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The key idea that I’ll come back to again and again is that living in a racist society exposes us all to absurd and harmful ideas that, in turn, help maintain the racial status quo.
My self-worth was unhealthily based on my ability to bring home straight As and shine in class.
As an adult, I would come to understand that my reliance on academic achievement to boost my ego no longer served me and that, to the contrary, it represented a kind of internalized oppression.
Growing up, I lacked the tools required understand racism, classism, and (hetero)sexism, much less their intersections, which is precisely why I decided to write this book. Like, I was this close to becoming some version of Ben Carson, Kanye West, or Omarosa.
Race is inherently
ridiculous for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that we now know there is no biological basis to dividing humans into “racial” categories.
When social scientists describe racism as “systemic,” we’re referring to collective practices and representations that disadvantage categories of human beings on the basis of their perceived “race.” The key word here is “collective.” Much of the racial stupidity we encounter in everyday life derives from the fact that people think of racism as individual prejudice rather than a broader system and structure of power.
When members of a so-called “racial” group are able to impose their prejudices in ways that reliably benefit them and disadvantage others, they have managed to successfully institutionalize their racist beliefs and protect their racial privileges. “Institutional racism” consists of racist ideas and practices embedded within social organizations and institutions (e.g., policies, laws, families, education).
The consequences of systemic racism are vast—from the burgeoning racial wealth gap, political disenfranchisement, mass incarceration and racist immigration policies to micro-aggressions, racial profiling, racist media imagery, and disparities in health, education, employment, and housing.
antiracists are people of any racial or ethnic background who take a personal, active role in challenging systemic racism.
White supremacy is the social, political, and economic dominance of people socially defined as “white.”
White supremacy is about power. It’s about the intersections of racial domination, class domination, gender domination, and other forms of oppression. It’s about capitalism. It’s about colonialism. The bottom line is that white supremacy is about resources: who gets (and retains) access to them, who gets excluded, whose lives are made to matter, and whose lives are rendered disposable.
Although white households typically hold ten to
thirteen times more wealth than black and Hispanic families,
People who believe this fallacy are also likely to point to the existence of a few wealthy women and women professionals as “proof” that sexism doesn’t exist, disregarding both the fact that women are systematically disadvantaged in every sphere of power and the fact that women certainly absorb misogynist beliefs that harm themselves and other women.
Just as patriarchy makes room for women—especially when they remain subordinate to men—white supremacy has historically made room for people of color who were willing to accommodate white dominance.
First: white supremacy is, most fundamentally, a system of power designed to channel material resources to people socially defined as white. Second: white supremacy is not just neo-Nazis and white nationalism. It’s also the way our society has come to be structured, such that political, economic, and other forms of capital are predominately maintained by elite whites.
epistemology of ignorance.
CRT boldly embraced an overtly activist agenda: the promotion of racial justice and the eradication of racial oppression. Bridging legal analysis with storytelling and narratives centering the experiences of people of color, critical race theorists set about to unveil and address the persistence of racism and white dominance.
Critical race theory is kryptonite for the myth of color-blindness and helps cut through the bullshit of postracial propaganda by specifying the role of social institutions
From a critical race perspective, the United States is not (and never was) a benevolent “nation of immigrants.” Rather, it is a nation of settler-colonialism, genocide, white nationalism, racial slavery, legal torture, and institutionalized rape. Since the inception of this country, laws and legal practices systematically favored whites economically, politically, and socially.
Few people realize that the nation’s very first immigration law, the Naturalization Act of 1790, was explicitly white supremacist, restricting naturalization to “free White persons,” though white women were left out of this exclusionary understanding of “freedom.”
If the vast majority of the population is ignorant of the racist past, how can they understand the impact of that past on the present?
As a longtime practitioner of mindfulness and meditation, I found that the more I brought my attention to the present moment, the more clearly I could identify the tightness in my chest or revulsion in my stomach when reading racist scholarship.
The word “epistemology” refers to the study of knowledge and its formation, so an epistemology of ignorance would involve creating “knowledge” based on . . . a profound lack of knowledge or stupidity. Using fancy academic language, Mills is basically saying that whites’ ideas “about race” are fundamentally based on misrepresentations and distortions of social reality, but their “not knowing,” their ignorance, gets routinely repackaged as credible, authoritative “knowledge,” even as “science.”
Nationwide, white families hold thirteen times the wealth of black families.
From mass incarceration to sentencing laws to racial discrimination in housing and home loans, the invisibility of institutional racism is maintained by the fact that it is literally hard to see. Hamilton and Carmichael describe institutional racism as “less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts.”
the self-imposed racial isolation and social apartheid preferred by many whites means that most members of the majority population have no meaningful relationships with people of color and, consequently, no significant exposure to the realities of systemic, institutionalized racial oppression.
White supremacy endures, ironically—and chronically—through the widespread erasure of its systemic and chronic nature. These erasures include covert forms of institutional racism as well as denial, misrepresentation, and disinformation by those who intentionally seek to secure resources for “whites,” as well as the “unintentional” and institutionalized distortions of racial reality that result from vague and imprecise descriptions of ongoing racialized social and historical realities. In this way, systemic racism is reproduced and extended through everyday practices that allow people to live
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As the racial order takes hold, the population that benefits from its maintenance is generally socialized in ways that ensure the system remains in place.
As a system, white supremacy needs people to believe that it (1) doesn’t exist, (2) has been overcome, or (3) only exists among extremists. White supremacy can’t tolerate millions of people finally realizing that it is pervasive and systemic. It needs us ignorant and hopeful. And it needs us to cling to a particular kind of hope—a hope that reinforces racial ignorance and denial of white supremacy. A hope that sells you neoliberal inclusion and “feel-good” tokenism—the kind of hope that cannot threaten the racial status quo.
White supremacy continues to persist, in part, due to the widespread temptation to only see and condemn other people’s racism—racism is always someone else’s crime.
In order to envision and build a more just society, we will have to collectively recognize the foundational immorality of the Founding Fathers and commit to creating a world better than the one they conceived.
white women’s (and nonblack women of color’s) hostility toward black women is related to their unwillingness to openly challenge the dynamics of oppression in their own lives.
internalized oppression
Black women’s labor (emotional, intellectual, political, and otherwise) gets routinely shamed and silenced even as it is appropriated and exploited by those who feel threatened by our legitimate critiques—and, yes, by our reasonable anger.
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) and All the Women Are White,
All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave (1982)
Pearlie Golden. Tarika Wilson. Tanisha Anderson. Miriam Carey. Mya Hall. Renisha McBride. Sandra Bland. Shelly Frey. Malissa Williams. Michelle Cusseaux. Shereese Francis. Kyam Livingston. Meagan Hockaday.
The Combahee battle was the only wartime effort designed specifically to liberate slaves, and in the process, Tubman became the “first woman in U.S. history to plan and lead a military raid.”
What I love about the Combahee statement is that the writers were unapologetic about centering black women’s liberation. “Above all else,” they wrote, “our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s but because of our need as human persons for autonomy.”
In 1851, Sojourner Truth stood up in the midst of a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, and delivered her famous address, “Ain’t I a Woman?” “Well, children,” she began, “where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that ‘twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about?”
Let’s just take a step back here to recognize the fact that Sojourner Truth had to get up in the middle of a meeting on women’s rights and demand to be seen because the white women leading this movement
weren’t looking out for women like her. The white abolitionists and black men fighting slavery weren’t looking out for her either. “Look at me!” The black woman’s unyielding cry, reverberating, ignored and unheeded, for centuries.
“black feminism” centers the experiences, knowledge, perspectives, well-being, and empowerment of black women.
“Intersectionality” is a black feminist approach to the study of power and inequality that understands systems of oppression as inextricably linked. Intersectional theory asserts that our social identities can overlap in ways that make us vulnerable to more than one type of discrimination, rather than imagining (as many people do) that sexism, class exploitation, and other axes of inequality are divorced from each other.
Regarding white women’s complicity with racism, they continued: “As Black feminists we are made constantly and painfully aware of how little effort white women have made to understand and combat their racism, which requires among other things, that they have a more than superficial comprehension of race, color and black history and culture.”
A frank appraisal of black feminists’ critique of white women’s racism reminds us that listening to black women means coming to terms with white women’s racism.
To put it bluntly: if you’re not thinking about race intersectionally, then you’re not thinking about race intelligently.
Black feminism teaches us that intersections of power determine whose suffering matters and whose suffering is ignored or justified—even and especially in the context of understanding racism.
