Narratives of racial exceptionality obscure the reality of ongoing institutional white control while reinforcing the ideologies of individualism and meritocracy.

But racial generalization also reinforces something problematic for people of color—the continual focus on their group identity. Furthermore, it collapses many racial groups into one generic category, thereby denying the specific ways that different groups experience racism. While people of color share some experiences of racism overall, there are

I began to see what I think of as the pillars of whiteness—the unexamined beliefs that prop up our racial responses. I could see the power of the belief that only bad people were racist, as well as how individualism allowed white people to exempt themselves from the forces of socialization.

In a society that grants fewer opportunities to those not seen as white, economic and racial forces are inseparable. However, poor and working-class whites were eventually granted full entry into whiteness as a way to exploit labor.

Naming who has access and who doesn’t guides our efforts in challenging injustice.

Ideally, we would teach our children how to recognize and challenge prejudice, rather than deny it.

we don’t have

The idea of racial inferiority was created to justify unequal treatment; belief in racial inferiority is not what triggered unequal treatment.

The second is the idea that if someone is a good person, that person cannot be racist, as demonstrated in the student’s note that if someone overheard, the person might “misunderstand” Robby. This sort of racism makes for a very challenging dynamic in which whites are operating under the false assumption that we can’t simultaneously be good people