White people desperately want to believe that only the lonely, isolated “whites only” club members are racist. This is why the word racist offends “nice white people” so deeply. It challenges their self-identification as good people. Sadly, most white people are more worried about being called racist than about whether or not their actions are in fact racist or harmful. But the truth is, even the monsters—the Klan members, the faces in the lynch mob, the murderers who bombed churches—they all had friends and family members. Each one of them was connected to people who would testify that they
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