Individual Change

Click here to read these selected posts first

White Clicktivism: Why Are Some Americans Woke Online but Not in Real Life?

by Brianna Holt | December 2020
“I’m a Democrat. I’ll be friends with anyone, like anyone from different sides of the political spectrum. I guess that makes me liberal,” she said. “Liberals are more open to experiences.” Maybe they are. But a woman of color would be physically threatened if their date exposed their Proud Boy membership over a few drinks. Kansen, a white woman, did not feel at risk and so it was partly her privilege – not her tolerance – that gave her a hall pass to entertain a member of a white supremacist group. … Despite racism being a structural problem, individual actions still matter. But, Cavanagh warns, people may believe in equality while opting out of decisions that are hard for them personally. “Voting can be thought of as a relatively low-cost act of solidarity and commitment to justice, unlike cutting off ties to your racist mother,” she says.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [White Privilege] [White Supremacy] [Systemic Racism] [White Blindness] [Accountability] [Cognitive Dissonance] [Collective Action] [Colorblindness]

As Nation Reckons with Race, Poll Finds White Americans Least Engaged

by Adrian Florido and Marisz Penaloza | August 2020
Collins sympathized with the people marching in the protests but felt “I’m not that type of person.” So instead, he called and wrote his representatives in Congress and asked what they were doing to address racism in the country. He didn’t hear back, “but I still thought it was important to do.” As the nation navigates its most consequential racial justice movement in a half-century, some people have responded to the calls for action to remedy the country’s racist past and present by protesting in the streets or doing something as simple as reading a book about race. But a new NPR/Ipsos poll finds that these people remain a minority.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Anti-Racism] [Systemic Racism] [Policing] [Collective Action] [Latino/a] [Asian] [White Culture] [Black Lives Matter] [Reparations] [-ing While Black]

The Ugly History of the Pledge of Allegiance — and Why It Matters; Requiring Displays of Patriotism Have Often Been Tied to Nativism and Bigotry

by Christopher Petrella | November 2017
The origins of the pledge trace to the late 19th century, the product of an expansionist American project. In 1891, the family magazine Youth’s Companion asked 35-year-old Francis Bellamy, a former pastor of Boston’s Bethany Baptist Church, to fashion a patriotic program for schools around the country to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s “arrival in America” by “raising the U.S. Flag over every public school from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” …Far from a political outlier, Bellamy tapped into the ubiquitous turn-of-the-century nativism that made enemies of the 2.5 million Slavs, Jews and Italians who immigrated to the United States throughout the 1880s and 1890s.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Indigenous] [Policing] [History] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Systemic Racism] [Immigration] [Slavery] [Anti-Racism] [Assumptions]

The Perils of ‘Helpful’ White People Shaken by Police Violence; The Police Shooting of Jacob Blake is the Latest to Inspire White Americans to Protest and Demand Change. Here’s My Advice.

by Lola E. Peters | August 2020
Often, white people arrive on the scene of Black trauma and immediately move into action mode. Instead of asking, “How can I help?” and following through, these white people declare, “Here’s what I’m going to do,” and become offended when told that’s not what’s needed. More often than not, be it the local mom’s group, microlocal protest groups, even in the protest zone formerly known as CHOP, Black organizers end up being distracted in the midst of furthering their own work to clean up the mess these self-proclaimed allies create. …
Racist systems have a history of picking and choosing who they will anoint as leaders of oppressed communities, funneling resources to those individuals or organizations, then declaring disappointment when the programs are ineffective or corrupted. For example, funding organizations insisting that potential recipients have 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, a board of directors and a formal structure, often don’t consider Indigenous, African or other POC communities, where decisions are made in community or by a circle of elders. They often end up funding groups or projects that have the savvy or experience to properly fill out their paperwork, but have no deep ties to community.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Police Shootings] [Policing] [Anti-Racism] [Black Lives Matter] [White Privilege] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [White Blindness] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Defensiveness] [Assumptions] [Systemic Racism] [Accountability] [White Fragility/Tears]

7 Racist Slurs Which You Should Drop from Your Vocabulary; Odds Are That You Use These Phrases Every Day

by Shourya Agarwal | October 2020
On this uphill climb to social justice, we have uncovered an underlying structure of discrimination that lurks beneath our milieu. As our language has been shaped alongside a predominantly racist climate, it has absorbed some of the recollections from that period. On our journey to free our system of its prejudice, we must also purge our lexicons of the scars of the past which stoke buried hatred. Here are some phrases that you should immediately remove from your usage.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [Anti-Racism] [Civil War] [Definitions] [Indigenous] [History] [White Culture] [Accountability]

Thirty Everyday Phrases That Perpetuate the Oppression of Indigenous Peoples

by Alex Kapitan | October 2020
Language isn’t neutral or objective. It is a vessel of cultural stories, values, and norms. And in the United States, everyday language plays into the violent, foundational myth of this country’s origin story—Europeans “discovering” a virtually uninhabited wilderness and befriending the few primitive peoples who lived there—as well as other cultural myths and lies about Indigenous Peoples that are baked into U.S. culture and everyday life.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Myths] [Systemic Racism] [History] [Definitions]

Performative Allyship Is Deadly (Here’s What to Do Instead); Activism Can’t Begin and End with a Hashtag

*Paywall Alert
by Holiday Phillips | May 2020
In the days after Arbery’s death, I scrolled through Instagram, reading post after post from white friends and influencers professing their outrage and disbelief. Urging us to #sayhisname. The posts were flooded with comments from more (mostly) white people, thanking them for their “bravery” and praising them for “speaking truth to power.” … Still, as a black woman, instead of feeling inspired by this act of solidarity, I found myself feeling angry and afraid. Looking through my feed, I wanted to say to my white friends, “You’re here now, but where are you the other 364 days a year when anti-racism isn’t trending? When racism isn’t tucked safely behind the screen in your hand, but right there in front of your face?”
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [Anti-Racism] [Advocacy] [Accountability] [White Fragility/Tears]

The Hidden Racism of Young White Americans

by Sean McElwee | March 2015
Recently, chilling videos surfaced online of young University of Oklahoma students, members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, reciting a racially-charged chant. The story appeared surprising for numerous reasons. Among them, education is supposed to reduce racial resentment (or at least temper outward expressions of it), and young people, known as Millennials, are supposed to be uniquely tolerant. The incident offers an opportunity to reevaluate how we think about racism in America, and how we can fight it.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Systemic Racism] [Housing] [Economics] [Employment]

Across America, Whites are Biased and They Don’t Even Know It

*Paywall Alert
by Chris Mooney | December 2014
Most white Americans demonstrate bias against blacks, even if they’re not aware of or able to control it. It’s a surprisingly little-discussed factor in the anguishing debates over race and law enforcement that followed the shootings of unarmed black men by white police officers. Such implicit biases — which, if they were to influence split-second law enforcement decisions, could have life or death consequences — are measured by psychological tests, most prominently the computerized Implicit Association Test, which has beens taken by over two million people online at the website Project Implicit. Includes a state map with the highest level of implicit bias.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Implicit Bias] [Policing] [Implicit Racism] [Accountability] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [White Supremacy] [Systemic Racism]

The Most Racist Places in America, According to Google

by Christopher Ingraham | April 2015
Where do America’s most racist people live? “The rural Northeast and South,” suggests a new study just published in PLOS ONE. The paper introduces a novel but makes-tons-of-sense-when-you-think-about-it method for measuring the incidence of racist attitudes: Google search data. The methodology comes from data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. He’s used it before to measure the effect of racist attitudes on Barack Obama’s electoral prospects. Includes a map of the most racist places in America.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [Employment]