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
One cannot understand how racism functions in the U.S. today if one ignores group power relations.
Interpretation
Understanding racism requires an awareness of the dynamics between different social groups and their power structures.
This quote by Robin DiAngelo emphasizes that a comprehensive understanding of racism in the United States cannot be achieved without considering the power dynamics between different racial and social groups. It highlights the importance of recognizing how these power relations influence societal behaviors, systems, and attitudes towards race.
In practice
This quote can be used in discussions about systemic racism in a classroom setting.
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.
For in the long run, either through a lie, or through truth, people were bound to give themselves away.
The framers of our Constitution meant we were to have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.
God is a scientist, not a magician.
In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ... we can no longer hope to save everything, but ... we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible.
You do not preach and encourage hatred for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field. It is an old, old story. It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe.
We shall say without hesitation that the atheist who is moved by love is moved by the Spirit of God; an atheist who lives by love is saved by his faith in the God whose existence (under that name) he denies.
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