Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

by Emmanuel Acho

Prejudice is an emotional commitment to ignorance. —NATHAN RUTSTEIN

you’re responsible for your biases, if for no other reason than that there are ways to make them more conscious. And when an idea is conscious, you can change your mind.

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.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, has biases. It’s the job of empathetic and considerate people not to let them dictate actions that harm others.

run) and catch us if you can.” 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 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.

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.

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.