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However, the longest-lasting pandemic in this country is a virus not of the body but of the mind, and it’s called racism.
Everything great is birthed through discomfort.
once bias informs our thinking, it can lead to explicit racism and bigotry.
LBJ said it best: “You can’t shackle and chain someone for hundreds of years, liberate them to compete freely with the rest and still justly believe that you’ve been fair.”
And white privilege is about the word white, not rich. It’s having advantage built into your life. It’s not saying your life hasn’t been hard; it’s saying your skin color hasn’t contributed to the difficulty in your life.
essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” McIntosh defines white privilege as “an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.”
Another part of white privilege is the omnipresent benefit of the doubt. It’s the safety of moving through the world without being profiled, without worrying that the police might harass you or worse just because of your skin.
The average net worth of a typical white family in 2016 was $171,000, a figure nearly ten times greater than that of a black family, at $17,150. TEN. TIMES. GREATER. Put another way, black people own about one-tenth of the wealth of white people in this country, adjusted for population. And check this: the wealth gap persists regardless of a household’s education, marital status, age, or income.
What I’m saying is that a white person’s skin color isn’t the thing contributing to holding them back, and that for all black people, their skin color contributes to what’s hard about their lives no matter what other privileges they might enjoy.
flattery, plagiarism isn’t flattery—it’s stealing. It’s doing none of the work yourself and taking as much of the credit as the world will give you. It’s not knowing or caring what kind of struggle went into someone else’s creation but using it to get yourself a passing grade—or a few thousand Instagram likes.
Cultural appropriation happens when members of a dominant group—in the United States, white people—take elements from the culture of a people who are disempowered. It’s problematic for a number of reasons. For one, it trivializes historic oppression. It also lets people show love for a culture while still remaining prejudiced toward the people of the culture and lets privileged people profit from the labor of oppressed people. On top of that, it can perpetuate racist stereotypes.
we will never achieve a post-racial America as long as the gears of systemic racism continue to churn.
systemic racism is the legitimizing of every dynamic—historic, cultural, political, economic, institutional, and person-to-person—that gives advantages to white people, while at the same time producing a whole host of terrible effects for black people and other people of color.
The socioeconomic makeup of a school can play a larger role in achievement than the poverty of an individual student’s family, and a poor education has a huge effect on later fortunes.
Alice McIntyre calls white talk: a.k.a. strategies white people use—consciously or not—to insulate themselves from their collective participation in racism.
Another way into this idea is the term white fragility, popularized by sociologist Robin DiAngelo. When white people are put in situations that challenge their identity, “we withdraw, defend, cry, argue, minimize, ignore,” explains DiAngelo. “And in other ways push back to regain our racial position and equilibrium.” Put very simply—y’all get defensive.
If you want to oppress someone, you’re gonna need power over them as a group—and no group holds it over white people.
There literally aren’t enough black people with institutional authority over white people to facilitate systemic racism against them. On
the unfairness black people have experienced has been the point of systemic racism, not the by-product of some other objective. What white people experience as unfairness as a result of Affirmative Action does not have as its aim being unfair to white people. And therein lies the main difference.
White lives have never been in danger from black lives to the degree that black lives have been endangered by white people and whiteness, and that’s on an individual level and a systemic level.
“We have a system of justice that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.
Poverty, not race, is a more accurate predictor of who commits crimes.
“I don’t see color” is not an okay thing to say, because to say we’re all exactly the same is to gloss over a whole history and presence of inequality.
That’s what this “we” is all about. If we can truly integrate white people and black people together, working in tandem, that’s when our world will make its joyful noise.
True allyship demands that it move from conversation to action.
Let’s think about what this means: race was a political creation, an economic creation—all this hate developed to secure the interest of some seventeenth-century dudes who wanted to get rich growing sugarcane and cotton, who wanted to make sure they’d always be the class on top. Which is to say, racism has always been about power. Which is to say, we invented racism.
Let me tell you what the movement for racial equality can’t afford: white people being fragile about racial issues. The premise of this book is about putting those issues on the table, about engaging with tough conversations, about white people having to sit with the discomfort, because that’s how progress is made.
