So You Want to Talk About Race

Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow.

Take some time to really dig deep through all of the advantages that you have that others may not. Write them down.

shadeism (a byproduct of racism creating a hierarchy within minority races based on skin tone)

I may well have been the most qualified person for the job. But it wasn’t a fair competition, and in acting like it was fair, and accepting my prize without question, I helped ensure that it would stay unfair.

I don’t know how to describe what those two days were like for me except to say that I hadn’t known before then that there was so much air to breathe.

Affirmative action teaches people of color and women that they don’t have to work as hard as white men. Sigh. Here’s the basic truth: the vast majority of affirmative action goals aim for a representative number of people of color and women. This means that if there are 10 percent black people in the area, the ultimate goal (not quota) would be aro

You have to get over the fear of facing the worst in yourself. You should instead fear unexamined racism.

Originally coined in 1966 by sociologist William Peterson to profile the socioeconomic success of Japanese Americans, the myth of the “model minority” has become a collection of stereotypes about Asian Americans, presenting them as an “ideal minority group” in the eyes of White Supremacy. Included in these stereotypes are presumptions of academic a

My hair and my lips were not the only part of me that was too much. I had taken on quite a babyish voice a few years earlier, after all of the jokes about how my loudness was so “typical for a black girl”—I didn’t know what that meant, because I was the only black girl at my school, but I knew it wasn’t good. My butt was also too big,