A summit aims to help people recognize myths and realities around race.

Dirrick Williams is all too familiar with racism. As a Black man and native of majority-white Pacific Grove, he knows what it feels like to look different and be treated horribly for it. In 2018, he was accosted and physically attacked by a white couple outside of a Monterey bowling alley; she called him the n-word, and he punched Williams’ jaw, breaking it in three places.

More recently, while attending a fundraiser in Carmel, he met a white man and they began to make small talk. When Williams said he had five children, the man responded with a racist trope: “Oh, by the same mother?”

It’s hard to imagine anyone would utter the n-word or punch someone in the face at such an affair. But that the casual utterance reveals something else – that racism is indeed still here, pernicious if subtle.

“Just because nobody is getting hung doesn’t mean the effects of racism aren’t continuing,” Williams says. “Microaggression – what a euphemism for acts of hatred. We have to understand there is no such thing as a microaggression – it’s macro. It always digs deep. There is always pain associated with it.”

Williams feels that pain, and he invites you to join him in exploring it. As the founder of the Black Leaders and Allies Collaborative (BLAAC) in 2021, Williams – a minister, an Air Force veteran, a life coach, a rehab counselor and an activist – has built a nonprofit dedicated to advancing racial equity. And for Williams, a lot of that happens through expanding people’s awareness of the fact that yes, racism is still with us, even if it’s portrayed as micro.

“The scope of our work revolves around the idea of people not understanding what racism is,” he says.

One opportunity to begin that work is at the second annual Race Relations Summit hosted by BLAAC on July 12, a day-long conversation about race and racism. (Event tagline: Race is fiction, racism is not.)

The summit will explore the institutional and workplace scale when it comes to addressing bias and racism, with guest speakers including Linda McKenzie, CEO of Global Empathy Training Academy, and Khuram Hussain, vice president for Equity & Inclusion at Middlebury College. But even at the institutional scale, the practice of deconstructing the fiction of race and the reality of racism leads Williams back again and again to what might be the most basic possible solution: investing in relationships. “Everything happens in relationship. If we fix relationships, racism goes away,” he says.

His vision for graduates of BLAAC’s intensive 14-week course, Euro-Centric Cultural Reflectionism, is for people to probe their own feelings and experience with race and racism – and then to get to a point where they can look at people of different races as whole people. Or as Williams puts it, “People who look at people who don’t look like them with a sense of curiosity, rather than disdain.”

That sounds simple, but Williams knows it’s not. He sees and lives his own identity as a Black man as something less than simple. In moments of relationship – when someone at a fundraiser invokes a racist trope about infidelity – what is his response?

In another recent incident, Williams was dining at The Club at Pasadera, when he ran into a friend who introduced him to another guest. They made small talk about their lives for a couple of minutes. After Williams told the new acquaintance about his work in race relations, the man raised the same insulting, racist stereotype: What are you going to do about all the Black fathers that don’t take care of their kids?

Williams turned the question into a mini lesson – about socioeconomic disparities, mass incarceration, what it means to be Black in America, and despite all of those structural inequities, statistics and examples to reveal how much Black men are thriving in spite of it all. “What do you think we should do about all of these things?” Williams asked.

There’s not an easy answer to that question other than ending racism in schools, prisons and institutions. But perhaps the place to start addressing any of those big, unwieldy things is by talking to people who look different than you do.

THE RACE RELATIONS SUMMIT takes place from 9am-3:30pm Friday, July 12 at Embassy Suites, 1441 Canyon Del Rey Blvd., Seaside. $75; includes lunch. 337-8995, blaac.org/events.

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@montereycountynow.com.