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February 1 - February 18, 2023
segregated cities have higher cancer-causing pollutants—for white people, too—than more integrated ones. Professor Morello-Frosch was quick to add: “And it’s not explained by poverty…. That effect remains even after you’ve taken into account the relative concentrations of poverty.”
overwhelmingly white public school districts have $23 billion more in funding than overwhelmingly of-color districts, resulting in an average of $2,226 more funding per student.
Today, the majority of public school students in the United States are children of color. Why? Because a disproportionate number of white students are enrolled in private schools, comprising 69 percent of K–12 private school enrollment.
private schools’ advent as “segregation academies,” today,
The pricing up and privatization of public goods has a cost for us all—most white families included.
homes in zip codes that had at least one elementary school with higher-than-average test scores were 77 percent more expensive than houses in areas without. Paying a 77 percent premium may be fine for white families with plenty of disposable income and job flexibility, but it’s a tax levied by racism that not everyone can afford.
Compared to students at predominantly white schools, white students who attend diverse K–12 schools achieve better learning outcomes and even higher test scores, particularly in areas such as math and science.
In the long run, research reveals that racially diverse K–12 schools can produce better citizens—white students who feel a greater sense of civic engagement, who are more likely to consider friends and colleagues from different races as part of “us” rather than “them,” who will be more at ease in the multicolor future of America in which white people will no longer be the majority.
By age three or four, white children and children of color have absorbed the message that white is better, and both are likely to select white playmates if given a choice.
Integrated Schools is a nationwide grassroots effort to empower, educate, and organize parents who are white and/or privileged like Ali, parents who want to shift their priorities about their children’s education away from centering metrics like test scores or assumptions about behavior and discipline and toward contributing to an antiracist public educational system.
“It’s okay, baby, it’s okay,” I murmured to him. But it’s not.
The United States is, in many ways, the problem.
“Conservative white males are likely to favor protection of the current industrial capitalist order which has historically served them well.”
if white American men who buy the zero-sum story don’t see themselves as suffering, their bias will be toward retaining a status quo that rewards them, even if it leads to suffering for others.
“If you’re in a society where you’ve already let someone go without shelter, then what does it matter if they drown?
480 days of parental leave in Sweden—are almost unimaginable in today’s America, because the dominant American political culture would say that people lacking those privileges are responsible for their situations.
government data still show that black people are 1.5 times more likely to breathe polluted air and drink unsafe water than the overall population.
sacrifice zone
‘People of color, they’re poor, and so therefore they live in the less desirable places.’ Well, you know…those less desirable places were the only places that they could legally own homes…. They’re not accidental…. Those are intentional.”
the elite mindset: “Don’t worry, this pollution can be displaced onto the Other, onto the wrong side of the environmental tracks. So…put on blinders, don’t pay too much attention to the gross amount of pollution that is being produced.”
It’s elites’ blindness to the costs they pay that keeps pollution higher for everyone.
Who would want to be one of the bad guys?
we are all paying for the moral conflict of white Americans.
Can we swim together in the same pool or not?
I didn’t get facts about how this country really began. I got the white version.”
Life After Hate,
no one wants to think that they are benefiting from a system that hurts other people. It’s much easier just to pretend like you don’t know.”
Instead of being blind to race, color blindness makes people blind to racism, unwilling to acknowledge where its effects have shaped opportunity or to use race-conscious solutions to address it.
white folks are terribly invested in our own innocence,”
In the American moral logic—and, increasingly, with “Stand Your Ground” laws, in the legal system—when you fear someone, no matter how objectively real the threat, you can be justified in doing them harm.
Don’t be scared of black kids. Be scared for them.”
“It’s so strange,” my mother used to tell me, “because we’re the ones who live in terror of what white people can do with impunity.”
white people must fear, at some deep level, that given half a chance, people of color would do to them what they have long been doing to us.
I found it hard to relate.
“Let America be America again, for it has never been America to me.”
Wanting someone to stand for the national anthem rather than stand up for justice means loving the symbol more than what it symbolizes.
America has lied to her white children for centuries, offering them songs about freedom instead of the liberation of truth.
Fox is not just news; it’s a propaganda outlet owned by a right-wing billionaire, and it uses anti-immigrant and racist stereotypes to undermine white support not just for progressive policies but for basic societal norms, from democracy to social distancing during the pandemic.
a thoughtful gaze,
Where were the throngs for Black Lives Matter rallies? Where have people been?…And I thought, where have I been?
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
the warm blue eyes and smiling face of a Little League coach
We Christians, in fact—British and American—were the ones who decided that we couldn’t do to Indigenous people and kidnapped Africans what we were doing, if they were indeed people made in the image of God. “So, we said they weren’t. They weren’t humans made in the image of God. What we did is we threw away Imago Dei. We threw it away to justify what we’re doing…. white supremacy was America’s original sin…. At the heart of the sin was a lie,” he said.
“As long as white people—even, you know, good-hearted, well-meaning, progressive white people—think that the issue of race is mostly about people of color and minorities and what has happened to them and what happens to them that we could help with—as long as that’s the mindset, they’re still stuck,” he told me. And they will remain stuck “until we understand as white people that the problem of racism is about us.”
leitmotif
“Racism actually has a dehumanizing aspect not only for those who experience racism, but [also for] those who perpetuate
God is not a hierarchical God, but that God is the oneness of all of us…. There’s no difference between me and God. It’s all the same. God is one. And so, racism is another way that divides that divine connection…because then we’re not only inflicting pain on others, but we’re maligning our purity.”
racism interrupts the human connection with the divine.
the line in the Quran in which Allah proclaims to humankind that “we…made you into nations and tribes [so] that you may know each other, not that you may despise each other.”
After losing his family’s business, the father, Ruhel Islam, reportedly said, “Let my building burn. Justice needs to be served.”
