First, it’s important to note that Mabel Wise was no ordinary white woman. Though not an activist, she very deliberately instilled in her children, and by extension in me (as her oldest grandchild and the one with whom she spent the most time), a deep and abiding contempt for bigotry or racism of any form. She was very proud of what I had chosen to do with my life, and although her antiracism was of a liberal sort that didn’t involve an amazingly deep understanding of the way that institutional injustice operates—it was an interpersonal level at which she tended to think of these issues—it was
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