Strategies

Click here to read these selected posts first

Why I Stopped Talking About Racial Reconciliation and Started Talking About White Supremacy

by Erna Kim Hackett | March 2020
Recently, people have asked me, “Why isn’t talking about white privilege enough, why white supremacy?” There is an obvious discomfort with the term by white people. The one exception to that is when things like Charlottesville happen. When people march around with Nazi flags, most folks I know feel comfortable saying, “I’m not down with that.” Which is a pretty low bar, but OK. However, when the term white supremacy is used for anything less obvious than tiki torch-wielding, Nazi flag-waving people, lots of folks get uncomfortable. Most of my crowd was taught to use the terms “white privilege” and “racial reconciliation”. Here is why I no longer focus on them and instead teach on white supremacy.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [White Privilege] [White Supremacy] [Systemic Racism] [Faith-Based/Spiritual] [Policing] [History]
[White Fragility/Tears] [White Privilege]

Why Juneteenth Matters: Professor Brenna Greer Shares the History and Significance

by Wellesley College | June 2020
Historians are increasingly illuminating the nature, extent, and consistency of investments in Black people’s oppression, which accounts for why, in this nation, Black freedom and racial equality have always required hard-fought battles, sometimes in the most literal and bloodiest sense. Juneteenth reminds us that, in this nation’s history, Black people’s freedom has traditionally been a question of economics and politics, not morality.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Economics] [Politics] [History] [Systemic Racism] [Slavery] [Civil War] [White Blindness] [White Supremacy] [Policing]

The Injustice of This Moment Is Not an ‘Aberration’; From Mass Incarceration to Mass Deportation, Our Nation Remains in Deep Denial.

by Michelle Alexander | January 2020
We are now living in an era not of post-racialism but of unabashed racialism, a time when many white Americans feel free to speak openly of their nostalgia for an age when their cultural, political and economic dominance could be taken for granted — no apologies required. Racial bigotry, fearmongering and scapegoating are no longer subterranean in our political discourse; the dog whistles have been replaced by bullhorns. White nationalist movements are operating openly online and in many of our communities; they’re celebrating mass killings and recruiting thousands into their ranks.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Immigration] [Systemic Racism] [Politics] [Prison System] [Employment] [Housing] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Colorblindness] [Slavery] [Police Shootings] [Advocacy]

I’m Black and Afraid of ‘White Fragility’; Robin DiAngelo’s Corporate-Friendly Anti-Racist Screed Actually Reinforces Racist Beliefs

by Cedrick-Michael Simmons | June 2020
DiAngelo views racism as a problem to be combated with sensitivity training. The premise of diversity and cultural competency training is that by educating European-Americans on the persistence and consequences of racism, they can be transformed into non-racist (or, ideally, anti-racist) individuals. But diversity training has been shown to be a largely ineffective way to address racism in American workplaces. These lectures and workshops do little—if anything—in the way of addressing the structural tensions that workers must navigate on a daily basis.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [White Fragility/Tears] [Anti-Racism] [Accountability] [Art & Culture] [Black Lives Matter] [Denial] [Myths] [Assumptions] [Systemic Racism]

Glorifying White Authors like DiAngelo Erases Decades of Black Writing on Whiteness

*Paywall Alert
by Anastasia Kārkliņa | June 2020
For weeks, white liberal Americans have been praising White Fragility, treating it as a must-read manual for white people, forming online discussion groups, and joining book clubs all across the country. What is troubling about the current white liberal obsession with DiAngelo is how digital conversations that glorify her most recent work rarely consider writings on whiteness and white people by Black American authors, at least not with the same sense of urgency and importance. If DiAngelo’s readership is earnestly committed to decoding whiteness, we must ask a glaringly obvious question: why are white liberal Americans so quickly inclined to praise and venerate a white expert on race but generally don’t extend the same attention to what Black writers, intellectuals, and political leaders have have had to say about whiteness and white people for decades?
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [White Fragility/Tears] [Black Lives Matter] [Anti-Racism] [Art & Culture] [Denial]

If You Really Want to Make a Difference in Black Lives, Change How You Teach White Kids

by Nahliah Webber | June 2020
There’s a George Floyd in every school where Black children learn. Black children are screamed at, berated, surveilled and searched in schools. Black children are slammed and dragged, kicked and prodded in classrooms. Black children are denied an education and disrespected because of their culture. Black children are groomed for containment. We’ve got children walking on tape with hands over their mouths like prisoners in training. Black children are suspended, detained, “demerited” and isolated in schools for trivial things every day. And there’s a killer cop sitting in every school where White children learn. They hear the litany of bad statistics and stereotypes about “scary” Black people in their classes and on the news. They gleefully soak in their White-washed history that downplays the holocaust of Indigenous, Native peoples and Africans in the Americas. They happily believe their all-White spaces exist as a matter of personal effort and willingly use violence against Black bodies to keep those spaces white.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Teachers] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [White Defensiveness] [Black Lives Matter] [Policing]

In Our Resistance against the State, Black and Indigenous Peoples are Collectively Powerful

by Red Dawn Foster and Miski Noor | July 2020
Though the history books written by enslavers and colonizers would have us unaware, our stories as Black and Indigenous Peoples are threaded together through past and present, and surely, through the future as well. Settler-colonialism is a continuous project that relies on sustained socio-economic policies that perpetuate white supremacy and maintain violence against Black and Indigenous peoples. Both genocide and enslavement built the settler-colonial nation as we know it today. Black and Indigenous history is tied to the colonization of this land and our liberation is inherently tied together, that is why Black and Indigenous solidarity is essential.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Black Lives Matter] [Systemic Racism] [History] [Politics] [Reparations] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Myths] [Confederate Monuments]

A Conversation about Truth and Reconciliation in the US

by Ezra Klein | July 2020
What would it take for America to heal? To be the country it claims to be? This is the question that animates Bryan Stevenson’s career. Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a clinical professor at the New York University School of Law, a MacArthur “genius,” and the author of the remarkable book Just Mercy — which was recently turned into a feature film where Stevenson was played by Michael B. Jordan.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Confederate Monuments] [Role Model] [Advocacy] [Prison System] [History] [Denial] [White Blindness] [Slavery] [Civil War] [Economics] [White Supremacy] [Systemic Racism]

A Medical Student Couldn’t Find How Symptoms Look on Darker Skin. He Decided to Publish a Book about it.

by Sydney Page | July 2020
*Paywall Alert
Malone Mukwende, a 20-year-old medical student, found himself repeatedly asking the same question: “But what will it look like on darker skin?”
He’s publishing a book to answer that question.
Since his first class at St George’s, University of London, “I noticed a lack of teaching about darker skin tones, and how certain symptoms appear differently in those who aren’t white,” said Mukwende, who recently completed his second year of study in the medical program. Whether a rash, a bruise, blue lips or other common physical reactions, “it was clear to me that certain symptoms would not present the same on my own skin,” said Mukwende, who was born in Zimbabwe and now lives in London. “I knew that this would be a problem for patients of a similar skin tone to mine, or of a darker skin tone in general.” Not only was there an absence of imagery to highlight the difference, but students were not instructed on the correct terminology to describe conditions that appear on darker skin, Mukwende said.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Role Model] [Advocacy] [Colorblindness] [Denial] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege]

How ‘Good White People’ Derail Racial Progress

by John Blake | August 2020
Angry White parents gripping picket signs. People making death threats and a piece of hate mail reading “Blacks destroy school systems.” Community panic about school desegregation orders. But this wasn’t archival footage of White Southerners from the 1960s. This took place last year in Howard County, Maryland, a suburban community that prides itself on racial integration. It was there that progressive White parents mobilized with other groups to try to stop a school integration plan that would bus poor students, who were mostly Black and brown, to more affluent, whiter schools.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [White Supremacy] [Silencing POC] [Systemic Racism] [White Privilege] [Black Lives Matter] [White Culture] [Economics] [Accountability] [White Defensiveness] [White Blindness]