Understanding the experience of black people in America—why black was created so people could be white—pried open how Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and other marginalized groups have been historically oppressed through laws and systems that had little or nothing to do with what was right. White as the default, white as the center, white as the norm, is the central part of the master narrative. The centrality of whiteness—how it constructed white versus black, legal versus illegal—hurts not only people of color who aren’t white but also white people who can’t carry the burden of what
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