How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

by Crystal Marie Fleming

It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn. —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

At school, I was one of those black kids who didn’t know they were black. It’s not that I denied my racial identity or viewed myself as “white.” I just don’t remember thinking about myself in racial terms.

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.

“A lot of times they’re so quick to criminalize and dehumanize you that they can’t even, you know, begin to process on how to help you. . . . How can you help someone when you have your cisnormativity and your prejudice blocking your view?”

[black] women . . . are so well socialized to push ourselves past healthy limits that we often do not know how to set protective boundaries that would eliminate certain forms of stress in our lives.