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February 23 - February 29, 2024
“The ultimate logic of racism,” Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “is genocide.”
getting uncomfortable is the whole idea. Everything great is birthed through discomfort.
Here’s Gwendolyn Brooks again, this time from her poem “Primer for Blacks”: The word Black has geographic power, pulls everybody in: Blacks here— Blacks there— Blacks wherever they may be.
It’s a descriptor of what black people all have in common.
Yes, it might be uncomfortable, but it’s the right thing to do.
The question of whether to use black or African American is ultimately a preference, one that helps a person present their identity to the world. Each person you meet might not have a preference, but maybe they do. Trust me, language matters.
Prejudice is an emotional commitment to ignorance. —NATHAN RUTSTEIN
Why weren’t white people being tagged as polar bears? The short answer is that the facial recognition algorithm had been disproportionately coded to, and tested on, white faces. It didn’t recognize black faces because no one had thought to teach it to do so. The long answer is something called implicit bias.
decision. If you see a clown and think, DANGER, look, you’re not the only one.
🤣
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.
I like to use the acronym DENIAL: Don’t Even kNow I Am Lying.
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.
Not only does that overlook the difference between the experience of being a black versus a white person in this country (more on that … throughout this book), it also provides a fertile ground for implicit biases to grow unrecognized and unchecked.
Instead of being color blind, be introspective. Try to identify your prejudices and hold them up to scrutiny. If you don’t know what they are, you can start by taking an implicit bias test. (Here’s one: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html.)
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.”
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.
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.
For many white people, white privilege is the power of feeling normal. It’s the silent reinforcement of being able to walk into a store and see its main displays show products that cater to you. It’s the ability to turn on the TV and see people who look like you represented in all walks of life. It’s passing the corner office at work and seeing someone who could have been you once upon a time, and maybe finding mentors who “see themselves in you.” It’s never wondering whether the name on your résumé is “too white”; it’s talking the way your local news anchor talks, the way the authorities say
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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.
This country won’t change in a significant way until the majority of white Americans acknowledge and address their white privilege.
If white people are the problem, white people must also be part of the solution.
“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
While it might be true that imitation is the highest form of flattery, plagiarism isn’t flattery—it’s stealing.
Borrowing influences from black culture is not an issue in and of itself. The problem becomes when you borrow from a culture without citing the sources and/or knowing the history.
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.
There will never be any circumstances under which a white person should use the word nigger. Period.
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. Those effects show up as inequalities in power, opportunities, laws, and every other metric of how individuals and groups are treated. Which is to say: systemic racism is making the unequal treatment of people of color the national norm.
Think about that: 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.
No, it’s not reverse racism to celebrate Black History Month. But it might be racist to call for a White History Month.
When people proclaim that black lives matter, it’s not about saying white lives don’t matter. It is a given in this country that they do. What black people are really and truly saying is that black lives matter as well as white lives.
“We have a system of justice that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.”
We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.
😳 really? you don't think *how* someone gets to a place is relevant to preventing it in the future?
This violence is, in itself, the product of systemic racism in ways we’ve already talked a bit about.
Not going to disagree that racism has a hand in the amount violence perpetrated, but I don't think all acts of violence committed by black people can be blamed on racism. That feeds into the stereotype of the angry black man that we're trying to move away from, right? But I do agree that all the things that systemic racism has had an impact on is like this giant ball of yarn that's gotten all knotted up ... how do we untangle this?
Poverty, not race, is a more accurate predictor of who commits crimes.
A thug is the fictional archetype of Dilulio’s nightmares, a stand-in for a black man that is hopelessly lost to violence or drugs; a vector of crime that needs to be feared and stopped; a caricature instead of a human being.
a more empathetic people is a better people
The bottom line: our criminal justice system too often treats black people like thugs instead of like people.
As the philosopher Norman Vincent Peale used to say, “Change your thoughts and change your world.”
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
we just can’t talk about the phenomenon of broken black families without the context of slavery.
history has a huge part to play on what kind of America we live in now.
Suicide is the third leading cause of death for black people ages fifteen to twenty-four, and black men are at four times higher risk than black women.
tougher to keep a family together when you’re fighting for your mental health, if not your life. Oh, and it’s a recap at this point, but let’s not forget the unequal education system, the stereotypes that vilify young black men, the justice system that forms a prison pipeline, discrimination in hiring, and for good measure, those racist housing practices. All those things work together to destabilize black people, making it harder and harder to keep families intact.
We all need to work together to make sure those odds are better.
THE NEXT TIME you hear someone spouting off about broken black families, make sure you help contextualize the issue for them.
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. Think on it, my friends.
And please, support black art—books, music, TV, films, visual art—especially that which provides nuanced images and characterizations of black people. I recommend James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk and the Barry Jenkins film adaptation, a great characterization of how black families endured in the ’50s and ’60s against stacked odds. Tell your friends when you like something. As more of these projects become profitable, more of them will exist in the world. The more that exist, the greater likelihood of nuanced depictions of black people. The more nuanced the depictions, the
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If I’m honest, sometimes it is like, Was a black man not good enough for you, black woman? or Was a black woman not good enough for you, black man?
my knee jerk reaction to this statement is "Ugh." ...
