Racism

My parents—even from within their racial consciousness—were susceptible to the racist idea that it was laziness that kept Black people down, so they paid more attention to chastising Black people than to Reagan’s

It revealed the bait and switch at the heart of standardized tests—the exact thing that made them unfair: She was teaching test-taking form for standardized exams that purportedly measured intellectual strength. My classmates and I would get higher scores—two hundred points, as promised—than poorer students, who might be equivalent in intellectual

accustomed to a life of burden as our appetite for liberation wanes.

Decolonizing reality consists of unlearning consensual “reality,” of seeing through reality’s roles and descriptions by what Don Juan calls acts of not-doing.

We train our focus on beauty here or there—this poem, that architecture—because it is easier than bearing witness to our own story. We begin to gravitate not toward beauty but toward illusion. In this state, you are not approaching what you seek. You are running from your own face. But this is not the way of wonder. Wonder requires a person not to

it allows us to focus on how—rather than if—our racism is manifest. When we move beyond the good/bad binary, we can become eager to identify our racist patterns because interrupting those patterns becomes more important than managing how we think we look to others.

We must be willing to exchange comfort for racial consciousness and to be more curious than critical or dispirited. If I didn’t belong to you, I wouldn’t have written this book. If you didn’t belong to me, you wouldn’t be reading it. I’m you, and you are me—you just don’t know that yet. We are here, sharing these pages, to embrace our membership in

We always hate what we fear.