by Tauriq Moosa | May 2017
In striving to be ‘civil,’ white moderates provide cover for deadly white supremacy. .. Welcome to our current reality, in which white supremacists are treated like B-grade celebs on a reality TV show.
White supremacists are, after all, routinely landing profiles in leading media sites — because it’s apparently surprising Nazis can brush their hair and tuck in their shirt — and often getting invited onto popular shows, as if their ideas deserve more attention and platforms. …The way things are doesn’t equate to how things should be.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2010’s] [Systemic Racism] [Politics] [White Supremacy] [White Blindness] [White Culture] [Prison System] [White Privilege] [White Fragility/Tears]
by Courtney E. Martin | June 2015
“I’m grateful for a framing that helps me understand my own fragility. Experimenting with how I use the power that comes from my privilege is a messy process. Sometimes I feel like I manage to do something really useful in the world, whether its recommending a brilliant person of color to speak at a conference and working with them to hone their transformative message for a broad audience or saying I won’t speak on a panel that I’ve been invited to because there isn’t a person of color on it. Interestingly, white fragility often shows up as talking a lot, a kind of flood of effortful explaining, or the equivalent of a peacock’s display of anti-racist sentiment — posting on social media with great fanfare or calling out other white people with a sort of zeal.”
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [White Fragility/Tears] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [Accountability] [Systemic Racism] [Collective Action] [Definitions]
by Gretchen Palmer | July 2016
If you would have told me three years ago, before Michael Brown, before Eric Garner, before the Black Lives Matter movement that I am a racist, I would have fought you tooth and nail. Absolutely not, no way ― how dare you accuse me of such an awful thing? I really DID believe that I wasn’t a racist – but the truth is , I hadn’t really examined the topic very much and I certainly had never been called to the mat on it… ”I was an unconscious liar.” Includes 5 articles for those ready to move forward.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Colorblindness] [White Fragility/Tears] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [White Privilege] [White Supremacy] [Accountability]
by Alan Pelaez Lopez | September 2016
Which one of your parents is the Black one? You never told me you were Black – you speak Spanish! I didn’t know [insert country] had Black people! Being both identities does not mean that I only live my life as Black 50% and Latinx 50%. Instead it means that I live my life as Black 100% of the time, and my life as Latinx 100%. The math doesn’t need to make sense! Below is a list of invasive comments, phrases, and questions that I, and many in my community, have received – and they must stop in order for us to work together, and really be a community.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Systemic Racism] [Implicit Bias] [Implicit Racism]
by Jamilah Lemieux | January 2017
I don’t know that I serve my own mental health needs by putting my body on the line to feign solidarity with women who by and large didn’t have my back prior to November. I’ve never felt any thing remotely resembling sisterhood with White women. That lack of sisterhood haunted me at times during the 2016 election season. As Election Day approached and Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton emerged as the frontrunner, I waited to feel something. Some sort of connection between her and me, some sort of emotion tied to the likelihood that a person who shares my gender expression would be the “leader of the free world.” It never came. However, the absence of that sisterhood never felt more real for me than it did when I learned that 53 percent of White female voters cast a ballot for a man whose bigotry was, perhaps, his greatest selling point. I never expected that White women by-and-large would favor Clinton over Donald Trump because she promised criminal justice reform or would do more to protect the rights of people of color than her opponent. But I did believe that Trump’s incredibly public misogyny—manifested in attacks on women’s looks, a boast about “pussy” grabbing and promises to prosecute people who seek abortions—would have made him less than favorable. Silly me to expect self-preservation to take priority over racism, I suppose.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Accountability] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [White Fragility/Tears] [Politics]
by Ashleigh Shackelford | November 2015
This Black Girl Attitude phenomenon lies within the idea that Black girls, women, and femmes are inherently angry, bitter, unrelenting, and a threat to functioning institutions and spaces. In understanding that this is how I’m seen, I do not intentionally align my presentation, navigation, or performance as a Black girl in a way that embodies the opposite of the stereotypes codified upon my existence within white supremacist patriarchy. Black girls are scripted as angry, bitter, ungrateful, savage beings that are denied the ability to be seen as dimensional or nuanced. So when a Black girl like me is walking around, existing, not forcing myself to assimilate to this politicized idea of ‘approachability,’ I am in direct affirmation of society’s idea of black femininity’s abrasive nature.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Microaggressions] [White Culture] [Systemic Racism] [Implicit Racism] [Implicit Bias] [Accountability] [White Supremacy]
