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Anti-bias Teaching in Practice
In conjunction with the links focused on “Understanding Bias,” the sites provided here are offered to support educators in considering what anti-bias teaching might look like in classrooms. Specific examples are provided from schools, classrooms, and communities.

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FROM DR. NICOLE A. COOKE

This project emerged out of the pain and frustration associated with the back-to-back deaths of #GeorgeFloyd #BreonnaTaylor and #AhmaudArbery in 2020.
We must do better as a global society! #BlackLivesMatter

This list is not a panacea. This compilation of resources is JUST A STARTING POINT to encourage people to do their own work and have their own hard conversations.

If you would like to link to this guide with attribution, please use this citation:

Cooke, N. A. (2020, May 30). Anti-Racism Resources for all ages. [A project of the Augusta Baker Endowed Chair at the University of South Carolina]. https://padlet.com/nicolethelibrarian/nbasekqoazt336co

A loose guide to the almost 200 resources listed here.

* Green = materials for youth
* Red = media and other important works
* Other Colors = items of particular interest and/or that I have used in my classrooms.

© 2020 Nicole Cooke

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Created by Dr. Andrew Ibrahim
Becoming Anti-Racist is a journey. Below is a visual that helps captures a lot of what I've learned so far. I share it with hope that it helps your journey too and helps keep you accountable with hard questions you should ask yourself. Whatever we are today, we can all be better. I'm ashamed I did not commit to this sooner. #BlackLivesMatter

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The Mind Of The Village: Understanding Our Implicit Biases

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The Mind Of The Village: Understanding Our Implicit Biases

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NPR's Hidden Brain:

A CONVERSATION ABOUT LIFE'S UNSEEN PATTERNS

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Where do our minds live? A simple, scientific response would be to say our minds live in our brains. But Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji says we should not think of our minds as being solitary.

"The individual mind sits in society. And the connection between mind and society is an extremely important one that should not be forgotten."

Banaji is one of the creators of the Implicit Association Test, a widely-used tool for measuring a person's implicit biases. She says it's important to acknowledge that problems rooted in prejudice cannot be solved by finger pointing.

"One of the difficulties we've had in the past is that we have looked at individual people and blamed individual people. We've said if we can remove these 10 bad police officers from this force, we'll be fine. And we know as social scientists - and I believe firmly - that that is no way to change anything."

This week on the Hidden Brain radio show, we examine research about the mind of the village. We'll begin with a focus on police shootings of unarmed black men. Later in the show, we look at how biases affect judges in the U.S.
Additional Resources:
This episode includes references to research by Mahzarin Banaji, Eric Hehman, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Joshua Correll, and Maya Sen. You'll also hear from Philip Tetlock.

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The Mind Of The Village: Understanding Our Implicit Biases

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Where do our minds live? A simple, scientific response would be to say our minds live in our brains. But Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji says we should not think of our minds as being solitary. "The individual mind sits in society. And the connection between mind and society is an extremely important one that should not be forgotten."

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SOME AMERICANS cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first Black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America - more sophisticated and more insidious than ever.

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RACE. IN YOUR FACE.

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How Can Parents Make Their Kids Understand How To Be Anti-Racist?

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How Can Parents Make Their Kids Understand How To Be Anti-Racist?

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NOEL KING, HOST:

At this point, given what's happening in our country, a lot of parents want to talk to their kids about racism. Some admit they don't know how. For thoughts on where to start, I talked to anti-racism scholar Ibram Kendi and children's author Renee Watson. I started by asking Ibram about a distinction that he often makes. Should parents teach their kids to be not racist or to be anti-racist?

IBRAM KENDI: From my understanding, when parents desire for their kids to be not racist, they typically do not talk to their kids about race. They avoid conversations about race or even explaining the racial inequities and dynamics in their community. As a result, typically, those kids are taught to be racist by society.

And so by contrast, when you're essentially raising a kid to be anti-racist, you're deliberately encouraging them to talk about race and Racism. You're deliberately teaching them that all the racial groups are equals. You're deliberately showing them, yes, there are different colors and there are different cultures. And we should value them all equally.

KING: Renee, Ibram is saying that if parents don't talk openly to their kids about racism, they will go out into the world and society will make them racist. Do you agree with that?

RENEE WATSON: Absolutely. I think that it's important for parents and for educators to be intentional about preparing our young people for the world that they are inheriting and living in. To not talk about it is a disservice to all young people. So not just black students who need to learn about their blackness and their history, but white students as well and nonblack people of color need to know our country's history and talk explicitly about it.

KING: There's research now that shows kids can internalize racial bias between the ages of 2 and 4. How should adults talk to such young children about racism?

KENDI: You can use books as a conversation-starter. What I find with my 4-year-old daughter is when I'm reading her books, she asks questions about those books. And so use tools like books. And then the child will potentially guide the conversation. I also think you can turn on the demonstrations on TV or go to the demonstrations. And I suspect even the 3 year olds will ask, what is going on? Again, it gives you the opportunity to talk about race and racism.

KING: May I ask - 4-year-olds often will ask you to read the same book over and over and over again.

KENDI: (Laughter).

KING: Is there a particular book that you read to your daughter where you think, OK, as I read this to her, I see her young mind getting it?

KENDI: Oh, well, she loved "Hair Love" and I think partly because I have locks. And she just saw me in the book and certainly saw herself.

KING: Renee, how do you talk to the young people in your life?

WATSON: Especially for the little ones, bringing them books that give historical context, like biographies. There's so many picture books that are biographies of black activists, artists, people who paved the way for us to be here. And then, I also think - I want to go back to "Hair Love." I think it's important to bring in books that allow readers to see black people living their everyday lives.

We don't want to teach children that black pain and struggle is the only part of black life. But I also think it's important to just let young people see that black people live lives. And they do their hair. And they play outside. And they have fun and that that is an important part of the conversation, too.

KING: Ibram, when you talk to your daughter about how to talk to other kids - if they hear something racist or something racist is said to them, these are young kids we're dealing with, what should their response be?

KENDI: If it's a black child, if it's a child of color, it's critically important for the parents of black children to, even long before they go and experience another child telling them their hair is ugly, to be constantly sharing with them and telling them that their hair is beautiful because when they receive that type of racist idea from another young child, they may not internalize it. They may not see themselves as the problem. They may see what the child said as the problem.

And then, simultaneously, I always encourage Imani (ph), who is - our daughter's name, to, if something happens to her, for her to have the ability to speak up about it. One thing I want to emphasize, though, is parents, caretakers, you know, anyone who loves young children, are typically teaching them how to be kind - why? - because we recognize that we should raise kind children.

It's the same thing when it comes to being anti-racist. We can teach these concepts before the children can fully understand them just as we teach many different values. And as they grow, they're going to understand it more just as we're growing, hopefully, we're understanding it more.

KING: In this country and around the world, we're seeing a period of immense turmoil and unrest with racial injustice at the center of it. What are you each telling the children in your lives about this particular moment?

WATSON: I've been having conversations about the historical context of it all. This isn't just happening. You know what I mean? We can go back just a few years. And then we can go back and encourage them to learn about activists who fought for our civil rights, who fought for our freedom. People have stood up before and that you've inherited that, too.

It's not just the pain that's been passed down, but it's also the resilience and the wherewithal to fight back and to stand up. So what are you going to do? How are you going to raise your voice? And I particularly talk about poets and artists a lot because I think that that's a way young people, especially, can lend their voices to the cause.

KING: And, Ibram, how about you?

KENDI: When George Floyd's daughter was on television and expressed, of course, how sad she was that he was no longer there and Imani saw that. And so she asked us, you know, about it. And ultimately, where we sort of landed on was me explaining that there was nothing wrong with black people.

If one day she is rejected because of the color of her skin and she doesn't have awareness of racism, who is she going to blame? Herself. And there's nothing worse for a very young child to be struggling with their own sense of self and their own confidence in themselves. And so I actually see this literature and these conversations as protective.

KING: Renee Watson and Ibram Kendi, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.

WATSON: Thank you.

KENDI: You're welcome.

(SOUNDBITE OF KEEM THE CIPHER'S "TRANSCEND.")

Copyright © 2020 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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How Can Parents Make Their Kids Understand How To Be Anti-Racist?

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NOEL KING, HOST: At this point, given what's happening in our country, a lot of parents want to talk to their kids about racism. Some admit they don't know how. For thoughts on where to start, I talked to anti-racism scholar Ibram Kendi and children's author Renee Watson.

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Ibram X. Kendi's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America--but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. Instead of working with the policies and system we have in place, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it.

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How to raise kids to be anti-racist and talk to them about racism

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How to raise kids to be anti-racist and talk to them about racism

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How to raise kids to be anti-racist and talk to them about racism

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From Privilege to Progress

Please amplify author Jason Reynolds in your networks. Did you know that if you’re white, statistics show that your network is more than 91% white? When you amplify the voices of people of color to your friends and followers, you are desegregating the conversation. You should also read his book STAMPED to educate yourself and cleanse your lens. #ShowUp

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Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man

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Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man

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Emmanuel Acho sits down to have an “uncomfortable conversation” with white America, in order to educate and inform on racism, system racism, social injustice, rioting & the hurt African Americans are feeling today.

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The Inaugural Episode - Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man

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Posted by Ibram X. Kendi
What a graphic @jane_mount, what a great stack of antiracist books for anyone starting or already on this journey to understand themselves and their society in order to transform themselves and their society. Thank you, Jane and @marmarfrick for this list! 😘
📚
#antiracism #antiracist #idealbookshelf #soyouwanttotalkaboutrace #howtobeabantiracist #stampedfromthebeginning #meandwhitesupremacy #thisbookisantiracist #stamped #betweentheworldandme #thecoloroflaw #blindspot #thewarmthofothersuns #goodtalk #minorfeelings #imstillhere #thefirenexttime #thenewjimcrow #whitefragility #mindfulofrace #justmercy #whentheycallyouaterrorist #whyimnolongertalkingtowhitepeopleaboutrace

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Jacqueline Woodson's Shares Essential Book for Discussing Racism With Kids

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Jacqueline Woodson's Shares Essential Book for Discussing Racism With Kids

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"It’s up to us to decide whose narrative we will not only choose to see, but choose to believe."

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These Children’s Books About Race Can Help Start Essential Conversations With Your Kids

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These reads selected by author Jacqueline Woodson will help us “decide whose narrative we will not only choose to see, but choose to believe.”

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The difference between Being "not racist" and anti-racist

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The difference between Being "not racist" and anti-racist

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There is no such thing as being "not racist," says author and historian Ibram X. Kendi. In this vital conversation, he defines the transformative concept of antiracism to help us more clearly recognize, take responsibility for and reject prejudices in our public policies, workplaces and personal beliefs. Learn how you can actively use this awareness to uproot injustice and inequality in the world -- and replace it with love.

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Ibram X. Kendi: The difference between being "not racist" and antiracist

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There is no such thing as being "not racist," says author and historian Ibram X. Kendi. In this vital conversation, he defines the transformative concept of antiracism to help us more clearly recognize, take responsibility for and reject prejudices in our public policies, workplaces and personal beliefs.

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The Beatley Library Anti-Oppression Guide!

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The Beatley Library Anti-Oppression Guide!

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This guide is intended to provide some general information about anti-oppression, diversity, and inclusion as well as information and resources for the social justice issues key to the Simmons University community.

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is the range of human differences, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual identity & orientation, age, socioeconomic class, physical ability or attributes, neurodivergence or neurological condition, religious or ethical values system, and national origin. (adapted from Ferris State University)

is defined as "the state, quality or ideal of being just, impartial, and fair." The concept of equity is closely tied to fairness and justice, and all three are context-specific to the historical, systemic barriers, disadvantages, and power disparities present in any given situation. It is helpful to think of equity as not simply a desired state of affairs or a "finish line," but instead as a continuous structural concept-a lens and mindset (proactively reinforced by policies, practices, attitudes, and actions) through which power and ownership are redistributed and inequity is challenged and addressed. (adapted from Race Equity and Inclusion Action Guide)

is involvement and empowerment, where the inherent worth and dignity of all people are recognized. An inclusive community promotes and sustains a sense of belonging; it values, celebrates, and recognizes the enriching benefits of diversity and practices respect for the talents, beliefs, identities, and lived experiences of its members. (adapted from Ferris State University)

is the systematic fair treatment of all people along all axes of identity and of any social position. In practice, it is the proactive operationalization of policies, practices, attitudes, and actions resulting in equitable access, opportunities, treatment, empowerment, and outcomes for all. (adapted from Center for the Study of Social Policy)

". Diversity & Inclusion have to do with the acknowledgment, valuing, celebration, and empowerment of difference, whereas Diversity & Inclusion" is a very frequently heard phrase. Though they go hand in hand, diversity & inclusion is notthe same as anti-oppression ference. Diversity & Inclusion and Anti-Oppression are all necessary in order to work toward Equity and Justice. Anti-Oppression challenges the systems and systemic biases that devalue and marginalize dif

Note: Definitions for diversity are...well...diverse. Context and environment play a big part in what we mean when we say "diversity," and as social justice movements have gained media spotlight, the term has unfortunately become somewhat hollowed out from being overused and under-defined from situation to situation. The definitions above do notcapture the many, many cultural and political nuances embedded in these terms, rather they are intended to provide a broad scaffolding for understanding and engaging with the dialogues in and outside Simmons a nd on which more specific iterations of these concepts as they apply to particular communities can be structured.

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Reading Is Only a Step on the Path to Anti-Racism

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Reading Is Only a Step on the Path to Anti-Racism

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Publishers' Weekly Column written by Nicole Cooke

Anti-racism is a long game. Instead of just reading, I want to challenge you to go the distance. I want you to do the real work of becoming anti-racist.

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Here’s How We Can Make A Deeper Change To Stop Systemic Racism

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Here’s How We Can Make A Deeper Change To Stop Systemic Racism

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Author of “I’m Still Here: Black Dignity In A World Made For Whiteness,” Austin Channing Brown and co-host of the web series “The Next Question,” Jenny Booth Potter explain the ways in which white people can be effective in making change during this time.

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Here’s How We Can Make A Deeper Change To Stop Systemic Racism

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An Anti-Racist Graphic Novel Reading List

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An Anti-Racist Graphic Novel Reading List

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In tribute to the memory of George Floyd, who died at the hands of the Minneapolis police, and in support of the worldwide outcry over his death, PW 's comics editors have compiled a list of graphic titles about African American life and history. The titles listed here are primarily nonfiction graphic works that address topics including the Civil Rights Movement, hip-hop, gentrification, white supremacy, the criminal justice system, police brutality, and the lives of black women. In addition the list also offers several works of fiction that offer insights into similar topics via their settings and skillful characterizations. We welcome suggestions for other titles to add to our list.

A Black Woman Did That by Malaika Adero and Chanté Timothy (Downtown Bookworks)
A lively compilation of illustrated biographical profiles of 42 dynamic black women whose accomplishments have transformed the world, including such figures as Michelle Obama, Ida B. Wells, Serena Williams, Ava DuVernay, and Stacey Adams. For young readers.

Bingo Love by Tee Franklin and Jenn St-Onge (Image).
Hazel and Mari, two black teen girls, meet at a bingo hall in 1963 and fall in love but must hide their feelings and go separate ways, only to accidentally reunite decades later-after marriage and raising children-in a lovingly rendered fictional tale about second chance queer love.

Black History in Its Own Words by Ronald Wimberly (Image)

A collection of inspirational quotations from black leaders and artists throughout American history accompanied by Wimberly's evocative drawings.

Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence byGeoffrey Canada with art by Jamar Nicholas (Beacon)

This vivid graphic adaptation of Canada's acclaimed memoir marks his emotional evolution as he moves through escalating levels of neighborhood violence while growing up poor in the Bronx.

Ghetto Brother: Warrior to Peacemaker by Julian Voloj with art by Claudia Ahlering (NBM)

The true story of Bronx legend Benjy Melendez, son of Puerto-Rican immigrants, who founded the notorious Ghetto Brothers gang in the 1960s before establishing peace between the warring gangs in the 1970s in what was a prelude to the Hip-hop era.

Hip Hop Family Tree by Ed Piskor (Fantagraphics)

This massive 4-volume graphic history of Hip-hop beginning in the 1970s in the Bronx covers four decades of musical, visual, and literary innovation that has transformed music and youth culture around the world.

Hot Comb by Ebony Flowers (Drawn & Quarterly)

Flowers offers a series of poignant and insightful graphic stories that explore the lives of black women, the cultural complexities around their hair, and issues of race and class in the U.S. and in Africa.

Kindred byOctavia Butler, adapted by Damian Duffy and John Jennings (Abrams ComicArts)

Recreated graphically, Butler's acclaimed 1979 novel tells the story of an -African American woman from the 1970s who travels back in time to slavery and meets an unlikely ancestor.

Nat Turner by Kyle Baker (Abrams)

Baker's powerful graphic work depicts the life and times of the self-educated African American preacher who led a slave revolt in Southampton County, Va., in 1831, believing that God wanted him to free the slaves.

Sentences: The Life of MF Grimm by Percy Carey and art by Ron Wimberly (Vertigo)

The true story of the life of legendary Hip Hop MC Percy "MF Grimm" from his time as child actor on Sesame Street, then as a drug dealer who uses a wheelchair after a murder attempt, and his eventual rise to become an underground rap star.

Showtime at the Apollo: The Epic Tale of Harlem's Legendary Theater by Ted Fox and James Otis Smith (Abrams ComicArts)

Fox's history of the famous venue surveys the personalities and social issues that have impacted the theater and the Harlem neighborhood that surrounds it, over the course of 85 years.

Six Days in Cincinnati: A Graphic Account of the Riots That Shook the Nation a Decade Before Black Lives Matter by Dan Mendez Moore (Microcosm)

An account of an uprising that engulfed Cincinnati in 2001 after 19-year-old Timothy Thomas was killed by the police, as told from the viewpoint of a participant in the civil disobedience.

Strange Fruit: Uncelebrated Narratives from Black History by Joel Christian Gill (Fulcrum). The lives of little known figures in black American history such as Box Brown and Bass Reeves are featured in biographical stories that bring them back to life.

Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse (First Second).
A pioneering queer/civil rights graphic novel based in-part on Cruse's life, it is the story of a young gay white man growing up in the Jim Crow south and his complex relationships with queer and straight members of the African American community in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement.

Yummy: the last days of a Southside Shorty by G. Neri and Randy Duburke (Lee and Low)
A YA graphic novel based on the life and death of Robert "Yummy" Sandifer, an 11-year-old gang member from Chicago's Southside who was killed by members of his own gang.

March Trilogy by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell (TopShelf)

The three volumes covering the life of Rep. John Lewis offer a gripping and panoramic narrative of the Civil Rights Movement across the arc of Lewis' heroic social activism and public service.

King: A Comics Biography by Ho Che Anderson (Fantagraphics)

The final deluxe hardcover compilation edition of a pioneering and critically acclaimed graphic biography of Martin Luther King Jr. has been praised for its expansive and creative depiction of King's life.

Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story by Fellowship of Reconciliation, Alfred Hassler, Benton Resnick (Fellowship of Reconciliation)

The landmark 16-page 1957 comic book account of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Rosa Parks details the tenets of the philosophy of nonviolence as well as the tactics used to battle Jim Crow segregation on city buses.

Big Black: Stand at Attica by Frank "Big Black" Smith and Jared Reinmuth, art by Améziane. (Archaia)

A graphic memoir by the late Frank "Big Black" Smith, a former Attica prison inmate later turned prisoner-rights advocate, who was an inmate leader during the four-day 1971 Attica prison uprising, a landmark event in the history of mass incarceration.

Race to Incarcerate by Marc Mauer with art by Sabrina Jones (New Press)

Maurer and Jones adapt Maurer's landmark examination of four decades of the explosive and socially corrosive expansion of the American prison population into a graphic work.

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix edited by Lois Ahrens (PM Press)

This anthology of comics looks at the economics, racial disparity, and racist social impact around financing and building prisons.

Race and Social Justice

Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet by Ta-Nehesi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze (Marvel)

The classic Marvel black superhero, the Black Panther T'Challa, King of the Afrofuturist African domain of Wakanda, has been reimagined for a new generation by National Book Award -winner Coates.

BTTM FDRS byEzra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore (Fantagraphics)

An irresistible combination of satire and horror in a quirky graphic exploration of urban gentrification, racial tropes, and class among the young and insufferably hip in a former working class Chicago neighborhood.

I Am Alfonso Jones by Tony Media with art by Stacey Robinson and John Jennings (Lee and Low)

This complex and inspirational graphic novel is aimed at young adults and memorializes a number of victims of police violence (among them Eleanor Bumpurs, Amadou Diallo, and writer Henry Dumas), while also probing the issues surrounding police brutality and Black Lives Matter.

Your Black Friend and Other Strangers by Ben Passmore (Silver Sprocket).

These thoughtful and dazzlingly illustrated short stories and graphic essays focus on contemporary responses to race, prisons, police brutality, gentrification, radical politics, and more.

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An Anti-Racist Graphic Novel Reading List

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In tribute to the memory of George Floyd, who died at the hands of the Minneapolis police, and in support of the worldwide outcry over his death, the 'PW' comics editors have compiled a list of graphic titles about African American life and history.

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Jane Elliott's "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" Anti-Racism Exercise 

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Jane Elliott's "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" Anti-Racism Exercise 

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The Oprah Winfrey Show,1992

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Jane Elliott's "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" Anti-Racism Exercise | The Oprah Winfrey Show | OWN

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Essential Listening: Podcasts on Race and Racism

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Essential Listening: Podcasts on Race and Racism

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Looking to educate yourself on racial injustice? Start with these recommended audio roundups.

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158 RESOURCES TO UNDERSTAND RACISM IN AMERICA

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158 RESOURCES TO UNDERSTAND RACISM IN AMERICA

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These articles, videos, podcasts and websites from the Smithsonian chronicle the history of anti-black violence and inequality in the United States.

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158 Resources for Understanding Systemic Racism in America

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These articles, videos, podcasts and websites from the Smithsonian chronicle the history of anti-black violence and inequality in the United States

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The E Pluribus Unum Fund will bring people together across the American South around the issues of race, equity, economic opportunity and violence, proving the American motto that "out of many, one," and we are better for it.

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"E Pluribus Unum" is Latin, meaning "out of many, one." A long-held motto for the United States, the phrase was first included in a sketch for a national seal in 1776. Since 1782, it's been included in the official Great Seal of the United States, which is affixed on formal State Department documents.

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'There Is No Neutral': 'Nice White People' Can Still Be Complicit In A Racist Society

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'There Is No Neutral': 'Nice White People' Can Still Be Complicit In A Racist Society

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For white people who have just recently recognized their own complicity in America's racist systems and are looking to "fix" that - it's not going to happen overnight.

"It's a little bit like saying 'I want to be in shape tomorrow' ..." says author Robin DiAngelo. "This is going to be a process."

DiAngelo is the author of White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. The book came out in 2018 and is back on the bestseller lists as streets fill with protesters calling for an end to police violence against black people.

The status quo in the United States is racism, DiAngelo says, and "it is comfortable for me, as a white person, to live in a racist society."

To sustain the momentum of these protests, DiAngelo says, it must become uncomfortable for white people to continue to benefit from racist systems.

"We've got to start making it uncomfortable and figuring out what supports we're going to put in place to help us continue to be uncomfortable," she says. "Because the forces of comfort are quite seductive."

Interview Highlights
On encouraging white people to reflect on how race has shaped their lives
This [work] will be lifelong: really thinking deeply about what it means to be white, how your race shapes your life. We live in a society that turns race over to people of color. They have a race. We're just people. And so we see ourselves as outside of race. And that's problematic for many reasons. But there's so much potentially rich insight that we can gain from deeply reflecting on our own racial experiences.
On how white people can be complicit in racist systems without recognizing their own racism

Nice, white people who really aren't doing anything other than being nice people are racist. We are complicit with that system. There is no neutral place.

Racism is what happens when you back one group's racial bias with legal authority and institutional control. ... When you back one group's collective bias with that kind of power, it is transformed into a far-reaching system. It becomes the default. It's automatic. It's not dependent on your agreement or belief or approval. It's circulating 24/7, 365.

Racism is the foundation of the society we are in. And to simply carry on with absolutely no active interruption of that system is to be complicit with it. And in that way, we can say that nice, white people who really aren't doing anything other than being nice people are racist. We are complicit with that system. There is no neutral place.
On challenging definitions
We've been taught to think about a racist as someone who consciously and intentionally seeks to hurt people based on race. And if that's what you think it means to be racist, then of course it's offensive that I would say you were racist. That's not what I mean by that. ... All of the racism I've perpetrated in my life was neither conscious nor intentional, but harmful to other people nonetheless.
On suggesting that white people ask how - rather than if - they have been shaped by race and racism
When you change your understanding of what it means to be racist, you will no longer be defensive. ... Who among your listeners right now would ever say they're consciously, intentionally mean across race? I think that definition [of racism as individual, conscious, malintent across race] is the root of most of the defensiveness.

When you change your definition, it's actually liberating. ... It's transformative. You know, you can stop defending, deflecting, denying, explaining away, giving all the evidence for why you are different and couldn't possibly have been impacted by the society you live in.

And you can start getting to work actually trying to identify: All right. It was inevitable that I was socialized into this system. It's inevitable that I will have blind spots. ... And so I'm going to focus my energy on how I've been shaped by the system, but not if.

We have to change our question. If our question is if I've been shaped, the answer will be an easy no. And then what further action is required of us? Nothing.

When the answer is how, well, that sets you on a lifelong process.
On specific steps white people can take
I would start with some very deep reflection on what it means to be white: How your own race shapes your life. ... Our voices, our part in this has been missing for all too long.

But again, we're never going to understand this if we don't listen to black, Indigenous and other peoples of color. So start reading what they're writing, listening to their videos, attending their talks and educating yourself.

There are two really excellent resources. ... One is Dr. Eddie Moore's 21-Day Racial Equity [Habit] Building Challenge - it'll walk you through a daily practice. And Layla Saad's Me and White Supremacy Workbook. That's a book you do rather than read. That will start us on what is a process - not a moment or an instant.
On asking white people to have humility
I've never met a white person who didn't have an opinion on racism. ... That doesn't make it informed. It's so complicated and nuanced and layered. ... So be willing to consider that maybe your opinions are not as informed as you think they are. ...

Most white people live segregated lives. Most of us don't really even know black people. Most of us go cradle to grave with few, if any, authentic, sustained cross-racial relationships and no real sense of loss about that. And yet, we have these opinions that we feel are equal to people who have, you know, studied and struggled and worked on these issues for decades. And so it's a little bit like saying, well, I've been to the Epcot Center, therefore I'm qualified to wade in on a debate with Neil deGrasse Tyson on whether Pluto is a planet.
On the two questions she hears most frequently
There are two top questions I get when I give a talk ... The first one is: What do I do? And when I get that question, I offer one back: ... How have you managed not to know? How have you managed to be a full-functioning, likely educated adult in 2020 and not know the answer to that question? And that's meant to challenge that person that, that's on you. The information's everywhere. Why haven't you sought it out up until this moment? What did it take to get you to ask that question?

So that's meant to be a challenge, but it's also a sincere question. Take out a piece of paper and jot down your answer to why you don't know what to do, or how to get started. And there will be your map. Everything you write on that piece of paper can be addressed. None of it will be quick or easy. But begin with that list.

The second top question that I get is: How do I tell or talk to other white people about racism? ... You notice that that question assumes that it's not us. We're good to go. We're down now. Let's go out and change the world.

It is us. We can never take ourselves out of that equation. And I think actually, the more we work on our own conditioning, the more effective we will be at helping others see theirs.
On maintaining momentum
We've seen these moments before. We thought we were post-racial after the civil rights movement. We thought we were post-racial after Obama's presidency. We are so not post-racial and we have never been. I do see these protests being sustained and different kinds of demands coming out of them. That is hopeful.

But the key is: What will happen when those cameras go away and when it's no longer - for lack of a better word, for white people, anyway - "exciting" or "righteous" to go down and protest? In some ways, that's the easier kinds of actions. What are we going to do to sustain it when we no longer have that kind of pressure, when we're back into our racial comfort zone?
Mallory Yu and Sarah Handel produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Beth Novey adapted it for the web.

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'There Is No Neutral': 'Nice White People' Can Still Be Complicit In A Racist Society

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For white people who have just recently recognized their own complicity in America's racist systems and are looking to "fix" that - it's not going to happen overnight. "It's a little bit like saying 'I want to be in shape tomorrow' ..." says author Robin DiAngelo. "This is going to be a process."

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What to read, listen to and watch to learn about institutional racism

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What to read, listen to and watch to learn about institutional racism

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As protesters take to the streets to speak out against police brutality and systemic racism long endured by black people in the United States, during a pandemic that disproportionately affects communities of color, the myriad consequences of institutional racism is a matter of national conversation and reflection.

In this moment, many non-black people are seeking to educate themselves about the experiences of black Americans and what actions everyone - but specifically, white Americans - can take to dismantle their own racial biases, as well as the larger discriminatory social, political and economic power structures that shape the nation.

Books, podcasts, films, articles and other resources can serve as a starting point for people who wish to become better allies in the fight for racial justice and equality by engaging with the work of black writers and scholars, learning about intersectional forms of oppression in the U.S. and actively educating their friends and family on these topics. Talking with some of the voices featured on the PBS NewsHour, as well as sharing some of our own recommendations, we've compiled a list of things for you to read, listen to and watch that might illuminate your understanding. This list is just a starting point.

Books

"White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide" by Carol Anderson

"Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon To White America" by Michael Eric Dyson

"How To Be Anti-Racist" by Ibram Kendi

"White Fragility: Why It's So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism" by Robin DiAngelo

"Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes What We See, Think, and Do" by Jennifer L. Eberhardt

"So You Want to Talk About Race" by Ijeoma Oluo

"The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap" by Mehrsa Baradaran

"The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism" by Edward Baptist

"The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story Of America's Great Migration" by Isabel Wilkerson

"Me And White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor" by Layla F. Saad

"White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America" by Margaret A. Hagerman

"The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin

"Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility" by Dorceta Taylor

"Playing In The Dark: Whiteness And The Literary Imagination" By Toni Morrison

"No, You Shut Up: Speaking Truth to Power and Reclaiming America" by Symone D. Sanders

"Say It Louder! Black Voters, White Narratives, and Saving Our Democracy" by Tiffany Cross

"Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People" by Ben Crump

"Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements" by Charlene A. Carruthers

"To The Mountaintop: My Journey Through the Civil Rights Movement" by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

"The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr." by Peniel E. Joseph

"We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy" by Ta-Nehisi Coates

"Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008" by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

"Stony The Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, And The Rise Of Jim Crow" by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

"Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity" by C. Riley Snorton

"The Mis-Education of the Negro" by Carter G. Woodson

"Come Hell Or High Water: Hurricane Katrina And The Color Of Disaster" by Michael Eric Dyson

"When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir" by Patrisse Cullors and ashe bandele

"Vernon Can Read!: A Memoir" by Vernon E. Jordan, Jr.

"Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement" By John Lewis and Michael D'Orso

"My Vanishing Country: A Memoir" by Bakari Sellers

"In My Place" by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

"How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir" by Saeed Jones

"Angela Davis: An Autobiography" by Angela Davis

"Black Indian: A Memoir" by Shonda Buchanan

"The Hate U Give" by Angie Thomas

"Parable of the Sower" by Octavia Butler

"Homegoing" by Yaa Gyasi

"Mama's Girl" by Veronica Chambers

"With the Fire on High" by Elizabeth Acevedo

READ MORE: Go beyond Toni Morrison with these 7 books that stare down the white gaze
Podcasts and films

Broken Justice is a PBS NewsHour original podcast series that looks at the impact that overworked and underfunded public defenders have on the American criminal justice system. It tells the story of Ricky Kidd, who was sentenced to life without parole for a double homicide he says he didn't commit and argues his court-appointed lawyer is the reason for that conviction.

Code Switch is an NPR podcast created by "a multi-racial, multi-generational team of journalists" that covers "overlapping themes of race, ethnicity and culture, how they play out in our lives and communities, and how all of this is shifting."

1619 is a podcast series from New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah Jones that connects "past and present" by examining "the long shadow of American slavery."

Say It Loud is "a PBS Digital Studios series that celebrates Black culture, context, and history."

" 13th," available both on Netflix and YouTube, is a documentary from director Ava DuVernay that looks at the U.S. prison system and "how the country's history of racial inequality drives the high rate of incarceration in America."

More to read
Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Candice Norwood, Bakari Sellers and Tonya Alston contributed recommendations to this list.
READ MORE
13-year-old founder of #1000blackgirlbooks shares some of her favorite reads 10 books besides 'To Kill a Mockingbird' that tackle racial injustice 10 children's books that feature diverse characters

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What to read, listen to and watch to learn about institutional racism

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As protesters take to the streets to speak out against police brutality and systemic racism long endured by black people in the United States, during a pandemic that disproportionately affects communities of color, the myriad consequences of institutional racism is a matter of national conversation and reflection.

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Showing up for Racial Justice

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Showing up for Racial Justice

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A home for white people working for justice - SURJ

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A home for white people working for justice Join SURJ Support When we fight racism, we all win.We want you on our team. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25F8qz8hKBg Find a Chapter Get Updates Learn More Current Campaigns Monthly Racial Justice Action Hours Ready to get off the sidelines and into action to support campaigns to close detention centers and ...

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Commitment To Combat Racism — Jane Elliott

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Jane Elliott, internationally known teacher, lecturer, diversity trainer, and recipient of the National Mental Health Association Award for Excellence in Education, exposes prejudice and bigotry for what it is, an irrational class system based upon purely arbitrary factors. And if you think this…

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They Can't Kill Us All: The Story of the Struggle for Black Lives

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They Can't Kill Us All: The Story of the Struggle for Black Lives

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Conducting hundreds of interviews during the course of over one year reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore, Maryland; and then back to Ferguson to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today.

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The Anti-Racist Starter Pack: 40 TV Series, Documentaries, Movies, TED Talks, and Books to Add to Your List

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The Anti-Racist Starter Pack: 40 TV Series, Documentaries, Movies, TED Talks, and Books to Add to Your List

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Parade: Entertainment, Recipes, Health, Life, Holidays

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So you want to be an ally but don't know where to start? First of all, thank you and welcome. This is an ever growing community of people who refuse to accept Black death and institutionalized racism as the norm. This community takes measurable steps, is intentional about their day-to-day interactions, and is committed to self- education. Where to begin? Look no further than the below starter pack of TV shows, documentaries, films, TED talks, and books that can ground your activism and ensure you're offering this movement more than lip service. Grab an accountability partner (or start a group!) as a way of debriefing what you learn and ensuring you stick with it.

There's no better day than today! Here's your anti-racist starter pack.

TV Series

1. Ava DuVernay's When They See Us stopped the world when she told the stories of the (now) Exonerated Five. This is a cautionary tale for some on the dangers of making the narrative match a racist agenda and insight into the fear of Black families across the country, and world.

2. OWN's Queen Sugar: Queen Sugar shares the beauty and complexity in family, legacy, and justice through the warmth of a Black family. Over the course of the seasons, we become even more exposed to Black rural advocacy and the power in land ownership.

3. FX's (available on Netflix): The Black LGBTQ+ community is no stranger to over-policing and brutal violence and Pose gives us a front row seat to the resilience and ingenuity of Ballroom culture and the fight for autonomy and safety.

4. Netflix's Seven Seconds: Before the hashtags and media, what is it like for a Black family learning they've lost a loved one and for a police officer realizing he took a life. How do these stories intertwine and what insight can we glean about repairing harm?

5. Dear White People (available on Netflix):Dear White People has drawn controversy from many who have been afraid to push past the title, but it's great insight to the inner workings of Black student activists and their campus experiences.

Related: 40 Ways White Women Can Help Fight Racism
Documentaries

Netflix's 13th by Ava DuVernay: Many cite The New Jim Crow (book by Michelle Alexander) as what woke them up to the extreme injustice in our criminal justice system and arguably 13th would be the documentary version of that, exposing how deep-rooted institutionalized racism is.
Related: Self-Care for Black Women Activists Right Now

1. The Children's March: Youth-led activism has been on the rise since the fearless survivors of Parkland sparked a 21st century gun violence movement. To understand the shoulders on which we stand, learn about the children of Alabama that brought a racist police chief and segregation to its knees.

2. The Kalief Browder Story (available on Netflix): For many of us, protesting is a right we take for granted. For those in the belly of our criminal justice system, advocating for yourself can be deadly. We must honor Kalief's sacrifice by knowing his story and ending cash bail.

3. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975: The Black Liberation movement of the late 20th century is riddled with stereotypes and propaganda causing many to believe that the movement died following the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. This documentary sets the record straight from the source with powerful interviews and recollections.

4. LA92 (available on Netflix): It's important that we never lose sight of the legacy of police violence. To understand the righteous anger of the Black community, learn more about the LA riots following the Rodney King trial.

Related: Beyoncé, LeBron James, Viola Davis, Taylor Swift and More Celebs Demand Justice for George Floyd
Movies and Short Films

1. Fruitvale Station (directed by Ryan Coogler): When advocating around police brutality, we often lose touch with the humanity of those we fight for. In this masterful film, we see a glimpse of what is stolen from us each time police use excessive force.

2. Higher Learning (directed by John Singleton): Since 2016, many have become hyper-aware of the deep rifts that exist in American society and others have always known that we have very different experiences of this country. Higher Learning will surprise you in how relevant it is to today and showing some of the hurdles to achieving a "post-racial" society.

3. Do The Right Thing (directed by Spike Lee): Eric Garner and George Floyd have both drawn connections to a fiction character who preceded them both: Radio Raheem of Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing. The film masterfully highlights where unrest stems from and what leads to the rage felt in uprisings and rebellions.

4. If Beale Street Could Talk (directed by Barry Jenkins): Activism can be very glorified by those privileged to be advocating from the abstract. This film-part love story, part drama-gives us a look into what is truly at stake for those facing wrongful incarceration head on.

5. I Am Not Your Negro (directed by Raoul Peck): James Baldwin has provided novels, personal essays, and prose to last many lifetimes! The film adaptation explores the extended history of racism through Baldwin's recollections and personal observations.

Related: 18 New Artists, Songs and Albums to Add to Your Playlists in Honor of Black Music Month

TED Talks

1. Bryan Stevenson's We Need To Talk About An Injustice:Bryan Stevenson is one of the leading racial justice advocates, working with people incarcerated on death row. If anyone can diagnose recent injustices and understand the steps forward it would be him.

2. Kimberle Crenshaw on The Urgency of Intersectionality: Following 2016, 'intersectionality' became quite the buzzword, yet gets used out of context often by both the Right and Left alike. Hear from the black woman who coined the term in the '80s as to how we use intersectionality to defend Black women.

3. Baratunde Thurston on How To Deconstruct Racism, One Headline At A Time: Racism isn't funny, but in this TED talk you'll learn about the pervasive nature of racism and laugh out loud way more times than you'll be able to count.

4. T. Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison on The Trauma of Systemic Racism is Killing Black Women:Racism is traumatic. Oftentimes we are focused so much on legislative changes and urgent calls to action, that we neglect the emotional well being of Black people everywhere facing PTSD from this cyclical violence. Dive more into self-care as radical preservation with this joint TED talk.

5. Verna Meyers on How To Overcome Our Biases? Walk Towards Them: #AllLivesMatter is the new color blind and both terms are proof that people fear being accused of biases more than they feel committed to addressing them. Let's lose the shame and take bold steps deeper into your allyship.

6. Heather McGhee's Racism Has A Cost for Everyone:My liberation is bound in yours. This is not a feel good statement but a reality when it comes to how racism impacts policy, budgets, and prevents us from achieving a society that works for us all

7. The Human Stories Beyond Mass Incarceration:We can never lose sight of the people behind the statistics and in this powerful TED talk, you'll be reminded of why we fight this fight.

8. Marlon Peterson's : Marlon Peterson is formerly incarcerated and one of the leading national experts on alternatives to incarceration. Learn about why we desperately need more empathy when it comes to addressing harm.

9. Emma Harrison's From Reform to Abolition: The Future of the U.S. Prison System: More than ever before, people are Googling abolition and exploring what a society without prisons looks like. Have questions about why we can't reform these systems or what this looks like in reality? Listen up!

10. Rayna Gordon's Don't Be A Savior, Be An Ally:Sometimes with the best intentions we still fall short. Hear from Rayna about thoughtful allyship that seeks to uplift and support not take over or "save."

Related: 25 Anti-Racist Instagram Accounts to Follow for Listening, Learning and Action-Taking
Books

1. by Bryan Stevenson: You've likely heard the story of someone who served decades in prison for a crime they didn't commit. How does that happen and how do we ensure people don't disappear behind the bars and into bureaucratic systems that value process more than justice?

2. Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward: America often equates Black to mean urban America when more of us live in "middle America" and the deep South than anywhere else. Ward is a literary artist who spins the stories of Black men in Mississippi with so much love and a deep desire to protect those she loves.

3. Free Cyntoia by Cyntoia Brown-Long: Everyone from Rihanna to Kim Kardashian was tweeting about Cyntoia Brown-Long, the young woman incarcerated for defending herself against her abuser and a sexual predator. Cyntoia's story is one that many women share-and this book sheds light on how systems set up to protect us, fail us time and time again.

4. by Trevor Noah: Noah's book reads like an episode of his late night show which is to say it's informative, compelling, and well researched. This is a must read for those looking to understand race and class.

5. Unafraid of the Darkby Rosemary L Bray: Racism feels like this big scary monster which can make some of us feel like we don't know where to begin in dismantling it and others feel it's not relevant to them at all. Bray sets the record straight with these vignettes and anecdotes about what racism looks like in practice but also how police interventions can work to alleviate the pressures.

6. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective by Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor: "Listen to Black women!" Want to learn what Black women from movements past have to say about justice and freedom? Look no further than this foundational manifesto.

7. Children of Blood and Bones by Tomi Adeyemi: Science fiction is a powerful tool for exploring problems from the distance we normally aren't afforded with day-to-day life. This first part of the electric new trilogy explores issues of fear, revenge, and what it takes to build a new future.

8. When They Call You A Terrorist by Patrisse Khan Cullors: Cullors co-founded Black Lives Matter over five years ago alongside two other Black women organizers. Years later, she reflected on her own journey to that moment and what it means to be labeled a terrorist by the government that has sought to erase you and those you love.

9. Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice by Paul Butler: This Harvard Law grad turned prosecutor went from high-powered attorney to wrongfully accused Black man in one day. What that experience taught him is cemented through this book and will tell you all you need to know about this rigged system.

10. Pushout by Monique Morris: Black girls and women are often left out of the conversation when it comes to criminal justice reform but Morris reiterates exactly how Black girls are oversexualized, more likely to be described as aggressive, and more frequently suspended or expelled, leading to this school-to-prison pipeline we hear so much about.

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The Anti-Racist Starter Pack: 40 TV Series, Documentaries, Movies, TED Talks, and Books to Add to Your List

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So you want to be an ally but don't know where to start? First of all, thank you and welcome. This is an ever growing community of people who refuse to accept Black death and institutionalized racism as the norm. This community takes measurable steps, is intentional about their day-to-day interactions, and is committed to self- education.

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As much as any film out there today, 'I Am Not Your Negro' helps us face our racial divide and possibly begin to change it as well.”– Kenneth Turan, LA Times.

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Search for showtimes and purchase tickets for I Am Not Your Negro. See the release date and trailer. The Official Showtimes Destination brought to you by Magnolia Pictures

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I Am Not Your Negro: Theater Showtimes & Ticket Purchasing - The Official Showtimes Destination

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Search for showtimes and purchase tickets for I Am Not Your Negro. See the release date and trailer. The Official Showtimes Destination brought to you by Magnolia Pictures

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10 Documentaries To Watch About Race Instead Of Asking A Person Of Colour To Explain Things For You

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10 Documentaries To Watch About Race Instead Of Asking A Person Of Colour To Explain Things For You

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Take some time to watch some (or all) of these important documentaries about race, racial prejudices and privilege within our society.

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10 Documentaries To Watch About Race Instead Of Asking A Person Of Colour To Explain Things For You

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It's important now more than ever that Australians engage in important conversations about race.

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A Call to Action for White Educators Who Seek to Be Anti-Racist

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A Call to Action for White Educators Who Seek to Be Anti-Racist

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PBS Teachers' Lounge

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I am a white mother and educator. For decades in school I have taught "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Unfortunately, for many of my students, the suffering often seems abstract and they falsely believe these are stories from a distant past. But, racism didn't end with the Civil Rights Movement. It is an ever present, persistent evil that impacts us all in every aspect of our daily lives. Wishing and hoping that systemic racism will just go away--or believing that it doesn't exist in our own communities--is its own form of violence. And recently I have been asking myself if I've made this point clearly enough in my teaching practice.

It should not have taken the recent brutal murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade, at the hands of police, to spark our consciousness. But it has, and this is now the time for me, and for other white parents and educators like me, to sit up, take notice, listen to Black communities, talk to our children and demonstrate anti-racist actions. This is not a time to be dismissive, but instead it's time for us to reach out, support in every way possible and take meaningful action. I am taking action to build a better future for my children and the children in my care. As a parent and educator I can help dismantle systemic racism. As I continue my own journey of learning about, and committing to, anti-racist action, here's what I believe we can do as educators to support meaningful change.

Our words must match our actions
Frankly, what we have done in the past has not worked. If our society had dismantled systemic racism, then we would not be seeing the necessary unrest that we see today. Our rhetoric needs to match our actions. As I think about what I do as an educator and as a parent, I am not 100 percent confident that my rhetoric and actions have always matched. But when I know better, I do better. I have friends, writers and public figures whose words I listen to, whose words I reflect on, and whose words I take to heart in order to support the change that needs to happen in our society. But it's not enough to read and reflect on those words, I must put those ideas into action.

We must broaden representation in classroom reading
When I reflect on my teaching practice and consider the words that I teach - the novels I use in my classroom, the authors whose works I use on a regular basis--it is clear that I have not had enough Black, Indigenous, or People of Color representation in my curriculum. On reflection, I have not ensured that every student who sits in a seat in my classroom has felt that their experiences were reflected in what we read. As a high school English teacher, I know that the white savior trope dominates our canon of American literature. I need to do a better job of including more writers who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. People like Maya Angelou and Zora Neale Hurston, people like Amy Tan and Ta-Nehisi Coates, people like Jason Reynolds and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, people like Sandra Cisneros and Junot Díaz, people like Celeste Ng and Ted Chiang, Langston Hughes and Cleo Wade, Sherman Alexie and Leslie Marmon Silko.

We must embrace tough conversations
First, we must be better listeners. It is time to de-center myself, my stories and my experience, especially when talking about race and racial justice. This is not about me; it's about my friends, colleagues, and community. We must be disciplined and listen to the stories and experiences of others. Listening means not interjecting my point of view or saying anything that might invalidate the experience of others. I listen to People of Color on the news, I read their words in books and on social media. I listen with the intention of hearing what they have to say so I can create a connection and an understanding. I listen to the conversations students have when they are in my classroom and I find teachable moments when the conversation needs to change. I do not pretend I don't hear it. Even if this may feel uncomfortable, we need to have these conversations. I listen to the questions my own children have about race and I answer truthfully and transparently. I acknowledge the mistakes I have made as well as the mistakes others make, and we talk about ways to actively change hearts and minds.

We must explore different ideas, and listen with intention to change
I talk openly about race issues, not just on social media but with people in real life. I initiate conversations (but only if they want to talk) with non-white friends, colleagues, and students, and I actively participate by asking questions to gain understanding. Not everyone in a cultural group feels the same way and by asking questions I can explore different ideas. Again, this requires being present in the conversation, and listening to learn. I talk to my students about racial stereotypes, about how so much of what we read in class overwhelmingly has white characters and about how literature supports learning empathy for others. As a parent, I talk to my children about current events, about historical events, about implicit bias and overt racism. I talk to them about the importance of speaking up, listening, and learning.

We must commit to constant self reflection and admit our own bias
I'm still learning. I am learning how much words matter. I love To Kill a Mockingbird but it is one of many books that uses the White Savior trope - as a society we have so much exposure to this idea that white people have to step in and save Black people. This reinforces that idea that Black people need to be saved by white people. Through my own reflection, I understand how this trope is harmful. True allies don't seek to "solve and save," instead we stand beside our Black friends and colleagues, build empathy, amplify their voices, and stand up alongside them. I now constantly check my thoughts, and question even those that are fleeting: are my ideas influenced by bias, white supremacy and racism? I recently read this from Greater Good Magazine, and it stayed with me: "Admitting that we are all subject to biases creates a safer space to examine them more carefully and take steps to fight them..."

We must use media to strengthen understanding
I'm still learning about cultural appropriation, implicit bias and the historical events that have gone largely ignored, but which have inevitably led our country to this moment. Education plays a role in change. My own learning has been shaped by I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Invisible Man, and more recently, titles like Stamped, Just Mercy, The Hate U Give, Monster, and Dear Martin. These are books I can pass along to my colleagues, my high school students and to my own sons. I watch movies with my family like Akilah and the Bee, Raising Dion, See You Yesterday, Hidden Figures and BlacKkKlansman. I'm learning from podcasts such as Code Switch and Seeing White and my children and I listen to them at home and in the car.

I'm learning why and how Black communities are disproportionately impacted by Covid-19. I'm learning how and why Black people, especially Black men, are disproportionately killed by police. I'm learning and sharing the names and circumstances of the deaths with my children. I'm learning that I need to support organizations like the NAACP that actively support change. I'm learning that I need to show up.

We must keep doing the work
There is no quick fix for systemic racism. It requires continued, ongoing effort to dismantle white supremacy. But I also have hope. With our combined voices and our combined intelligence, we fight for racial justice and usher change. My Black students, colleagues and friends are in pain. As a white person, as a mother of white sons, as a white educator, it is incumbent on me to be more aware, to learn more, to empathize, to listen and to support others as we work to dismantle white supremacy and forge a new way forward.
More Resources

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a call to action for white educators who seek to be anti-racist

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A Call to Action for White Educators Who Seek to Be Anti-Racist | PBS Education

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I am a white mother and educator. For decades in school I have taught "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Unfortunately, for many of my students, the suffering often seems abstract and they falsely believe these are stories from a distant past.

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Say Her Name: The Life and Death Of Sandra Bland

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Say Her Name: The Life and Death Of Sandra Bland

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Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland explores the death of Sandra Bland, a politically active 28-year-old African American who, after being arrested for a traffic violation in a small Texas town, was found hanging in her jail cell three days later. Dashcam footage revealing her arrest went viral, leading to national protests. The film team followed the two-year case beginning shortly after Bland's death, exploring the questions of what really happened to her, and what we may learn from her tragedy.

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Twelve books that give context to current protests

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Twelve books that give context to current protests

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Oxford University Press

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Cities across the United States have seen ongoing protests since the death of George Floyd while in police custody on 25 May. Conversations are taking place on social media as well as in the real world, and media coverage has been relentless. We at Oxford University Press would like to highlight some of our books across politics, history, and philosophy that we hope can contribute to the important conversations currently taking place and provide valuable context. Where possible, we've made some of these books available at no cost for a limited time. Explore additional free articles on race and diversity on our website.

1. American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship by Niambi Michele Carter
Carter argues that immigration, both historically and in the contemporary moment, has served as a reminder of the limited inclusion of African Americans in the body politic. As Carter contends, immigration provides a way to understand the nature and meaning of black American citizenship-specifically the way that white supremacy structures and constrains not only African Americans' place in the American political landscape, but the black community's political opinions as well.
American While Black is free on Oxford Scholarship Online until 10 July.

2. The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea by Christopher J. Lebron
Started in the wake of George Zimmerman's 2013 acquittal in the death of Trayvon Martin, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has become a powerful campaign to demand redress for law enforcement injustices against the African American community in the United States. Drawing on the work of revolutionary black public intellectuals, Lebron clarifies what it means to assert that "Black Lives Matter" when faced with contemporary instances of anti-black law enforcement.

3. Situational Breakdowns: Understanding Protest Violence and Other Surprising Outcomes by Anne Nassauer
Nassauer demonstrates that when routines break down, surprising outcomes often emerge. Focusing on detailed accounts of peaceful and violent protests from the 1960s until 2010, violent uprisings such as Ferguson 2014, and armed store robberies caught on camera, Nassauer argues we can understand how and why routine interactions break down by looking at how situations develop systematically. She discusses how violence emerges and what police and protesters can do to avoid violent clashes.

4. Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism by Allissa V. Richardson
This book reveals how the perfect storm of smartphones, social media, and social justice empowered Black activists to create their own news outlets, which continued a centuries-long, African American tradition of using the news to challenge racism.Bearing Witness While Black is the first book of its kind to identify three overlapping eras of domestic terror against African American people-slavery, lynching, and police brutality-and explain how storytellers documented such atrocities through journalism.

5. Steeped in the Blood of Racism: Black Power, Law and Order, and the 1970s Shootings at Jackson State College by Nancy K. Bristow
Minutes after midnight on 15 May 1970, white members of the Jackson city police and the Mississippi Highway Patrol opened fire on young people in front of a women's dormitory at Jackson State College, a historically black college. Just ten days after the killings at Kent State, the attack at Jackson State never garnered the same level of national attention. In the aftermath, the victims and their survivors struggled unsuccessfully to find justice. The shootings were soon largely forgotten except among the local African American community. This book reclaims this story and situates it in the broader history of the struggle for African American freedom in the civil rights and black power eras.
Steeped in the Blood of Racism is free on Oxford Scholarship Online until 10 July.

6. Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from AfroNet to Black Lives Matter by Charlton D. McIlwain
Activists, pundits, politicians, and the press frequently proclaim today's digitally mediated racial justice activism the new civil rights movement. InBlack Software, McIlwain shows how the story of racial justice movement organizing online is much longer and more varied. Chronicling the long relationship between African Americans, computing technology, and the Internet from the 1960s to present, the book examines how computing technology has been used to neutralize the threat that black people pose to the existing racial order, but also how black people seized these new computing tools to build community, wealth, and wage a war for racial justice.

7. Sick from Freedom: African American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Jim Downs
Downs recovers the untold story of one of the bitterest ironies in American history-that the emancipation of the slaves had devastating consequences for innumerable freed people. Slaves who fled from bondage during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, suffering, and death. But the war produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, with deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands of freed people.
Sick from Freedom is free on Oxford Scholarship Online until 10 July.

8. A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should be Uncivil by Candice Delmas
Advocates from Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi to the Black Lives Matter activists have recognized that there are times when, rather than having a duty to obey the law, citizens have a duty to disobey it. There are limits: principle alone does not justify law breaking. But Delmas argues that uncivil disobedience can sometimes be not only permissible but required in the effort to resist injustice.
A Duty to Resist is free on Oxford Scholarship Online until 10 July.

9. Until There is Justice: The Life of Anna Arnold Hedgeman by Jennifer Scanlon
Scanlon presents the first-ever biography of Hedgeman, a demanding feminist, devout Christian, and savvy grassroots civil rights organizer. Anna Arnold Hedgeman played a key role in over half a century of social justice initiatives. Hedgeman ought to be a household name, but until now has received only a fraction of the attention of activists like A. Philip Randolph, Betty Friedan, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

10. Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington, DC Riots of 1968 by J. Samuel Walker
Walker's book takes an in-depth look at the causes and consequences of the Washington, DC, riots of 1968. It shows that the conditions that existed in the city's low-income neighborhoods helped generate the problems that erupted after Martin Luther King's murder. The book also discusses the growing fears produced by the outbreaks of serious riots in many cities during the mid-1960s. Walker analyzes the reasons for the riots and the lessons that authorities drew from them. He also provides an overview of the struggle that the city faced in recovering from the effects of the 1968 disorders.

11. The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941-1978 by Mark Brilliant
Brilliant examines California's history to illustrate how the civil rights era was a nationwide and multiracial phenomenon-one that was shaped and complicated by the presence of not only blacks and whites, but also Mexican Americans, Japanese Americans, and Chinese Americans, among others. The Golden State's status as a civil rights vanguard for the nation is due in part to the numerous civil rights precedents set there and to the disparate challenges of civil rights reform in multiracial places.

12. Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice by Raymond Arsenault
They were black and white, young and old, men and women. In the spring and summer of 1961, they put their lives on the line, riding buses through the American South to challenge segregation in interstate transport. Their story is one of the most celebrated episodes of the civil rights movement, yet a full-length history has never been written until now. In these pages, acclaimed historian Raymond Arsenault provides an account of six pivotal months that jolted the consciousness of America.

Feature image created by OUP.

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Twelve books that give context to current protests [reading list]

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Cities across the United States have seen ongoing protests since the death of George Floyd while in police custody on 25 May. Conversations are taking place on social media as well as in the real world, and media coverage has been relentless.

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Summer Reading: Over 40 Books on Race, Racism, and the Black American Experience to Read Now, as Recommended by Rutgers-Newark Faculty

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Summer Reading: Over 40 Books on Race, Racism, and the Black American Experience to Read Now, as Recommended by Rutgers-Newark Faculty

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In these socially charged times, one of the most important things in the fight against systemic racism and our own internal biases is education. Faculty at Rutgers University-Newark teach and work at one of the most diverse university in the United States, and their research covers race and bias from across a wide range of disciplines in the arts, humanities, sciences, business and law. We put out a general call asking for book recommendations on the black experience in America, and the response was immediate and overwhelming. Below, our faculty recommend their current and classic favorites and tell us why we should read them now.

Most Recommended:

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein

From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

In the Castle of My Skin, George Lamming

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

These books were named multiple times as essential reading. The Color of Law is a "hard-hitting and sobering book [that] traces the role of local, state and federal housing policies in segregating the races in the United States," says Tom McCabe, who teaches a History of Newark course at RU-N. "If you ever wondered how your neighborhood came to be all-white, all-black-or-brown, or if you ever wondered the same about your schools, read this book," adds Belinda Edmondson, acting chair of African American and African Studies.

Melissa Valle, an assistant professor in Sociology says From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation "provide[s] much needed structural analyses and context for this latest spate of uprisings around the country. Lamming's novel, In the Castle of My Skin, is "A powerful story about the relation between the UK and its Caribbean colonies," says Sadia Abbas, associate professor of English. And finally, Mark Krasovic, says The Fire Next Time, is a classic for reasons including "the stunning beauty of its language in the face of ugliness and its constant reminder of our interconnected fates, whether they ultimately be liberatory or destructive."

Full Reading List

Recommends:

"A powerful story about the relation between the UK and its Caribbean colonies and the ways in which race structures experience in the colony and the colonial center. Characterized by Lamming's densely suggestive storytelling and analytical style."

"Professor Judy is originally from Minneapolis. The book brings together critical theory, the suppressed Muslim history of american slavery, antiblack racism and the philosophical tradition. It's a significant and brilliant contribution to several disciplines and a profound meditation on language, thought and the possibilities of different varieties of signification."

"A powerful and slily brilliant modernist text about race, poverty and disability."

"The first volume of Moten's trilogy, consent not to be a single being, this book is a collection of brillliant and anarchic, brilliantly anarchic, deeply thoughtful essays aesthetics, politics, life and blackness."
Recommends:
Recommends:

"This collection of essays by writer, cultural critic and Emerson College professor Jabari Asim explores our contemporary moment of emergency as an afterlife, marshaling the past to shed light on the present. Asim salvages hope through a focus on black resilience and black survival. The collection was a finalist for PEN's Art of the Essay award last year. Asim has also written children's books about African-American history."

"This is the first and only substantive history of the U.S. Border Patrol, by UCLA African-American Studies professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez, who won a MacArthur Genius Award last year. Just as interrogating the history of policing in the United States is key to understanding black lives and Black Lives Matter, knowing the history of how our borders are policed is key to understanding the lives of immigrants and racialized Others in the United States."

"Minneapolis-based author and scholar Erika Lee provides a tragically timely genealogy of hate directed at "aliens" in American society, beginning with Ben Franklin and ending with Trump's travel bans. Lee is director of the Immigration Resource Center at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Her comprehensive narrative shows how a nation of immigrants is, paradoxically, also a nation of xenophobia."

Recommends:

"It's easy to read and provides useful background."

"Provides theoretical background, comparative perspective."

"This is a great novel by a major writer."
Recommends:

If you ever wondered how your neighborhood came to be all-white, all-black-or-brown, or if you ever wondered the same about your schools, read this book.

"It argues that the reason we, the residents of the richest country on earth, find ourselves in a pandemic without enough hospital beds or indeed (for 10 percent of the population) without even healthcare; or with barely enough unemployment insurance policies to cover the masses of suddenly unemployed people, is because in the United States the white majority would rather shrink the social welfare net than pay into any system that supports "undeserving" people of color."

"It examines recent US history to argue that the segregation that plagues our cities and contributes to the kind of explosive racial strife we are currently experiencing is the result of decades of consistent anti-integration local, state and federal policies in housing and education. If you ever wondered how your neighborhood came to be all-white, all-black-or-brown, or if you ever wondered the same about your schools, read this book."

"This book builds on the argument, first advanced by Trinidadian historian (and eventually prime minister) Eric Williams that slavery and capitalism are intrinsically linked by illustrating how slavery did not simply contribute to but actually provided the foundation for America's present wealth. In so doing it refutes the belief that African Americans are somehow marginal or play a supporting role in the creation of this country's wealth when their ancestors provided the very basis of it."

"It links the present injustices--the systematic incarceration of mostly African American men, the denial of voting rights to ex-felons who are disproportionately African American--to the nation's shameful "Jim Crow" era of the past century, arguing that the segregation era has never ended, only resulted in (to paraphrase Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man) a more efficient blinding."

"A classic."
Recommends:
"My main advice is that what is needed right now, above all, in this era of COVID-19 and BLM, is class-conscious antiracist literature that points to the material interests that most people in the 99% share when it comes to eradicating racism. Some poems by Langston Hughes in the 1930s are particularly powerful and accessible e.g., "Always the Same"; "Open Letter to the South"; "White Man!"; "Rising Waters" -- and there are plenty more.

"A novel that explores the need for antiracist class consciousness among working-class whites in the South."

Two short stories: "A Party Down at the Square", Ralph Ellison, and "Like a Winding Sheet", Ann Petry

"These two stories from the 1930s have worked for me time and again in the classroom. This last short story is just wonderul for the way it links the alienation of labor to sexist and racist ideology and practice."
Recommends:
"This is a comprehensive review article by one of the premier social psychology researchers of this topic. In it, Fiske distinguishes between the three anti-social tendencies, between motivated prejudice and prejudice that arises from mental short-cuts (automatic processes), and between overt, conscious expressions of prejudice and more subtle, implicit forms of prejudice."

"This book, although a bit old, provides an excellent review of what it feels like to be stigmatized--as well as why stigmatization happens. Chapters discuss how stigmas affect the way one is treated, how it restricts relations with others and limits one's own public behaviors, and how it affects one's own sense of self. This is a text I go back to often."

"This is a somewhat unconventional choice, but it may be an important part of the total story. Fogelman tries to understand the motives and characters of people who overcame their prejudices and did so at a crucial time under the most trying of circumstances. Knowing how and why prejudices are overcome may provide some markers on our way out of the current difficulties."

Recommends:

"I recommend this for so many reasons, including the stunning beauty of its language in the face of ugliness and its constant reminder of our interconnected fates, whether they ultimately be liberatory or destructive."

"Read this for its chronicle of the life of one of our nation's most remarkable thinkers and organizers, for its detailing of her 'radical democratic vision,' and for its conviction that there is no shortcut around that vision in our search for peace and justice."

Recommends:

"This book makes connections between the founding organizations and publications of intersectional black feminism in the 1970s, the radical abolitionism of Harriet Tubman and leaders of the Movement for Black Lives today... The book recounts how Black queer feminists, survivors of violence, have historically and recently organized themselves to demand freedom. As Yamahtta-Taylor's title suggests, this primer shows how to get free by drawing on lessons from history and responding with alacrity, passion, and creativity to violence and crisis."

"Cathy Park Hong recalls the long history of Anti-Asian racism and incarceration in the United States. This precisely written anti-racist manifesto addresses complex feelings of guilt, shame, and rage through readings of the brilliant Afro-Latino standup comic Richard Pryor; meditations on migrating while Asian; and unflinching assessments of quotidian, startlingly normalized racist violence that characterizes the United States from the 1882 race-based Chinese Exclusion Act through the first decades of the twenty-first century."

"The first generation of formerly enslaved Hispanic Caribbean migrants arriving in New York and South Florida in the 1870s organized themselves into clubs that gave them a voice in a revolutionary political party, created a self-funded voluntary night school, and created newspapers where they published their opinions and engaged in interpretation, critique and debate.

Members of this tight-knit Afro-Latinx community eventually founded the Schomburg Collection... at a time of extreme anti-black racial terror and Supreme Court decisions that made racial segregation and exclusion from full citizenship the law of the land. These Afro-Latinx thinkers offer a model for how to get organized to bring about change that is relevant during the economic and policing fallout of the COVID19 global pandemic."

Recommends:

"Part history, part memoir this page-turner lays bare a 1970s racial murder in North Carolina, and it also eloquently elicits a time and place in America that seems like it was a long time ago, but it wasn't. Tyson experienced these events and tries to make sense of them through the lens of the humanist-historian."

"A New Journalism account of the Newark Rebellion of 1967, Ron Porambo's book is a years-long investigation of institutional racism and corruption that spread from the top of city and state governments to local police forces in the state's largest city."

"This hard-hitting and sobering book traces the role of local, state and federal housing policies in segregating the races in the United States. Rothstein, who spoke at the HLLC a year or so ago, details how the government and our courts upheld racist policies to maintain the separation of whites and blacks."

Recommends:

Recommends:

We can counteract our own prejudices. The first step is to turn a hidden bias into a visible one.

Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji

"A deep dive into the origins of implicit bias for all readers by the two researchers who put implicit bias on the map with their ground-breaking work. A take-home message is that we may not have much power to eradicate our own prejudices, but we can counteract them. The first step is to turn a hidden bias into a visible one."

"Dr. Eberhardt makes a connection between implicit bias and system racism. She exposes racial bias at all levels of society, including law enforcement. And she also offers us tools to address it."
Recommends:
"This book makes the critical distinction between race, which is a construct, and racism, which is a real and devastating set of behaviors that create oppression and distort democracy. Progress will not be possible until the nation recognizes and acts upon the fact that racism, not 'race,' is our biggest problem. Racecraft can be read in tandem with Melissa L. Cooper's brilliant intellectual history Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Island, Race, and the American Imagination. Cooper's book details how white Americans created a 'racial' identity for African Americans from Georgia's coastal islands, and how black Sapelo Islanders understood their own history and identity as one of struggle against oppression. It thereby shows the critical distinction between 'making race' and 'fighting racism' in U.S. life."

"Muhammad's study of Progressive-era Philadelphia shows how easy it was for white "experts" to manipulate seemingly neutral statistics about crime to support their belief that African Americans were inherently criminal."

"White Americans' ongoing economic exploitation and cultural denigration of African Americans has been strongly facilitated by residential segregation. Rothstein's comprehensive study details the multiple ways that U.S. laws at the local, state and federal level have consistently buttressed segregation. He demonstrates how at least some Americans have demonstrated a willingness to live in integrated communities, only to have their efforts thwarted by often obscure forms of institutionally racist laws. Until these laws are exposed and replaced by policies facilitating integration and fairness, segregation and its attendant evils will remain a primary support for the American racism."

"This book examines the famous power outage and subsequent looting that hit New York City in the summer of 1977 through multiple perspectives, but makes the fundamental point that looting and civil unrest is ultimately caused by a maldistribution of power."
Recommends:

In Darkness and Confusion, Ann Petry, a 1947 short story about the Harlem Riot of 1943 which appears in Petry's 1971 collection.

The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality, Lorraine Hansberry - a book-length brochure by the Civil Rights group, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) with text by Lorraine Hansberry.

"The Riot" Gwendolyn Brooks - a series of three poems about the Chicago Riots of 1968.

The three books that I've chosen are lesser-known works by authors renowned for championing racial and gender justice. As importantly, they were written as Ann Petry, Lorraine Hansberry, Gwendolyn Brooks engaged with the respective social justice movements of their time and how they as black women turned their words into being witnesses to and weapons to injustice.

Recommends:

"I would recommend Faces at the Bottom of the Well by Derrick Bell because it is such an important read of the condition of racism through a legal and political lens but with such narrative creativity. Books like this that are rich and provocative yet nontraditional and accessible invite vigorous discussion. Plus he's just so smart about so much. And We Are Not Saved is equally good for similar reasons."

Recommends:

"All three books provide much needed structural analyses and context for this latest spate of uprisings around the country. Taylor focuses specifically on the Black Lives Matter movement and the purposes of these kinds of protests. Hill uses high-profile and controversial cases of State violence similar to the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor (e.g., the police killings of people like Mike Brown, Kathryn Johnston and Freddie Gray, as well as the poisoning of the water in Flint, MI) to demonstrate that such cases are "a symptom of a deeper American problem," and that at the root of each case "is a more fundamental set of economic conditions, political arrangements, and power relations that transform everyday citizens into casualties of an increasingly intense war on the vulnerable" (p.xxii). Davis provides insights into what a just future could and should look like and the need for a radical re-imagining of the criminal justice system that abolishes prisons."

Recommends:

"These books constitute serious scholarship that combines historical sense with uncompromising anti-racism. Each places the question of race in historical, political and ideological contexts in the United States while avoiding the perils of race reductionism or reducing racism to a question of perception or individual prejudice. Required reading to enable effective anti-racism in the context of broad emancipatory politics in the United States."
Recommends:
"Typically, when we think of racism, our focus is on major events that generally receive widespread news coverage. However, racism also occurs in everyday, mundane situations such as those that occur in the marketplace. It is in this context that we often see what researchers describe as microaggressions, microassaults, implicit racism, etc. This research-based book provides not only empirical evidence of marketplace discrimination, but it also examines the legal issues and historical contexts of such marketplace phenomena."

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Summer Reading: Over 40 Books on Race, Racism, and the Black American Experience to Read Now, as Recommended by Rutgers-Newark Faculty

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In these socially charged times, one of the most important things in the fight against systemic racism and our own internal biases is edu

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How can we help students understand George Floyd’s death in the context of institutionalized racism?

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Institutionalized Racism: A Syllabus - JSTOR Daily

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How can we help students understand George Floyd’s death in the context of institutionalized racism?

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Curriculum for White Americans to Educate Themselves on Race and Racism–from Ferguson to Charleston

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Curriculum for White Americans to Educate Themselves on Race and Racism–from Ferguson to Charleston

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A good collection of articles/links from 2015.

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When teaching about race and racism, I invite participants to consider the following analogy: Think of racism as a gigantic societal-sized boot.

" Which groups do you think are fighting the hardest against this boot of racism? " I ask them. Invariably, participants of diverse races answer that those fighting hardest to avoid getting squashed by the boot are people of Color. (Keep in mind that I don't ask this question on day one of our study of race. Rather, participants come to this conclusion after exploring the concept of White privilege and studying the history of race and racism in the United States through multiple sources and perspectives.)

" If that's true," I continue, " then who do you think is wearing the boot?" The participants' answer (though it often only reluctantly hits the air): White people.

" If that's true, then whose responsibility is it to stop the boot from squashing them? The people of Color already pushing upward and resisting the boot? Or the people wearing the boot-consciously or not-who contribute to a system that pushes downward? "

Everyone has a role in ending racism, but the analogy shows how little sense it makes for only those facing the heel-end of oppression to do all the work. It's time for White America to take on a far bigger role in taking off the boot.

There are no doubt complexities that come with White Americans working for racial justice. White privilege can lead to a chronic case of undiagnosed entitlement, creating poor listeners, impatient speakers who talk over others, and people unaccustomed to taking orders. Nevertheless, the movement for racial justice needs more White Americans to get involved. And it's our responsibility to help each other get involved-and get involved productively.

I compiled this list to help White Americans do so. One positive to emerge from these difficult times is the wealth of resources now available for White Americans. Never have I seen so many ideas, options, and concrete steps to take action against racism. And we are making progress: Looks Like White Americans Are Finally Starting to Come Around on Race and Policing. A few police officers are even being held accountable -finally-for their devastating decisions.
But so much work remains. A few notes about this list:

To keep this list from becoming overwhelmingly long, I prioritized recent sources-from Ferguson to Charleston-and organized them in reverse chronological order.

Every resource listed is relatively short. Not one of these resources links to a book (except here, here, and here). In other words, there's no excuse not to dig into them.

Many links on the list focus on the recent killings of Black men, but, as the three articles below illustrate, institutionalized racism has a much longer reach (and that these lists are hardly comprehensive):

Finally, by "curriculum," I do not mean a unit of study for classroom use (to be clear: this list is separate from my work in the classroom); rather, these resources, inspired by the #Charlestonsyllabus, are for anybody who wants to learn more from perspectives often underrepresented among many White circles.

Reading Articles Written Specifically for White Americans

To My White Friends Who See Tragedy in the Black Community and Say Nothing, Make it Personal, published by Huffington Post on June 26, 2015

'We need co-conspirators, not allies': how white Americans can fight racism, published by The Guardian on June 26, 2015

Be Less Racist: 12 Tips for White Dudes, by A White Dude, published by Mash-up Americans

7 Ways To Be A White Ally For Charleston And The Black Community, published by Huffington Post on June 19, 2015

10 Things All White Folks Need to Consider about the #BaltimoreUprising, published by Everyday Feminism on April 29, 2015

11 Things White People Can Do to Be Real Anti-Racist Allies, published by AlterNet on April 27, 2015

6 things I wish people understood about being biracial, published by Vox on March 11, 2015 (This one is not specifically addressed to White people but many would benefit from reading it.)

What white people need to know, and do, after Ferguson, published by The Washington Post on November 28, 2014

12 Things White People Can Actually Do After the Ferguson Decision, published by Huffington Post on November 26, 2014

To follow sources that publish such articles, find an extensive listing here. If these articles leave you with unanswered questions, there's now even a website devoted to answering the questions of White Americans: askawhiteperson.com.

Understanding Whiteness, White Privilege, Microaggressions, and a History of Racial Discrimination

Native Americans Get Shot By Cops at an Astonishing Rate, published by Mother Jones on July 15, 2015

Slavery to Mass Incarceration, a five-minute video, narrated by Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative, that concisely contextualizes mass incarceration as an evolution of slavery, published on July 7, 2015

I, Racist: Why I don't talk about race with White people, published by Medium on July 6, 2015

The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes, a short video that provides a "haunting" glimpse into the mass abduction, abuse, and murder of Black people that lasted centuries, published by Slate Magazine on June 25, 2015

What Is Whiteness?, published by The New York Times on June 20, 2015

We Need To Talk About White Culture, published by The Daily Beas t on June 19, 2015

Historian Says Don't 'Sanitize' How Our Government Created Ghettos, a 35-minute interview with Historian Richard Rothstein, in which he links current racial inequities directly to past governmental policies, from NPR's Fresh Air on May 14, 2015

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism, published by The Good Men Project on April 9, 2015

Only Part of the Story Is Being Told About the Police Shooting in Pasco, published by Time on March 3, 2015

Our Anti-Immigrant Racism Is Rooted in History, published by Common Dreams on February 17, 2015

Killing in Washington State Offers 'Ferguson' Moment for Hispanics, published by The New York Times on February 16, 2015

If Anyone Ever Questioned How White Privilege Manifested Itself in America This Is The Perfect Illustration, a five-minute video excerpt showing that, though race is a social construction with no scientific basis, governmental policy systematically gave it social and economic significance-all to the benefit of White Americans over the course of centuries-from Atlanta Blackstar on February 2, 2015

We Can't 'Get Over It': 4 Ways Understanding Past Wrongs Can Create Better Indigenous Allies, published by Everyday Feminism on January 15, 2015

Why Ferguson Should Matter to Asian-Americans, published by Time on November 26, 2014

Joining Groups

Coalition of Anti-Racist Whites (CARW): a group of white people in the Seattle area working to undo institutional racism and white privilege through education and organizing in white communities and active support of anti-racist, people of color-led organizations. We support the self-determination of people of color, honor their leadership and are held accountable to people of color-led organizations.

European Dissent: A national network of groups with the goal to be a visible force in the creation of a multiracial network of people intent on building working relationships between the white community and the communities of color in the struggle for a just society.

Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ): A national network of groups and individuals organizing white people for racial justice.

Parenting Racially-Conscious Children

How silence can breed prejudice: A child development professor explains how and why to talk to kids about race, published by The Washington Post on July 6, 2015

It's My Job to Raise Children Who Are Not Only Not Racist But Actively Anti-Racist, published by Huffington Post on July 1, 2015

The Hard Talk: White Parents Discussing Racism with White Children, published in Uprooting Criminology on June 20, 2015

Facing this country's racist past and present will likely stir up a lot of feelings for many of us. Guilt may be among them. In dealing with guilt, I encourage you to read the words of Audre Lorde:

. I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.

Instead of spending your energies on guilt, I encourage you to spend them seeking inspiration to act. There's no shortage of inspiration. For a moment on June 30th, in the wake of terrorism in Charleston, you could even find it on a flagpole at the South Carolina State House.

Less than two weeks after Bree Newsome's act of resistance, the governor of South Carolina signed a bill into law removing the Confederate Flag from the State House. Change is possible.

Stay connected for more ways to fight for social justice!

To learn more about the race curriculum controversy that led to the creation of this website, a controversy in which a public school district attempted to shut down a long-established study of race for seniors-all based on the misinformation of one White family-click here.

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Curriculum for White Americans to Educate Themselves on Race and Racism-from Ferguson to Charleston

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The movement for racial justice needs more White Americans to get involved. And it's our responsibility to help each other get involved-and get involved productively. I compiled this li...

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These recent poetry collections offer poignant narratives and snapshots of racial injustice in America, from lasting testaments of systemic violence to a public appeal for the vital work that remains to be done as the country confront its legacy of racism and exploitation.

White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia by Kiki Petrosino (Sarabande)
"In this deeply felt fourth collection, Petrosino investigates her family tree-especially its roots in Virginia-and reports back on this exploration and its gaps.... This is an important and remarkable exploration of heritage."

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These recent poetry collections offer poignant narratives and snapshots of racial injustice in America, from lasting testaments of systemic violence to a public appeal for the vital work that remains to be done as the country confront its legacy of racism and exploitation.

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Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism

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Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism

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Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism a book by Derrick Bell and Michelle Alexander

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The groundbreaking, “eerily prophetic, almost haunting” work on American racism and the struggle for racial justice (Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow). In Faces at the Bottom of the Well, civil rights activist and legal scholar Derrick Bell uses allegory and historical example--includi…

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Black Parents Explain How to Deal with the Police | Cut

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Black Parents Explain How to Deal with the Police | Cut

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Black Parents Explain How to Deal with the Police | Cut

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The New York Times

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Antiracist Reading & Viewing | Book Pulse

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Antiracist Reading & Viewing | Book Pulse

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By Library Journal

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The ongoing debate over the freedom to read moved to the chambers of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, which held a hearing September 12 entitled "Book Bans: How Censorship Limits Liberty and Literature."

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Book Riot

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Why You Need to Stop Saying "All Lives Matter"

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Why You Need to Stop Saying "All Lives Matter"

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Let me be clear: stating that black lives matter doesn’t insinuate that other lives don’t.
BY RACHEL ELIZABETH CARGLE

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Teenagers Discuss Microaggressions and Racism #HatchKids

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In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from intersectionality and affirmative action to "model minorities" in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race and racism, and how they infect almost every aspect of American life.

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The Power Book: What is it, Who Has it and Why? 

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The Power Book: What is it, Who Has it and Why? 

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With this inspiring and brightly illustrated guide to power, learn about the different types of power, what it means to have power, and what you can do with your own power to create positive change in the world, no matter who or how old you are.

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The Power Book: What is it, Who Has it, and Why? (Hardcover)

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With this inspiring and brightly illustrated guide to power, learn about the different types of power, what it means to have power, and what you can do with your own power to create positive change in the world, no matter who or how old you are. What makes you the boss of me?

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In these times of tragedy it’s more important than ever to educate ourselves about America’s long history of racial injustice, racially motivated violence, and silencing of Black voices. It’s important to discover new ways of supporting the Black community and celebrating Black culture.

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Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, Candis Watts Smith

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It’s more important than ever to educate ourselves about America’s long history of racial injustice, racially motivated violence, and silencing of Black voices. It’s important to discover new ways of... READ MORE

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Ten myths white people believe about racism

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Ten myths white people believe about racism

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Predominantly white churches may be hesitant to talk about racism. Some may fear saying the wrong thing or not getting it right. Others may assume their congregation does not need to talk about racism, since they do not see their members reflecting racist actions or beliefs. Even if a predominantly white church views itself as socially progressive and talks about concepts such as systemic racism, persons in these congregations may still harbor illusions about racism that prevent a deeper understanding of the problem. The following myths often arise or lurk near the surface in white people's discussions of racism.

Myth 1: Racism is not our problem. This perspective can be seen in the question "Why do we need to talk about that?" The assumption is that we, in our faith community, are not racists.

A helpful way to expand listeners' capacity to see racism as everyone's problem is to name some of the implicit biases that people may not even notice: pulling your purse closer to you when in an elevator with a black man; walking to the other side of the street when you see people of color coming your way; feeling afraid or nervous when you are around people of color; assuming a person of color must be guilty of a crime when they're pulled over or arrested by the police; jumping to conclusions about a person of color stealing something that you may have misplaced; or feeling the impulse to ask people of color "Where are you from?" (meaning a different country) when you do not ask whites the same question. These examples highlight the subtle ways implicit bias is still at work.

Another way of framing racism as our problem is to identify the advantages white people may experience. In other words, name not just the negative side of the impact of racism on communities of color, but also the way white people have benefited from years of racism. These privileges may be different for whites who experience other aspects of their identity as marginalizing, but there are enough examples that it is possible for even the most disadvantaged white person to be able to relate to at least one of them.

Myth 2: Racism is about hateful actions and words. If racism were just about mean actions and words, then we could easily say this is not about us; we ourselves do not harbor racist beliefs or say racist things (at least to people of color). Two problems arise from this belief. The first is that it assumes that we are the best judges of whether we are racist or not. The second is that it misses a whole world of data that shows less obvious factors in racial inequality and discrimination.

Racism is more than someone calling a person of color by a terrible name. It is also seen in differences in pay, housing discrimination, mortgage lending, school segregation, and rates of policing and incarceration. White people may not feel that we have anything to do with these larger problems, but our silence is part of the problem. Our acceptance of the status quo makes these injustices harder to challenge. While racism is certainly seen in hateful actions and words, it is also seen in our inaction and silence regarding the larger social problems that stem from our racist history and continue because of our indifference.

Myth 3: Only Ku Klux Klan members and self-proclaimed white supremacists perpetuate racism. It is easy to envision the "bad guys" when it comes to talking about racism-men wearing white sheets and pointy hats, burning crosses in yards. Or we think of the images of young white men chanting "Blood and soil!" in Charlottesville in the summer of 2017.

The moment we point away from ourselves to some other person or group as the "real racists," we become like the self-righteous character in Jesus' parable who declares, "God, I thank you I am not like other people" (Luke 18:11). The moment we catch ourselves making that distinction, we need to remind ourselves to be more like the tax collector in the story, asking, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" (Luke 18:13). Even when we are faced with great opposition in talking with other white people about racism, we need to remember that we are no different from those people. We share the same benefits from the sinful legacy of racism.

Racism is evident not only in hateful actions but in silence and inaction.

Myth 4: Racism has to do with intentions. If we have no intention of offending someone else and no consciousness of racial bias, then we may feel resentful for being accused of racism. If we are generally good people who feed and clothe the homeless and give our money to the poor, it can feel as if we are being unjustly accused of racism when the rest of our behavior shows our moral intentions.

Unfortunately, great harm comes to others not simply by our intentions, but by our inattentions. If we are not paying attention to how others are harmed by large social forces that may be out of our personal control but nevertheless benefit us in unjust ways, our inattentiveness to these social forces can be hurtful. Paying attention to the ways racism continues to unjustly privilege white people and disadvantage people and communities of color enables us to see racism as much bigger than our intentions. Separating intention from inattention means that if we say something that inadvertently hurts someone else, we do not need to get defensive. Instead, we can say, "I'm so sorry. I did not realize what that would sound like or feel like for you." We can use the experience as a learning opportunity to see life from another's point of view.

Myth 5: Racism is caused by ignorance. We cannot blame racism on ignorance, because we perpetuate it even when we should know better. To say racism is only about ignorance denies the ways racism is perpetuated even by those who denounce white supremacy and seek to work against it.

It also ignores the fact that racism has been justified and defended by persons who have received many years of education. Scientists have claimed to demonstrate the inferiority of other races to Caucasians by pointing out head circumference and other physiological "proofs" for the white man's superiority. Trained clergy with academic degrees argued for the legitimacy of slavery on religious grounds. Lawyers made cases for "separate but equal" schools for children of color segregated from white children. White politicians with college degrees have labeled entire countries of black and brown populations with derogatory terms. Even at the highest levels of academia, persons of color continue to experience racism from those who are bearers of the intellectual torch.

Myth 6: Racism is irrational. This myth assumes that racism does not make sense and that it is based on faulty ideas about the racial superiority of whites over nonwhites. But what do we mean by rational? Sometimes we operate out of a rationality of common sense that includes "what serves our best interests." As a white person, if you've been given the choice to live in a good neighborhood with excellent schools for your children where your house is likely to appreciate in value, would it not be rational for you to want to live there if you can afford it? If developers want to build apartments in the neighborhood that will increase the availability of low-income housing, giving more people access to these great schools, it may seem just as rational to want to protest such development. After all, you do not want your children's schools overcrowded, and maybe you fear the possibility of increased crime in your neighborhood or even your home value declining. These responses may all seem rational, but at the same time they perpetuate a system of racial exclusion.

The way racism perpetuates itself is often through these subtle avenues. We fail to consider how our prejudices operate to preserve our own self-interests. It is completely rational for us to want the best schools for our children. It is completely rational to want our home investments to increase in value. But how do we respond to persons for whom the color of their skin prevents them from buying a home in the best school districts or getting a mortgage for a home they can invest in?

Myth 7: Racism can be remedied through education. Unfortunately, education cannot solve all of our problems. We are selfish. Even if we know we should be less selfish, it does not make it any easier for us to want to share with others. Even if we have been educated in liberal schools, it does not prevent us from operating out of our unconscious biases. Even if we have been taught to recognize that the stereotypes about people of color are not true, we may still respond physically out of deep prejudices when we are least aware. Learning the right definitions of racism or using the most up-to-date terms will not inoculate us against continuing to act in racist ways or contributing to racial inequity.

Some people have never had the advantages of an education and yet have led the way in antiracism and kindness toward all people. If we assume racism can be remedied through education, then we are assuming a privileged status for those who are educated, as if those with education are more virtuous or have a greater capacity to be good.

Myth 8: Racism will end as we have more and more interracial relationships. While it is important for our congregations to become more diverse, it will not be enough to end racism. Traci West, in her book Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women's Lives Matter, writes about her experiences as an African American in white congregations where she was repeatedly told that she had a beautiful voice, though she was actually self-conscious about not having a good voice. Because she was the only African American in these congregations, these awkward interactions and the assumptions behind them left West feeling even further marginalized.

Even within multicultural faith communities, racism has opportunities to operate. Sociologist Korie Edwards conducted a study of a multiracial congregation to see how whites and people of color negotiated their relationships in the church community. Edwards found that whites continued to remain dominant in power positions in the church, even when their percentage of overall membership declined to the point of being a minority within the church. In other words, racism exists even in multicultural contexts, and it is important to keep talking about it even when we have made significant progress in becoming a more integrated church and society. White people in particular need to continue to examine our own racism and how it may be at work even when we have a lot of interracial relationships.

Racism can continue to operate even within multicultural faith communities.

Myth 9: Racism is not something that impacts my friends of color. If your friends of color do not share with you their experiences of discrimination, it does not mean that such experiences have never happened to them. There are many reasons why persons of color may choose not to share such stories with others. Even if your friends of color tell you racism does not impact them, there are still many others for whom racism is a daily threat to their well-being.

A related sentiment is that people of color benefit from talking about racism-that they have a "race card" they can play to their advantage. Anne Cheng has written about the race card and its meaning for persons of color. She asks, "What does it mean that the deep wound of race in this country has come to be euphemized as a card, a metaphor that acknowledges the rhetoric as such yet simultaneously materializes race into a finite object that can be dealt out, withheld, or trumped?" She points out the irony that the liability of race has come to stand for an asset: a special card.

To respond to this sentiment, it can be helpful to highlight recent statistics about the impact of race on one's ability to secure a mortgage from a bank or pass wealth on to one's children, to be shown homes one is interested in buying or renting, to get interviewed for a job, or to live a long life with access to quality health care-or, conversely, one's likelihood of being stopped by the police.

Myth 10: Racial discrimination is against the law; what else can we do? While overt racial discrimination is outlawed, there are ways in which laws continue to enable such discrimination to take place. Michelle Alexander has argued that the harsh drug laws of the 1980s' War on Drugs have resulted in the mass incarceration of men of color through prison sentences and felony convictions that justify the same kind of discrimination allowed legally under the Jim Crow laws of 1877-1950: housing discrimination, job discrimination, and the inability to vote.

There are some state and federal laws that have been (or should be) put into legislation requiring greater accountability for police officers' use of deadly force. There are laws that can address the unequal sentencing practices and the detrimental effect of over-policing poor neighborhoods. More laws are certainly still needed, but laws will not be enough. The relationship between legislation and racism is always complex and yet interrelated. We need to advocate for greater racial justice in every area of our society and at all levels of government.

This exercise of naming ten myths and misperceptions about racism may help us better prepare for the challenges of talking about racism in white contexts.

Of course, the answer to these myths is not simply telling another person, "What you are saying is a myth." The solution is more difficult and more relational. It involves conversation, listening, and respect. The more we can help one another understand the complexity of the problem, the closer we can get to addressing it. Awareness of these myths helps us paint a more nuanced picture, inviting listeners to see more deeply the many facets of racism that contribute to the fissures in our community and inspiring change in congregations.
Read the author's list of ten strategies for preaching about racism in mostly white churches. A version of this article appears in the print edition under the title "Ten myths about racism." It was adapted from Carolyn B. Helsel's forthcoming book, Preaching about Racism: A Guide for Faith Leaders, just published by Chalice Press. Used by permission.

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Ten myths white people believe about racism

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It's not our problem. Education can fix it. Only extremists are...

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Quite frankly, the first book I've seen that provides an honest explanation for kids about the state of race in America today. --ELIZABETH BIRD, librarian

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Not My Idea: A Book about Whiteness a book by Anastasia Higginbotham

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An honest explanation about how power and privilege factor into the lives of white children, at the expense of other groups, and how they can help seek justice. --THE NEW YORK TIMES ONE OF HUFFPOST’S RECOMMENDED ANTI-RACIST BOOKS FOR KIDS AND TEENS **A WHITE RAVEN 2019 SELECTION** NAMED ONE OF SCHOO…

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Austin Channing Brown

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Scroll through social media, and you will be sure to find a million photos of Martin Luther King Jr, dressed up, holding hands with other Black Americans in gorgeous black and white photos. Above or below, Im sure you've seen captions that echo the sentiment: This is how protesting is done the correct way.

When I have posted support of the rebellion, I've personally received plenty of challenges like, "What would MLK do?"

Both types of posts serve to imply that there are easy answers to this present moment in history.

But I want to encourage us to Trouble The Narrative. It's time for you to move beyond simplistic, convenient narratives and wrestle with complexity and nuance.

It's easy to believe that the 1960s had only one leader, MLK, and that he led the perfect protests and that those protests are what led to change. As much as I honor King, that is entirely ahistorical. The 60s were filled with protests like King's but also rebellions (riots) like the ones we've seen over the last...

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Scroll through social media, and you will be sure to find a million photos of Martin Luther King Jr, dressed up, holding hands with other Black Americans in gorgeous black and white photos. Above or below, Im sure you've seen captions that echo the sentiment: This is how protesting is done the correct way.

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Dear White People, Stop Making Racism All About You

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Dear White People, Stop Making Racism All About You

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Here are 10 ways to talk about white privilege on social media without annoying people of color.

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Racism is a problem in the United States.​ Identify your own bias and help others explore theirs with this graduated scale.

Created by https://racismscale.weebly.com/

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Project Implicit, Harvard University

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On the next page you'll be asked to select an Implicit Association Test (IAT) from a list of possible topics . We will also ask you (optionally) to report your attitudes or beliefs about these topics and provide some information about yourself.

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Some Guidance for Talking with Kids about the Protests that are Sweeping this Country

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Some Guidance for Talking with Kids about the Protests that are Sweeping this Country

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©2020 TEACHERS COLLEGE READING AND WRITING PROJECT. CREATED: 5.31.20

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100 PICTURE BOOKS INCLUDING BLACK PEOPLE AND COMMUNITIES & WHY YOU NEED THEM

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100 PICTURE BOOKS INCLUDING BLACK PEOPLE AND COMMUNITIES & WHY YOU NEED THEM

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It Does Not Matter If You Are Good: On Omar Jimenez, George Floyd, Christian Cooper and the myth of being non-threatening.

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It Does Not Matter If You Are Good: On Omar Jimenez, George Floyd, Christian Cooper and the myth of being non-threatening.

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BY R. ERIC THOMAS, ELLE

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On Omar Jimenez, George Floyd, Christian Cooper and the myth of being non-threatening.

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11 Things White People Should Stop Saying to Black People Immediately

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11 Things White People Should Stop Saying to Black People Immediately

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Whenever a black youth like Michael Brown gets shot, or a racist blowhard like Donald Sterling gets exposed, many white people on and off the Internet react with remarks brimming with the ugliness of anti-black racism. And it absolutely has to stop.

More often than not, many white people resort to putting the onus back on the people who are experiencing the pain of racism. This tactic often derails the broader conversation, allowing white people to continue ignoring their own biases, and prevents a frank examination of the larger systems and powers accountable for enshrining the dehumanization of and discrimination against blacks and people of color. That larger system is white supremacy, a version of which has little to do with neo-Nazis or the KKK as most would assume.

A growing number of black people have been ruthlessly beaten, shot and killed by white police officers of late, a fact all too easy to gloss over for white people who will continue moving through American life with white privilege. White privilege means not having to deal with the disproportionate impact of police brutality, racial profiling and exclusion from everyday social settings and public accommodations.

Rather than tackle a thorny issue with tact and honesty, however, privilege also allows people to ignore the conversation, mock it or walk away from it altogether. But it doesn't have to be that way. Americans don't have to let this type of ignorance stop us from examining the many subtle, insidious attitudes and beliefs that help perpetuate racism through microaggressions - a term coined by African-American psychologist Chester Pierce and further developed by Derald Wing Sue and researchers at Columbia University to explain smaller instances of systemic, cumulative racial indignities.

Here are a few problematic examples that can be used to help elevate a much-needed dialogue as the images streaming out of Ferguson, Mo., bring us face to face with America's legacy of institutional intolerance.

1. "Why do black people have to make everything about race?"

If it seems as though black people talk about race so much, that's because America, as a government and as a power structure, has made everything about race, from the moment Columbus landed in 1492 to the recent shooting of Michael Brown at the hands of a cop with institutional power and privilege on his side.

White people will never fully understand how racism impacts the everyday lives of black people and people of color. That's because they benefit from a racial system that enshrines institutional racism and racial prejudice as the rule of law and social order.

For those who aren't already actively anti-racist, however, exercising empathy is a good place to start. Doing so means taking the lead from black people, listening to their stories of racialized pains and struggles, and reflecting on the ways privilege minimizes those hindrances for white people.

If the continuing conversation about racism upsets you, take a second to imagine what it's like for the black people who deal with racism everyday, and who are tired of thinking and talking about it, but discuss it anyway because for them, it's not just a dinner table dialogue.

2. "I don't have white privilege. Stop saying that I have white privilege."

White privilege isn't inherently about being raised in an affluent, two-parent home with high educational attainment and markers of upward mobility in American society. White privilege is the many built-in perks afforded to white people by virtue of being born with white skin and white ethnicity in a social and legal system that enforces white supremacy as the rule of law. It's not having to seriously think about or discuss how the situation in Ferguson will affect friends and relatives or even how a broader justice system will work to protect (or to not protect) the constitutional rights of black people.

White privilege is being able to walk away from the conversation, or to stop reading a piece about racism when it stirs up discomfort, rather than wrestling with the subject matter and owning up to personal biases and limits to understanding.

White privilege can be used for good too, of course, if those who wield it actively challenge the prejudices of their white friends and reject white supremacy. But as long as white people keep denying their privilege, white officers with badges and institutional power on their side will continue killing blacks with impunity.

3. "I'm not racist. I have black friends."

CNN via YouTube

Aside from the lazy logic of such a statement, this phrase describes the phenomenon wherein people use black people as accessories and distractions.

Having a black friend, or any relationship with a person of color, doesn't mean your everyday habits and politics are exempt from having racist implications. For proof, look no further than Donald Sterling, who told his girlfriend, a person of color, to stop bringing black people with her to basketball games because he feels blacks are inferior.

4. "These protesters speak so well, but they're such violent people."

AP

Most of the protests in Ferguson have been peaceful, but that fact hasn't stopped some characterizations from making it appear as though a race war is brewing. In effect, blacks are being typecasted as loud, irrational people who shouldn't be paid attention to, when they actually have valid concerns about the abuses from their local police force.

These types of remarks go hand in hand with an amazement about how poised, well-spoken and presentable some black protesters have been amid the chaos. In other contexts, "You speak so well" may sound like earnest praise, and sometimes it's received by black people as a commendation because of the apparent intent. However, more often than not, this sentiment is a backhanded compliment that assumes most black people speak with rudimentary grammar and communicate using "lesser" linguistic patterns such as Ebonics.

If a black person has great oratory skills, it's certainly possible to say so in a way that isn't infantilizing or denigrating. Talk about the content of the remarks and other communication dynamics they employed to be effective, but please do not assume that someone else's method of communication is automatically inferior just because it sounds different.

5. "You probably voted for Barack Obama just because he's black."

President Obama issued a statement on Tuesday regarding Brown's shooting death, and finally spoke Thursday about it as he would any other major policy issue, noting a Justice Department investigation already in progress, and that there's "never an excuse" for police brutality or excessive force against peaceful protesters.

Unlike many other presidents and political leaders before, Obama has a better understanding of black issues, given his lived experiences as a person of color and his education. But don't treat black people as though they can't make an informed political decision that uses a cost-benefit analysis, or even a pragmatic approach to politics, in order to cast their vote.

The vast majority of African-Americans vote for Democratic candidates like President Obama in major elections, but this is often because of a sense of " linked racial fate" - in other words, the candidate that represents the issues most relevant to the everyday lives of black people is most likely to win a disproportionate share of votes from black constituents. So it's not as much about skin color as it is about positions on issues, which is how most anyone else votes.

Otherwise, people like former Tea Party Republican congressman Allen West would have swept the the black vote in their elections, despite their problematic views on issues affecting black people.

6. "It's not fair that you all can say the n-word, but we can't."

The n-word has hundreds of years of slavery, segregation and institutional racism attached to it. But in recent decades, it's been reclaimed by black people, which now means that some blacks use it in a variety of different ways, often to refer to one another in a not-so-derogatory manner.

But just because some black people have reclaimed the word in their everyday vernacular, or even in their cultural productions, doesn't mean white people get to participate in that same reclamation. White people irrevocably lost that opportunity the day the n-word coincided with lynchings, whippings, mob beatings and police shootings.

7. "I'm clutching my purse or my wallet when you walk past, because I think you might steal from me."

Anyone of any race can perpetrate a mugging, or commit any other crime that involves physical or personal property. But because of how white overrepresentation in America's police departments and the justice system impacts the enforcement of laws, research shows there's a disproportionate impact on how blacks are caught and publicly held accountable for their wrongdoing. The situation in Ferguson mirrors that very reality, as the Los Angeles Times shows, based on a report from the Missouri attorney general's office about racial profiling in that state. That might explain why some people feel as though every time they hear about a violent crime or theft, they see a black mugshot or hear a name that "sounds" black.

It also removes accountability from larger social systems, such as the school-to-prison pipeline and the prison-industrial complex, that may put someone in a position where they must choose between not having basic needs and stealing from someone who can afford them. Instead, disproportionately white police departments pull out all the stops in a show of excessive force, protecting white privilege and white wealth in the process.

8. "I don't understand why you people..."

The phrase "you people" is coded language, a euphemism for the n-word, black people, outsiders or "the other." By being an outsider to whiteness and white supremacy, "you people" suggests that blacks (and other people of color) do not belong in the same rooms, venues or halls of power as white people.

9. "When I see you, I don't see race."

Color-blind racism is still racism. Without facing history and the present realities, it's impossible to understand how racism affects the everyday life of peoples of all races and ethnicities.

Almost everyone, save for those who ascribe to a racist system or retain deep-seated racial prejudice, wants to be able to unite across races, ethnicities and cultures to live in harmony. But with the systems and structures of previous generations still in place, which codify and promote racism in politics and everyday life, we're nowhere close to being post-race or being able to "not see" skin color.

But there are moments every day when that racial divide is bridged in a way that is mutually beneficial and even life-giving for all parties involved. For proof, take a look at this black family, which welcomed a white reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch into their home for safe shelter and sustenance while he reports about the situation in Ferguson. It's an illuminating example of what an authentic cross-cultural embrace can look like.

10. "If black men don't want to get stopped by police, maybe they shouldn't dress that way."

It shouldn't matter what a young person is wearing, or how they walk down the street, or how they talk, how they speak or where they come from. It doesn't matter if black men wear suits everywhere, or stop sagging their pants, or stop wearing hoodies - a "classy" dress code isn't going to stop police brutality.

In fact, many white young people wear the same kinds of clothing, yet are not subjected to the same kinds of the racialized subtexts. On average, a white man in a hoodie is less likely to be perceived as a threat by a police officer or concerned citizen. Indeed, the moment a self-appointed Florida neighborhood watchman named George Zimmerman thought he could accost and harass a black young man wearing a hoodie and jeans, the situation snowballed into that young man's death.

It is never the victim's fault. And no change of clothing will hold the people and systems accountable for murdering young black people.

11. "Racism ended in the 1960s. Stop making such a big deal out of nothing."

Jackie Summers via Twitter

This statement couldn't be farther from the truth. In fact, if you pay attention to news coverage, there's a laundry list of big and small issues proving that American racism is far from being a thing of the past.

The killings of Michael Brown, Renisha McBride, Jordan Davis, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and many other nameless, faceless black young people - all at the hands of police and whites - come at a time when black women like Marissa Alexander are simultaneously being denied the " stand your ground" defense and instead threatened with decades in jail for firing a warning shot at an allegedly abusive spouse.

When it comes to the reality in Ferguson, Mo., the images speak for themselves. And that unsavory reality begins with the family that Brown leaves behind, including a father and mother struggling with the pain of burying their son because of the very people who should be keeping them safe.
Image Credit: AP

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11 Things White People Should Stop Saying to Black People Immediately

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Whenever a black youth like Michael Brown gets shot, or a racist blowhard like Donald Sterling gets exposed, many white people on and off the Internet react with remarks brimming with the ugliness of anti-black racism. And it absolutely has to...

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Something Happened in Our Town: A Child's Story about Racial Injustice

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Something Happened in Our Town: A Child's Story about Racial Injustice

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Something Happened in Our Town follows two families -- one White, one Black -- as they discuss a police shooting of a Black man in their community. The story aims to answer children's questions about such traumatic events, and to help children identify and counter racial injustice in their own lives.

Includes an extensive Note to Parents and Caregivers with guidelines for discussing race and racism with children, child-friendly definitions, and sample dialogues.

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Something Happened in Our Town: A Child’s Story about Racial Injustice a book by Marianne Celano, Marietta Collins, Ann Hazzard, et al.

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A Minneapolis Children’s Theatre Company Original World Premiere Production A NEW YORK TIMES and #1 INDIEBOUND BEST SELLER American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom’s Top 10 Most Challenged Books A Little Free Library Action Book Club Selection National Parenting Product Award…

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27 THINGS WHITE PEOPLE SHOULD NEVER, EVER SAY TO THEIR BLACK CO-WORKERS

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27 THINGS WHITE PEOPLE SHOULD NEVER, EVER SAY TO THEIR BLACK CO-WORKERS

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While most agree these issues aren’t appropriate to discuss at work, they inevitably do come up. However, in order to keep the peace with their co-workers of color, it’s probably a good idea if our white colleagues tread lightly on matters that are really emotional and of consequence to the black community.

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27 Things White People Should Never, Ever Say to Their Black Co-Workers

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We asked our audience to post across Black Enterprise’s social media accounts things white people should never say to their black co-workers.

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Author Jason Reynolds shares a powerful message about racism and antiracism.

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We can’t have an honest reckoning about race until we start to recognize all the ways in which privilege and prejudice creep into our lives.

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We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide

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We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide

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Carol Anderson's White Rage took the world by storm, landing on the New York Times bestseller list and best book of the year lists from New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Chicago Review of Books. It launched her as an in-demand commentator on contemporary race issues for national print and television media and garnered her an invitation to speak to the Democratic Congressional Caucus. This compelling young adult adaptation brings her ideas to a new audience.

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Mapping Our Roles in a Social Change Ecosystem

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Mapping Our Roles in a Social Change Ecosystem

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Welcome to Solidarity Is, a project that generates tools, trainings, and narratives to facilitate transformative solidarity practices for movement building organizations and activists who are invested in meaningful social change.

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Implicit Bias -- how it effects us and how we push through | Melanie Funchess | TEDxFlourCity

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Implicit Bias -- how it effects us and how we push through | Melanie Funchess | TEDxFlourCity

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Everyone makes assumptions about people they don’t know. Melanie will teach us to recognize these assumptions and work toward a common understanding.

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Implicit Bias -- how it effects us and how we push through | Melanie Funchess | TEDxFlourCity

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This Comic Perfectly Explains What White Privilege Is

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This Comic Perfectly Explains What White Privilege Is

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This Comic Perfectly Explains What White Privilege Is

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Artist Jamie Kapp took to Tumblr with a succinct explanation of this complex issue.

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The Talk: Conversations about Race, Love & Truth

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The Talk: Conversations about Race, Love & Truth

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In the powerful follow-up to We Rise, We Resist, We Raise Our Voices, thirty diverse and award-winning authors and illustrators capture frank discussions about racism, identity, and self-esteem. Here is an invitation to all families to be advocates and allies for change. (to be released 9/29/2020)

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Bookshop: Buy books online. Support local bookstores.

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Sorry, the page you’re looking for doesn’t seem to exist. If you’re looking for a specific book, you may find it by searching by title or author below:

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Things Not To Say As a White Person When Talking About Racism

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Things Not To Say As a White Person When Talking About Racism

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Things Not To Say As a White Person When Talking About Racism (Updated) - Justine Larbalestier

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Not all white people are racist. True. Also irrelevant. Not all white people are racist but we all benefit from being white because we live in a world that is structured to give white people advantages and that makes whiteness the default. #notallwhitepeople is also an attempt to change the subject…

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It's Hard to See Racism When You're White

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It's Hard to See Racism When You're White

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Well, if you are actually interested in understanding racism and how it ties into cultural appropriation, please read instead of endlessly badgering PoCs on tumblr with your cliched, unoriginal arguments and repeating the same questions over and over.

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Check Your Privilege: Live into the Work

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Check Your Privilege: Live into the Work

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In this book, five social activists offer a window into their journeys of Living Into the Work. Learning from their relationships with anti-blackness, white supremacy, privilege, and discrimination, we feel empowered to brave the next step on our our Check Your Privilege journeys.

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Bookshop: Buy books online. Support local bookstores.

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Sorry, the page you’re looking for doesn’t seem to exist. If you’re looking for a specific book, you may find it by searching by title or author below:

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Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

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Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

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Invisible No More is a timely examination of how Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color experience racial profiling, police brutality, and immigration enforcement. By placing the individual stories of Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Dajerria Becton, Monica Jones, and Mya Hall in the broader context of the twin epidemics of police violence and mass incarceration, Andrea Ritchie documents the evolution of movements centered around women's experiences of policing.

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Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color a book by Andrea Ritchie and Angela Y. Davis

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“A passionate, incisive critique of the many ways in which women and girls of color are systematically erased or marginalized in discussions of police violence.” --Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow Invisible No More is a timely examination of how Black women, Indigenous women, and women…

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Resources for Further Research

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Understanding My Privilege | Sue Borrego | TEDxPasadenaWomen

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Understanding My Privilege | Sue Borrego | TEDxPasadenaWomen

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University Chancellor, Susan E. Borrego, reflects on her life as an emancipated minor and dissects the emotionally charged conversation surrounding race relations in the United States. This raconteur uses her powerful first-person account of "White Privilege" and "Black Lives Matter" to underscore the responsibility each one of us has to bring about change.

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Understanding My Privilege | Sue Borrego | TEDxPasadenaWomen

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Stop Asking People Of Color To Explain Racism – Pick Up One Of These Books Instead

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Stop Asking People Of Color To Explain Racism – Pick Up One Of These Books Instead

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#blacklivesmatter library, teaching, activism, and community resource list

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#blacklivesmatter library, teaching, activism, and community resource list

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23 BOOKS TO DEEPEN OUR COMMITMENT TO RACIAL JUSTICE

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23 BOOKS TO DEEPEN OUR COMMITMENT TO RACIAL JUSTICE

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Undoing racism takes work: a lifetime of learning hard truths, challenging systems, and asking questions that bring us closer to a just world. Where do you start?

FoodCorps is striving for a world where every kid in every school has access to healthy food. The health disparities that face kids in communities where we serve are a direct result of structural inequities and systemic discrimination based on race, place, and class.

We recognize how we have perpetuated these inequities in our work: there are times when we have fallen into patterns of white saviorism, for example, and leaned heavily on white-dominant organizational practices. Over the past year, we've begun to realize the extent of the harm we've contributed to in new and difficult ways. Mending this harm is complex work we take seriously; we're working toward building a service corps that reflects the communities we serve and a staff culture where everyone feels welcomed and included. Still, we realize we haven't figured it out yet, and that this is the beginning of what will be a long journey.

Part of our pursuit toward becoming an anti-racist organization involves some individual learning about how we contribute to, and benefit from, structural inequities. For many of our staff, that means reading up on racial justice-including books specifically about this topic as well as other works that center the stories of people of color. Here, we also recognize the importance of white-identifying staff educating themselves on the realities of racism in our world, rather than placing the burden on colleagues of color to teach them.

There's no shortage of inspiring, informative, and even challenging books on the realities of racism in America and around the world. Here are some of the books a few of us have read-or that have been recommended to us-as part of our quest to work toward racial justice together.
"This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color" edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa
Originally published in 1981, "This Bridge Called My Back" is a classic feminist anthology of works centering on the intersectional identities and experiences of dozens of women writers and artists of color.
"How to Be an Antiracist" by Ibram X. Kendi
From the publisher: "Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas-from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities-that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves."
"So You Want to Talk About Race" by Ijeoma Oluo
Ijeoma Oluo's book is an accessible but robust primer on race in America-including why it can be so hard to talk about racism, and how to confront that discomfort and talk about it anyway.
"For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood" by Christopher Emdin
Educator Christopher Emdin challenges the perception of "urban youth of color as unteachable," and instead provides both theoretical and practical guidance for white educators and others teaching in urban schools.
"The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table" by Minda Harts
Described as "Lean In for women of color," a career advice guide that considers how white privilege, microaggressions, and other mechanisms of racism prevent women of color from advancing professionally, and provides support to women of color navigating these systems.
"Juliet Takes a Breath" by Gabby Rivera
The sole young-adult fiction book on this list, this novel looks at issues of race, gender, and sexuality through the eyes of Juliet, a Puerto Rican lesbian from the Bronx exploring a summer internship in Portland, Oregon.
"Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race" by Beverly Daniel Tatum
This classic book examines the psychology of racial dynamics in America, with a particular eye toward how these dynamics play out for young people.
"When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir" by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele
This memoir from a founder of the Black Lives Matter movement takes a long look at the epidemic of police brutality and the formation of Black Lives Matter: "Condemned as terrorists and as a threat to America, these loving women founded a hashtag that birthed the movement to demand accountability from the authorities who continually turn a blind eye to the injustices inflicted upon people of Black and Brown skin."
"An African American and Latinx History of the United States" by Paul Ortiz
American history as it's taught in many high schools is often framed through a white-centric lens. This book challenges that default, offering "an intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights" using a variety of narratives and primary source documents.
"Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor" by Layla F. Saad
Layla F. Saad's book invites readers into an interactive reading experience focusing on the ways they uphold white supremacy in their lives, taking responsibility for this truth, and learning from it.
"The Color of Food: Stories of Race, Resilience and Farming" by Natasha Bowens
From the publisher: "Author, photographer, and biracial farmer Natasha Bowens' quest to explore her own roots in the soil leads her to unearth a larger story, weaving together the seemingly forgotten history of agriculture for people of color, the issues they face today, and the culture and resilience they bring to food and farming."
"The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" by Michelle Alexander
Legal scholar Michelle Alexander challenges the idea that the election of President Barack Obama signaled an end to racism in the United States, and instead posits the criminal justice system as "a contemporary system of racial control."
"The Nickel Boys," Colson Whitehead
This work of historical fiction is based on the real story of an abusive reform school for boys in Florida. In Colson Whitehead's version, two friends have different ideas about how to escape the injustices they suffer during the Jim Crow South of the 1960s.
"This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror" by Moustafa Bayoumi
A collection of essays, this work considers the "culture of fear and suspicion" that follows Muslim Americans in the United States and examines how Islamophobia plays out across institutions after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
"Black is the Body: Stories From My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, And Mine" by Emily Bernard
A collection of essays about the author's experiences with race: "Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably."
"Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land" by Leah Penniman
Soul Fire Farm is a community farm centering people of color and committed to "ending racism and injustice in the farm system." Farming While Black offers a manual for people of African heritage reclaiming their roles in the food system.
"The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority" by Ellen D. Wu
From the publisher: "The Color of Success tells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the 'yellow peril' to 'model minorities'-peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values."
"Queer and Trans Artists Of Color: Stories of Some of Our Lives" by Nia King
This collection of interviews has been described as containing "the future of QPOC art activism." It centers the ideas of queer and trans artists of color about what it means to survive and find success-and it's been expanded into additional volumes, too.
"Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism" by Safiya Umoja Noble
How search engines reinforce racism? UCLA associate professor Safiya Umoja Noble researched algorithms and bias for six years to learn about how search engine results uphold stereotypes about black people-as well as the human decisions responsible for creating these systems.
"The History of White People" by Nell Irvin Painter
From the publisher: "Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, illuminating not only the invention of race but also the frequent praise of 'whiteness' for economic, scientific, and political ends."
"On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" by Ocean Vuong
Another work of fiction on our list, poet Ocean Vuong's debut novel is an exploration of race, class, gender, and sexuality as it comes to light for a family grappling with the effects of war in their home country of Vietnam.
"Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race" by Reni Eddo-Lodge
Inspired by the author's viral blog post on the same subject, this book unpacks the author's frustration with "the way that discussions of race and racism in Britain were being led by those who weren't affected by it," and posits new ideas for thinking and talking about race.
"Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates
This powerful work is framed as a letter from the author to his adolescent son, sharing both the history and the modern burdens of racism as it manifests in the United States.
"Antagonists, Advocates and Allies: The Wake Up Call Guide for White Women Who Want to Become Allies with Black Women" by Catrice M Jackson
How do white women perpetuate racism against Black women? This book "delivers uncomfortable truths and painful realities about the conscious and unintentional pain you have inflicted on Black women" and shares how white women can use their privilege to eliminate racism.
"This Book is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake Up, Take Action, and Do the Work" by Tiffany Jewell
One more book for the young people in your life: Tiffany Jewell's book is an accessible overview of racism, privilege, and oppression and full of tools for dismantling systemic racism as well as challenging day-to-day instances of racism in life.

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25 Books to Deepen Our Commitment to Racial Justice

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Undoing racism takes work. That means reading up on racial justice and learning how we contribute to-and benefit from-structural inequities.

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One day in 1968, Jane Elliott, a teacher in a small, all-white Iowa town, divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and gave them a daring lesson in discrimination. This is the story of that lesson, its lasting impact on the children, and its enduring power 30 years later.

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(sirens wailing) >> NARRATOR: 27 years ago, when civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, grief and frustration erupted in America's cities.

And far away in Iowa, one third-grade teacher knew she had to do something.

>> The shooting of Martin Luther King could not just be talked about and explained away.

There was no way to explain this to little third graders in Riceville, Iowa.

I knew that it was time to deal with this in a concrete way, not just talk about it, because we had talked about racism since the first day of school.

>> This is a fact.

Blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people.

>> NARRATOR: It was a daring experiment in prejudice.

>> I watched wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third graders.

>> NARRATOR: Can one teacher in one day change the lives of her students forever?

Tonight, "A Class Divided."

>> August 1984.

A high school reunion brings some 50 former students to Riceville, Iowa.

Eleven of them, some with their spouses and children, arrive early for a special reunion with their former third-grade teacher, Jane Elliott.

>> Oh... (laughing) >> And this is my husband.

This is my husband Tom.

>> Tom... Brian?

(laughing) >> How are you?

>> Oh, fine, I'm just... Roy Wilson!

>> I made it!

>> You darling, oh, Roy!

>> Haven't been here in 14 years.

>> I'm so glad to see you.

(all talking at once) >> How are you doing?

>> Fine.

>> Long time since I've seen you.

>> Yeah, it has been.

>> Where are your little ones?

>> They're at home with Mama.

>> And this is your husband?

>> Yeah, that's Greg.

Greg Rollins.

>> Greg Rollins, nice to meet you.

>> NARRATOR: Fourteen years earlier, when they were students in her third-grade classroom, ABC News filmed a two-day exercise for a documentary, "The Eye of the Storm."

Now, at their request, they will see that film again and relive the experience of her unique lesson in discrimination.

>> ♪ God bless America, my home sweet home ♪ ♪ God bless America, my home sweet home.

♪ >> This is a special week.

Does anybody know what it is?

>> National Brotherhood Week.

>> National Brotherhood Week.

What's brotherhood?

>> Be kind to your brothers?

>> Okay, be kind to your brothers... >> ...like you would like to be treated.

>> Treat everyone the way you would like to be treated.

Treat everyone as though he was your... >> Brother... >> Brother.

And is there anyone in this United States that we do not treat as our brothers?

>> Yeah... >> Who?

>> Black people.

>> The black people.

Who else?

>> Indians?

>> Absolutely, the Indians.

And when you see, when many people see a black person or a yellow person or a red person, what do they think?

>> Look at that... dumb people.

>> Look at the dumb people.

What else do they think sometimes?

What kind of things do they say about black people?

>> They call them Negroes, niggers... >> In the city, many places in the United States, how are black people treated?

How are Indians treated?

How are people who are of a different color than we are treated?

>> Like they're not part of this world.

They don't get anything in this world.

>> Why is that?

>> Because they're a different color.

>> Do you think you know how it would feel to be judged by the color of your skin?

>> Yeah... >> Do you think you do?

No, I don't think you'd know how that felt unless you had been through it, would you?

It might be interesting to judge people today by the color of their eyes... would you like to try this?

>> Yeah!

>> Sounds like fun, doesn't it?

Since I'm the teacher and I have blue eyes, I think maybe the blue-eyed people should be on top the first day.

>> And up here?

>> I mean the blue-eyed people are the better people in this room.

>> Huh-uh.

>> Oh yes, they are... blue-eyed people are smarter than brown-eyed people.

>> Huh-uh.

>> My dad isn't that... stupid.

>> Is your dad brown-eyed?

>> Yeah.

>> One day you came to school and you told us that he kicked you.

>> He did.

>> Do you think a blue-eyed father would kick his son?

>> My dad's blue-eyed, he's never kicked me.

Ray's dad is blue-eyed, he's never kicked him.

Rex's dad is blue-eyed, he's never kicked him.

This is a fact.

Blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people.

Are you brown-eyed or blue-eyed?

>> Blue.

>> Why are you shaking your head?

>> I don't know.

>> Are you sure that you're right?

Why?

What makes you so sure that you're right?

>> I don't know.

>> The blue-eyed people get five extra minutes of recess, while the brown-eyed people have to stay in.

>> Ooh.

>> The brown-eyed people do not get to use the drinking fountain.

You'll have to use the paper cups.

You brown-eyed people are not to play with the blue-eyed people on the playground, because you are not as good as blue-eyed people.

The brown-eyed people in this room today are going to wear collars.

So that we can tell from a distance what color your eyes are.

On page 127... one hundred twenty-seven.

Is everyone ready?

Everyone but Laurie.

Ready, Laurie?

>> She's a brown-eye.

>> She's a brown-eye.

You'll begin to notice today that we spend a great deal of time waiting for brown-eyed people.

The yardstick's gone, well, okay.

I don't see the yardstick, do you?

>> It's probably over there.

>> Hey, Mrs. Elliott, you better keep that on your desk so if the brown people, the brown-eyed people get out of hand... >> Oh, you think if the brown-eyed people get out of hand, that would be the thing to use.

Who goes first to lunch?

>> The blue eyes.

>> The blue-eyed people.

No brown-eyed people go back for seconds.

Blue-eyed people may go back for seconds.

Brown-eyed people do not.

>> Why not the brown-eyes?

>> Don't you know?

>> They're not smart.

>> Is that the only reason?

>> ...afraid they'll take too much.

>> They might take too much.

Okay, quietly now... not a sound.

>> And it seemed like when we were down on the bottom, everything bad was happening to us.

>> The way they treated you, you felt like you didn't even want to try to do anything.

>> It seemed like Mrs. Elliott was taking our best friends away from us.

(playground whistle blows) >> What happened at recess?

Were two of you boys fighting?

>> Russell and John were.

>> What happened, John?

>> Russell called me names and I hit him.

Hit him in the gut.

>> What did he call you?

>> Brown eyes.

>> Did you call him brown eyes?

>> They always call us that... all the blue eyes call us that.

>> They say (taunting): "Come here, brown eyes"... >> They were calling us blue eyes.

>> I wasn't.

>> Sandy and Donna were... >> Yeah.

>> What's wrong with being called brown eyes?

>> It means that we're stupider and... well, not that but... >> Oh, that's just the same way as other people calling black people niggers.

>> Is that the reason you hit him, John?

Did it help?

Did it stop him?

Did it make you feel better inside?

Make you feel better inside?

Did it make you feel better to call him brown eyes?

Why do you suppose you called him brown eyes?

>> Because he has brown eyes?

>> Is that the only reason?

He didn't call him brown eyes yesterday and he had brown eyes yesterday.

Didn't he?

>> We just started this... >> ...yeah, ever since you put those blue things on.

>> They kind of tease him.

>> Oh, is this teasing?

>> No... when he did it, it was.

>> Were you doing it for fun, to be funny, or were you doing it to be mean?

>> Mean?

>> I don't know, don't ask me.

Did anyone laugh at you...?

I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating, little third-graders in a space of 15 minutes.

>> Yesterday, I told you that brown-eyed people aren't as good as blue-eyed people.

That wasn't true.

I lied to you yesterday.

>> Ooh boy, here we go again.

>> The truth is that brown-eyed people are better than blue-eyed people.

>> (laughter) >> Russell, where are your glasses?

>> I forgot them.

>> You forgot them.

And what color are your eyes?

>> Blue.

>> (laughter) >> Susan Ginder has brown eyes.

She didn't forget her glasses.

Russell Ring has blue eyes and what about his glasses?

>> He forgot them.

>> He forgot them.

Yesterday we were visiting and Greg said, "Boy, I like to hit my little sister as hard as I can, that's fun."

What does that tell you about blue-eyed people?

>> They're naughty... in fact, they fight a lot... >> The brown-eyed people may take off their collars.

And each of you may put your collar on a blue-eyed person.

The brown-eyed people get five extra minutes of recess.

You blue-eyed people are not allowed to be on the playground equipment at any time.

You blue-eyed people are not to play with the brown-eyed people.

Brown-eyed people are better than blue-eyed people.

They are smarter than blue-eyed people and if you don't believe it, look at Brian.

Do blue-eyed people know how to sit in a chair?

Very sad.

Very, very sad.

Who can tell me what contraction should be in the first sentence?

Go to the board and write it, John.

Come on, let's do it again, loosen up.

Up, up, up!

Come on.

That's better.

Now, do you know how to make a W?

Okay, write the contraction for "we are."

Now that's beautiful writing!

Is that better?

>> Yes.

>> Brown-eyed people learn fast, don't they?

>> Yeah.

>> Boy, do brown-eyed people learn fast.

Very good.

Greg, what did you do with that cup?

Will you please go and get that cup and put your name on it and keep it at your desk?

Blue-eyed people are wasteful.

Okay, want to be timed this morning?

>> Yeah.

>> I use Orton Gillingham phonics.

We use the card pack, and the children, the brown-eyed children were in the low class the first day and it took them five and a half minutes to get through the card pack.

The second day it took them two and a half minutes.

The only thing that had changed was the fact that now they were superior people.

>> You went faster than I ever had anyone go through the card pack.

Why couldn't you get them yesterday?

>> We had those collars on.

>> You think the collars kept you... >> We kept thinking about those collars.

>> My eyes kept rolling around.

>> Oh, and you couldn't think as well with the collars on.

Four minutes and 18 seconds.

>> I knew we weren't going to make it.

>> Neither did I.

>> How long did it take you yesterday?

>> Three minutes.

>> Three minutes.

How long did it take you today?

>> Four minutes and 18 seconds.

>> What happened?

>> Went down.

>> Why?

What were you thinking of?

>> This.

>> I hate today.

>> You do?

I hate it too.

>> Because I'm blue-eyed.

>> See, I am too.

>> It's not funny, it's not fun, it's not pleasant.

This is a filthy, nasty word called discrimination.

We're treating people a certain way because they are different from the rest of us.

Is that fair?

>> No.

>> Nothing fair about it.

We didn't say this was going to be a fair day, did we?

>> No.

>> And it isn't.

It's a horrid day.

Okay, you ready?

What did you blue... people who are wearing blue collars now find out today?

>> I know what they felt like yesterday.

>> I do too.

>> How did they feel yesterday?

>> Like a dog on a leash.

>> Yeah... like you're chained up in a prison and they throw the key away.

>> Should the color of some other person's eyes have anything to do with how you treat them?

>> No.

>> All right, then should the color of their skin?

>> No.

>> Should you judge people... >> No.

>> By the color of their skin?

>> No.

>> You're going to say that today.

And this week and probably all the time you're in this room.

You'll say, "No... Mrs. Elliott..." >> No... >> Every time I ask that question.

>> No, Mrs. Elliott.

>> Then when you see a black man or an Indian or someone walking down the street, are you going to say, "Ha ha, look at that silly-looking thing"?

>> No, Mrs. Elliott.

>> Does it make any difference whether their skin is black or white?

>> No.

>> Or yellow?

Or red?

>> No.

>> Is that how you decide whether people are good or bad?

>> No.

>> Is that what makes people good or bad?

>> No.

>> Let's take these collars off.

>> Here, Mrs. Elliott, you can have it.

>> What would you like to do with them?

>> Throw them away.

>> Go ahead!

Now you know a little bit more than you knew at the beginning of this week.

>> Yes... a lot... >> Do you know a little bit more than you wanted to?

>> (in sing-song): Yes, Mrs. Elliott.

>> This isn't an easy way to learn this, is it?

>> (in sing-song): No, Mrs. Elliott.

>> (teasingly): Oh, will you stop that!

>> (laughter) >> Okay, now let's all sit down here together, blue eyes and brown eyes.

Does it make any difference what color you are?

>> No.

>> Down, girl... >> (laughter) >> Oh, you found your friend, huh?

>> Okay, ready to listen now?

Okay, now are you back?

>> Yes!

>> Does that feel better?

>> Yes!

>> Does the color of eyes that you have make any difference in the kind of person you are?

>> (mockingly): No, Mrs. Elliott.

>> Does that feel like being home again, girls?

>> (mockingly): Yes, Mrs. Elliott.

>> (teasingly): Oh, will you stop it?

>> (laughter) >> CHARLIE COBB: This was the third time Jane Elliott had taught her lesson in discrimination.

The first, two years earlier, was in April of 1968.

>> On the day after Martin Luther King was killed, I... one of my students came into the room and said "They shot a king last night," Mrs. Elliott.

"Why'd they shoot that king?"

I knew the night before that it was time to deal with this in a concrete way, not just talking about it, because we had talked about racism since the first day of school.

But the shooting of Martin Luther King, who had been one of our heroes of the month in February, could not just be talked about and explained away.

There was no way to explain this to little third graders in Riceville, Iowa.

As I listened to the white male commentators on TV the night before, I was hearing things like "Who's going to hold your people together?"

as they interviewed black leaders.

"What are they going to do?"

"Who's going to control your people?"

As though this was... these people were subhuman and someone was going to have to step in there and control them.

They said things like, "When we lost our leader, "his widow helped to hold us together.

Who's going to hold them together?"

And the attitude was so arrogant and so condescending and so ungodly that I thought if white male adults react this way, what are my third graders going to do?

How are they going to react to this thing?

I was ironing the teepee... we studied an Indian unit, we made a teepee every year.

The first year the students would make the teepee out of pieces of sheet, we'd sew it together.

And the next year we'd decorate it with Indian symbols.

I was ironing the previous year's teepee, getting it ready to be decorated the next day.

And I thought of what we had done with the Indians.

We haven't made much progress in these 200, 300 years.

And I thought this is the time now to teach them really what the Sioux Indian prayer that says, "O great spirit, keep me from ever judging a man until I have walked in his moccasins," really means.

And for the next day I knew that my children were going to walk in someone else's moccasins for a day.

Like it or lump it, they were going to have to walk in someone else's moccasins.

I decided at that point that it was time to try the eye color thing, which I had thought about many, many times but had never used.

So the next day I introduced an eye color exercise in my classroom and split the class according to eye color.

And immediately created a microcosm of society in a third-grade classroom.

>> COBB: Riceville hasn't changed much in the 17 years since then.

It's still a small farming community surrounded by corn fields.

Its population is still under a thousand.

And it's still all white and all Christian.

And though Jane Elliott has continued to teach her lesson in discrimination, there has been little outward local reaction: no objections from school authorities or the parents of the 300-odd students who have by now been through it.

>> Okay, let's... let's get in a circle.

>> The reunion of her former third-graders was Jane Elliott's first chance to find out how much of her lesson her students had retained.

>> All right, now, Raymond.

Why...

I want to know why you... were so eager to discriminate against the rest of these kids.

At the end of the day, I thought, "the miserable little Nazi."

>> (laughter) >> Really, I just...

I couldn't stand you.

>> It felt tremendously evil.

You could... all your inhibitions were gone.

And no matter if they were my friends or not, any pent-up hostilities or aggressions that these kids had ever caused you, you had a chance to get it all out.

>> Yeah, I felt like I was... like a king, like I ruled them brown-eyes, like I was better than them, happy.

>> And you did it all day.

>> Yeah.

>> How did you feel when you were the out-group?

>> Boy, that day, after we went home... (laughs) ooh, you know, talk about hating somebody.

>> Yeah.

>> It was there.

>> You hated me.

>> Yeah... of what you were putting us through.

Nobody likes to be looked down upon.

Nobody likes to be hated, teased or discriminated against.

And it just boggles up inside of you... you just get so mad.

>> Were you just angry or was there more than that?

>> I felt demoralized, humiliated.

>> Is the learning worth the agony?

>> Yeah, it is.

>> Yes.

>> It made everything a lot different than what it was.

We was... we was a lot better family altogether, even in our houses we was probably, because it... it was hard on you; when you have your best friend one day and then he's your enemy the next, it brings it out real quick in you.

>> Some of the remarks were the kinds of things I would have wished I could have programmed into them, if I had been able to program them.

They are the things I would have wanted them to say.

Some of the things were just mind blowing.

>> You know you hear these people talkin' about, you know, different people and how they're, you know, different and they'd like to have 'em out of the country: "I wish they'd go back to Africa," you know an' stuff.

An' sometimes I just wish I had that collar in my pocket.

I could whip it out an' put it on and say, "Wear this, and put you... put yourself in their place."

I wish they would go what I, you know, do what I went through.

>> We was at a softball game a couple weekends ago and there was a black guy, "Hi Verla," you know... and we hugged each other and everything, and some people really looked just like, "What are you doin' with him?"

you know.

And you just get this burning feeling... sensation... in you that you just want to let it out and put them through what we went through to find out; they're not any different.

>> I still find myself sometimes when I see some people together and I see how they act... you know, I think, "Well, that's black."

And then right in the next second...

I won't even finish the thought, I'm saying, "Well, I've seen whites do it.

"I've seen other people do it.

It's not just the blacks."

It's... everyone acts differently.

It's just a different color is what hits you first.

And then later, as I said, I don't even finish that thought before I remember back when I was like that and then I remember not, you know... everyone acts the same way; it's just your way of thinking is the difference.

>> Like when my grandparents or somebody and they start talkin' about old times and they say, "the Japs" and all this an' that, and they start, you know, holdin' that against them.

I think, "How'd you like to have been them?

"Japanese-Americans get thrown into these camps just because they happen to be part Japanese."

You know, I...

I just said, "You, you calm down and think about it," but when they get older they're set in their ways and they're not gonna change.

>> When you get older?

>> I'll be set in my ways but they're different than their ways.

>> I was absolutely enthralled.

Sandy Dohlman's statements that "When my son comes home "with the word 'nigger' and the other things "that he hears downtown, I say to him, 'Listen, "that isn't the way we judge people.

"You don't judge people by how they look.

"You judge them by what's on their inside, not their outside.'"

>> I'm glad that she's teachin' them not to hate because even though he does hear this from the other people, he... if he goes home and he thinks, "Well, Mom and Dad like the black people; I'm gonna like 'em too," so I don't think he's gonna pick nothin' bad up out of it.

>> You chose your husband well.

>> (laughter) >> He chose me.

>> You chose her well.

>> (laughter) >> Little kids'll take it... you know, they'll listen to a lot of other people too, so they're gonna end up kinda confused over it.

>> But if she keeps on telling him.

>> Yeah.

>> Is he going to be the kind of person you kids are?

Or is he going to be the kind who judge people by the... >> Well, he'll know right... somewhat right from wrong.

>> He'll know that.

>> He'll know that he will.... >> ...but he'll have the, the ideas.

He won't be judging 'em by their color but he won't know what we know fully, having been through it.

>> He won't learn the collar thing.

>> The prejudice from us.

>> He won't... he won't learn prejudice first-handed.

>> Yeah.

>> He won't learn to be prejudiced from us, I mean, they won't learn to discriminate between people from us.

They may... he might hear it from others but never from us.

>> Okay, what's it like to be married to somebody like that?

>> (laughter) >> When I was gonna marry Sheila, I knew I... for my future that I was going into the military.

At first I thought, "Is she gonna be able to handle being with all the different nationalities?"

And then I read "The Storm"... read the book.

>> "A Class Divided."

>> "A Class Divided" before we got married and before I joined the Army, and I said, "Hey, she's not gonna have any problems."

>> Should every... should every child have the exercise or should every teacher?

>> Everybody.

>> Everybody, not just... >> Everybody who has... >> I think every school ought to implement something like this program in their early stages of education.

>> COBB: If Jane Elliott's lesson in discrimination changed the way these young people feel about discrimination and racism, it also had a totally unexpected result.

>> The second year I did this exercise I gave little spelling tests, math tests, reading tests two weeks before the exercise, each day of the exercise and two weeks later and, almost without exception, the students' scores go up on the day they're on the top, down on the day they're on the bottom and then maintain a higher level for the rest of the year after they've been through the exercise.

We sent some of those tests to Stanford University to the Psychology Department and they did sort of an informal review of them, and they said that what's happening here is kids' academic ability is being changed in a 24-hour period.

And that isn't possible but it's happening.

Something very strange is happening to these children because suddenly they're finding out how really great they are and they are responding to what they know now they are able to do.

And it has happened consistently with third graders.

>> COBB: The film made of Jane Elliott's third graders in 1970 has been widely used with students and teachers... and by government, business, and labor organizations concerned about human relations.

Perhaps the most unusual use of it is here, at Green Haven Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Stormville, New York.

Here, in a sociology course taught by Professor Duane W. Smith of Duchess Community College, his almost exclusively black and Hispanic classes have been seeing the film for more than ten years.

>> What I'd like to do is introduce the subject of prejudice and discrimination through this film called "The Eye of the Storm."

>> Blue-eyed people are smarter than brown-eyed people.

>> Huh-uh.

>> They are cleaner than brown-eyed people.

>> Huh-uh.

>> They are more civilized than brown-eyed people.

>> FILM NARRATOR: Sandra and her brown-eyed friends didn't like that day, but Raymond did.

>> I felt like I was a king, like I ruled them... >> Do you think the children, by this process, really learned the meaning of discrimination?

>> Most of the children, before the film started, they had played and lived together in harmony and a certain action coming from the teacher and seeing the teacher as an authoritarian figure and someone to respect, they accepted the views that was being given to them.

But I think that at the end of the lesson they could clearly see that prejudices and other forms of discrimination are things that people build within their minds.

They are not actual physical barriers that say, "Yo, you can't cross the street."

>> The one kid I could really agree with was, at recess, he was a brown-eyed kid.

He had this inner turmoil against this feeling of being divided or prejudiced against where he would hit another kid that he's known for so many years in the gut.

Whether... he also stated that it didn't help any, so that automatically should be a lesson to every adult in the world.

Violence doesn't help any, and, you know, this is a film that I hope my children get to see.

>> COBB: Unlike New York, Iowa is 98% white Anglo-Saxon; yet even here, minority groups account for more than 20% of the prison population.

To make sure its prison system employees are sensitive to the concerns of this large minority, the Iowa Department of Corrections last fall hired Jane Elliott to give her lesson to some of them.

The group, which included prison guards and parole officers, was told only that it would be attending a day-long workshop.

David Stokesbery.

>> Most of our training you go to, people give you information and you learn that way.

>> Blue-eyed?

>> When I first came with the sign-up and such and got put in the group, I didn't know... when I started seeing the signs around, you know, "brown-eyes only" and such, I figured they were the better group because they had a lot of spaces available and there were none for the blue-eyes.

So when I got put in the blue-eyes group and put the collar on, I knew then that I was going to be in the deprived group, I guess.

>> Okay, now you can stay in this area... >> The workshop was supposed to begin at 9:00.

They took the brown-eyes in about 9:00 and left us standing in the hall.

I literally stood because there weren't enough chairs and I didn't know whether I wanted to fight to take a chair down, I didn't know if somebody would come and take the chair away from me if I did.

>> COBB: While David Stokesbery and the other blue-eyed people waited, inside the meeting room, Jane Elliott prepared the brown-eyed people for what was going to happen.

>> Now this is not something I can do alone.

This exercise won't work without your cooperation.

Blue-eyed people aren't allowed to smoke, blue-eyed people aren't allowed to sit in these empty chairs.

Do not let a blue-eyed person sit next to you.

You know you can't trust them and besides which they don't smell good.

Everybody knows that about blue-eyed people.

You don't know what you can catch from a blue-eyed person.

>> By 9:20, I felt some antagonism.

I'm stuck out here for 20 minutes standing, waiting.

>> I still say we ought to see what kind of a reaction we'd get by everyone just simply going in.

Anyone who wants to do it?

>> Nobody seems to have courage in their conviction.

They do a lot of talking but nobody takes any action.

>> Maybe we should oppose it by all singing a song or doing something really loud, you know.

>> "We shall overcome"?

>> Yeah.

All right (laughter).

>> I need to have you keep it down.

I don't know how many times I need to give that instruction, but you need to keep it down so you don't bother the people in the, in the workshop.

>> I was pretty well ticked off by the time we got taken in there.

>> ...purses and overcoats in the corner.

I need to have you put your purse and your coat in the corner.

>> It would be to your advantage in the future, people, if you'd get to meetings on time.

It would also be to your advantage if you'd put your gum away.

>> I'll leave.

>> Put your gum away.

>> I'll leave.

>> Do you want to get paid for today?

>> Uh-huh.

>> Well, then stay, but put your gum away.

>> I don't have a purse, so I don't have any place to put my gum.

>> I'm sure that you are inventive enough to find a place for the gum.

Now I'd like for you to notice where she put her gum.

You have this problem with blue-eyed people.

You give them something decent, and they just wreck it.

You'll also notice that blue-eyed people spend a lot of time playing "Look at me, "see how cute I am, I can be funny.

"I can make a joke of this.

This is amusing, I'm amused by this."

Another thing that is obvious about blue-eyed people is that they are poor listeners.

The first thing you have to do when you get... when you are teaching in a segregated situation, when you're working in a segregated situation, is teach the listening skills.

The listening skills are: number one, good listeners have quiet hands, feet and mouths.

Everyone needs to write these down.

I'd like for you to look at the man in the back, in the black jacket.

The game we're playing is, playing it cool.

This is a favorite blue-eyed game, playing it cool.

"Nobody can bother me, man.

"I can handle this.

I don't have to do this.

I'm gonna ignore this whole thing."

Number two, good listeners keep their eyes on the person who is speaking.

I take it you don't have a pencil?

>> No.

>> Nor you?

>> No.

>> Perhaps you could borrow one from one of your neighbors.

Sir, I realize that you feel that you don't need to write it down, but whether or not you write it down, perhaps you could remember it.

>> I'll borrow a pen.

>> Good listeners have quiet hands, feet and mouths.

Do you know what that means?

>> I'm not sure.

>> I believe that.

Do you want me to explain it to you?

>> No, that's okay.

I'll get a pencil and write this down directly.

>> Look, blue-eyed people, all... many of you have pencils.

Will one of you please lend him a pencil?

Or don't you trust him?

Which I can understand.

From the last ten minutes, what have you observed about blue-eyed people?

>> Blue-eyed people are very stubborn, very self-centered, and wish to control as much of their surrounding as possible, people-wise I mean.

Very inconsiderate people.

I don't even know why you have them here in the first place.

>> We have them here because we are required to have them here.

>> We, we have to, huh?

>> This is one of the things you have to put up with.

>> Oh.

>> Number three, good listeners listen from the beginning to the very end.

Okay, good listeners decide to learn something.

And this is the thing you'll have the most difficulty with with blue-eyed people.

They decide not to learn something.

Some of you have had trouble with blue-eyed people in your home environment.

Some of you have had trouble with blue-eyed people in your workplace.

Does anybody have an example of that that they'd like to talk about?

Anyone?

>> Yeah.

I have two nephews, and one is blue-eyed, and one's brown-eyed.

And the blue-eyed one, like, he never cleans his room, and he's real lazy.

And the brown, you know... and he doesn't seem to have a lot of energy, the blue-eyed one.

But the brown-eyed one, he's real outgoing, and he plays in sports and he's pretty good at it.

And, he just seems like a better kid.

So if I have kids, I hope they have brown eyes.

>> You, are you married?

>> No.

>> Then it's a good thing you don't have kids, isn't it?

>> Right.

>> Then you will know what to do when, when you choose a mate.

>> Right.

>> Would you like to read that first listening skill to me?

>> I haven't got it on my paper yet.

>> Oh, why is that?

>> I haven't borrowed the pencil to write it down as yet.

>> And you think it's unnecessary?

>> Well, at this particular point, yes, I do.

>> Why?

>> Well...

I, I have it in my head for the most part.

>> There's a lot of space up there for it, isn't there, friend?

Do you suppose you could tell me what it is?

>> It has something to do with keeping your hands and feet still, as I recall.

>> Has something to do with that.

>> (laughter) I find it interesting that you're amused by our having to stand here and wait for this man to do something that everybody else has already done.

I find that highly interesting.

Stupid, but interesting.

If, if you are in a situation where someone is constantly, constantly refusing to do what the people in authority ask them to do, what do you know about them?

What do you know about that person?

>> Well, I think it's a game with them.

Attention.

>> Has it gained anything for this gentleman?

>> Disrespect from, I think, the brown-eyed people.

>> Has it proven anything to brown-eyed people?

>> Yes.

It, this is a typical trait of a blue-eyed person.

>> Now read the second one.

>> I don't have the second one.

Can I read it off hers?

>> You don't have the second one, either?

>> No.

>> You have, you were keeping it in your head.

What happened to that plan?

>> Just the, just the first one I had in my head, not the second one.

>> Oh, the other three aren't important?

>> Well, they're probably important.

>> But not important enough for you to write down, right?

>> Well, they're important.

I should've written them down, most probably.

>> Most probably?

Does anybody back there know?

You don't have it written down either?

I want you to take a look at these two so-called gentlemen.

Now, we need to hear the good listening skills from you.

I don't want you to think that I'm badgering you boys.

But on the other hand... >> I don't think that.

>> On the other hand, you're here to learn something.

And if you learn nothing else today, it would be nice if you would learn the listening skills.

What do you know now about brown-eyed people that you didn't know before... about blue-eyed people that you didn't know before you came in here?

>> I'm finding I'm gonna have to explain things a bit more explicitly to a blue-eyed person than I would to a brown-eyed person.

>> How many times did I have to repeat the listening skills for Roger?

>> Well, brother Roger is having a rough time today, isn't he?

It was about six or seven different times.

>> You think that's amusing, Roger?

>> Apparently somewhat amusing.

>> COBB: As part of the lesson, the Corrections Department employees took a written test.

>> All right, I need these names and the scores.

>> I have K.R., eleven.

>> I'm sorry I can't hear you.

>> K.R., just initials, eleven.

>> K.R., just an initial?

No last name?

>> No names.

>> How many?

>> Eleven.

>> And Churdin, or Charles, I'm not sure.

>> Thank you, sir.

>> Tell me the name again.

>> Uh... Churdin?

>> You can't read the name?

>> No, I can't.

>> It's probably mine.

>> What's your name?

>> My name is Chambers.

>> First name?

>> Jeanine.

>> And what was her score?

>> Six.

>> Next?

>> E. Riley, with a five.

>> E?

>> E. Riley?

>> Will E. Riley please stand?

>> It's mine.

>> You know, it's... what you do to the image of blues with your behavior is unfortunate.

What you three people do to the image of women, with your behavior, really makes me angry.

The fact that you do this kind of thing and this kind of sloppy work reflects badly on women.

I resent that doubly.

Yes?

>> Ma'am, I'd really appreciate it if you'd call us by name.

When you say "you three people," we don't know who you're speaking to.

It could be anyone here.

>> My dear, if you wanted me to call you by name, you'd have put your name on your paper.

>> It's on my coat.

>> It was to be on your paper.

>> You didn't see my papers, ma'am.

>> I didn't get your name either, because it wasn't on your paper.

>> That's right.

>> All right.

Now how could one call you by your name if you don't care enough about your name to put it on your paper?

Don't expect me to... >> You don't know how to read?

>> Don't expect me to worry about it if you don't put it on your paper.

Don't sit here and say "My name is important to me" after you have just deliberately not put it on your paper.

>> I don't remember saying my name was important to me.

I remember saying, "I'd like to know who you're speaking to," when you say "you three."

>> Then what should you do?

>> Ask you to use my name, which I did.

>> And where should your name have been?

>> Right where it is... >> On your paper?

>> ...and on my birth certificate.

>> Is it on your paper?

>> No, ma'am.

>> Where'd you get a birth certificate?

>> Same place you got yours.

>> Out of a slot machine, same as you did, lady.

>> I think you're probably right about your own.

>> At least I know who my parents are, ma'am.

>> Is she being rude?

>> Yes.

>> Is she being inconsiderate?

>> Very.

>> Is she being uncooperative?

>> Very.

>> Is she being insultive?

>> Yes.

>> Are all those the things that we've accused blue-eyed people of being?

>> Yes.

>> Is she proving that we're right?

>> Yes.

>> Does anyone have any comments to make at this point?

>> Do you feel that there are important blue-eyed people?

>> There are exceptions to every rule.

>> And what are those exceptions?

>> There are a few important blue-eyed people.

>> Very few.

>> You said that.

>> Do you think that you are one of them?

>> No.

>> That's good.

>> Then why are you up there then?

>> I'm blue-eyed.

The difference between you and me is, I have a brown-eyed husband and brown-eyed offspring, and I've learned how to behave in a brown-eyed society.

And when you can act brown enough, then you, too, can be where I am.

>> I wouldn't want to be where you are.

>> Are you certain?

>> Absolutely positive.

>> You like where you are?

>> I love where I am.

>> You like it so much that you don't even identify yourself on your paper.

>> I don't need to, lady.

>> Her using the term "lady" where I'm concerned, what do you think she's trying to do?

Is it ignorance, or is it deliberately insulting?

>> I would say it was deliberately insulting.

>> If it's ignorance, she needs to be taught that to many of us, the word "lady" is a pejorative.

I don't appreciate it.

It is, it's a put-down.

And it's used to keep women in their place.

>> I promise in the future to call you by the correct name.

>> I'm sorry.

>> I will call you by the correct name after this.

I won't be kind.

>> That was kindness on your part?

>> Yes, I think to call someone a lady is a kindness.

>> Then your problem is ignorance.

>> You can call me "lady" any time you like.

>> I wouldn't do that to you.

>> No, I know you wouldn't.

>> I really wouldn't.

I, I think that, and that's part of the problem.

Is a total lack of awareness at what sexism amounts to and how much you contribute to the sexism that keeps you where you are.

>> I like where I am, lady.

I did it again, didn't I.

>> Yes.

>> I'm getting kind of fed up with this whole bunch of garbage.

>> Why?

>> Brown-eyed peoples are no different than we are.

I hate to tell them that.

They have these false delusions and such.

>> Are they being disruptive?

>> No, you trained them very well.

I think that's what they did with the storm troopers in Germany, also.

You guys do a real good job sitting up there.

>> You think that what's happening here today feels like it would have felt to be in Nazi Germany?

>> Yes.

>> Where, where do you think you are in that then?

>> Where do I think I am?

>> Who are you?

If you're in Nazi Germany, who are you?

>> Ah, the Jews?

>> COBB: After a break for lunch, Jane Elliott helped the Corrections Department employees analyze what had happened.

>> Did you learn anything this morning?

>> I think I learned from the experience a feeling like I was in a glass cage and I was powerless, there was a sense of hopelessness...

I was angry, I wanted to speak up and yet I... at times I knew if I spoke up, I'd be back in a powerless situation, I'd be attacked.

A sense of hopelessness.

Oppression.

>> Had you experienced that before?

>> I realized this morning that there were very few times in my life that I've ever been discriminated against.

Very few.

>> And you were this uncomfortable in an hour and a half?

>> I was amazed at how uncomfortable I was in the first 15 minutes.

>> Can you empathize at all then with blacks, minority group members in this country?

>> I'm hoping better than before.

>> If we tried to argue with you you would use just the mere argument as reason for us being lesser than the brown-eyed folks, you know, you couldn't win.

>> Yeah, but don't we do that every day?

>> I think some do, yeah, but I would hope that I never get so unreasonable.

I... you know, the statements you were making were groundless and such, and yet we couldn't argue with them because if we argued then we were argumentative and you know, not listening and getting out of our place and all that stuff.

And that was frustrating to me.

And then frustrating to me was the other... the little green tags who were sitting on their hands.

My group here was...

I didn't think boisterous enough in our opposition to the whole thing.

>> Why didn't you people support one another?

Why didn't the blue-eyed people... the blue-eyed people on this side just sat there.

And let's face it, you covered your asses.

Right?

Why did you just sit there?

>> I think that's symptomatic of the problem as a whole.

We see that, you know, in society in general.

We see a few people who are making a lot of noise and the rest of the people sitting back waiting to see what they're going to do.

>> Okay, as long as I was picking on him, I was leaving you alone, right?

>> Right.

>> I'd say a lot of people accept that.

They let... have a few people do their fighting for them and they stand back and if this person's going to win, then they'll get on this side.

But if that person's not going to win, they'll stay back over here, you know.

That's just how it works.

>> If you were in a real situation where you had to do something about racism, would you stand up and be counted?

>> What I would do I don't know.

It would depend on... >> But you would do something.

>> I would have to do something.

I couldn't go home tonight and face my kids if I didn't.

>> How did you brown-eyed people feel while this was going on?

>> A sense of relief that I wasn't a blue-eyed person.

>> Sense of relief that you had the right color eyes.

>> Right.

>> Absolutely.

>> I really understood, at least I felt that I understood what it was like to be in the minority.

>> Why were you angry?

>> First of all, because it was unreasonable.

Secondly, because I felt discriminated against.

Thirdly, I think that all of us, everyone in this room has dealt with discrimination on both sides.

You don't have to be black or Jewish or Mexican or anything else to have felt discrimination in your life, and as you become an adult you learn to deal with those feelings within yourself and you learn to handle those.

And when you feel yourself in a situation that you can't get out of, which we couldn't... we were a captive audience and it was not a normal situation because normally you aren't badgered.

>> What if you had to spend the rest of your life this way?

>> I don't know how to answer that.

>> You don't wake up every morning knowing that you're different.

You wake up as a white woman who is going to her job at 8:00 or whatever.

Where a black person is going to wake up knowing from the minute they get up out of the bed and look in the mirror, they're black and they have to deal with the problems they've had to deal with ever since they were young and realize that I am different and I have to deal with life differently.

Things are different for me.

And I don't think you can really say that you have felt... maybe you have felt some sort of discrimination, but you haven't felt what it is like for a black woman to go through the daily experiences of arguing and saying, "Listen to me, my point of view is good," you know, "what I have to offer here is good."

And no one wants to listen because white is right, that's the way things are.

>> I think the necessity for this exercise is a crime.

No, I don't want to see it used more widely, I want to see it... the necessity for it wiped out.

And I think if educators were determined that we could be very instrumental in wiping out the necessity for this exercise.

But I want to see something used.

I'd like to see this exercise used with all teachers.

All administrators.

But certainly not with all students unless, unless it's done by people who are doing it for the right reasons and in the right way.

I think you could damage a child with this exercise very, very easily, and I would never suggest that everybody should use it.

I think you could have training classes for teachers, bring them in, put them through the thing, explain what happened, do the de-briefing and then practice doing this until teachers... until a group of teachers were able to do it on their own.

And I... teachers are not disabled learners.

They could learn to do this obviously.

If I can do it, most anyone can do it.

It doesn't take a super teacher to do this exercise.

>> COBB: What began in a third-grade classroom has spread from students to teachers to corrections officers.

At the center is still a single teacher determined to inoculate her students, both young and old, against the virus of bigotry.

>> After you do this exercise, when the de-briefing starts, when the pain is over and you're all back together and you're all one again, you find out how society could be if we really believed all this stuff that we preach.

If we really acted that way, you could feel as good about one another as those kids feel about one another after this exercise is over.

You create instant cousins.

I thought maybe that lasted just while they were in my classroom because of my superior influence, but indeed these kids still feel that way about one another.

They said yesterday... over and over the remark was made, "We're kind of like a family now."

They found out how to hurt one another and they found out how it feels to be hurt in that way and they refuse to hurt one another that way again.

And they said, "We're kind of like a family now," and indeed we were.

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FRONTLINE | A Class Divided | Season 1985 | Episode 9 | PBS

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One of FRONTLINE's most requested programs -- a teacher's lesson in discrimination.

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Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School

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Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School

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Leading experts offer concrete and realistic strategies for dealing with race in schools in a groundbreaking book that should become required reading for every teacher in the country.

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Dear fellow white people: Here’s what to do when you’re called racist

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Dear fellow white people: Here’s what to do when you’re called racist

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/dear-fellow-white-people-heres-what-to-do-when-youre-called-racist/2019/08/20/6e31941a-beda-11e9-b873-63ace636af08_story.html

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IN LESS THAN TWO MINUTES, THIS CLIP FROM 'BLACK-ISH' EXPLAINS WHY RACISM IN AMERICA ISN’T OVER

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IN LESS THAN TWO MINUTES, THIS CLIP FROM 'BLACK-ISH' EXPLAINS WHY RACISM IN AMERICA ISN’T OVER

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The scene is a simple family discussion around the living room TV, but for one minute and 30 seconds, Anthony Anderson transforms it into a profoundly moving meditation on police violence, the hope Barack Obama’s election represented, and the reality of being black in America.

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"Let's say they listen to the cops and get in the car," Anthony Anderson's character Dre said Feb. 24 on black-ish, referring to his kids, if they were to be arrested.

"Look what happened to Freddie Gray."

The scene is a simple family discussion around the living room TV, but for one minute and 30 seconds, Anthony Anderson transforms it into a profoundly moving meditation on police violence, the hope Barack Obama's election represented, and the reality of being black in America.

Racism is still a live issue in the United States, and on Feb. 24, black-ish explained why. Watch below:

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In Less Than Two Minutes, This Clip From 'black-ish' Explains Why Racism in America Isn't Over

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Racism is still a live issue in the United States, and on Feb. 24, black-ish explained why.

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Can We Talk about Race? AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS IN AN ERA OF SCHOOL RESEGREGATION

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Can We Talk about Race? AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS IN AN ERA OF SCHOOL RESEGREGATION

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In this ambitious, accessible book, Tatum examines some of the most resonant issues in American education and race relations.

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Skip to Main Content (Press Enter)

"What Tatum seeks to do above all is trigger sometimes challenging discussions about race, and infuse those discussions with a reality-based focus on how race affects us all. Her latest book does that beautifully, asking touch questions, and patiently, inclusively seeking answers."- Boston Globe

"Ten years ago, Tatum's book asked the question, ' Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?' Her latest book follows up with a broader question about the nation's readiness to talk honestly about the forces that continue to make race such a thorny issue . . . A probing and ambitious start to a series of books to prod national discussion on issues of race, education, and democracy."-Vanessa Bush, Booklist

"Four research-rich, concisely written essays on race and education, including examinations of the 'resegregation of our schools,' the need for educational curricula and staff that respect the diverse communities they serve, [and] the challenges of interracial friendships . . . What Tatum seeks to do above all is trigger sometimes challenging discussions about race, and infuse those discussions with a reality-based focus on how race affects us all. Her latest book does that beautifully, asking tough questions, and patiently, inclusively seeking answers."-Chuck Leddy, Boston Globe

"Another thoughtful, personal and provocative book that will encourage discussion about many of the difficult issues still surrounding race in America-in and out of the classroom."-Marian Wright Edelman, president, Children's Defense Fund

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Can We Talk about Race? by Beverly Tatum: 9780807032855 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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Major new reflections on race and schools-by the best-selling author of "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?" A Simmons College/Beacon Press Race, Education,...

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Philip Nel: "Was the Cat in the Hat Black?" | Talks at Google

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Philip Nel: "Was the Cat in the Hat Black?" | Talks at Google

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Philip Nel is an academic who discusses the hidden messages of race within children’s books. His latest title, Was the Cat in the Hat Black?, presents five serious critiques of the history and current state of children's literature tempestuous relationship with both implicit and explicit forms of racism.

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Was the Cat in the Hat Black? | Philip Nel | Talks at Google

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This video provides a crash course in how to identify and overcome white fragility in order to a) improve our racial literacy, b) become better allies, and c) amplify black and brown voices in the interest of achieving equality and justice for people of color.

Source material: Diangelo, Robin. "White Fragility," The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 2011. Read the full article here: http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/view/249

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Anti-racism work is an ongoing, everyday process of active allyship, listening and learning. In that spirit, the Resource Sharing Project provides a round-up of some of our favorite resources to aid in your journey to undo racism in your coalition and community.

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Resources Archive - Resource Sharing Project

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Connecting You with Resources and New Possibilities

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Anti-Racism For Kids 101: Starting To Talk About Race

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Anti-Racism For Kids 101: Starting To Talk About Race

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If you’re nervous about talking about race with your kids, these books about racial diversity will give you an easy place to start destigmatizing difference & celebrating racial diversity.

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[Image description: Illustration from All Are Welcome by Alexandra Penfold & Suzanne Kaufman. Children of various races and faiths pointing to locations on a world map.] If you're nervous about talking about race with your kids, these books about racial diversity will give you an easy place to start destigmatizing difference & celebrating racial diversity. Bold and *marked books are written or illustrated by #OwnVoices makers of color. Raising Luminaries is free and accessible for readers who can't afford a paywall. Donate or shop using an affiliate link via| Paypal | Venmo | Ko-fi | Buy a t-shirt | Buy a book Anti-Racism For Beginners: Part 1 Acknowledging & Celebrating Racial Diversity Posts may contain affiliate links, which allow me to earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Check out the full affiliate disclosure along with my statement of accountability. If you're into supporting libraries (please do!) more than consumerism, you can also support my work directly:

...

" How do I teach my kids to be anti-racist when I'm still learning myself?"
- Anonymous, Books For Littles Facebook Group (archived)

...

It's normal to get flustered when when our children talk about race. But if we let nervousness keep us silent and still, our fear becomes a weapon.

Growing up, I was told that discrimination would magically disappear if we stop acknowledging racial difference. All people are the same. Skin color doesn't matter. Only bad people are racist. If we are all nice and well-behaved, racism will go away.

This is the fallacy of colorblind ideology. It's a tool to keep us complicit in white supremacy. Don't be a tool.

We must talk about race with young kids. Racism thrives in silence.

When we refuse to talk about race at an early age, children absorb our silence as shame. We're taught that if we have nothing nice to say - say nothing at all. Well - white folks are aggressively silent when it comes to race! Does that mean that being Brown or Black is something to be ashamed of?

Kids pick up when we refuse to acknowledge racial difference - and how we treat people of color. Why are we surprised then, to see nice, well-behaved children reflect unconscious bias against people of color, then grow into adults who blame people of color for violence and harm against them?
(It's your job to be that adult.)
Your child needs at least one adult to speak truth to BS about racial assumptions.

My White mother who openly talked about race from birth - and how society would perceive and treat me because of my multiracial heritage. She raised me to understand that discrimination against me was not my fault. Violence would happen to me because of my race, my gender, my class but it wasn't caused by me - it was caused by white supremacy.

The Mominator refused to let me internalize the idea that I deserved racism. To do that, she first needed to acknowledge my race and the fact that I would have obstacles in life that white kids didn't.

We can help our children understand racism - and empower them to work toward racial equality.

Raise kids of color to feel proud of their culture and their right to self-advocate.

Raise white kids to recognize their duty to stand up against injustice.

But first, you've gotta acknowledge that racial differences - even though they are an imaginary, human-imagined construct, exist as a real thing in our society, with real-life impact on real-life people.

Start by telling our kids that yes - we do see skin color and racial identities.

For folks who were never given space to talk about racism and discrimination as kids (or even racial diversity), it's scary to start. We don't want to say the wrong thing and mess it up.

No worries, we are going to start very gently with non-controversial, easygoing books that just show kids that racial diversity exists. In future collections, we'll get into more emotionally loaded topics - like racial discrimination, racial privilege, colorism, and the subtle tools that uphold white supremacy, such as white fragility and respectability politics.

And this diversity is glorious.

Acknowledge & Celebrating Racial Diversity

From two anonymous BFL members:

"My daughter came home saying she didn't like her brown skin and wanted white skin and 'bright' hair instead. I'm looking for books that reinforce pride in who she is."

"My white daughter said to me the other day, 'I don't like dark skin. ' I ran to the internet to research books like these."

Yikes.

Use these comments as learning opportunities. Read these books to discuss biases they've absorbed during a quiet time home together (story time!) Encourage kids to speak bias aloud so they can hear how ridiculous it sounds, think about where it comes from, and realize how it develops.

When children point out that they like particular skin tones, body shapes, or hair textures more than others - don't shout at them or insist they are wrong. Kids this age can't untangle feelings from fact. Shaming them for a gut reaction is just going to get them to clam up.

Instead, help them untangle bias from fact on their own. Ask why they feel this way. Use in an open, non-judgemental tone. Keep asking questions to unpack these assumptions. We're not here to tell them what to think, we're here to model critical thinking about racial bias moving forward.

Discuss how all bodies are good bodies - how we differ, and what we have in common.

All Are Welcome, *Lovely, We're Different, We're The Same

Acknowledge & Celebrate Cultural Diversity

When we over-simplify racism, we tell kids that racism is simply bias against people based on skin color - it's not.
How do we counter the entrenched dominant narrative's focus on whiteness?
(That's colorism, another problem we can tackle later.)

Racism expands beyond skin color - it's assumptions and discrimination against individuals and groups of people, based on racial identity. This includes not just skin color, but also cultural norms and behavior, language, and other markers of racial and ethnic identity.
*On The Day You Begin, *Where Are You From?, *Alma And How She Got Her Name
White supremacy is assuming that racism would be over if people of color just assimilated and acted more like white people, that assimilation is even a goal for people of color, and that non-white culture is deviant or inferior to whiteness.

Read stories that show how people of color are not monolithic - we're complex individuals who can't be reduced to the caricatures of mainstream media. Our ethnic heritage is something valuable worth exploring, and our ancestors traditions, achievements, and challenges have an impact on who we are today.

But our race and ethnicity is not the only thing that defines us. Show kids how we all have a right to pride in our heritage - just not at the expense of punching down another culture.

Not pictured: *Islandborn is another lovely book, which I recommend with reservations. In 2018, several survivors came forth about Junot Díaz's problematic behavior toward women. One of these reports has been shown to have been overblown - but I'm not comfortable with the way we're dismissing all survivors of his actions because of this. The book itself is great - so I'll let you decide how to move forward with all that on your own.

Explain How Diversity Makes Us Stronger

Having a broad range of experiences to draw from, mindsets to brainstorm, and abilities to solve the problems facing humanity is a very good thing. Human diversity is good for all of humanity and evolution and stuff. I am pretty sure this is SCIENCE.

The idea that winnowing humanity into one make-believe-super-race, or segregating us all into silos based on our racial identity sounds ABSURD. Right? RIGHT?!

Obviously some families are not absorbing the fact that genetic diversity is good for society and the fate of humanity, so we have to make this clear. That whole 'melting pot' assimilation thing our teachers celebrated 20 years ago turned out to be a bad idea.

What we need is more of a chunky stew, with folks proudly retaining and celebrating our individual racial and cultural identities while cognizant of the challenges and discrimination many groups face. These books help kids see how diversity makes us stronger.

Stay Curious, Stand Brave & Talk About Race

Don't stop here. Now that your kids understand that human skin, hair, and all of that stuff comes in a broad change of colors, shapes, and textures - help them see how all people deserve basic human rights, respect, and kindness.

Click here for part 2 of raising Anti-Racist Kids - Children's Books That Teach Kids About Social Power & Paternalism

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Anti-Racism For Kids 101: Starting To Talk About Race - Books For Littles by Raising Luminaries

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Books to help kids to unpack racial bias so they can hear how ridiculous it sounds, think about where it comes from, and realize how it develops.

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"White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"

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"White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"

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By Peggy McIntosh

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White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
Downloadable PDF © 1989 Peggy McIntosh "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" first appeared in Peace and Freedom Magazine, July/August, 1989, pp. 10-12, a For use in a bound volume there will be a copyright fee. McIntosh's lists must not be taken out of their autobiographical contexts. These articles may not be electronically posted except by the National SEED Project. publication of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Philadelphia, PA.
I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.

Through work to bring materials from Women's Studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are over-privileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to improve women's status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't support the idea of lessening men's. Denials which amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages which men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened or ended.

Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of white privilege that was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that 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.

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in Women's Studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about white privilege must ask, "Having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?"

After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive.

I began to understand why we are justly seen as oppressive, even when we don't see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.

My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow "them" to be more like "us."

I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those conditions which I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic location, though of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can see, my African American co-workers, friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place and line of work cannot count on most of these conditions.

1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

2. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.

3. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.

4. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.

5. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.

6. When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.

7. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

8. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.

9. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods that fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who can cut my hair.

10. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.

11. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.

12. I can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.

13. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.

14. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

15. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.

16. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world's majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.

17. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.

18. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to "the person in charge," I will be facing a person of my race.

19. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven't been singled out because of my race.

20. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children's magazines featuring people of my race.

21. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared.

22. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of race.

23. I can choose public accommodations without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.

24. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.

25. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones.

26. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have them more less match my skin.

I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote it down. For me, white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one's life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.

In unpacking this invisible knapsack of white privilege, I have listed conditions of daily experience that I once took for granted. Nor did I think of any of these perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think that we need a more finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for some of these varieties are only what one would want for everyone in a just society, and others give license to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant and destructive.

I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a pattern of assumptions that were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turf, and I was among those who could control the turf. My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I could think of myself as belonging in major ways and of making social systems work for me. I could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely.

In proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made inconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit, in turn, upon people of color.

For this reason, the word "privilege" now seems to me misleading. We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work systematically to overempower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one's race or sex.

I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred systemically. Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. Others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups.

We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages, which we can work to spread, and negative types of advantage, which unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies. For example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege for a few. Ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few have it, it is an unearned advantage for them. This paper results from a process of coming to see that some of the power that I originally saw as attendant on being a human being in the United States consisted in unearned advantage and conferred dominance.

The question is: "Having described white privilege, what will I do to end it?

I have met very few men who are truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like me is whether we will be like them, or whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance, and, if so, what will we do to lessen them. In any case, we need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the U.S. think that racism doesn't affect them because they are not people of color, they do not see "whiteness" as a racial identity. In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.

Difficulties and dangers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantages associated with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage which rest more on social class, economic class, race, religion, sex, and ethnic identity than on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking, as the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977 continues to remind us eloquently.

One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both active forms, which we can see, and embedded forms, which as a member of the dominant group one is taught not to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.

Disapproving of the systems won't be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitudes. But a "white" skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate, but cannot end, these problems.

To redesign social systems, we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these taboo subjects. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.

It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.

Although systemic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me and I imagine for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the perquisites of being light-skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.

*This is an authorized excerpt of McIntosh's original white privilege article, "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women's Studies," Working Paper 189 (1988), Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley College, MA, 02481.
© 2010, Peggy McIntosh - Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley, MA
Some Notes for Facilitators on Presenting My White Privilege Papers

1. My work is not about blame, shame, guilt, or whether one is a "nice person." It's about observing, realizing, thinking systemically and personally. It is about seeing privilege, the "up-side" of oppression and discrimination. It is about unearned advantage, which can also be described as exemption from discrimination.

2. Please do not generalize from my papers. They are about my experience, not about the experiences of all white people in all times and places and circumstances. The paragraph in each paper before the list begins says this, and also allays fears of white people that a paper on white privilege will call them racist.

3. Keep "the lists" in their autobiographical contexts. It is a matter of scholarly integrity and accuracy not to claim more than I did. I compared my own circumstances with some of those of African American women I worked with. Being clear about this will actually increase your effectiveness as a facilitator. You can say, "This is from just one white woman coming to see she's white in her time and place and workspace. . . .She's writing about herself, not you."

4. The work goes best when you draw on participants' own personal experiences, not their opinions. Opinions invite argumentation. Telling about experience invites listening. Opinions tend to bring on conflict, whereas shared experiences tend to elicit curiosity and empathy. When participants move from experiential testimony to opinion, bring them back, knowing that most schooling discourages testimony.

5. When exploring privilege, it is useful to use "Serial Testimony," a disciplined mode in which each participant gets to respond in turn, uninterrupted, for, say, one minute, timed. I call this "the autocratic administration of time in the service of democratic distribution of time."

6. But without rigorous use of a watch or timer, Serial Testimony can be as undemocratic as any other form of discussion.

7. Understand that every participant has an intricate "politics of location" (Adrienne Rich) within the systems of social power. For example, all people in a workshop or class will have a lifetime of experiences of both advantage and disadvantage, empowerment and disempowerment, overwhelming or subtle, within many different systems of power.

8. Recognize that all people are both located in systems and also uniquely individual.

9. Co-presentations and panels of people speaking about their experiences one after another can be very effective. I do not usually arrange for "dialogues," since I feel they are often a veiled form of debating and fighting, rather than listening and learning. I discourage "crosstalk" after panels unless it further clarifies and respects what the panelists have said. This is what Peter Elbow called playing the "The Believing Game."

10. My lists of the unearned privileges I have relative to my colleagues are not "check lists" or "questionnaires." They are not "confessional readings."

11. Please draw attention to the specificity of "my sample." I compared my circumstances only with what I knew of the circumstances of my African-American female colleagues in the same building and line of work. This sample is very specific with regard to race, sex, region, location, workplace, vocation and nation.

12. Behind and within my examples are institutions that bear on my experience such as schools, the police, the IRS, the media, the law, medicine, business.

13. Do not get trapped in definitions of privilege and power. They lack nuances and flexibility.

14. Invite people to make their own autobiographical lists of privilege, for example, about:

15. Beware of gym-exercises which position people in only one aspect of their identities, asking them to step forward or backward from a baseline at a given prompt.

16. Urge participants to avoid self righteousness and preaching to family and friends about privilege, especially if it is something they have just discovered themselves. Explain the word "systemic." Help participants or students to think about what it is to see society systemically, and structurally, rather than only in terms of individuals making individual choices.

17. Think about why U.S. people, especially White people, have trouble seeing systemically. Explain the myth of meritocracy: that the unit of society is the individual and that whatever one ends up with must be whatever that individual wanted, worked for, earned, and deserved. Why do you think this myth survives so successfully, suppressing knowledge of systemic oppression and especially of its "up-side,"systemic privilege?

18. Help participants to strengthen three intellectual muscles: a) the ability to see in terms of systems as well as in terms of individuals; b) the ability to see how systemic discrimination , the downside, is matched by systemic privilege, the upside; c) the ability to see many different kinds of privilege systems.

19. You can argue that work on privilege in schools and universities makes people smarter, not necessarily better. Academic institutions do not claim that making us better is their primary goal, but accurate thinking is a goal they claim to foster.

20. When I present, or co-present with a person of color, on Privilege Systems, whether or not I am the first to speak, I usually:

tell how I came to see men's privilege and their obliviousness to it, which made me see laterally to my own race privilege and my obliviousness to it;

read some examples from my white privilege list, and sometimes read some of my heterosexual privilege list, class privilege list, Christian privilege list, and lists of privilege relative to Asian Americans, Indigenous people, Latino/as, etc.;

analyze some of the different misreadings of my paper by white people and people of color;

raise the question of how I can use unearned advantage to weaken systems of unearned advantage, and why I would want to.

The co-presenter and I take equal time to testify about how we came to see privilege systems in and around us. After this, we use Serial Testimony. We form either small circles of people, or pairs, to respond, in turn, uninterrupted, for one minute each, to the following prompts:
Round one: What are one or more ways in which you've had unearned disadvantage in your life?
Round two: What are one or more ways in which you've had unearned advantage in your life?
Round three: What is it like for you to sit here and talk about and hear about these experiences of unearned advantage and disadvantage?

Round three is like a debrief in itself. Any further debrief should be only on new learnings from the exercise. Random discussion of the exercise usually leads away from experience to generalizations and repetitions of the same opinions people came into the session with.

Some people "get" the idea of systemic privilege and ask "But what can I do?" My answer is, you can use unearned advantage to weaken systems of unearned advantage. I see white privilege as a bank account that I did not ask for, but that I can choose to spend. People with privilege have far more power than we have been taught to realize, within the myth of meritocracy. Participants can brainstorm about how to use unearned assets to share power; these may include time, money, energy, literacy, mobility, leisure, connections, spaces, housing, travel opportunities. Using these assets may lead to key changes in other behaviors as well, such as paying attention, making associations, intervening, speaking up, asserting and deferring, being alert, taking initiative, doing ally and advocacy work, lobbying, campaigning, protesting, organizing, and recognizing and acting against both the external and internalized forms of oppression and privilege.

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"White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" and "Some Notes for Facilitators" - National SEED Project

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White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack Downloadable PDF © 1989 Peggy McIntosh 'White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack' first appeared in P...

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A Look at Implicit Bias and Microaggressions: A primer on the impact of implicit biases in schools and how they can be expressed by students and faculty.

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A Look at Implicit Bias and Microaggressions: A primer on the impact of implicit biases in schools and how they can be expressed by students and faculty.

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CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE TEACHING

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A Look at Implicit Bias and Microaggressions

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A primer on the impact of implicit biases in schools and how they can be expressed by students and faculty.

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Beyond the Hashtag: How to Take Anti-Racist Action in Your Life

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Beyond the Hashtag: How to Take Anti-Racist Action in Your Life

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In this op-ed, Zyahna Bryant — a Charlottesville-based activist, organizer, and social impact strategist — offers insight into how people can take anti-racist action.

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Anti-racist work isn't easy, and amid the COVID-19 crisis, things look a bit different than they used to. But there are still powerful ways to show up.

Educate yourself!

Reading the work of Black scholars who break down issues of the justice system, policing, and prison abolition are great places to start. Some of my personal recommendations include works by Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Michelle Alexander, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Ida B. Wells, and The 1619 Project, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Resources like the Abolitionist Futures conference, the Prison Culture blog, and the African American Intellectual History Society have compiled extensive reading lists on policing, incarceration, and the racism baked into both systems. Other groups, including Critical Resistance, have published documents like an " Abolition Organizing Toolkit." And in Minneapolis, MPD150 is a group of local grassroots organizers pushing for the abolition of the city's police department, and it also has a handy zine for frequently asked questions about abolition.

Invest time and resources in on-the-ground community abolitionist efforts.

In the current situation in Minneapolis, these efforts can include Freedom Funds like the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which directly supports activists and organizers who are doing work on the ground. The Minnesota Freedom Fund is "supporting a movement constellation of formations," according to its Twitter, where they also advise donating to the Black Visions Collective, Reclaim the Block, and Unicorn Riot. Respect the leaders on the ground who have been doing the work and leading the way. As documented by the National Bail Fund Network, freedom and bond funds exist all over the country, and they need support even when police brutality isn't in the headlines.

Get involved locally.

This is an important national conversation that gets renewed every time another city is seized by racist horror, but good politics start locally. Sign yourself up for a local listserv or organization that is working to create a lasting organizing infrastructure in your community. If you need help getting started, look for local news reports of anti-racist protest actions, find out who is organizing them, and if you can support their ongoing work.

Uplift and center the voices of the most marginalized people.

In all conversations, it is crucial that we uplift and center the voices and experiences of the people who are most impacted by these issues. Lift up and listen to people like Tami Sawyer, Da'Shaun Harrison, Delaney Vandergrift, Clarissa Brooks, Bree Newsome Bass, and many others. Say the names of Black women who often go unheard of and unseen on major news and media platforms, and make room for Black women to speak for themselves.

Take action in your own life.

Name and call out racism, misogynoir, transphobia, homophobia, queerphobia, fatphobia, and white supremacy in all its forms. It may be uncomfortable to confront your parents, your boss, your teacher, or your peers, but that's no excuse not to do it. Fighting oppression is uncomfortable work by its nature, and working to make change in the systems you're already a part of is as important as plugging into conversations about systems you don't interact with regularly.

Why does it matter?

It is important to be part of building the organizing infrastructure in our communities so that the next time there's another hashtag mourning another death, we already have the playbook to act. We have the leaders and gatekeepers (who do the work) positioned to continue to lead in a sustained way, but they need the support of everyone who wants to see an end to these racist systems.

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Activist and organizer Zyahna Bryant offers advice on anti-racist activism in the wake of George Floyd's death.

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From Teaching Tolerance

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Learning for Justice provides free resources to educators-teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners-who work with children from kindergarten through high school.

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75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice

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75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice

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106 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice

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Note 1: This article was last updated on February 5, 2022.
Note 2: Our work is to fix what we broke and left broken. The work isn’t done…

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From the podcast, On Being with Krista Tippett

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Krista Tippett, host: Eula Biss authored an important essay in 2015 called "White Debt." She reflected on whiteness in America through the metaphor of buying a house - how surprisingly comfortable debt can be in the right circumstances, and how easily we forget that we don't actually own what we feel we possess. She helpfully opens up words and ideas like "complacence," "guilt," and something related to privilege called "opportunity hoarding." This show has been turned to by many in this moment and so we are offering it up anew. It is the only on-air conversation I've ever had in which my guest and I had to stop midway and acknowledge how embarrassing it is that we have to have this conversation at all, and how inadequate all of our words. Yet how urgent that we reach for them nevertheless. Rereading the essay that introduced me to her, I'm struck by sentences that have now revealed their deepest, hardest truths in my community in Minneapolis and across our nation. She wrote:

"Whiteness is costing me my community. It is the wedge driven between me and my neighbors, between me and other mothers, between me and other workers. Like a bad loan, the kind in which the payments increase over time, the price of whiteness remains hidden behind its promises."

I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being

Tippett: And about how we live together as opposed to just how we talk together.

Biss: Yeah. I think if you can't talk about something, you can't think about something. I've worked with students who could barely let themselves think, they were so scared of thinking the wrong thing.

Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.

[ music: "Seven League Boots" by Zoe Keating]

Eula Biss teaches writing at Northwestern University and is best known for her book On Immunity. She's also the author of Notes From No Man's Land, which deals in part with her experience growing up in a multiracial family. We spoke in 2016.

Tippett: I really want to frame our conversation around ideas that you pulled together so compellingly in this article you wrote in The New York Times in December 2015 called "White Debt: Reckoning with what is owed - and what can never be repaid - for racial privilege."

I realized, as I read that you've actually been living and thinking around this subject for a long time. And in fact, as you wrote in your Notes from No Man's Land, it very much centers around themes of race, and you actually have, in your family, a cousin who's of mixed race. There are mixed race adoptions in your family. In fact, most of our families, if we traced them fully, we would probably find this. But your mother's long-time boyfriend when you were a teenager was African American.

Biss: I do try to resist the idea that there's something unique or special about the kind of racial makeup of my family because I feel like that supports this idea that only people who are racially other have an entryway into race. I guess that's my preamble to the answer.

And the answer is that I think you're right. I think most American families are in one way or another somewhat racially complicated. Mine was maybe especially so. My household when I was growing up was mixed. My stepsister was black, my stepfather was black. So I was exposed to people from a lot of different backgrounds, but I don't think that that is, in America, all that unusual either.

Tippett: One thing I love about this article you wrote and about your writing in general is that you interrogate words, individual words, language that always appears in this conversation that we don't really know how to have - interrogating language as a way of searching for a better understanding so that "whiteness" is there. One of the other words that you take apart - you say that the word "complacence," as you looked at the roots of that word, the etymology of that word, that in fact it did not mean what you expected it to mean, and that also is a way to reflect on this.

Biss: I was looking for a word that would describe a kind of blindness that wasn't even willful. When I looked at the meaning of the word "complacent," it actually looked more intentional than the meaning I was searching for. Because I think that that's part of the problem is the attitude is highly unintentional. It's highly unexamined. It's relaxing into your own privilege without even thinking about it. And that, again, is one of the privileges of being white, is that you can coast through your experience, you can coast through your life without having to think about what your race means to other people, and what your existence in a community means to the people around you.

Tippett: You cite this essay by Claudia Rankine that she wrote in The New York Times Magazine after the massacre in the church in Charleston. She wrote, "I asked another friend what it's like being the mother of a black son. 'The condition of black life is mourning,' she said bluntly. For her, mourning lived in real time inside her and her son's reality. At any moment, she might lose her reason for living. Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black."
And you wrote, "Sitting with her essay in front of me, I asked myself what the condition of white life might be." I know that word "complacence" is something that you reflected on, but I wonder how would you think about that question right now, what the condition of white life might be, how to start to summarize that or to evoke that.

Biss: Well, I guess my mind, it goes right to the particulars. That moment that you read made me think of a meeting that I was recently in at my son's elementary school, I think, because of Claudia's friend talking about her son, and the question of how to keep him safe. I was at a meeting that was parents discussing how we were going to bring the issue of talking about race to the school community. And there was a huge range of experience in this room. There were parents who had not talked to their children about race at all, and there were parents for whom it was a daily concern.

There was a Kenyan woman there who was saying that the way her children looked every day had everything to do with how dangerous she understood it to be black in America. She talked about the way she dressed her two children and the way she taught them to talk to strangers and the way she taught them to act in public. And I was thinking about how few of those concerns I had shared, especially around safety. I haven't spent time training my son in ways of being polite, for instance, because I'm afraid that someone will kill him. That doesn't directly answer your question, but it points back towards the state of white life, or the state we're in.

Tippett: Yeah. I live in a placid, kind of high-functioning, Leave It to Beaver neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, the kind of neighborhood where you can - I moved here because your kids can get on their bicycle on a Saturday morning and not come back until dinnertime. You don't ever worry about them. But right around the corner from my house, five blocks from my house, Philando Castile was shot. But the fact that we have to talk about this with our kids, because somehow, even though we are inhabiting our cities together, we're not having the same experience. It's very complicated and disturbing when you start to look at it that way.

Biss: It is. It really is. And an article came out in Bloomberg News that was making the rounds of conversation in my neighborhood. It was an article about Evanston Township High School, which is the high school that serves everyone in Evanston. So it's necessarily a highly integrated high school. And a series of studies, one of them done at Stanford and another done within the Evanston school districts, found that in these integrated schools that we have in Evanston, black students and white students are not getting the same education.

This is even within the same buildings, with the same teachers, within the same physical space. And it's still unclear exactly what the nature of the problem is, but one of the phrases that came up in this article, one of the researchers used a phrase "opportunity hoarding." They use this phrase to describe what white parents do to make sure that their children are getting more than other children are getting.

And I really thought about both the opportunity hoarding that I had seen around me and the opportunity hoarding that I, myself, had engaged in. One example of opportunity hoarding that I'm just remembering from this article was that, for instance, something a little over 90 percent of white students at Evanston Township High School have taken at least one advanced placement class. And the numbers for African-American students are around 50 percent. There's many more white students, a disproportionate amount of white students ending up in advanced placement classes.

There are probably a lot of factors that feed into that. There's parent advocacy, there's probably some racial bias going on on the part of the school, there's probably dozens of different factors. But I think the reason that that term "opportunity hoarding" spoke to me is I thought, well, that's something I can control for. Like, that's something I can watch in my own behavior. That's something that I could have conversations with my neighbors around, and how we're treating the opportunities that are available to our children, and whether we're ensuring that those opportunities are available to all the children in our community.

Tippett: And don't you think, also - I mean, that's a kind of an unsettling phrase, "opportunity hoarding."

Biss: Yeah. Oh, deeply.

Tippett: But it also when it comes to our children, there's such a fierce drive that we have to give them the best, to make things possible for them. It's not, I think, consciously about wanting them to flourish at the expense of someone else. But what you're pointing out and what that language makes clear is that in fact, that is what happens. Maybe I'm wrong that it's always unconscious.

Biss: Yeah, and especially when we're talking about limited resources, if those limited resources are hoarded, it necessarily means somebody isn't getting them. This thinking got refreshed for me when I bought a house here in Evanston. Buying a house and getting a mortgage inspired me to do a little bit of research into housing laws and the history of redlining in my community and the history of housing discrimination and mortgage discrimination in Chicago.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has written really beautifully about this, especially in his piece, "The Case For Reparations." He very elegantly lays out a history of legalized housing discrimination. Some of his examples, his particulars, come from Chicago. And when you look at that history, you can see a highly-intentional and entirely legal history of white people hoarding both real estate and financial resources like mortgages at the expense of other people.

Even in the case of predatory lending, there are people making money at the expense of African-American families who lose their houses because of the unfair loans that they've been given, the poor terms of lending. Buying a house was another moment where I felt that I was kind of forced to reflect on how I was benefiting personally from a long history of racist policies in my country.

[ music: "The Winter Day Declining" by This Patch of Sky]

Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, I'm with the writer Eula Biss, and we're talking about whiteness.

Tippett: I was just speaking with Isabel Wilkerson, who wrote The Warmth of Other Suns, and very much to that point, she talks about when there was this exodus of 6 million African Americans in the 20th century from the South to the North. They could only live in certain places, and those certain places turn out to now be our inner cities and were charged exorbitant rates because they had no choice. That is in the DNA of our cities, you're right. The buying of the house was the image that you worked with in this New York Times piece and really delving into the meaning of debt and the experience of debt - and moral debt as well.

Biss: The moral debt. I knew for a long time that I wanted to write about the feelings I was having around buying and owning a house and getting a mortgage. But what broke that piece open was a conversation with my neighbors who had lived in Germany. One of my neighbors mentioned to me that the word for "debt" in German is also the word for "guilt." That was very illuminating for me. And I have, for a long time, wanted to think about white guilt in a way that could be productive, both personally productive, but also socially and politically productive. As a term, "white guilt" is pretty poisonous.

Tippett: Or even the notion of white privilege. Well, what I experience - we're very attentive to editorially when we put shows on the air around race, around these issues - you want people to listen. And I personally don't think people get paralyzed or turn away because they don't care. I mean, maybe it's true that sometimes they don't care, but there's a paralysis that sets in, right? It's about, "I don't know what to do with this. I don't know how to make it better." And I think that's one reason one doesn't put "guilt" in a show title. [ laughs]

But I think you're arguing for not letting guilt be a bad word, honoring the fact that - I mean, you wrote, "Why not imagine guilt as a prod, a goad, an impetus to action? Isn't guilt an essential cog in the machinery of the conscience?" Maybe we should try to let this word in, welcome this word in this conversation about race. I honestly think we talk about race when we talk about how we don't know how to talk about it. It's not even really like we do have a national conversation about race. And maybe because we don't let the word "guilt" in. I mean, maybe that's important.

Biss: And I do think - circling it back to this question of, "What's the state of white life?" I do think the state of white life is that we're living in a house we believe we own but that we've never paid off. I also think that maybe the language that people could find more palatable would be this word "responsibility," this word that we associate with adulthood and drudgery. [ laughs]

Tippett: Yeah, rather than shame.

Biss: But that's another coloration of guilt, is that there's that meaning of the word "guilt" that gestures at responsibility. Because I am culpable for this, I am now responsible for...

Tippett: Culpable for and benefiting from, right?

Biss: Yes. Exactly. And I think a lot of people want to wash their hands because the benefit has been indirect, right?

Tippett: And in a lot of cases, the culpability can feel indirect too, but it doesn't make it right. [ laughs]

Biss: Right. Absolutely. I have the unusual situation of living in a house - the house that we bought here in Evanston has an identical twin that's right next door to it. We live in a little brick bungalow that is right next door to an identical brick bungalow. These two brick bungalows were built by brothers, and neither of those brothers live in the houses anymore. But our next-door neighbor is an African-American man who's been living in his house since I was born. And so we're a white family living in a house that's identical to the house of the black family next door, which has given me some occasions for reflection on the differences in our lives and the ways that we have or have not benefited from the systemic racism around us.

One example of that is that before we moved into our house, the previous owner did a major renovation of the attic of this little bungalow. And I was describing this renovation to my next-door neighbor over the fence, and he said, "I'd love to do something like that to my attic. I would love to do it. I want so much to renovate our attic. I always have wanted to." And he said, "But I'm never going to have the money for that."

This is a man who's worked his whole life. He's worked for the post office for longer than I've been alive. And he mentioned to me in an offhand way, he said, "You know, I have a lot of family members who are in jail and who are in prison, and that one of the draws on us financially is supporting the families of people who can't work." That's just one tiny window into how the criminalization of black life is a draw financially on people who are not engaging in any activity, who have never been accused of a crime, never put in jail, never imprisoned.

Tippett: And then can't renovate their attics to increase the price of their property and all of that.

Biss: Exactly. And my neighbor left off this conversation by saying, "I guess God just didn't want me to be rich." And I said, "I don't think it's God, actually."

[ music: "Cowgirl" by The Album Leaf]

Tippett: After a short break, more with Eula Biss. You can always listen again, and hear the unedited version of every show we do on the On Being podcast feed - wherever podcasts are found.

I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, we're talking about "whiteness" - an awkward, inadequate, and urgent conversation. I'm with the author Eula Biss, who wrote the important essay "White Debt." I interviewed her in November, 2016, and her insights feels prescient and useful now.

Tippett: It feels so good to talk about this. There's a sentence you had in the "White Debt" piece: "I have written and erased 100 sentences here trying and failing to articulate something that I can sense, but not yet speak." I may be reading into this, but the truth is this is all so fraught. There are so many things coming to the surface that, in part, feel very shocking, whether they should be shocking or not - violence, and seeing the roots of things we haven't seen. I think one reason I appreciate that you work with the language - because language itself is so fraught, and the wrong word can be taken as an offense, even though we're reckless with other words.

Biss: I think that this is a major problem for us in terms of talking about race. As attentive as I am to language and as sensitive as I am to it as a writer and as much as I believe that insight can be found or lost through language, I do think that when it comes to racism, we pay too much attention to language, and we give language a power that I don't believe it actually has. When in fact, I think there are many graver actions that are happening that happen without anyone ever saying anything offensive.

And a lot of our policing of offensive language - it's not that that is unimportant, it's not that people should be allowed to say whatever they want, but I feel that there's extra energy put into that policing because we aren't sure how to address the real problems and how to address the kind of systemic racism that happens without anyone ever saying anything that would look to us like racism. I think that this is part of how we're hobbling ourselves around, coming to kind of broader and more advanced understandings around what's going on with race.

Tippett: And about how we live together as opposed to just how we talk together, how we speak together.

Biss: Yeah. I think if you can't talk about something, you can't think about something. I've worked with students who could barely, barely let themselves think, they were so scared of thinking the wrong thing.

I don't want to be misunderstood as making an argument for offensive language. But the argument that I'm making is that I think that we need a cultural atmosphere where we understand where the crimes are happening and that many of the crimes are not in the arena of language, but that we need to be able to stumble through imperfect language and imperfect sentences in order to find our way to where the crimes are happening.

Tippett: I have a friend who's in her late 70s and she is a professor. She told me a story about in the mid '60s when civil rights was happening. She had a close friend who was also a colleague, a fellow academic, who was African American, and that they had a pact- or that Pauline had a kind of agreement with her - that she would bounce things off her that she was going to say or write, and say, "Is this racist? Does this work? Is this offensive?"

I love that story because it was self-correction in the context of a relationship. And she was safe enough to ask to be corrected, as opposed to so worried about getting something wrong that she wouldn't say anything. I feel like we've had this illusion here in our 21st century that we're way past that, right? We should know what the wrong word would be, or what the offensive thought would be, or what the egregious omission would be. And we don't. I mean, sadly, we should, but we don't. And I've wished - what if we could each have a friendship like that, a safe space where we could err and ask to have it pointed out lovingly so that we could get it right.

Biss: This is another way in which I really, really strongly believe that for all the ways that white people benefit materially from racism, that we're very damaged by it. And I think that this is one of the ways in which we're damaged. The racist structures of our society cut us off from close friendships with people of color. And that doesn't mean we don't have them, but there's many ways in which we're alienated from each other. And that's one of the things we lose, that kind of productive conversation that can move a person's thinking forward and can expand a person's - not just their acceptable vocabulary, but also their real understanding.

Tippett: Their understanding and their presence in the world, their ability to move forward. Another very striking thing about this moment we inhabit is, we're aware of all this unfinished business, these things we actually thought we'd made so much progress on, but also seeing full circle that the legacy of whiteness is now costing white people: the foreclosure crisis or opiate addiction or the white pain in the presidential campaign. There's a way in which a lot of what happened to people of color is now afflicting white people as well. These systems didn't stay closed. The structures didn't stay closed.

Biss: I think where I see it is in fractured alliances. These disaffected, poor white people see themselves as white before they understand themselves as poor. So there's a potentially very powerful alliance between poor whites and poor blacks in our country, and that alliance has been undermined.

Tippett: And prevents flourishing, right? It would be life-giving for those fractures to soften and fall away.

Biss: And ultimately, I think who it benefits is a very tiny, tiny, little segment of the society. This is another way of talking about the 1 percent, right? But part of how we've empowered the 1 percent is by allowing other people to think that by virtue of their race, they might have access to the 1 percent, that all they need to do is work hard enough and try hard enough and be good enough, and that they might get to belong at some point.

Tippett: Or their children might get to belong at some point.

Biss: Or their children might.

Tippett: I want to come back to raising our children; that's a primary place we can walk with this differently. You write very beautifully about raising your son, the ordinary joys of life. You did mention a while ago how you wrote in that Times piece on white debt about - I think this must be what you were talking about - somebody took exception to that, when your son was 4, he brought home a library book about the slaves who built the White House. I'm just going to read this.

"I didn't tell him that slaves once accounted for more wealth than all the industry in this country combined, or that slaves were, as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, 'the down payment' on this country's independence, or that freed slaves became, after the Civil War, 'this country's second mortgage.' Nonetheless, my overview of slavery and Jim Crow left my son worried about what it meant to be white, what legacy he had inherited. 'I don't want to be on this team,' he said, with his head in his hands. 'You might be stuck on this team,' I told him, 'but you don't have to play by its rules.'"

Biss: And that "you don't have to play by its rules" part is, of course, easier said than done. That, for me, is an ongoing parenting challenge, but it's also a challenge for me as an adult living an adult life - where and when do I refuse the rules? Where and when do I defy expectations that are written into the social code?

For me, it's tricky because rules are so important for both parenting and for education. Our children's lives are a little nets of rules. So I think that it's actually a pretty complicated, nuanced conversation to talk about how do you discern whether a rule is unjust or not? And when do you choose to violate it?

Tippett: You were talking a little while ago about the study about high schools and AP classes. I was thinking as you were talking about that - my son went to a great big urban high school in St. Paul. And we liked that about it, that it was a big urban high school, and it was diverse. But a new friend of mine who's African American talked about taking his son to visit that school and being there at lunchtime. And being there at lunchtime and seeing this high school cafeteria where you have all these high school kids being high school kids. They're laughing, and they're talking, and it was very mixed. And then the bell rings, and the white kids head up the stairs to the AP and IB classes and hardly any black kids. So you have this stark segregation.

And what feels so shameful, to me, is that I - my son has graduated now, and he had graduated by the point that I heard this story, and I knew that there was a segregation going on that I didn't understand and I didn't like, but I didn't - why? It is our job as white parents, as much as it's the job of the parents of the kids of color, to not let this continue.

Biss: Right. Yes. I've been very inspired by a number of things that I've read in a journal that's no longer being published called Race Traitor. This was published by Noel Ignatiev, the author of How The Irish Became White. John Garvey published this journal for years. One of the stories I read in there was about a group of parents who protested the selection processes in their school that produced a gifted program. In a school that was majority black, the gifted program was majority white.

White parents protested this, saying this can't possibly be the case. Not all the gifted children in the school can be white. There must be a problem with how we're deciding who gets into the gifted program. There must be something wrong here. And I do think that that's our job as white parents, is to see that and know it can't be true. And then to try to - whatever that system is that's producing a gifted program that is entirely white at a school that's mostly black, to dismantle that system. Again, easier said than done. But I do think that there are - in these particular cases, there are things that can be done if people say, "We won't have this."

I was also really inspired by a story that I heard on public radio here in Chicago a couple years ago about a group of students at a very wealthy public school in Lincoln Park. These students, many of them were white students who were protesting the fact that their school was going to get a major renovation that would cost a lot of money. And they were protesting on the grounds that they didn't think their school was the most in need of the public schools in the city. And they thought that it was unjust that city funds would be going towards their school when there were schools that didn't have enough textbooks to go around. I also found that story quite exciting and thought, "OK we're getting somewhere here."

[ music: "Entwine" by Auditory Canvas]

Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, I'm with the writer Eula Biss, and we're talking about whiteness.

Tippett: As you're out there talking about this and as you've gotten a reaction to the "White Debt" piece, is there a difference in - how do people of color respond? Do you hear from non-white people about this thinking?

Biss: I do. I'm not sure this is answering your question, but I guess one of the things that surprised me in terms of response to my own work was that, for the most part, my writing about race did not seem to make a lot of people very upset. And that worried me a little bit, actually, to tell you the truth. [ laughs]

And actually, I think that's somewhat true. Especially if you're a writer in this subject matter, you're probably not doing your job unless people are pissed off and angry.

Tippett: I mean, that's a diagnosis of a problem, isn't it? I wonder if - you're just being kind of straight. You're saying, "Let's talk about whiteness." You're framing the question a little differently. Gosh, we've got to have a place for speaking honestly that is not that controversial, even if it's not everybody's experience.

Biss: One of the things I've observed in education - and this is something I don't feel like it's talked about a lot - is that learning can be really, really upsetting. And I do think that it's fair to expect that in a conversation that's as difficult as this, there will be flashes of defensiveness, of anger, of bitterness, of ferocious resentment. And that I guess the space has to contain that.

Tippett: There's something hopeful about taking in fury as a function of learning.

Biss: Maybe it's because I have a terrible temper myself, but I actually - I'm inclined to embrace fury in not just in an academic setting, but in a conversation in general. Any essential conversation, I think, probably has the potential to set off some anger.

Tippett: Another aspect of this moment is that I hear language, and not just language, but intentions surfacing words like "truth" and "reconciliation" commissions for race - and "mercy." I mean, using words like "mercy" in conversations about public policy. Words like "redemption" I feel are coming in.

You have reflected on - and I feel like this is a new opening to say, "How do we live redemptively, reparatively, rather than destructively?" What does that look like? How does it start? And again, you and I are speaking as two white people, but we have to craft and kind of discover that new way of living one life and one action at a time.

Biss: Though I find this super embarrassing to talk out loud about.

Tippett: No, it feels really scary, honestly.

Biss: And I'm already pre-mortified about any of this being on the air, on the radio. I think I'm allowing this embarrassment to just wash over me because I still really deeply, fundamentally believe in bumbling your way through a conversation about this subject because I think it is so important. We just cannot be silent on this subject.

Tippett: Because it is so inadequate, is what you're saying.

Biss: It's very inadequate. I also, as we talk, just feel super aware of my own partial understanding. And I feel like I'm constantly touching the edges of my own comprehension. And I'm aware that I'm really not getting it all. So it feels just very uncomfortable and intensely mortifying. [ laughs]

Tippett: [ laughs] But I think to your point also, we need to also allow ourselves to have inadequate conversations and not think that we have to begin by getting it right or perfect or complete, because it's not possible. As you said, we're talking about generation upon generation, and things that have been conscious and unconscious, and we don't know how much we carry around unconsciously. That's something we're learning about ourselves.

Biss: The very first question my son ever asked me about race - it wasn't that long after he started talking. He was somewhere between 2 and 3, and he asked me - I was anticipating a question like this, but I did not anticipate the form it took. He asked me why a friend of his had brown skin. I was expecting a question like that, but what was surprising was that the friend he asked about was someone who would be considered white. And I think her background is Romanian, but her features are European. She moves through the world as a white person and so does her mother. But her skin is, in fact, darker than the skin of a number of other people we knew who would be classified as black.

So the very first question my son asked me about race was much more complicated than the question I'd been anticipating. What he was asking me is, "Why is this person with dark skin called 'white' when there are people with lighter skin who we call 'black?'" What he was really getting at is a question that went straight to the inconsistencies in how we define race in this country.

Tippett: And some of the absurdity of it.

Biss: Some of the absurdity of it.

Tippett: Somewhere, you pose these two questions together, or these two ideas: the things we do to each other out of fear, the things we owe each other. Say a little bit more about what would be on your list of the things we owe each other.

Biss: Well, again, I think this is, in some ways, very personal for me because I do ask this question of myself, for myself, all the time. But again, one of my kind of private conclusions for my own self - and this has to do with fear, but it's slightly different - is that I do feel that we owe each other trust until that trust is broken. And I think that that can be in practice incredibly difficult.

We live in a political climate in a political atmosphere that makes trust extremely difficult. It can even seem quite foolish, actually, to trust in this particular climate. I think there are people who would disagree with me on this, and probably rightly. I guess that's just my way of saying that I'm not entirely sure that what I'm saying is right. I'm maybe even partly convinced I'm wrong on this. But it's still something that I've come to that is important to me, is that in my every day interactions with other people, I feel that trust is something of a radical act. And I go to great efforts to trust the people around me.

Tippett: Do you find that that is a risk that has rewards is to talk about the paradigm of - do you find that many people in situations rise to that occasion? That it's worth it for you to go through erring on the side of trust?

Biss: For me, it has been. For me, it's a rewarding way to live. That doesn't mean that people haven't disappointed me and broken my trust. But when that happens to me, it tends to be in situations where I never would have anticipated it. I feel like this does come back to the question of fear. I think there's some people who feel that nurturing their own fear will be a balm against danger. If you just feel fearful enough and often enough, you'll save yourself from the dangers of the world. And I don't think that's true. I think you get hurt either way.

Biss: So you either you get to live as a suspicious, wary person, paranoid, who gets hurt, or you get to live as someone who trusts other people and gets hurt. I'm not sure if that's an uplifting conclusion.

Tippett: No, that's really helpful, and in this context of whiteness, what do we owe as white people?

Biss: This is a question that I am asking myself all the time and trying to answer in actually very concrete ways. And my answer is, again, constantly evolving and constantly shifting. But I do feel that I owe action to the communities that I'm a part of. Those communities are various and overlapping. But for instance, the whole reason I was in a meeting at my son's school to be involved in making race something that we're talking about in the schools and with children and with teachers, and when we're doing hiring, and when we're inviting guests to speak. That's something I fail on too.

I feel that I also owe it to my neighbors not to reduce them to symbols, to see them as people and not as symbols or ideas or shorthand for an experience that we assume is shared and may not be shared.

[ music: "Timeless" by Poppy Ackroyd]

Tippett: Eula Biss teaches writing at Northwestern University. Her books include On Immunity: An Inoculation and Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays. Her writing has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times and Harper's Magazine.

The On Being Project is Chris Heagle, Lily Percy, Laurén Dørdal, Erin Colasacco, Kristin Lin, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Lucas Johnson, Suzette Burley, Zack Rose, Serri Graslie, Colleen Scheck, Christiane Wartell, Julie Siple, Gretchen Honnold, and Jhaleh Akhavan.

The On Being Project is located on Dakota land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. And the last voice that you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn.

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Eula Biss - Talking About Whiteness | The On Being Project

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Writer Eula Biss has been thinking and writing about the matter of being white and raising white children in a multi-racial world for a long time. Her work opens up the uncomfortable but urgent conversation about "whiteness" and what we owe each other.