by Jessica Sager | June 2020
White centering is putting your feelings as a white person above the Black and POC causes you’re supposed to be helping. Layla F. Saad explains in Me and White Supremacy, “White centering is the centering of white people, white values, white norms and white feelings over everything and everyone else.” White centering can manifest as anything ranging from tone policing and white fragility to white exceptionalism and outright violence.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [White Fragility/Tears] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [Silencing POC]
by David Roberts | July 2018
It occurred to me that white people rarely if ever experience questions like this, about their very legitimacy. Do they belong? Is having more of them around good for America? One thing white people have never experienced is a poll on whether their presence in their own country is intrinsically detrimental. In fact, I thought, I bet asking the question at all — not answering it either way, just asking it — would make a lot of white people flip out. Imagine if they saw that on a poll! So, as a bit of goofy provocation, I made just such a poll:
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Systemic Racism] [White Fragility/Tears] [White Supremacy] [White Defensiveness] [Politics]
by Emily Long | August 2020
You may have seen land acknowledgments on social media, where instead of geotagging a photo, posters identify the Indigenous people the land belongs to;or maybe you’ve heard a land acknowledgment presented at the beginning of a live concert or theater performance (remember those?). Land acknowledgments help us better understand, reflect on, and celebrate the history of Indigenous peoples, languages, territories, and treaties. So how do you learn more about specific land and the people it belongs to?
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [White Supremacy] [History] [Accountability] [White Privilege]
by Ijeoma Oluo | April 2017
And with that, the anger that I had toward her began to melt away. Dolezal is simply a white woman who cannot help but center herself in all that she does—including her fight for racial justice. And if racial justice doesn’t center her, she will redefine race itself in order to make that happen. It is a bit extreme, but it is in no way new for white people to take what they want from other cultures in the name of love and respect, while distorting or discarding the remainder of that culture for their comfort. What else is National Geographic but a long history of this practice. Maybe now that I’ve seen the unoriginality of it all, even with my sister’s name that she has claimed as her own, she will haunt me no more and simply blend into the rest of white supremacy that I battle every day.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Anti-Racism] [Slavery] [Role Model] [White Privilege] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Fragility/Tears] [Implicit Racism]
by Christy DeGallerie | September 2017
When you think of a racist what pops in your mind? White supremacists? The KKK? You usually think of white people down south right? You know, the ones who have confederate flag bumper stickers, and hurl the N-word at Black people who cut them off while driving, or school districts that ban Black hairstyles. These folks are more of the poster children of racism. I’m here to let you in on a little secret: You don’t need to write a resume for the new available seat in the Ku Klux Klan to be a racist. We’ve heard many times before that racism is taught, that it starts at home with our parents and caregivers. This is absolutely true, but racism is also in our school systems, the media, it even comes from the mouths of orange men running for president.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [White Fragility/Tears] [Politics] [Implicit Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [Systemic Racism] [Accountability]
by Mary C. Curtis | September 2014
*Yet whites are, frequently, disappointingly, incredulous. Very often a “friend’s” reaction that goes something like this: “I don’t think a police officer would stop anyone for no reason at all.” Or: “You must have done something suspicious.” Or my favorite: “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about.” I am not some child coming home with some tall tale, and I am certainly not a delusional liar.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Policing] [Systemic Racism] [White Culture] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts]
