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January 18 - January 18, 2023
Everything great is birthed through discomfort.
Prejudice is an emotional commitment to ignorance. —NATHAN RUTSTEIN
Again, unconscious prejudices can manifest as racist actions, that’s the whole problem. But I think it’s important to start here, with the fact that you don’t even have to know you’re racist for the damage to be done.
Race doesn’t really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don’t have that choice. —CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE, AMERICANAH
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.”
White privilege is a hard conversation because we all want to believe in the American dream. We want to believe that America is both a democracy and a meritocracy, where all of our lives are the result of our own hard work and ambitions. I believed exactly that, all the way until I was getting my master’s degree and took a class called Social Determinants of Health. Only then did I realize that not only do some people not start from zero, a lot of black people start in the negatives. And that’s just not fair.
“Let’s just say it’s not real. Let’s just say I’m wrong about white privilege—but I believe in it. It means I will have lived my whole life looking out for other people. Making sure everybody else gets the first shot and I get the second. Make sure people who are not in the mix get in it.” If he found out he was wrong after all that, he’d still have a life of good deeds to show for it. On the other hand, Carl told the man, “If you find out that you were wrong at the end of your life, that white privilege was real and you didn’t acknowledge it, it means that you were stepping on the necks of
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What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we love black culture? —AMANDLA STENBERG
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. —JAMES BALDWIN
If that were your reality, if that were the history of your forebears, how angry would you be? At what point would you get over that anger? How in the heck would you get over that anger?
It’s not white people’s job to police the feelings of black people, but as fellow human beings, please grant black people the right to the full gamut of emotions regarding their wounds.
What is reverse racism if it’s not, well, real? It’s a prime example of what scholar Alice McIntyre calls white talk: a.k.a. strategies white people use—consciously or not—to insulate themselves from their collective participation in racism.
Novelist Jason Reynolds does a wonderful job of expanding on the reasons why: If you say, “No, all lives matter,” what I would say is I believe that you believe all lives matter. But because I live the life that I live, I am certain that in this country, all lives [don’t] matter. I know for a fact that, based on the numbers, my life hasn’t mattered; that black women’s lives definitely haven’t mattered, that black trans people’s lives haven’t mattered, that black gay people’s lives haven’t mattered … that immigrants’ lives don’t matter, that Muslims’ lives don’t matter. The Indigenous people of
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Also, here’s a language-born mindset change: instead of thinking of it as criminal justice, think of it as justice. We get into sticky territory with the word criminal. Not that criminals don’t exist, but who gets called a criminal and why is not so cut-and-dried and usually has something to do with race and class or both.
I also invite you to visit Pen American (pen.org) and read some of the wonderful writing coming out of prisons. If you’re interested in the humanity of people who are incarcerated, who better to educate you than people actually in prison?
The breakdown of the black community, in order to maintain slavery, began with the breakdown of the black family. Men and women were not legally allowed to get married because you couldn’t have that kind of love. It might get in the way of the economics of slavery. Your children could be taken from you and literally sold down the river. —KERRY WASHINGTON
Another language shift for you: I’ve used broken in this chapter because it’s so prevalent, but I don’t love it for the same reason I use enslaved rather than slave. To call it a broken black family makes it seems like the brokenness is somehow normal, just how black families are—when we know by now that the disjoint owes a lot to systemic forces. What if we called them broken-apart families instead? That would put more emphasis on the fact that black families didn’t become fractured all on their own.
It was a great day for black-white love, but here’s a little perspective on that victory: black people had received both their civil and voting rights before they were allowed to legally marry white people.
While you can ask about their values, don’t expect a partner to educate you on their culture. If you care about them, you’ll pursue that education yourself.
You can’t shield your child from the world for all of their life. Eventually, they are going to be in a world that isn’t color blind. And they will have to know how to navigate that world that sees their color
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. —DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
The longer the protests have gone on, the more I recognized them as the dividend-paying rebellions that they are. The more I come to see the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement—Garza, Cullors, and Tometi—as present-day Sons of Liberty. Or rather, the Sisters of Liberty: women who had an agenda.
In the 1960s’ civil rights movement, we had MLK and his nonviolent civil disobedience, and that was effective. But the 1960s famously had another civil rights leader: Malcolm X—at least, early Malcolm X, who preached “by-any-means-necessary” tactics in the fight for racial equality. The fact is, both kinds of protest helped to bring about that decade’s hard-won change.
Remember what they said in the Declaration of Independence: “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.” Protest, riots, revolts have been responses to repeated injury, and for what it’s worth, none of them has gone as far as the response the Declaration is talking about (the Revolutionary War).
the late civil rights hero John Lewis, who had this to say about the fight for equality: “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year; it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”
Defunding the police could mean more money for underfunded schools, for mental health programs, or for drug recovery programs, all of which can help to reduce crime.
True allyship demands that it move from conversation to action. And that action will include risks.
Black people don’t have the luxury to have a change of heart. It might not have been the world depending on me, but I didn’t know who needed my voice, so I wasn’t going to back down. The lesson there is that being an ally means showing up.
The way I see it, this book is like the huddle. I’ve announced the plays, and while the chapters may speak to different readers in different ways, the time is almost here for all of us to go run the play. Because, ultimately, it’s not about the huddle; it’s about what you do after you break.
Calling someone a slave is like saying that’s what they were: like they were born into this identity, like what’s happening to them is in line with who they are. Enslaved, on the other hand, puts emphasis on what happened. Enslaved says black people weren’t naturally born as slaves: they were coerced into slavery. Enslaved puts the emphasis on what white people did to black people.
