Racism

In a startling scene that underscores the absurdity of white supremacist practices, the police officer charged the driver for driving a bus that was “too yellow.” The officer’s “reasoning” was that the bus was deceptive—too closely resembling a school bus.

thoughts and ways were never anything like mine? But each year I know love and belonging—a love that doesn’t require sacrifice at the altar of acceptance—I become more of who I already am. I am liberated into what Merton calls my “true self.” I believe this is my deepest calling.

the history of ethnic racism, of African Americans commonly degrading Africans as “barbaric” or routinely calling West Indians in 1920s Harlem “monkey chasers”—or when I remembered my own taunts of Kwame back in eighth grade—I tried not to run away from the hypocrisy, either. How can I get upset at immigrants from Africa and South America for

The judges, however, wisely rejected that argument, quoting Thurgood Marshall's observation that given the mysteries of human motivation, “it would be unwise to presume as a matter of law that human beings of one definable group will not discriminate against other members of their group.”

Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing.

racist White people unleash on Black people

It took time for me to accept that where we are has as much to do with our formation as with whom and during what. Place is the one thing that always is. We are always somewhere. I have been without people but never without place. Perhaps that is why it is so easy to become numb to it.

The privilege of whiteness means that one’s day-to-day life is not impacted by skin color,

In the black neighborhoods, he learned that developing one’s own sound was essential and that sound and feeling were paramount over technique.