Erasing Ignorance: 9-Year Old Donzel Proves That Racism Fails the Reasonableness Test

This is the ARCC of Change with Donzel Leggett, a podcast from the Anti-Racism Commitment Coalition, an organization dedicated to eradicating racism and hate and spreading anti-racism. Listen as Donzel talks about the relevant topics that will inspire you and help build your capability to take action and change the world. Because none of us are doing enough as long as racism still exists. And now, here's your host, Donzel Leggett.

Donzel Leggett: Hello and welcome to the fifth episode of the ARCC of Change with Donzel Leggett. In this episode, we will continue focusing on the long-term mission of ARCC, which is to transform ourselves and our networks to be anti-racist, starting with the first step of erasing our ignorance about racism. I will explain the reasonableness test, and I will tell you how the nine-year-old Donzel recognized that racism made no sense because it failed the reasonableness test. And finally, I will explain to you how to start breaking down your walls of ignorance about racism. Now, let's get started with our show.

So I am Donzel Leggett, host of the ARCC of Change podcast and founder of the Anti-Racism Commitment Coalition, or ARCC. ARCC is a coalition of dedicated people committed to eradicating racism and spreading anti-racism throughout our communities, our countries, and the world. This is the ARCC of Change. Now, after the United States presidential election a few weeks ago, we pivoted to phase two of our ARCC mission, which is transforming ourselves to be anti-racist and spreading anti-racism throughout our networks. We started this in episode three, “Forty-Five Is Out. What Now?” where I introduced the process of transforming yourself by first erasing your ignorance about racism and hate. Then second, educating yourself about anti-racism. And third, building the character to stand up, speak out, and take action to spread anti-racism. Then in episode four, I shared my anti-racism journey to help bring this to life. I provided a holistic example of how I am continuing to break down my walls of ignorance about racism and hate, educate myself about anti-racism, and continue to build the character and the strength for me to take action and spread anti-racism and continue to do more and more. Because as I've said before, none of us have done enough as long as racism still exists. Now in this episode, I will start going step by step with the transformation process, starting with step one, erasing ignorance. In subsequent episodes, I will delve deeper into step two, educating yourself about anti-racism. And step three, building the character to spread anti-racism. And even how to have those tough conversations with the people in your network.

I'm going to speak about erasing the ignorance of anti-racism in two ways. In the next episode, I will focus on historical data and factual logic to provide hard evidence and examples, as well as research that many of you are probably not aware of to make my case that racism makes no sense. But in this episode, I want to focus on reasonableness. In other words, common sense. Because if we truly think about racism from a common sense perspective and question whether it is reasonable or not, we shouldn't really need historical facts to convince us that racism makes no moral sense and fails the reasonableness test.

But first, let me start with a story to explain what I mean by reasonableness and the reasonableness test. I'll do this by telling a true story from early in my professional career. I started my career as an industrial engineer at the Quaker Roots Cereal Manufacturing Plant in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. This was my first job out of college, my first real job. Now, this plant made, among other things, ready-to-eat cereal like Captain Crunch and Crunch Berries. As an industrial engineer, one of the key accountabilities was cost accounting and ingredient tracking, what we call usage, and the financial impact of this to the plant. This meant knowing all of the formulas, the exact amount of ingredients to be used, tracking to calculate what the difference was in ingredients used that the formula called for compared to the actual amount of ingredients used in the product, the finished product, and translating this into cost impact. This is called yield. Meaning how much of the finished product is yielded from the ingredients. The idea is that for every one pound of ingredients, we should get one pound of finished product. It's like if you want to bake a cake, you have a pound of ingredients, you should have a pound cake. Anything less is a loss or waste.

So this was my first job out of college and I was really inexperienced at the time. You could say I was green and to make matters worse, again, I didn't know much at all about cost accounting. This was not my area of study at university. So the senior industrial engineer took me under his wing and trained me how to do this. Now, his name was Ganesh and he had over 25 years of experience. He was viewed as the guru of cost accounting in the plant; any questions about the manufacturing financials always went to him first because everyone knew that what he said was always correct. He became my mentor and he taught me his process for translating the formulas into financial bills of materials, we call them, with expected losses in manufacturing, like moisture loss and things like that.

Now, I won't bore you with all those details, but he taught me how to build these. He then translated them into standards and built the financials in terms of formulas in Excel to calculate the yield at the end of every month. Now, he had done this for many years. He basically gave me all of the calculations, all the formulas in Excel so that I could do it and taught me how they worked. After a few months of tutoring me, kind of watching over my shoulder, I took full accountability to track cereal yield. And I got very good, not only at calculating an accurate yield, but also tracking the yield at a very detailed level and then providing guidance on where losses were coming from, what the root causes were, and how to potentially correct it to stop the waste and improve the yield. We started actually seeing good progress, improving the yield and saving money.

However, one month I started noticing that there was this one ingredient that wasn't one that we used a lot of. It was a small amount in the formula, but it was a very expensive ingredient. And it was showing that our usage had increased fairly significantly, but it wasn't aligned with the other ingredients, meaning the other ingredients in the formula were not going up at the same rate. And it was creating a poor yield. This one ingredient was what we call a very expensive red coloring that we use in one of the products, in Crunch Berries. Again, none of the other related ingredients were showing this rate of increase.

I checked, I rechecked the numbers, rechecked my formulas, the formulas that Ganesh had given me. There was nothing out of line. I checked my calculations. Everything was right. The numbers didn't lie. So I went to Ganesh and asked for his advice because I couldn't figure out why only this ingredient was going up. I explained the issue to him and how I double-checked all the formulas and my calculations and there were no errors. Ganesh, remember, he made the formulas. He knew that they were right. But he looked them over again as well. Again, there was nothing wrong. Everything was as to be expected. Everything was calculated correctly.

Then after he thought about it for a while, Ganesh told me about the reasonableness test. He told me this is asking yourself, even in the face of something that is accepted to be fact or true, or that has been accepted for a long time, taking a step back and asking yourself, does this make sense? Is it reasonable?

So I took a step back and thought about whether this loss made sense. Was it reasonable? I thought about the amount my calculations were showing that we were overusing. Even though this was not a lot. Again, this was not an ingredient we use a lot of in the first place. This was a very concentrated coloring. If we were overusing it to that level, we would obviously see it in the product as off color. It would be very noticeable. If we were wasting it, we would have seen red color everywhere and we'd be getting calls from the city wastewater department about red water.

I went to our quality lab and asked, had there been any noticeable change in the color of the product? And they said, no. I went to check with our environmental team and asked, hey, have we gotten any calls from the city about problems with our wastewater? Any weird colorations, red in particular? No. I went to the production floor to check with the line team for any visual evidence out there. Did they see any red coloring anywhere? I asked the operators if they've noticed anything different in terms of extra red coloring being used or showing up anywhere. Nothing.

But I refused to accept the loss as correct because the calculation showed it was. I continued to check for alternate explanations. Eventually, I discovered that a new operator had misreported the amount used by putting the decimal point in the wrong place, increasing the amount claimed to be used by 10 times. We weren't overusing the ingredient. There was simply an input error. The formulas were right and the calculations were right, but one of the assumptions was wrong.

Even though Ganesh had built those formulas and the tracking process and had been very accurate for a long, long time for tracking yield, it was not foolproof. It was not something you could just take the answer from and not challenge. So we changed the process from that point forward to have data input standards and cross-checks for the operators and a formal assessment process every month with different constituents from around the plant to put fresh eyes and different perspectives. We used diversity to review it and challenge it for reasonableness.

This was a great reminder to me that no matter how much you respect someone, you should never accept what they tell you or teach you as gospel. You should always ask yourself, does this make sense? Does this pass the reasonableness test? If you don't push yourself with the question of reasonableness, you are allowing a wall of ignorance to block your mind from learning and growing and ultimately from pursuing the truth.

I learned that even in this work setting where I was inexperienced and being trained by a very highly regarded expert, it was my accountability to check for reasonableness, even if it meant challenging my friend, my mentor, whom I respected and cared for a great deal. That no matter the reliability of the process, the credibility of the source, I should always ask myself, does this make sense? I should continually break down any and all walls of ignorance.

You know, it's interesting that I hadn't considered this before. In this work setting, because this whole idea of reasonableness was something I practiced practically my whole life, even when I was a little boy, especially questioning the logic and reasonableness of accepted social norms like the concept of race and the undercurrent of racism. Two walls of ignorance that seem impregnable to most people in our society. In the next segment, I will tell you how I asked myself this question as a nine-year-old boy and worked to break down these walls of ignorance.

Donzel Leggett: Let me start off by saying that racism makes no common or moral sense. If challenged to make sense of it, it's impossible. It fails the reasonableness test. For racism to be accepted by a person, common sense and morality must be suspended. What's powerful enough to displace morality and common sense, you ask? The pursuit of power through division, ignorance, fear, and greed.

This is a really important distinction to understand to break down your walls of ignorance about race. The superficial racial differences and stereotypes and the racism that drives them are not common sense and are not natural to us and are not moral. But they are logical when you understand that they are pushed on us to divide us in the pursuit of power. It is that simple. Racism was created to obtain and sustain power.

I don't really remember thinking much about racism or being aware of it when I was little. Growing up in Key West, Florida, I lived right kind of on the border of the remnants of formal segregation in an alley bearing my family's name, Enos Lane, between Duval Street and Whitehead Street. My neighbors were Black, White, Cuban. But pretty much everyone who lived in the neighborhood south of us, called Bahama Village, were Black of Bahamian descent. And most everyone to the north of us were White. There were definitely some exceptions, but generally speaking, it was still fairly segregated.

But I had friends all across the island. Different racial groups, different socioeconomic groups. Pretty diverse friends. In fact, aside from my family members, cousins, stuff like that, my family, the first time I spent the night out at a friend's house was a White kid. And again, with the exception of family, I spent more nights at White kids' houses, White family's houses, than I did Black. I don't ever remember thinking anything different about that.

Race was not a concept to me at the time. It was simply that, you know, we just had some differences. Some of those differences were skin color. Others were hair. Others were income levels, different jobs our parents had. Others were how we talked or how we dressed. But I didn't categorize anyone by what you would call race. There were simply nice kids and kids who weren't nice. That's how I looked at it.

Then in third grade, never forget it, one day this girl called me the N-word. It was the first time that I remember being called this word and the first time that I thought about race and what it meant to experience racism.

Ironically, it also coincided with the release of the groundbreaking TV series Roots, based on the 1976 novel by Alex Haley, chronicling his research into his family history, starting with an ancestor being captured in Africa. During what I'm sure that ancestor, whose name was Kunta Kinte in the book, thought was just a normal day, tending to his chores. Then out of nowhere, he was chased down like an animal and captured and shipped across the Atlantic and sold into slavery in the United States.

This was the very first time that many Americans, Black and White, came face to face with the barbaric practice of slavery in the United States. And how terrible it was for Black people. And how evil it was for the White people that practiced it. And scene after scene, the Africans, who were the supposed savages, were kind, forgiving, and humane. While the White slave owners were mean, spiteful, and cruel.

I hadn't thought much about slavery. But one of the main points I took away as a little boy watching Roots was how cruel and sinful one would have to be to do that to another person. And how obvious the reliance on ignorance was to allow this cruelty to go on for so long.

For many Black people, it awoke a yearning to learn their history like Alex Haley had done. But also for many of us, it created a powerful feeling and a tone of Black pride and defiance to never allow ourselves to be treated like that ever again.

For many White people, it was an awakening to the horrors of slavery and challenged their moral conscience of what the United States' history really was about, who their ancestors really were. It made them wonder what to do to make amends for 400 years of terror, of subjugation and near genocide.

But for other White people, it awakened racist ideas to justify them looking down on Black people and reinforced negative stereotypes and prejudices.

For me, I had known that Black people in the Americas, my ancestors, had been slaves and had fought for their freedom for hundreds of years. I knew that this created some lasting prejudice. I was born just months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. So I remember hearing about him. And the struggle for equality. But I had not really seen myself as representing that history because I had rarely experienced racism myself, especially with the kids I was around. We were aware of the history, but we hadn't yet been taught racism.

As the great Nelson Mandela said, no one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion. People must learn to hate. And if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love. For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.

As I said, I lived in an integrated neighborhood and I never felt any issues playing with White friends or going to their houses or anything like that. As I said, my first sleepovers to non-family members' homes were with White families.

I went to a Catholic school for kindergarten and first grade, and I remember that the nuns were mean and that they practiced corporal punishment there, meaning you got hit if you did not listen to them. But I don't remember ever being singled out or anything like that. If any of us broke the rules, we were punished the same. In fact, I remember that it was a couple of White kids that were always in trouble and always getting punished and hit with a ruler on their knuckles or whatever it was in front of everybody.

I don't remember any of the kids in the Catholic school ever treating me different or with prejudice or hate or even saying anything to me about being Black.

I moved to public school from second grade on. And I don't remember any big changes, certainly at first. Again, I was at a very integrated school, mostly White. I made a lot of new friends. Some of my Catholic school friends actually moved over in second grade as well. But it was still pretty much the same.

Again, just like in the neighborhood, there were kids that were nice and that I liked. There were some kids that were not nice and I didn't like. But it was because the ones who were not nice were just jerks and nobody liked them. Some were White, some were Black, some were Cuban. There was no difference. You could be a jerk. You could be all three of those. Didn't matter.

I never thought that they were bad or jerks because of their race. I thought they were bad and jerks because they were bad and jerks.

I remember getting into a fight with one of these jerks, one of these bad kids, bully kids who was a White kid. And I remember there were five other White kids with us on our way home from school. And I remember hitting him in the nose and bloodying his nose. I don't remember anything coming up about race or anything about me being Black. I do remember one kid saying, man, Donzel, you punched him right in the nose.

But in third grade, after Roots came on, I started noticing differences. Race became more of an issue. It created an awkward relationship with White kids. Some of my good friends were not inherently prejudiced and many of their families were not either. But they had a hard time getting their heads around it.

Most White parents who were not racist typically just avoided conversations about race in their own homes. But in the homes where the parents did harbor racist beliefs, they would reinforce negative stereotypes of Black people, encouraging and teaching and planting racist beliefs and seeds that they hoped will grow in the minds of their kids. They were teaching them to be racist and to hate.

I started feeling that I was being seen differently. I could tell that I was being treated differently. I could tell that there were places I was not welcomed like I had been before. I could always tell the kids who were taught to be racist because they would be the leaders of giving me the cold shoulder. And the kids whose parents were not racist, I could tell them as well because they would get very quiet. And they would look at me as if they were sorry, but they wouldn't say anything.

I also started noticing more and more bad stereotypes about Black people being represented on television, movies and in print. The portrayal of Black Africans would always be of naked savages living in primitive huts. The inference that I felt was you're lucky we brought your ancestors here. Or you'd be living like that.

And Black Americans were always portrayed as having broken homes and fractured family structures and lacking morals and were predisposed to be in trouble, to be pimps and criminals, to be lazy and dumb. These stereotypes were damaging and pervasive. It felt to me like an attempt to justify racism against Black people.

The more I saw and heard these stereotypes, the more they made me angry and ashamed. But more importantly, I remember that they didn't make sense to me. Even as a nine-year-old kid, they didn't make sense. So I started challenging each one of them with the reasonableness test.

First, I had lots of White friends and none of them had families that were stronger and more morally upstanding than my family, which, of course, was Black. Remember, I was in their homes a lot. I got to see their family units and how they worked. I got to see the things that they did, what was allowed and what wasn't. I got to see how they spoke to their parents.

In many of these homes, no one went to church. And the ones that did go, church was really just a Sunday thing. In my household, you had to go to church every Sunday. You had to sing in the choir. You had to be in Christmas programs and Easter programs. You had to memorize poems and things to say in those programs. You had to go to Sunday school. You had to learn and be able to do homework and bring it back to Sunday school. And you had to go to summer Bible school as well.

I knew more about the Bible at nine years old than all of my White friends combined. No question.

Many of my White friends would talk about their grandparents being in nursing homes. In our family, that just wasn't something that you planned for. As grandparents aged, it was the family's responsibility to return the care that they gave us back to them. So someone would move in with them or we would move them into one of our homes. Nursing homes would be the last resort.

Now, I'm not saying that it's a bad thing to put someone who needs round-the-clock care in a nursing home, but I am drawing a distinction that to promote and say that Black people have broken family structures and poor morals, it's just flat-out wrong. And I knew that at nine.

One of the other things that really surprised me was when I would go to my White friend's house, I would hear them talk back to their parents, especially their mom. Sometimes I'd even hear them curse. This was definitely way out of bounds in my house and unheard of in most Black households.

My great-grandmother, for example, was 87 when I was nine. And she used to watch me and my cousins after school while our parents were working. And if me or my cousins ever talked back to her, she would give us a backhanded lick.

Now, a backhanded lick is not a slap on our back with our hand. A backhanded lick is slapping you in the face with the back of our hand. And my great-grandmother wore big costume jewelry rings. So if she hit you, she was going to hit you in the mouth and it was going to feel like a brass knuckles punch. She wanted to make sure you realized that's not acceptable. You only did it once because you realized don't ever do that again.

You just don't talk back to your mom, your grandma, your great-grandma in a Black family. Even the toughest, baddest cats that I know would not talk back to their mom. Their mom would tell them, stop doing those bad things. They'd say, yes, ma'am. Now, they might go in the streets and still do it, but they ain't talking back to their mom.

Speaking of doing bad things, I had White friends that did bad things. I had Black friends that did bad things. The difference was, first, my White friends rarely got caught because they never were suspected or very rarely would they be suspected. In fact, some of the things I learned that they did, I had no idea that they would do something like that.

Secondly, if they did get caught, many of them had connections and money to make the problems go away. None of the brothers, none of the Black guys had the luxury of not being suspected. They were always among the first to be suspected and their parents did not have the connections and resources to help them.

And unfortunately, once you got caught, you kind of had this reputation of being bad. The White kids never got caught, so rarely did they have that reputation.

And when it comes to lazy, the people in my family were the exact opposite of lazy. My grandmother worked as a maid pretty much her entire life. And she worked really, really hard. She cared for the children of the family she worked for. She cleaned the house of the family she worked for. And then she'd go home and have to do the exact same thing with her own children in her own house.

She cooked for the family she worked for, prepared all their meals. She'd have to go home and do the same thing for her family. I remember that her knees and her elbows were dark and rough because she always mopped the floors on her hands and knees because she said that was the only way to do it right.

My mother worked as a nurse's assistant in rotating shifts, but she still found the time to take care of the family, tutor me in school, and volunteer at the church, no matter how tired she was.

And my dad started as a janitor at the phone company and worked his way up to linesman before he retired after 43 years. I barely remember either of them ever missing a day of work. And the same could be said of many of the Black families in Key West at that time.

And then there was the egregious stereotype that Black people are dumb. Now, I knew this made absolutely no sense because I was in White schools pretty much my whole life. And it was clear that I was not only as smart as the White kids, but one of the smartest in my class.

So none of these stereotypes made any sense to me. None of them passed the reasonableness test. The only thing that I couldn't refute was Black people's lack of notable history. Was there a history before slavery that was notable? Did Black people have a role in history or did it start with slavery?

When we covered social studies in school, there was very little information about Black people prior to slavery. African history and influence on history was not covered in our education with the exception of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a reference to Frederick Douglass and, of course, Crispus Attucks.

Even in the show Roots, there was very little time spent exploring life in Africa or presenting anything about African history. So with this stereotype, I was stuck. And as I said, a people with no history is an empty people. And it's easier to look at an empty people as not mattering as much.

I could have just accepted this as just the way it was. Prevailing wisdom. Just let it go. Focus on the here and now. But I was not satisfied with that. So I remember at nine thinking, where can I go to get more information to challenge this stereotype?

Remember, this was 1977, way before the internet. So you had to be creative if you wanted to investigate and research. Information was not at our fingertips as it is now. My elementary school didn't cover anything on African history. So I knew for sure that the school library wouldn't have anything that could help me. And I didn't live very close to the public library. I doubted that they would have very much information on African history anyway as well.

As I mentioned, in Black families, you have to spend a lot of time in church as a kid. It becomes like your second source of information. And the Bible says—whether you're Christian or not—is one of the oldest books known to us. And it does have a lot of historical context. I thought maybe, maybe I could use the Bible as a way to gauge the reasonableness of racism historically and see if I could find anything in it about Africans. I'll tell you what I discovered next.

The ARCC of Change podcast is brought to you by the Anti-Racism Commitment Coalition. Visit us at joinarcc.org to learn more about ARCC and join our movement.

Donzel Leggett: So how did I use the Bible to erase the ignorance about racism at nine years old?

Well, I started with the New Testament to challenge the basics of Christianity against racism to see if it made any sense. I thought about all I was taught about Christianity. Again, I'm not pushing the religion of Christianity. I'm just telling you my story of how I thought about this at nine years old.

Everything that Jesus was supposed to stand for 2,000 years ago was about love and understanding, about turning the other cheek and loving your neighbor and loving your enemies. It's about all of us being the children of God and Jesus dying on the cross so that all of us could be free from sin and have everlasting life. And not just the Jews, but the Gentiles as well. And the Gentiles, meaning all non-Jews, no matter your color, no matter your religion, no matter what you believed before.

After reading many of the books in the New Testament, I reread them again. It was clear that racism was not a Christian behavior. Yet many slave owners from America's past and racists in America's present claim to be devout Christians. And that made no sense.

So I simply asked myself, if Jesus appeared during slavery in America, what would he do? You don't have to be a Christian or be an expert on Jesus to know he would stand against it. If Jesus were here today, what would he do about racism? Would he stand against it? Anyone who knows anything about Jesus, whether you're a Christian or not, would say the reasonable answer is that Jesus would definitely stand against racism and stand against the racist.

There's a famous acronym in Christianity, WWJD. What would Jesus do? It's a kind of reasonableness test for Christians. So what would Jesus do, WWJD? He would rebuke racism and spread anti-racism. It was beyond doubt to me as a nine-year-old kid that racism is anti-Christian and utterly failed the reasonableness test.

Then I looked at all the stories in the Old Testament and started questioning many of the events, locations and people. It just didn't make sense in my view. Like, how is it that all the stories take place in North Africa and West Africa and the Middle East, near Asia, yet all the people are represented from the Bible as looking European? I could not make this equate in my mind. It made no sense.

I remember asking my mom about this, you know, asking her, "Mama, explain to me, how is this possible?" And she couldn't in detail because every time she gave me an answer, I had another question. I had another question. I just kept saying, "Well, why? Why is that?"

So my mom said, you know what? Luckily, we have Mr. Milton.

See, Mr. Milton was one of the most brilliant people to ever live in Key West. He was an elder in our church. When I was about nine years old, somewhere in that range, he was probably in his late 80s at that time. He was completely blind. But this man was literally a walking dictionary. And this was before smartphones, so he couldn't Google anything. He had to recall it from his mind.

Mr. Milton, in and of himself, proved to me that racism was hogwash because he crushed, absolutely crushed, all of the stereotypes that people tried to say about Black people. There was nobody in Key West, White, Black, Cuban. I don't care if they had Martians there. I don't care where you came from. There was nobody there smarter and wiser than Mr. Milton.

And when I say wise, I'm talking about wisdom because wisdom is really key. Wisdom is the melding of intelligence or book smarts with common sense and moral character. Mr. Milton obviously had off-the-charts intelligence, but his wisdom was awe-inspiring.

When he was younger, he could see. He learned architecture and he and a few other prominent Black men in the Black community came together and built many of the Black churches and homes in early Key West for many of the Black residents. Many of the structures are still standing today and they all worked together in such a way that everybody could afford a home by working together as a community.

That doesn't sound like a community with bad morals or poor family structures or always looking to get into trouble.

At some point in his middle age, he realized that he was going blind. He knew that blindness would take away one of the greatest pleasures in his life, which was reading the Bible. So get this. He memorized the entire Bible before he went blind.

So I was asking my mom all these questions and I remember her telling me, "Ask Mr. Milton your questions because he knows everything." She said, in fact, if you don't believe me, open the Bible to a random page, tell him the page number and the verse number, and he'll recite the verse for you word for word.

I remember, you know, going to church and asking him about it. And I gave him a page number. I gave him a verse number. And he literally recited the verse. I was absolutely blown away, amazed. I mean, this is akin to, for the younger folks listening to this, again, me asking you to find a Bible verse and you just type it in your phone and Google brings it up for you or whatever search engine you're using. Except Mr. Milton did that with his brain only. Remember, he was blind in his late 80s at this time. Simply amazing.

Now imagine as a nine-year-old kid hearing all these stereotypes about Black people. You know, that they have broken family structures and don't have moral character. And, you know, they're predisposed to be criminals. They're lazy and they're dumb and they can't learn. And you know all that's not true because of the family that you have and the fact that you've been around other people. And, you know, all these things happen with all communities.

But then you meet Mr. Milton and you see him do that. Clearly, any wall of ignorance you had before that moment is shattered at that point.

So I asked him about racism and some of the questions that I had about Christianity. How is it that all the stories about Jesus are about love, turning the other cheek, loving your neighbor, loving your enemy? Yet White people can claim to be Christians and at the same time hate and be cruel to Black people. How is that possible?

How is it possible that all the stories in the Bible take place in North Africa, West Africa, the Middle East, you know, Near East Asia? Yet all the images as depicted of people look European. How is that possible?

How is it possible that Moses is depicted as a European-looking man when he passed as an Egyptian royal? And Egypt, contrary to popular opinion, is actually in Africa. They're Africans. How is that possible?

How is it possible that Jesus appears with blonde hair and blue eyes when he was born in the Middle East? How is that possible?

These were the questions I asked Mr. Milton.

Mr. Milton was very patient with my questions. He responded by saying, many people take what is presented to them and accept it as is. Many adults actually love this, he said, with their children because it's easier for them to teach that way. Kid asks them a question, they tell them an answer, the kid accepts it.

But the key with learning, Mr. Milton told me, is asking questions and not accepting the answer until you feel the central point of what you're asking has been addressed. Then asking yourself, does this make sense? Then you have to decide if it doesn't make sense to you, will you keep pushing or even to the point where it's uncomfortable, until you are satisfied that what you're hearing, that what you're learning makes sense? Or will you just accept it and just let it go?

He said a lot of people have given up over time and just accepted what's been told to them. He said many people are impressed that I memorized the Bible. But I ask you, what is more important, reciting the words that have been written in a book or understanding the intent behind the words and putting that intent to practice?

He said, go back and read the Bible a little deeper and do some other research on your own and come back to me with your thoughts.

You see, Mr. Milton didn't give me his answers. He asked me questions for me to find my answers.

I did what he said. I went back. I read the Bible a little bit deeper. And I researched geography and came back to him with my thoughts.

I told Mr. Milton that after reading the Bible in more detail and doing a little bit of research, it was clear to me that the way the Bible is being interpreted, specifically related to the characters in the Bible, made no sense based on the geographic locations of the majority of those stories being in North and East Africa and the Middle East and Near East Asia.

I said there are very few mentions in the Bible about physical appearance of people relative to skin tone and hair, showing how race did not matter so much at that time. But when characteristics were mentioned, they illustrate diversity of skin tone and hair texture.

Also, when considering the climate of those areas and the people that live there, there's no question that the characters in the Bible would have been a mixture of lighter- and darker-skinned people of many different shades of brown and black with dark brown or black hair of varying textures.

I said, in my opinion, Moses would be considered a Black man or at the very least a man of African descent if he existed today. And Jesus certainly would not be viewed as European with blonde hair and blue eyes. He would have been a brown-skinned man with brown eyes and dark curly hair. He would look more like me than a rock musician.

Mr. Milton asked me then, "Why do we not see them portrayed like this if you believe that this is true?"

I told Mr. Milton at nine years old that this is because it helps White people justify prejudice, which keeps them in power. If the characters in the Bible were mostly Black and brown, it would be very hard to justify treating Black people so badly.

Mr. Milton took a deep breath and said, "That's a very wise assessment for a young boy like you. You should seriously think about becoming a preacher."

Visit us at joinarcc.org to learn more about ARCC. Donate to our cause and join the movement that will change the world.

Donzel Leggett: It's been 43 years since that conversation with Mr. Milton. And I didn't become a preacher. But I did think about what best way I could go about proving to people that these negative stereotypes that racism was based on were all wrong.

I focused on being the exact opposite of these negative stereotypes to show everyone around me that these were not true about Black people. But this is passive anti-racism and it has only some effectiveness. It's limited because people start seeing you as the exception instead of the rule. Thus, the stereotypes for the masses remain and sometimes even get reinforced.

Actively calling out the ignorance about racism, the fact that it doesn't pass the reasonableness test, and that it makes no sense, is critical. It is so important to eliminate this blind spot for people.

Even White people who are not racist have this blind spot. They have a subconscious superiority because of all of the Eurocentric history that's been celebrated and all the African history that has been buried and whitewashed to ensure that the prevailing knowledge is that White people did all the great things in history and the Black and brown people didn't really have any history. Or any contribution to history.

Remember that people without history are people that it's easy to justify they don't matter much. This is why erasing ignorance is so important to start the journey of anti-racism.

This is the first step in active anti-racism. Ignorance is like the wall that blocks you from being aware of your blind spots. It's almost like it's draped in an invisibility cloak so you can't see it without purposely looking and searching for it. Everyone has this wall of ignorance. We all have to purposely work to break it down.

Until this wall is broken down, it's impossible to fully educate yourself. You can fool yourself by learning in very narrow areas, but you will never develop holistic wisdom as long as you allow the walls of ignorance to stand.

Wisdom allows you to see the truth that racism fails the reasonableness test because it does not make moral sense. And that the only reason racism exists is to sustain the power of dominance and greed by dividing people and exploiting the wall of ignorance with a false narrative of fear, inferiority, and negative stereotypes.

If you truly want to make a difference in racial justice, it starts with you as a person. Transform yourself to be an anti-racist and to be someone who believes in anti-hate by first breaking down the walls of ignorance, then educating yourself about anti-racism, then building the character to stand up, speak out, and take action to influence those in your network to do the same.

Start questioning whether racism and hate make sense to you. Question where your thoughts about race came from, whether about Black people or Asian people or Indigenous people or mixed-race people or White people.

Where your thoughts about hate came from, whether it's about Jewish people or Christians or Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists or the untouchable castes or LGBTQ people.

Question, does it make sense and is it reasonable? Is it moral?

Think back to your childhood of when you became curious of race and other differences between people. And was this consciousness good or not?

Question history as you know it and were taught it and whether it makes common sense now.

Ask yourself, what you know about racial groups that are different from your own, their history, their culture, their values. Are you accepting stereotypes or rejecting them? Does what you know pass the reasonableness test? Do you accept that you have blind spots? And are you continually working to break down your walls of ignorance by educating yourself?

The key is for you to think and think deeply about racism and hate. It may feel uncomfortable, but if you truly want to eradicate racism and hate, you have to be willing to allow yourself to feel uncomfortable. You have to welcome that uncomfortable feeling.

Use your intelligence, your common sense, and your moral character to develop wisdom. And I guarantee you that the more you use that wisdom to think deeply about racism and hate, the more you will realize, like I did as a nine-year-old boy, that racism and hate fail the reasonableness test and make absolutely no sense.

To find the ARCC of Change podcast with Donzel Leggett and learn more about the Anti-Racism Commitment Coalition or ARCC, please visit joinarcc.org. You can also subscribe to the ARCC of Change with Donzel Leggett on your favorite podcast hosting sites.

I greatly look forward to our next episode, an opportunity to inspire you to become part of the movement that will change the world by eradicating racism once and for all. Until next time, stay safe and continue to ask yourself, am I doing enough? And remember that none of us are doing enough as long as racism and hate still exist.

Thanks for listening and goodbye. The ARCC of Change podcast with Donzel Leggett is brought to you by the Anti-Racism Commitment Coalition. To learn more about ARCC, donate to our cause, and join the coalition, visit joinarcc.org. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And share this podcast to help spread our mission to change the world by ending racism once and for all.

Donzel Leggett: Thanks for listening. Until next time, stay safe and be inspired.