How to Be Less Stupid About Race Quotes

“The bottom line is that white supremacy is about resources: who gets (and retains) access to them, who gets excluded, whose lives are made to matter, and whose lives are rendered disposable.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“Have you ever wondered how people lived with slavery, Jim Crow, and lynching but looked the other way? Look around right now. This is how they did it. They did it by going on with their lives. They did it by being polite, not rocking the boat.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“Once you realize that a racist society inevitably socializes its citizens to absorb racist ideas and behave in a discriminatory way, then you’re less likely to be preoccupied with adjudicating whether an individual is or is not “a racist.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“The news industry isn’t just a mirror reflecting society’s racism. It’s a megaphone.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“Growing beyond our racial ignorance—and getting serious about disrupting white supremacy—requires developing an intersectional sensibility: awareness of interlocking systems of oppression and concern for a wide variety of marginalized groups. To put it bluntly: if you’re not thinking about race intersectionally, then you’re not thinking about race intelligently.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“mean, you know things are really bad when a gotdamn ice-cream company has to debunk the pervasive belief that racial oppression is a thing of the past because schools, academics, politicians, and journalists are failing to do so.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“As a system, white supremacy needs people to believe that it (1) doesn’t exist, (2) has been overcome, or (3) only exists among extremists. White supremacy can’t tolerate millions of people finally realizing that it is pervasive and systemic. It needs us ignorant and hopeful. And”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“Since the inception of this country, laws and legal practices systematically favored whites economically, politically, and socially. In”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“But it appears that many reporters and news professionals believe their job is to distort racial reality, drive up the ratings, and cape for white supremacy.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“It means becoming familiar with the typical tropes of minimization, deflection, and denial that allow racism to persist unrecognized and/or justified on a daily basis. And it means going far beyond “calling out” your racist friend or family members for their racist comments and behavior (something the vast majority of whites do not do). If we are ever to move beyond this racial order, then we will also have to dismantle the system of unearned privilege attached to being socially defined as “white.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“As Northern liberals frequently point to Southern (and/or conservative) racists in order to deny their own racism, so, too, do Europeans frequently point to the overt evidence of racism in the United States to portray their own societies as nonracist, racially benign, or “less racist.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“For example, the fact that whites practiced slavery and genocide within the geographic confines of the United States means that US citizens cannot easily pretend that chattel slavery and “race” are irrelevant issues here without completely disregarding basic history and ongoing social issues.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“TURNER: Two hundred and fifty years’ worth of slavery—250 years’ worth of slavery. Almost a hundred years’ worth of Jim Crow in this country, the fact that the systems in this country still treat black folks, in particular, African-American folks as second-class citizens. And part of what the senator doesn’t want to face is also part of the problem. No one has said . . . that all white people are racists. But we do, in this country, have racist institutions. Look there were white folks out there, marching against the neo-Nazis and the KKK. But the fact that we can’t deal with systemic racism in this country, something is wrong with that.23 There’s”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“Once established as an ideological and political system, white supremacy reproduces itself through repertoires of silence, denial, misrepresentation, disinformation, deflection, willful ignorance, justification, and—when all else fails—brute violence and force. This is the case no matter how or when white supremacy is established in a nation’s history. As the racial order takes hold, the population that benefits from its maintenance is generally socialized in ways that ensure the system remains in place. Within white supremacist societies, members of the majority population are socialized to draw upon every discursive and coercive tool at their disposal to maintain dominance without regard to logical coherence, empirical evidence, reason, or morality. Ordinary racists and their extremist counterparts employ liberal, inclusive, and even, at times, “antiracist” ideas in order to obscure the racist intentions and effects of their actions and institutional arrangements. The combination of racist and antiracist ideas is, in fact, one of the most prominent and pernicious methods used to mask or justify continual white dominance and to uphold the “non-racist” pose that has become politically expedient in the wake of World War II and the US civil rights movement.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“systemic racism is reproduced and extended through everyday practices that allow people to live in a racist society but fail to make meaningful connections between their own observations, their nation’s history, and broader patterns of domination.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“through [whites’] indifference, inertia and lack of courage.”21”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“Because institutional racism is a systemic power structure, it functions through collective action and systemic practices. As such, it is “deliberately maintained . . . by the power structure”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“how racism becomes institutionalized in the ideas and routine practices of our social organizations: our families, our laws and policies, our educational system and decisions and structures shaping the representation of race we absorb from the media. From mass incarceration to sentencing laws to racial discrimination in housing and home loans, the invisibility of institutional racism is maintained by the fact that it is literally hard to see.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“racism comprises both individual and institutional components,”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“As for the “why” of white supremacy, that’s easy: Europeans wanted to exploit other human beings for material profit, take shit that didn’t belong to them, and feel good about it in the process. The”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“Certainly the histories of slavery, patriarchy, and class oppression demonstrate that violence and dominance are human problems, not merely “white problems.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“Imagine if you went to the doctor for an annual checkup and your physician sat across from you, looking very somber. Peering over her glasses, she says, “I’m very sorry to break this news to you, but . . . you have an illness.” Alarmed and anxious you ask, “What kind of illness?”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“we’ve all been socialized in ways that obscure the realities of racial domination for the benefit of white male property owners.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“More broadly, critical race theorists such as Mills emphasize the role of European colonialism, genocide, and chattel slavery in producing intertwined ideologies of white superiority and scientific racism in order to retroactively justify the (continued) exploitation of people socially defined as “nonwhite.” And here’s the kicker: Mills has convincingly argued that the maintenance of white supremacy involves and requires “cognitive dysfunctions” and warped representations of the social world that conveniently serve the interests of the majority population.14 These distortions and cognitive errors produce “the ironic outcome that whites [are] in general . . . unable to understand the world they themselves have made.” This brings us back to Mills’s rather esoteric phrase: the epistemology of ignorance. The word “epistemology” refers to the study of knowledge and its formation, so an epistemology of ignorance would involve creating “knowledge” based on . . . a profound lack of knowledge or stupidity. Using fancy academic language, Mills is basically saying that whites’ ideas “about race” are fundamentally based on misrepresentations and distortions of social reality, but their “not knowing,” their ignorance, gets routinely repackaged as credible, authoritative”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“white supremacy is a system of power and domination, one founded on racial oppression and which provides material benefits to people socially defined as “white.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“white supremacy” was not merely about a few racist extremists but rather about a system of domination that stretched into the present day and affected every sphere of society.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“During my office hours, I met talented, brilliant students who lacked access to basic resources, worked multiple jobs, commuted obscene hours, and even struggled with homelessness.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“As I would come to see clearly, dominant discourses of individualism, exceptionalism, and meritocracy work to sustain collective denial about racism and other forms of injustice.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“To take just one example, the 1862 Homestead Act gleefully gave away millions of acres of stolen land almost exclusively to whites.10 And, quiet as it’s kept, white people continue to be the number-one beneficiaries of affirmative action today. Race scholars are aware that white women are the top recipients of affirmative action, but few have considered that white women’s primary access to affirmative action helps maintain the racial wealth gap.11 Because these white women typically marry white men, their affirmative action benefits are channeled toward their white families.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“From using racially justified mass murder, land theft, and labor exploitation to enacting racist citizenship laws, people socially defined as “white” have built generations of wealth and political power by playing the race card and founding an entire nation on white identity politics.”
― Crystal Marie Fleming, How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide