*Read First – Assumptions Archives - Tools For Racial Justice

When White People Are Uncomfortable, Black People Are Silenced

by Rachel Elizabeth Cargle | January 2019
In 1962, Fannie Lou Hamer was fired from her job after she campaigned to encourage African Americans to vote. Two years later, when Hamer testified at the DNC in support of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party—specifically its efforts to further black voter registration —President Lyndon B Johnson called an impromptu news conference to make it impossible for national television networks to cover her testimony live. TAGS: [Assumptions] [White Culture] [Silencing POC] [History] [2010’s]

Why So Many Organizations Stay White

by Victor Ray | November 2019
“In the United States, white organizations are a kind of social structure combining ideas about race (for instance, who should manage and who should work) with organizational resources. The forming of this structure goes all the way back to the central role slavery played in the formation of the country.”
TAGS: [Assumptions] [White Privilege] [Employment]

White People: Which Side Are You On?

by Karen Fleshman | June 2017
White People: Which Side Are You On?
I realized just recently that my original stomping ground was a “sundown town,” a place where people of color could not rent nor own a home, much less stay in a hotel. Sundown towns were as American as apple pie, omnipresent in this country until the 1960s, when federal law made their ordinances and practices illegal.
The law changed. Residential patterns, and mindsets, did not. De Facto. Instead, the problem — the phenomenon — shifted, took on a different shape to accommodate present conditions.
TAGS: [History] [Collective Action] [Assumptions] [2010’s] [White Privilege] [Systemic Racism]

For White Women Learning Calculus in a School Building on Fire

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by Jennifer Harvey | October 2018
Here we sit, with ever more evidence that massive racial failure on the part of white women is at the center of this political crisis. At the root of it all is our collective choice to not learn, prioritize, or consistently live in public antiracist solidarity with communities of color, and especially with women of color.
TAGS: [White Supremacy] [2010’s] [Assumptions] [White Blindness] [Accountability] [Implicit Racism]