The goal of my work is to make visible the inevitable racist assumptions held, and patterns displayed, by white people conditioned from living in a white supremacist culture.
Robin DiangeloRead
Mainstream dictionary definitions reduce racism to racial prejudice and the personal actions that result. But this definition does little to explain how racial hierarchies are consistently reproduced.
Interpretation
This quote challenges the simplistic view of racism by highlighting the underlying systems that perpetuate racial hierarchies.
Robin DiAngelo's quote emphasizes that understanding racism goes beyond individual prejudice and actions; it requires an analysis of the systemic structures that uphold and reproduce racial inequalities. This perspective urges us to look at how societal norms and institutional practices contribute to the ongoing dynamics of racism, rather than seeing it solely as a matter of personal behavior.
In practice
During a diversity training workshop, to illustrate the importance of understanding systemic racism.
The goal of my work is to make visible the inevitable racist assumptions held, and patterns displayed, by white people conditioned from living in a white supremacist culture.
Whites often respond defensively when linked to other whites as a group or 'accused' of collectively benefiting from racism, because as individuals, each white person is 'different' from any other white person and expects to be seen as such.
One of the most important misunderstandings for white people to get over to move forward is this idea that racism is a good-bad proposition - that if we're good we can't be part of it, that being uncomfortable means you're a terrible person. We have to let go of that and understand it as a system we all live in.
You have to be in accountable relationships across race. Accountable means that they're authentic, they're sustained, and that you do talk about racism, and you are able to be given feedback.
This is what I have learned: Any white person living in the United States will develop opinions about race simply by swimming in the water of our culture. But mainstream sources - schools, textbooks, media - don't provide us with the multiple perspectives we need.
White consciousness is deeply anti-black, and that's for progressives and conservatives.
So while I can't tell you if bringing a child into this world is the morally-responsible to do, I can say that the future, much like the present, is going to be a whole lot better than you think.
Evil has no substance of its own, but is only the defect, excess, perversion, or corruption of that which has substance.
To say that we are sorry for our sins is mere hypocrisy, unless we show that we are really sorry for them, by giving them up. Doing is the very life of repentance.
Here then at long last is my darkness. No cry of light, no glimmer, not even the faintest shard of hope to break free across the hold.
If you say that you reject violence when it exceeds the limits imposed by the needs of defense, they accuse you of pacifism, without understanding that violence is the whole essence of authoritarianism, just as the repudiation of violence is the whole essence of anarchism.
I wasn't just the madwoman in the attic--I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.
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