So You Want to Talk About Race
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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between January 2 - January 12, 2019
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These are very scary times for a lot of people who are just now realizing that America is not, and has never been, the melting-pot utopia that their parents and teachers told them it was.
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These conversations will not be easy, but they will get easier over time. We have to commit to the process if we want to address race, racism, and racial oppression in our society.
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The system of racism functioned primarily as a justification for the barbaric act of chattel slavery and the genocide of Indigenous peoples. You cannot put chains around the necks of other human beings or slaughter them wholesale, while maintaining social rules that prohibit such treatment, without first designating those people as somewhat less than human.
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I could not address abuse in my relationship because I was too busy defending my right to even call it abuse.
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Every day is a new little hurt, a new little dehumanization. We walk around flinching, still in pain from the last hurt and dreading the next. But when we say “this is hurting us,” a spotlight is shown on the freshest hurt, the bruise just forming: “Look at how small it is, and I’m sure there is a good reason for it. Why are you making such a big deal about it? Everyone gets hurt from time to time”—while the world ignores that the rest of our bodies are covered in scars.
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But race was designed to be interwoven into our social, political, and economic systems. Instead of trying to isolate or ignore race, we need to look at race as a piece of the machine, just as we’d look at class or geography when considering social issues. Race alone is not all you need to focus on, but without it, any solution you come up with just won’t work. We live in a complex world, and when looking at socioeconomic problems in our society, we simply cannot come to a viable solution without factoring in race.
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We like to filter new information through our own experiences to see if it computes. If it matches up with what we have experienced, it’s valid. If it doesn’t match up, it’s not. But race is not a universal experience.
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So if your lived experience and your interpretation of that lived experience are valid, why wouldn’t the lived experience of people of color be just as valid? If I don’t have the right to deem your life, what you see and hear and feel, a lie, why do you have the right to do it to me?
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The truth is, you don’t even have to “be racist” to be a part of the racist system.
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If I call a white person a cracker, the worst I can do is ruin their day. If a white person thinks I’m a nigger, the worst they can do is get me fired, arrested, or even killed in a system that thinks the same—and has the resources to act on it.
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The ultimate goal of racism was the profit and comfort of the white race, specifically, of rich white men. The oppression of people of color was an easy way to get this wealth and power, and racism was a good way to justify it.
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If you hear someone at the water cooler say, “black people are always late,” you can definitely say, “Hey, that’s racist” but you can also add, “and it contributes to false beliefs about black workers that keeps them from even being interviewed for jobs, while white workers can be late or on time, but will always be judged individually with no risk of damaging job prospects for other white people seeking employment.” That also makes it less likely that someone will brush you off saying “Hey, it’s not that big of a deal, don’t be so sensitive.”
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Tying racism to its systemic causes and effects will help others see the important difference between systemic racism, and anti-white bigotry.
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If you find yourself frequently referring to your feelings and your viewpoint, chances are, you are making this all about you.
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Because your opponent isn’t a person, it’s the system of racism that often shows up in the words and actions of other people.
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But you have to just keep trying, because the alternative is your complacency in the continued oppression of people of color.
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And if you are white, and you don’t want to feel any of that pain by having these conversations, then you are asking people of color to continue
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to bear the entire burden of racism alone.
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we may be a part of the reason why the deck is stacked against others, that we may have been contributing to it for years without our knowledge, is why the concept of privilege is so threatening to so many.
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The concept of privilege violates everything we’ve been told about fairness and everything we’ve been told about the American Dream of hard work paying off and good things happening to good people.
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I have to do my part by confronting it whenever I encounter it—even if it means less
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benefits for me and some uncomfortable conversations.
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When we identify where our privilege intersects with somebody else’s oppression, we’ll find our opportunities to make real change.
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You can be both privileged in some areas of life, and underprivileged in others. Both can be true at once and can impact your life at the same time.
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Being privileged doesn’t mean that you are always wrong and people without privilege are always right—it means that there is a good chance you are missing a few very important pieces of the puzzle.
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Every day you are given opportunities to make the world better, by making yourself a little uncomfortable and asking, “who doesn’t have this same freedom or opportunity that I’m enjoying now?”
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But if you don’t embrace intersectionality, even if you make progress for some, you will look around one day and find that you’ve become the oppressor of others.
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Implicit bias is the beliefs that sit in the back of your brain and inform your actions without your explicit knowledge. In times of stress, these unexamined beliefs can prove deadly.
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And a large portion of police encounters with people of color—or with any people for that matter—are high-stress situations where that implicit bias is more likely to take over at any hint of unpredictability or escalation and flood an officer with irrational fear. When an officer shoots an unarmed black man and says he feared for his life, I believe it. But that fear itself is often racist and unfounded.
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And communities with higher poverty, fewer jobs, and less infrastructure are going to have higher crime, regardless of race.
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But when you cannot trust the police to protect you, who do you call to report illegal activity? When a crime happens, why would you cooperate with a police force that you do not trust to enforce the law without bias or excessive force?
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Studies have shown that if you have a “black-sounding” name, you are four times less likely to be called for a job interview. White women still make only 82 cents for every white man’s dollar, black women only earn 65 cents for every white man’s dollar, and Hispanic women earn even less at 58 cents for every white man’s dollar.
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Psychologists attest that overly harsh discipline destroys children’s trust in teachers and schools, along with damaging their self-esteem.
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We often focus on the outcomes of the school-to-prison pipeline as the ultimate tragedy—the high drop-out rates, future poverty and joblessness, the likelihood of repeated incarceration—but when I look at our school-to-prison pipeline, the biggest tragedy to me is the loss of childhood joy. When our kids spend eight hours a day in a system that is looking for reasons to punish them, remove them, criminalize them—our kids do not get to be kids. Our kids do not get to be rambunctious, they do not get to be exuberant, they do not get to be rebellious, they do not get to be defiant. Our kids do ...more
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WORDS HAVE POWER. WORDS ARE MORE THAN THEIR dictionary definition.
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Why would you want to rub in the fact that you are privileged enough to not be negatively impacted by the legacy of racial oppression that these words helped create?
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Cultural appropriation is the product of a society that prefers its culture cloaked in whiteness.
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But we don’t live in a society that equally respects all cultures, which is why what would otherwise be seen as offensive and insensitive behavior, is instead treated as a birthright of white Americans.
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And it does not seem fair to those who feel that other cultures can take from white culture without the same risk of being labeled appropriative. But what actually is not fair, is the expectation that a dominant culture can just take and enjoy and profit from the beauty and art and creation of an oppressed culture, without taking on any of the pain and oppression people of that culture had to survive while creating it.
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No matter what our intentions, everything we say and do in the pursuit of justice will one day be outdated, ineffective, and yes, probably wrong. That is the way progress works. What we do now is important and helpful so long as what we do now is what is needed now. But the arguments I was having in college are not the arguments the world needs now as I prepare to send my son to college. And if I refuse to acknowledge and adjust to that, all I’m doing is making things harder for a generation that would really like to move things forward.
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is our role not to shape the future, but to not fuck things up so badly that our kids will be too busy correcting the past to focus on the future. It is our job to be confused and dismayed by the future generation, and trust that if we would just stop trying to control them and instead support them, they will eventually find their way.
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And if there was anything I could say or do that would convince someone that I or people like me don’t deserve justice or equality, then they never believed in justice and equality in the first place.
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If you’ve been privileged enough to not suffer from the cumulative effects of systemic racism and are therefore able to look at racially charged situations one at a time, and then let it go, please recognize that very few people of color are able to enter into discussions on racism with the same freedom. When people of color speak out about systemic racism, they are opening up all of that pain and fear and anger to you.
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To refuse to listen to someone’s cries for justice and equality until the request comes in a language you feel comfortable with is a way of asserting your dominance over them in the situation.
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When you instead shift your focus to getting people of color to fight oppression in a way in which you approve, racial justice is no longer your main goal—your approval is.
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Those who tone-police you are trying to manipulate you into thinking that their validation is required to legitimize your desire for racial justice. This is abusive behavior.
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Your mistakes or your achievements will never on their own define you. But you can only do better if you are willing to look at your entire self.
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Your intentions have little to no impact on the way in which your actions may have harmed others. Do not try to absolve yourself of responsibility with your good intentions.
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Do not discount someone’s complaint because their emotions seem foreign to you. You may think that someone is making a mountain out of a molehill, but when it comes to race, actual mountains are indeed made of countless molehills stacked on top of each other. Each one adds to the enormity of the problem of racism.
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You should instead fear unexamined racism. Fear the thought that right now, you could be contributing to the oppression of others and you don’t know it. But do not fear those who bring that oppression to light. Do not fear the opportunity to do better.