Racism

spoke not of changing the world, but of listening to one’s inner life.

slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.

This is commitment work. This work is hard. There is no way to sugarcoat it. White supremacy is an evil. It is a system of oppression that has been designed to give you benefits at the expense of the lives of BIPOC, and it is living inside you as unconscious thoughts and beliefs. The process of examining it and dismantling it will necessarily be

But I do believe that there is a difference between ignorance and malice – even though the former can very much feel like (and descend into) the latter.

But the answer “black” immediately carries a heavy load, and a number of potentially violent actions—that would have been unlikely otherwise—suddenly become psychologically possible. You don’t just lecture or book this type of body or take it down to the station. It would have no respect for you if you did that—after all, it is more than used to

Most African Americans have had at least two life-altering experiences that are burned into their memory—the moment they realized they were black and the moment they realized that was a problem.