Imagination: Getting You Riled Up

Let's talk about race, baby
Let's talk about you and me
Let's talk about all the good things
And the bad things that may be
Let's talk about race

White people are still raised to be racially illiterate. If we don't recognize the system, our inaction will uphold it.

The question is not whether I have been shaped by and participate in the forces of racism, it's how I've been shaped by them.

Imagine instead, if the story of Jackie Robinson went something like this: "Jackie Robinson was the first black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball." This telling acknowledges the role of white control. It simply wasn’t up to Robinson. Had he walked onto the field before being granted permission by white owners and policy makers, the police would have removed him. Critically, the real Jackie Robinson story is a story of the relationship between blacks and whites in this country, between this individual black man and a white institution. Reframing race in the Jackie Robinson story reveals white structures of power and the strategies used by those who contested that power, strategies that we can build upon today as we work for racial justice.

As a product of my culture, my racial illiteracy has rested on a simplistic definition of a racist: an individual who consciously does not like people based on race and is intentionally hurtful to them. Based on this definition, racists are purposely mean. It follows that nice people with good intentions who are friendly to people of a different race cannot be racist. Not only does this definition hide the structural nature of racism, it also enables self-delusion: If I am a nice person with good intentions I am free of all racial bias and cannot participate in racism. Within this limited paradigm, to simply suggest that as a white person, my race has meaning and grants unearned advantage, much less to suggest that I have absorbed racist messages which may cause me to behave in racist ways — consciously or not — will be deeply disconcerting. The mainstream definition of a racist set me up beautifully to not only deny any impact of racial socialization, but also to receive any suggestion of racially problematic behavior as a personal blow — a questioning of my very moral character. Of course I would take umbrage, feel hurt, attacked and misunderstood; this is what I term white fragility.

Yet regardless of my intentions, these defensive reactions only protect the racist status quo. Those of us who profess to believe in racial equality have to challenge our understanding of racism in ways that don’t uphold it. We also need to build our skills and stamina for the racial discomfort engendered by a new paradigm. . . .

All of us have a part to play, but the ultimate responsibility for addressing racism lies with those who control the institutions — white people. Jackie Robinson could not have broken the color barrier on his own. If I don’t understand racism as a deeply embedded system that I have been shaped by and participate in, my inaction will uphold it. In other words, as long as whiteness remains unnamed it will continue to reproduce racial inequality.

They matter, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

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Imagination gets people all riled up

Black Space, White Blindness

Why white Americans have such a hard time picturing a middle-class black neighborhood.

In a series of studies, Bonam has found that white Americans hold ironclad stereotypes about black neighborhoods—even when they display little or no animus toward black people. They’re likely to infer from the presence of a black family that a neighborhood is “impoverished, crime-ridden, and dirty,” though they make none of those assumptions about an identical white family in the same house. They’ll knock the value of a house down by $20,000, or nearly 15 percent, if they believe the neighborhood is black. Even after being explicitly told a neighborhood’s home prices and demographics, white participants showed a massive divergence in their perception of the neighborhood’s class depending on whether they thought it was black or white. . . .

How do we know it’s not just that the observer is racist? In her most recent research, published with Caitlyn Yantis and Valerie Jones Taylor, Bonam compared white participants’ impressions of people and places. Participants were given profiles of houses with values or people with incomes and asked to assign each profile a class indicator from 1 to 7. When assigning class status to people, the participants gave virtually the same rankings to white and black profiles. (Low bar, I know.) But when assigning class status to houses, knowing the race of the neighborhood led to widely divergent outcomes. Most strikingly, white participants were almost incapable of assigning middle-class status to houses in black neighborhoods.

Bonam calls this phenomenon “invisible middle-class black space.” People who are ready to accept the middle-class status of a black person can’t do the same with a neighborhood.

They matter, the stories we tell ourselves about who others are.

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Become boring

White Fragility In The Workplace

Watch this video and find out how you can be more white-sensitive.

Raising racial awareness of white discomfort with racial awareness

Workplace discrimination is a very serious issue. We have to be sensitive to our employees' different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. And just as it's important to be sensitive to our Black, Arab, and other non-white co-workers, it's also equally important to be sensitive to our white co-workers' sensitivity to that sensitivity.

A simple system to help you foster a non-hostile work environment for your white employees and co-workers:

Stop
Ignore
Listen
Empathize
Never
Complain
Eat

The SILENCE System

They matter, the stories we tell ourselves about how to get along.

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Being a decent human being can be a lot like being a dog

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34371577-disappeared

He ignores them. Life's too short to waste valuable energy on imbeciles. Anger is energy, and energy needs to be carefully preserved, like water on a three-day desert hike.

The ultimate responsibility for addressing racism lies with those who control the institutions — white people.