white

Capitalism as retribution for racism. But isn’t that how whiteness recruits us?

Although the Congressman was joking, we probably did know white people better than they knew themselves, and we certainly knew white people better than they ever knew us. This sometimes led to us doubting ourselves, a state of constant self-guessing, of checking our images in the mirror and wondering if that was really who we were, if that was how

But my experience in this world has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the word racist, to them, conjures, if not a tobacco-spitting oaf, then something just as fantastic—an orc, troll, or gorgon. “I’m not a racist,” an entertainer once insisted after being filmed repe

Mackey borrows his title from Amiri Baraka, who aptly defines the history of white musicians profiting off of black music as turning “a verb into a noun.”

When is a white person just doing their job, or having a bad day, or just being drunk and not being racist? When are whites just being kind?

In 2011, academics Samuel R. Sommers and Michael I. Norton conducted a survey in which they found that whenever whites reported a decrease in perceived antiblack bias, they reported an increase in antiwhite bias. It was as if they thought racism was a zero-sum game, encapsulated in the paraphrased comment by former attorney general Jeff Sessions: L

I recently rewatched his Moonrise Kingdom, which, as one blogger noted, is as pleasurable and light as a macaron.

he was yet another white “authority” who gaslit my reality.

As the poet Prageeta Sharma said, Americans have an expiration date on race the way they do for grief.