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racism’s adaptations over time are more sinister than concrete rules such as Jim Crow.
pillar of white fragility: the refusal to know.
These writers are seen as representing the universal human experience, and we read them precisely because they are presumed to be able to speak to us all.
White solidarity is the unspoken agreement among whites to protect white advantage and not cause another white person to feel racial discomfort
Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on
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you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct.
There has been no actual loss of power for the white elite, who have always controlled our institutions and continue to do so by a very wide margin.
Consider this data on the distribution of wealth: • Since 2015, the richest 1 percent has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet owns.11 • Eight men own the same amount of wealth as do the poorest half of the world. • The incomes of the poorest 10 percent of people increased by less than three dollars a year between 1988 and 2011, while the incomes of the richest 1 percent increased 182 times as much. • In Bloomberg’s daily ranking of the world’s five hundred richest people, the world’s wealthiest three (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Jeff Bezos), all white American men, have total net
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diverting blame away from the white elite and toward various peoples of color—for example, undocumented
They wrote covenants to keep schools and neighborhoods segregated and forbade cross-racial dating.
The practice of our lives as a white collective has rarely been in alignment with the values we profess.
This idea—that racism is not a white problem—enables us to sit back and let people of color take very real risks of invalidation and retaliation as they share their experiences.
Research matching census data and police department crime statistics show that this association does not hold,
The vast history of extensive and brutal explicit violence perpetrated by whites and their ideological rationalizations are all trivialized through white claims of racial innocence.
2016 study found that half of a sample of medical students and residents believe that blacks feel less pain
white racial hegemony to saturate everyday life, it has to be secured by a process of domination, or those acts, decisions, and policies that white subjects perpetrate on people of color.”
expectation that people of color should teach white people about racism is another aspect of white racial innocence that reinforces several problematic racial assumptions. First, it implies that racism is something that happens to people of color and has nothing to do with us and that we consequently cannot be expected to have any knowledge of it.
requires nothing of us and reinforces unequal power relations by asking people of color to do our work.
without first building a trusting relationship and being willing to meet them halfway by also being vulnerable
segregation (our schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, shopping districts, places of worship, entertainment, social gatherings, and elsewhere)
We can concentrate poverty and kids of color and then fail to provide the resources to support and sustain those schools, and then we can see a school full of black kids and say, ‘Oh, look at their test scores.’
racially coded; “urban” and “low test scores” are code for “not white” and therefore less desirable.
Dismissing what we don’t understand • Lack of authentic interest in the perspectives of people of color
shaped every aspect of my self-identity: my interests and investments, what I care about or don’t care about, what I see or don’t see, what I am drawn to and what I am repelled by, what I can take for granted, where I can go, how others respond to me,
racism first needed to be reduced to simple, isolated, and extreme acts of prejudice. These acts must be intentional, malicious, and based on conscious dislike of someone
deflecting the charge, rather than reflecting on my behavior.
“Racism is a systemic, societal, institutional, omnipresent, and epistemologically embedded phenomenon that pervades every vestige of our reality. For most whites, however, racism is like murder: the concept exists, but someone has to commit it in order for it to happen. This limited view of such a multilayered syndrome cultivates the sinister nature of racism and, in fact, perpetuates racist phenomena rather than eradicates them.”
still affected by the forces of racism as a member of a society in which racism is the bedrock.
requirement that applicants have an advanced degree rather than equivalent experience is automatically disqualifying some of the applicants that could bring the perspectives and experiences you say you are looking for.”
relentless messages of white superiority and the resulting and inevitable internalization of these messages for white people.
color blindness: “I don’t see color [and/or race has no meaning to me]; therefore, I am free of racism.” The second set claims to value diversity: “I know people of color [and/or have been near people of color, and/or have general fond regard for people of color]; therefore, I am free of racism.” Both categories
color-celebrate. This set claims that the person sees and embraces racial difference. Color-celebrate claims include statements such as
color-blind and the other color-celebrate,
extreme segregation and racial inequity.
Someone who claims to have been taught to treat everyone the same is simply telling me that he or she doesn’t understand socialization.
We understand that gender is a very deep social construct, that we have different experiences depending on our gender roles, assignments, and expressions,
flimsy evidence to certify ourselves as racism-free.
rendering the terms interchangeable and thus meaningless.
For most whites, being the minority in their school or neighborhood is usually temporary.
system of racial inequality that benefits whites at the expense of people of color (as antiracists do),
racism is a social system embedded in the culture and its institutions.
the practice of our lives is more powerful than the words we say,
Most of us only teach our children not to admit to prejudice.
not to say certain things that are overtly racist is teaching the child self-censorship rather than how to examine the deeply
Ideally, we would teach our children how to recognize and challenge prejudic...
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children are vastly more sophisticated in their awareness of racial hierarchies than most people believe.
children internalize both implicit and explicit messages about it from their environment.
found racial hostility in white children as young as three years
Our identities are not unique or inherent but constructed or produced through social processes. What’s
“good” side of a false binary. I have found it much more useful to think of myself as on a continuum. Racism is so deeply woven into the fabric of our society that
