Bokelskere.no

There is so much excellent advice out there today - written both by people of color and white people. Search it out. Break with the apathy of whiteness and demonstrate that you care enough to put in the effort.

One way that whites protect their positions when challenged on race is to invoke the discourse of self-defense. Through this discourse, whites characterize themselves as victimized, slammed, blamed, and attacked.

We see anti-black sentiment in how quickly images of brutality toward black children (let alone black adults) are justified by the white assumption that it must have been deserved.

The simplistic idea that racism is limited to individual intentional acts committed by unkind people is at the root of virtually all white defensiveness on this topic.

This idea -that racism is not a white problem- enables us to sit back and let people of color take very real risks of invalidation and retaliation as they share their experiences. But we are not required to take similar cross-racial risks.

Today we have a cultural norm that insists we hide our racism from people of color and deny it amongst ourselves, but not that we actually challenge it. In fact, we are socially penalized for challenging racism.

When you consider the moral judgement we make about people we deem as racist on our society, the need to deny our own racism -even to ourselves- makes sense.

While the idea of color blindness may have started out as a well-intentioned strategy for interrupting racism, in practice it has served to deny the reality of racism and thus hold it in place.

Race is an evolving social idea that was created to legitimize racial inequality and protect white advantage.

One of the greatest social fears for a white person is being told that something that we have said or done is racially problematic. Yet when someone lets us know that we have just done such a thing, rather than respond with gratitude and relief (after all, now that we are informed, we won't do it again), we often respond with anger and denial.