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Charles Baudelaire’s admonition that “the loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.”
identity politics refers to the focus on the barriers specific groups face in their struggle for equality.
white settler societies such as Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
how seldom we experience racial discomfort in a society we dominate,
white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of superiority and entitlement.
unexamined beliefs
I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color.
self-awareness, continuing education, relationship building, and actual antiracist practice.
Race will influence whether we will survive our birth, where we are most likely to live, which schools we will attend, who our friends and partners will be, what careers we will have, how much money we will earn, how healthy we will be, and even how long we can expect to live.2 This book does not attempt to provide the solution to racism.
our opinions are necessarily uninformed, even ignorant.
silence, defensiveness, argumentation, certitude, and other forms of pushback. These
key Western ideologies: individualism and objectivity.
patterns are recognized as such precisely because they are recurring and predictable.
there is no true biological race. The external characteristics that we use to define race are unreliable indicators of genetic
As Ta-Nehisi Coates states, “But race is the child of racism, not the father.”
poor whites were focused on feeling superior to those below them in status, they were less focused on those above.
Prejudice is pre-judgment about another person based on the social groups to which that person belongs. Prejudice consists of thoughts and feelings, including stereotypes, attitudes, and generalizations that are based on little or no experience and then are projected onto everyone from that group.
All humans have prejudice; we cannot avoid
Discrimination is action based on prejudice.
women could be prejudiced and discriminate against men in individual interactions, women as a group could not deny men their civil rights. But men as a group could and did deny women their civil rights.
Ideologies are the frameworks through which we are taught to represent, interpret, understand, and make sense of social existence.
ideology in the United States include individualism, the superiority of capitalism as an economic system and democracy as a political system, consumerism as a desirable lifestyle, and meritocracy (anyone can succeed if he or she works hard).
racial ideology that circulates in the United States rationalizes racial hierarchies as the outcome of a natural order resulting from either genetics or individual effort or talent.
Racism differs from individual racial prejudice and racial discrimination in the historical accumulation and ongoing use of institutional power and authority to support the prejudice and to systematically enforce discriminatory behaviors with far-reaching effects.
laws, policies, practices, and norms of society in a way that people of color do not.
Census Bureau, the United Nations, academic groups such as the UCLA Civil Rights Project and the Metropolis Project, and nonprofits such as the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League.
racism as “a system of advantage based on race.”
does not mean that individual white people do not struggle or face barriers. It does mean that we do not face the particular barriers of racism.
remove the qualifier reverse from any discussion of racism. By definition, racism is a deeply embedded historical system of institutional power. It is not fluid and does not change direction simply because a few individuals of color manage to excel.
legal, political, economic, and social rights and privileges that are denied to others.
Instead of the typical focus on how racism hurts people of color, to examine whiteness is to focus on how racism elevates white people.
urged white people to turn their attention onto themselves to explore what it means to be white in a society that is so divided by race.
political, economic, and social system of domination.
Again, racism is a structure, not an event.
through movies and mass media, corporate culture, advertising, US-owned manufacturing, military presence, historical colonial relations, missionary work, and other means, white supremacy is circulated globally.
the peoples of Europe to assert, promote, and maintain the ideal of white supremacy in relation to all other people of the world.
white supremacy as “the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.”
political states differentially favoring their interests, an economy structured around the racial exploitation of others,
white supremacy to describe a sociopolitical economic system of domination based on racial categories that benefits those defined
least likely to have a wide variety of authentic egalitarian cross-racial relationships.
white supremacy is something much more pervasive and subtle
shifts the locus of change onto white people, where it belongs.
challenging our complicity with and investment in racism.
whites circulate and reinforce racial messages that position whites as superior.
social institutions (education, medicine, law, government, finance, and the military)
fear, contempt, and resentment are also stored.
modern norms, policies, and practices result in similar racial outcomes as those in the past, while not appearing to be explicitly
Whites enact racism while maintaining a positive self-image in many ways: • Rationalizing racial
race talk to capture “the explicit insertion into everyday life of racial signs and symbols that have no meaning other than positioning African Americans into the lowest level of the racial hierarchy.”
white children develop a sense of white superiority as early as preschool.
