John "I am a Racist" Nance: A Lacking Speech About Empathy At The 2023 NCCMA Conference
Tyson Lewis | March 2, 2023
“You hate me, don't you?
I know you hate me just as much as you hate yourself
Jealous of my wisdom and cards I dealt”
As a growing college news platform, The Echo attended the 2023 North Carolina College Media Conference (NCCMA) for the second year in a row. The conference's intention is to hold courses relevant to student media organizations as well as rewards for our work. Yet, unexpectedly also a long rambling speech from an old white man and his struggle with… being racist.
If the turn is confusing for you, it was dizzying at the moment.
John Nance is an assistant clinical professor and director of clinical field placement in the Counseling Program at UNC Charlotte. He has also served as chairs of the American Counseling Association Human Rights Committee.
He noted in his speech that his only relation to media is amateur videography. He is not a journalist or media person at all which he says explicitly. Nonetheless, it raised some red flags as an audience member at a conference for student media organizations.
He apologizes many times throughout the course of his presentation for participating in white supremacist systems of power. He shares his personal doubts for even giving this presentation. After reading, I hope you understand why I wish he doubted himself harder instead of giving the presentation.
As he was scheduled as the conference’s Keynote speaker, all participants in the conference were sitting in the large gathering hall. The schedule reads:
1-1:50 p.m. Keynote: Empathy and the Quest for Truth: Developing Through a Marginalized Lens.
Earlier that day the conference had opened with a panel about how journalists can better engage with underserved communities. Communities that have lost trust with media outlets due to active underrepresentation and misunderstanding. So the keynote seemed interesting enough.
It was a helpful panel of people who knew the field and its faults. They understood how we could work towards a more equitable journalism. A panel for journalists by journalists — multiple of whom were also themselves people of color (POC).
The subtitle of the speech “changing the world in fifty minutes.” He admittedly did not succeed.
Nance contrasted this as he took to that same stage and opened by proclaiming that he was uncomfortable with being the one to speak about race at this event as a white man during Black History Month. He inquired as to whether or not it was inappropriate many times during the speech.
He asks himself whether or not it was appropriate that he give this speech — that he “preaches” it to us.
He asks, and I answer “no.” If his concern was truly Black/POC speakers having the spaces to speak critically of media organizations, he could have simply turned down the speaking gig and suggested that a Black/POC could speak instead.
Not only a Black/POC speaker, but someone who knew the media and could actually effectively launch constructive criticism of a biased field. Something that he made clear was not his goal as his studies and practice are in counseling.
Instead of media organizations Nance primarily talks about himself. Like the character Craig from S1E9 of Afrosurrealist tv show Atlanta, he talks about the oppression and trauma of Black Americans. It was surreal when he explicitly stated that the speech was for the white conference attendants as the POC in the room already knew this.
Not only was he a white man talking about race in a field outside of his expertise on Black History Month, but he was also giving the presentation to a presumed white audience. Inherently excluding the POC in the room who are just as actively participating in the conference.
If the speech was not for us, then it was for Nance to talk to white people self appointed on behalf of us.
He references a local morning news report wherein a Black man’s murder had been reported on directly in between another unrelated crime and an update on the status of state executions in S.C.
He could have easily made a poignant statement about how this scenario does show implicit biases in reporting as the local news station had lumped the man’s murder alongside the electric chair and images of police from an unrelated crime.
Instead he performatively holds back tears on stage and simply talks about how it makes him angry. He makes no argument at all and just says that the three aforementioned stories being presented together made him enraged, stating that if you don’t know why it makes him angry, “read, read, read.”
He takes the biases and faults in media presentation and makes it about himself. He explains media bias and lack of context in reporting Black stories with a quirky analogy of his use of AI filters on social media apps. When journalists harmfully misrepresent POC, it is like an inaccurate AI generation of himself… to him.
And when Nance says ,“read, read, read,” he doesn’t cite any Black authors to read or anything at all during the presentation. The best he does is tell the audience to read. On his website he cites the reading lists of Ibram X. Kendi and The Harvard Kennedy School, but only after citing a Jane Mount graphic.
As well as his website’s reading list citations, Nance has also given a similar presentation as a TedX event. For the first eight minutes of Ted Talk he talks about growing up as a gay man, and then quickly transitions into a story wherein he tries to “help” a crying Black girl who was walking on the street that he lived on.
“In my expertise, I’m going to go help them,” Nance said. “It made the situation much worse.”
After exacerbating the pre-existing tensions and making it worse for the already struggling girl, Nance was able to learn something he says. He concludes by saying that she was the expert in that situation. She was closer to her own experience and thus she knew it better.
This anecdote was similar to one that he told in his speech at the conference wherein he talks about an encounter he had had with one of his Black clients — Shante, wherein she said that Nance will never understand her oppression as a Black woman.
“You will never understand the whips and chains,” Shante said.
Nance conveniently admits that he had forgotten what he had said that prompted her to have to say that, but he sure remembers how he replied by saying that she would never understand “the cross and the nails.” He acknowledges that he was using his identity as a gay man to gaslight the black woman. He doesn’t expand further from there.
Instead, however, he expands on his personal experience with violence he has been a victim to on account of being gay. Without the self awareness to recognize what he was doing, he distracted from his anecdote about Shante with stories of his own oppression.
Taking notes from the young girl who Nance acknowledges was an expert when he approached her with misguided intentions of helping, Shante was similarly an expert on her own experiences when she pointed out that Nance used his experience as a gay man to undermine the experiences of Black women.
The entirety of his presentation went without trigger warnings which was frustrating for the POC in the room for whom the speech wasn’t even intended anyway.
Several colleagues of mine from The Echo and I stayed in the hall after he had slipped away and we were baffled. Soon after we talked to N.C. State’s Nubian Message about the presentation we had just witnessed.
We collected our thoughts as fellow journalists against whatever the hell Nance was trying to do.