to like the first p that we talk about from making change, which is power. We said, we all have power, we all have power. What it forces us to do is confront the negative relationship we usually have with that

word power. Most of the time, people that struggle with the word so used to power being done against them for bad reasons that like power could feel scary, power can feel like greed, Power could feel like oppression. But if I think just literally, what is power? Ability to do stuff, the ability to do something right. So if you look at the cover of tangible like where, you'll notice that like this a little toolbox and two things

are in a toolbox in outlet in the mirror. Sometimes I need an outlet because you gotta plug in two things to access to power that you have already like plug it in, plug it in, and the mirror is just a reminder like, oh, shoot, yes, yes, I do have power. I sometimes forget that I'm not sitting here talking about Oh, let's empower our families, let's empower our students, let's empower our educators. You already have the power. Will

I allow you to showcase your power? Will I allow you to, like in this meeting with all these people on this board, to object, to object, to raise a question, right, like if we have a space where that becomes normal? Because I think going all the way back to sort of like this premise of the intellectual spaces we need to create. Where I was wrong in my first book. My first book was obsessing over like a critical thinking

we need to unlock critical thinking. Thinking like the lawyer could be a way to unlock critical thinking and brilliant. But what I realized over time is there is a much more important prerequisite question we have to ask, and that question is do our kids even have the psychological safety to be brilliant? Yeah? Are we given these learning environments set up in such a way where our kids have a safety to be brilliant, to be critical thinkers? We've all worked in the space that wasn't like that.

We've all had a set of friends who were not those content friends where you can share that with in different circles where it wasn't psychological safety to object to voice dissent. This conversation we had right now, Scott, we probably could even have it in public. What are people chrying and be like, I don't like what y'all are talking about. I'm offended. We are having some public right now, right, But like if it was you and me in a public space where people were free to interject, we would

have people that interject uncomfortable. Oh, we'll hear it, We'll hear the comments. We'll still get comments, you know, but I hear you. I hear you for sure. Let's apply a lot we're talking about today to this sticky wicket of gifted education. Some people have some schools have cut gifted education programs, and their justification is because of equity. Now,

what are your thoughts about that? So it's pretty straight lined, right, Like I can get this idea that like, okay, all kids have gifts and talent without a doubt, And I could also say that we need to acknowledge that we do have some set of kids where they've got this asynchrony between where they're at, you know, intellectually academically, and where they're at when it comes to age and social development, where if we don't deal with that asynchrony, there's going

to be some funk that might ensue. Right, There's gonna be some some challenges to really set that kid towards the chart for excellence that they're sort of meant to get to, whatever have you. And let's be clear, education has a lot of things we don't get right. We have a lot of inequities that are baked into what we're doing. It's also clear that, like there's a lot of legacies around really bad stuff like eugenics and segregation that are associated with the foundations we get to the education.

That said, if equity means that we're reducing the predictive power that demographics have on outcomes, can we just be honest about something. We've got some kids, because of resources that they have outside of school. No matter what academic program you offer in your school or don't offer, they'll be good. They're gonna get access to that eighth grade

algebra one program regardless. So I like to use that example often because I could look at school systems that are very diverse, and if they have eighth grader to take in algebra one, sometimes that class itself does not reflect the district demographics. So equity can't be okay, no one else is gonna be able to take eighth grade algebra one. We're gonna ban it. Equity can never mean everybody gets nothing. What would real equity look like? Though?

What if we say my K through seven model is going to be geared so that one hundred percent of my kids will have at back at algebra one in eighth grade. You want to disrupt stuff? Every kid has acts us to ALGEBA one and eighth grade. That would put so many more kids on track to take advanced level AP math courses once they get into high school. It can like break things. Maybe some kids won't be successful, well, they'll just try to get a ninth grade beg whooped

to do right. But that's transformational, that's actually changing something. Putting this chart where that demographics to predictive outcomes thing isn't so predictive anymore. So are we willing to do that kind of work? It's really easy to do the performative cosmetic equity that makes us feel good, and we can say equity, but if we're not actually changing the outcomes and creating these opportunities through changing those outcomes, what

are we doing? Yeah, it's also kind of like signaling the message that you don't think minorities who are underrepresented in gifted programs are capable of excellence. Like when you cut the program, aren't you kind of saying that, You're saying like, oh, well, they're not even cable of excellence, so we should just cut the whole excellence program. It feels like there's an implicit bias there. Joy again explicit,

It's right, it's explicit. Well, oh it is. None of these kids are gifted anyway, right, Like basically kind of joy loss and Davis talks about that a lot. It's one of the most stregeous forms of bias that comes out there. And again, I want to give an example of this disruption. Okay, when I talk about power and privilege and all this stuff, one thing that I have a privilege about right now is I know a lot

of folks and they get their education space. Right, have a keynote that a lot of national estate conferences and work with a lot of districts around this work, and this interception of gifted inequity is what I do a lot of. So I started realizing that so many districts that are doing things like oh I'm gonna do local norms, I'm gonna test everybody or screen everybody was still seeing these discrepancies where certain kids will underrepresent it. And I

started realizing, you know what's wild. Teaching force overall is not that diverse, but in a gifted education it's even less diverse than the overall teaching field, which is already much less diverse than the kids were serving. What if we got to the space where if we change the face of who gets to teach gifted, won't be able to change the face and who gets to be gifted. Turns out there's research that says that black and brown educators are to three times more likely to identify black

kids as gifted. I started thinking about bees, because there's this whole thing where bees were like, they're not supposed to fly, they're too fat, the wings are too short, but like scientists were comparing their wings to the way that birds go up and down, but birds go for bees go forward and back with a little bit of a backswing. If you know how bees fly, it makes sense that they're always supposed to fly. So I started thinking about these black and brown educators, like maybe they

intuitively know that bee was always supposed to fly. So I started a nonprofit arm in my work where think l'll called the Bee Project, where we just got fourteen black and brown educators here in Arizona certified and endorsed

as gifted educators. Because again, if we change who gets to teach gifted, we might be able to change who gets to actually be in these gifted programs, because we have so many districts where kids actually go through all the screening past and they're like, yeah, I'm not sure what this program is for me. The teacher there actually looks like it. It It was hard to say it's not for you. So this is the kind of example of the type of thing that you might be uniquely privileged

to do given your space. But will we do it well? We do the kind of thing that's going to create more opportunities where they don't currently exist, so we can disrupt that pattern. One pattern I don't like is a lot of black and mind educators for all we talk about with recruiting them don't stay in the classroom long as long as their white counterparts. How do we change that? Yeah, you're addressing these from different issues than you normally hear

and people arguing how to address those issues. For a lot of people focus on universal screening. They focus on the testing side of things as opposed to you know, you're like, well, it actually matters who's doing the teaching

in the gift of that program. And this is a larger point that you're making me think of, and that's that you know, people spend so much time in the gift education field obsessing over the measurement of INTEL and identifying the right kids, and then there's like very little discussion about like the quality of the program itself and like what are the kids going to do when they're

actually in there? And so much of the funding goes towards the screening as well, and the funding doesn't go towards as much as picking high quality gifted education teachers. So I really like that you're focusing that side of the equation. And it is a who cares factor too, right, Like like who really cares? Like why should I be concerned about this? Like like, who cares? So I think sometimes we like being in our little boxes. We like being in our little on the other except child of

my district, sometimes we like that. And I'm like, but what if there was something more powerful than this? Right? Like, I know, with all the work you've done with twy eceptional children, I consider myself blessed and lucky that I was identified gifted at seven and diagnosed with ADHD at thirty seven. I fundamentally feel that going up in Brooklyn, New York and our school system, had that been reversed,

I think I would have been screwed. I think that instead of me asking questions as being deemed as curious and inquisitive, look, god, it's a trouble maker right there. That would be true. I am a troublemaker, but I would be a bad trouble maker instead of a good trouble maker. Yeah, yeah, I hear you. I think you're right. I think the unfortunate thing is you're right and also allowed yourself to come out as ADHD on your own terms and set the narrative how you want to set it.

I mean, imagine if you were diagnosed all these kids that are diagnosed with the orange disabilities. They if they have no say and how they want to set the narrative or how they want to integrate it into their self, they're just forced to just they're branded. That's it. They're branded. Yeah. And then the thing that's so wild about this is the older I get, the more I realize, like, really, an ideal world, every kid would have an individualized education plan.

Like everyone is, like we said, differently privileged, right, Like we all kind of see things and learn things. It's a little bit differently. And some things we got are easy. Some things we need to take a little bit more of a struggle. But like, why are we not seeing this as a more universal approach to stuff? And my whole thing is like, why can't we just shift the conversation a together, which is like it can't just be

about closing the gaps? How could the highlight of education be that somehow now black and brown kids are doing as well as white kids. What the white kids aren't doing that great? What is that? What if instead of we upsets with shattering the ceiling, chatter the ceiling and no one's doing that great? I love that? Well, maybe we should just stand on that point. Let's end on the note shatter the ceiling. I kind of liked that idea.

I think a part of that too, Going back to like you ask me, like, what's different about the last two years? What happened? I think there's some things we've looked at casually as fine but are actually unacceptable. If you want to be inspired, follow hashtag black girl magic on Twitter. Right you'll see amazing stories of black women doing amazing things like oh my god, it's one of got our PhD in this and this and this, and earn this thing and have the special award, all these

great things. But what I say is this how we created this as a norm. Well, we've got black women with unbelievable talent, unbelievable potential. It takes magic for them to succeed because we only have a system designed to unlock in nurture excellence. That's not our system. We have the lowest time of denominator system. What if we didn't have that anymore? That's what I want to push us towards, an idea of chanceable equity that we can actually be

excited about. We can have this kind of instruction that would make us fundamentally feel in our hearts and minds that our world is better because of the work that we are doing to contribute to the world being better. Great brother, Breach, I love it. I love it. Colin Man, thank you so much for coming on the Psychology Podcast again. You know I'm a big fan of your work and I just love the way you're thinking about these issues in a really nuanced and practical fashion. So thank you

so much. Can't wait to see what the next party. I promise to save you this time. I'll save you. Got your back next time. That's so funny. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thusycology podcast dot com. We're on our YouTube page the Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check

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