Author Archives: Sarah Shugars

La Japonaise

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Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts has recently come under fire for inviting patrons to “Channel your inner Camille Monet and try on a replica of the kimono she’s wearing in La Japonaise.”

It’s worth taking a moment to look at the image they used to promote the opportunity: A white American woman pretending to be a white French woman pretending to be Japanese. There’s a lot going on there.

After several complaints from Boston’s Asian American community, the MFA has decided to remove the dress up portion of the activity, instead inviting guests to “touch and engage with” the kimonos, but “not to try on.”

I’ve seen this story pop up on my newsfeed the last few days, but it really caught my attention with the morning news announced the change from the MFA.

The (white) news anchors said that the MFA received “a small number of complaints” from a “handful of activists.” They added that the MFA initially responded that it would continue with the demonstrations, but eventually shifted their position after the complaints “went viral.”

The news anchors expressed general confusion as to why anyone was offended by the exhibit, and appeared disheartened that the MFA had changed it’s policy in response what they saw as a small number of protestors. They called it a case of “political correctness going to far.”

That got my attention.

Now. I do appreciate a general concern about the dangers of political correctness. The last thing that serves a productive conversation about race is an atmosphere in which people feel shut down from expressing themselves – where they’d rather say nothing than run the risk of saying the wrong thing. This is the approach that led to the fallacy of a “color blind” society – as if denying our problems would make them go away.

But “political correctness gone to far” is also a conveniently safe out for people who don’t see – or don’t want to see – a problem.

Frankly, when you have a group of Asian Americans saying they find an exhibit of Kimono dress-up offensive, I think you have to stop and try to understand why they feel that way. It doesn’t matter whether you don’t find it offensive – it’s about not thoughtlessly discrediting someone with a different view from you.

Blogger Evan Smith has a great post explaining why the “be Camille Monet” activity is problematic:

The painting in question, a work from 1876, is a singular example of Orientalism, a tradition in Western art that broadly caricatures regions as disparate as North Africa and East Asia with the aim of cultivating a Romantic visual language around Western cultural imperialism. Japonisme, the particular subset of Orientalism that Monet’s canvas depicts, is a loose interpretation of Japanese culture by French aesthetes marked by ornamentation, hyper-femininity and a sense of escapism bordering on pure fantasy. In La Japonaise the artificiality of the genre is underscored by the blonde wig Camille donned when posing for the painting in order to emphasize her whiteness, contrasting her body to the Otherness of her garments and surroundings.

That’s not to say we need to dismiss the artwork all together, but neither should we celebrate the Orientalism it embodies.

The painting took place less than 30 years after Commodore Perry’s “opening of Japan.” It was a time when Europeans were fascinated by the “topsy turvey” world of Japanese culture – seen as both civilized and barbaric.

In fairness, the Japanese were equally intrigued by European culture – seen as both civilized and barbaric. And there is some great Japanese art that depicts the ape-ishness of Europeans, just as European art captured the beauty and brutality they saw in Japan.

Orientalism was an important movement in European culture, and it seems reasonable that Western society should study it, seek to understand it, and possibly even celebrate the art that came out of it.

But we shouldn’t seek to recreate it.

We should seek to appreciate and understand other cultures, not seek to appropriate them. We shouldn’t celebrate their seeming exoticism, but seek to truly understand them.

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Stuyvesant Town

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I am just returning from a weekend in New York, where I spent part of my time at Stuyvesant Town, or Stuy Town as it is more colloquially known.

Stuy Town and the adjoining Peter Cooper Village are a large post-World War II development originally conceived as housing for returning veterans and their families.

Covering 80 acres, 110 buildings, and 11,250 apartments, the development is the largest apartment complex in Manhattan and feels somewhat out of place in the dense urban center. There are trees and fireflies. Water features and basketball courts.

Previously, the area had been the Gashouse District – full of large, leaking gas tanks and people whose poverty kept them from living anywhere else.

In the early 1940s, the land was taken by eminent domain – a controversial move since the land was then owned and developed by Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Supporters argued that the government needed to “induce insurance companies and savings banks to enter the field of large-scale slum clearance.”

To make room for the new development, 600 buildings, containing 3,100 families, 500 stores and small factories, three churches, three schools, and two theaters were razed. The New York Times called it “the greatest and most significant mass movement of families in New York’s history.”

And the controversy didn’t end there. After law makers declined to add a nondiscrimination clause to MetLife’s contract, the company barred blacks, with the company’s president Frederick H. Ecker arguing that “negroes and whites do not mix.”

The property has changed hands since then – and updated their applicant requirements – but it remains a private property with privately controlled rules. This felt particularly weird for a development that feels very much like a small town.

The development does have a very active tenants association, but I somehow expected more than that. I wanted there to be an egalitarian governing council that would oversee decisions about improvements and moderate tenant conflicts.

Stuyvesant Town is now Manhattan’s largest, and possibly last, “bastion of affordable housing,” having itself expelled poor people for a more refined, middle class community.

And there it stands, a monument to good intentions and the deep challenges of urban planning.

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Agency

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Social psychologist Geert Hofstede is perhaps most well known for his construction of cultural dimensions. Hofstede considers culture as “the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from others.”

Among his six dimensions of culture, Hofstede evaluates a society’s “Individualism versus Collectivism (IDV).” Hofstede explains:

The fundamental issue addressed by this dimension is the degree of interdependence a society maintains among its members. It has to do with whether people´s self-image is defined in terms of “I” or “We”. In Individualist societies people are only supposed to look after themselves and their direct family. In Collectivist societies people belong to “in groups” that take care of them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.

The United States, as conventional wisdom would indicate, is more individualistic than collectivist.

I’ve been thinking about this recently, because in some ways that finding seems at odds with the lack of agency experienced by so many Americans – particularly people of color, those living in poverty, and others who are marginalized in our society.

As Kelly Oliver argues in The Colonization of Psychic Space: “One’s sense of oneself as a subject with agency is profoundly affected by one’s social position.”

Being an individualistic society, then, puts oppressed people in a double-bind. While Hofstede finds that American society expects “that people look after themselves and their immediate families only and should not rely (too much) on authorities for support,” the message to oppressed people consistently undermines their own sense of agency and self-efficacy.

Frankly, I was always somewhat skeptical of Hofstede’s anaylsis, and not only because he also has a masculinity/femininity scale defined as “wanting to be the best (Masculine) or liking what you do (Feminine).”

But the idea of America as an individualistic place, where everyone’s expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps…that just sounds like the line you’d get out of the ol’ boys network.

Surely, that has long been an element of our culture, and has often been a strongly expressed element of our culture, but it doesn’t speak for all of us and it doesn’t speak for me.

Oliver argues that “by resisting oppression, one regains a sense of oneself as an agent,” and that the process of resistance can be healing insofar as it can help build agency.

So let’s all, collectively, reject the narrative of an individualistic America. Let us collectively lift each other up and work together to change the dominant narrative. This is our country and we can shape it.

Happy Fourth of July.

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Mobilizing a Movement: A Pro-Life Case Study

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I heard a statistic last week which blew my mind: half of all pro-life advocates start as neutral or even pro-choice. Brought into the movement through social networks, these people eventually convert their view points and become pro-life activists.

In a classic case of the backfire effect, I simply refused to believe the speaker. Pro-choice supporters don’t become pro-life advocates to fit in with a different social group. That’s crazy talk.

So I looked into it a little more.

In The Making of Pro-life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works, Ziad W. Munson documents the mobilization efforts of pro-life activists around the country. His initial goal was to understand the difference between mobilized activists and unmobilized supporters. But as he studied mobilization he found this question didn’t make sense: activists were mobilized from a broader pool than simply unmobilized supporters. As Munson explains:

One of the central arguments of this book is that individuals get involved in pro-life activism before they develop solid beliefs or firm ideas about abortion. Individuals mobilized into the pro-life movement in fact begin the mobilization process with a surprisingly diverse range of ideas about the issue. A quarter of those who are now activists were more sympathetic to the movement’s opponents when they first became involved, expressing beliefs that abortion should be a woman’s right or that abortion is (at least sometimes) morally acceptable. Only after they participated in pro-life movement activities did their views begin to change. Another quarter of all activists first became mobilized with an ambivalent attitude towards the issue. They saw valid arguments on both sides of the controversy and admit that they could have been persuaded either way about abortion.

…This argument does not claim that individuals have no ideas about abortion before they get involved in the movement, nor that everyone is equally likely to become mobilized regardless of his or her preexisting beliefs. Some individuals, because of their person biographies and beliefs, are more likely to know others who are involved in the movement and thus are more likely to come into personal contact with the movement – a key condition in the mobilization process. And although fully a quarter of the activists once held pro-choice views, none of them were strongly invested in this position or were active on the other side of the debate. The point is not that people are completely empty vessels, waiting to be filled with ideas from social movements, but only that our view of social movement activity as expressive behavior that presupposes commitment misses the mark.

That made me feel much better about the initial statistic – which had sounded like liberal activists suddenly become conservative ones. The number started to make a lot more sense: when people with generally ambivalent views become engaged in the work, they develop stronger views.

Munson adds that the half of pro-life activists who started with pro-life beliefs held only “thin beliefs” on the topic: their views were “poorly thought out, often contradictory, and seldom related to a larger moral vision.”

This way of understanding social movement mobilization raises important questions about socialization and group interactions. It emphasizes the importance of social and collaborative relationships, of engaging together in working to make change. And it highlights the importance of dissension, of creating spaces where all ideas are robustly considered.

And perhaps most fundamentally, it demonstrates the critical role of civic education: people can form their views on issues later, but we need to educate them to think coherently and critically, to learn from others but to form their own opinions, to be skeptical of popular opinions. And we need to teach them to explore all sides of an issue as they begin to get involved, to seek out ideas and opinions which differ from the ones the are forming.

Otherwise…they may just find themselves as activists on the wrong side of an issue!

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Voting is Not Enough

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In the last presidential election, only 61.8 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot. Unsurprisingly, the 2014 midterms were even worse, with just 36.4 percent of eligible citizens voting – the worst turnout in any election cycle since World War II.

Those are the kind of numbers which make civic advocates despair.

The Editorial Board of the New York Times reported that the low turnout “was bad for Democrats, but it was even worse for democracy.” The Times went on to bemoan the causes of the record-low turnout: “apathy, anger and frustration at the relentlessly negative tone of the campaigns.”

But we should be wary of correlating increased voter turnout with increased civic health – voting is an important act in a healthy democracy, but a turn out rate is not enough to diagnose a civic ailment.

In Power and Powerlessness, John Gaventa develops a power-powerlessness model of voting.

In a coal mining valley of Appalachia, Gaventa is struck by how local elections are always battles between elites which never address or engage the poor, working people of the community:

Though intensely fought, the conflict which emerges into the local political arena is rarely substantive compared with what could emerge. The candidates do not raise questions potentially challenging to either Company or courthouse – such as why the locally derived wealth is not redistributed through taxation.

Gaventa documents how both public and private (eg, voting) challenges to existing power structures are forcefully shut down by those in power. Over time, these power structures become stronger and the fear of reprisal becomes ingrained. Those without power exhibit repeated behavior which would be perplexing to an outsider.

In one Company town, turnout rates would get as high as 100%. Voting day was a special day, where folks would dress up to participate. Then they’d go to to the ballot box and vote unanimously for the company man – a man who was actively engaged in the oppression of the people voting for him.

While “a host of studies in political science argue that the poor may not participate or may not participate effectively, because of low income, poor education, lack of information, and other factors of a socio-economic state scale,” Gaventa draws a different conclusion:

Factors such as low income, low education and low status may, in fact, be reflections of a common index of ‘vulnerability’ or social and economic dependency of a non-elite upon an elite. Through processes of coercive power, those most likely to challenge inequalities may be prevented from challenge…Over time, there may develop a routine of non-conflict within and about local politics – a routine which may, to the observer, appear as a fatalism found in ‘backwardness.’ As regards to voting…the phenomenon would be better understood as a product of power relations, such that actions of challenge – and even, over time, conceptions of such actions – by the powerless against the powerful become organized out the political milieu.

All of this is not to say that we shouldn’t talk about voting, but voting is far from enough. When we talk about voting, we should talk about power – and not just the desperate claim that one person’s vote has the power to make a difference. We should talk about how structures of power shape our very approach to voting.

In one talk at Frontiers of Democracy last week, Denise Merrill, Connecticut’s Secretary of the State, said that the number one reason people give for not voting is that no one asked them.

While perhaps we shouldn’t feel the need to send an engraved invitation to every member of our democracy inviting them to participate in it, the reality is…we do.

When I see low voting rates, I don’t see a people who are too apathetic or too stupid to vote, I see a people who have been taught – explicitly and implicitly – that they have no agency in this world. That their voices and their thoughts have no value.

And when we talk about voting, too often we reinforce this sense – after all, if one vote out of 3 million is all the power you have…that’s just a reminder of just how powerless you are

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Fun and Civic Work

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Last week, I had the great pleasure of attending the 2015 Frontiers of Democracy conference. One theme that came up several times was fun.

In a session I facilitated, for example, I asked participants to share how they personally engage in civic work and then reflect on what they learned from each other’s approaches.

At the end of the session, one group reported that they’d had a quite engaging discussion about whether or not fun was required for sustainable civic impact.

Fun makes the work more enjoyable – making it easier to mobilize and engage others, and sustaining those who choose to take on the work. Fun brings people together, transforming a group of individual actors into a true community, capable of engaging in the work together.

But fun could also be superfluous, an add on that only works in some contexts, or even damaging – undermining the seriousness of an issue with frivolity.

We talked about gamification, using the tools of gaming to make civic experiences more fun.

We talked about the natural fun that comes about when people in a room simply like each other and enjoy each other’s company. One person described how much fun she has making signs or doing so-called boring work with a group she works with. The work may be dull, but being with the people is just fun.

There was also good discussion about whether fun was the right word – perhaps it was more of a public spiritedness we were looking for?

Later, in a conversation about engaging communities with city planning, someone else talked about the importance of engaging the arts – using music and dance to create a festive atmosphere. An event should be fun, so that community members would actually want to attend.

And finally, as the conference drew to a close, another person wondered if the concern about fun was actually a byproduct of the professionalization of civic work. If you feel like the host, you want to make sure your guests are having fun.

It strikes me – and perhaps I’ve been reading too much Wittgenstein – that we’re not talking about the same type of “fun” in all these scenarios.

There is certain type of forced fun, which does feel like a host trying to entertain guests. There can be a paternalistic danger in this approach, too – a tendency to say, “we’d better make civic work fun because that’s the only way we can get the people to do what is best for them.”

As if we aren’t people too. As if we do this work because we are somehow wiser or more self-aware.

The irony here, of course, is that at any good party the host is the only one worried about people having fun – everyone else is busy simply having it.

Perhaps that’s another type of fun – or a public spiritedness, if you will. When people come together, when people talk together and spend time together and simply get to know each other – that is fun. There’s no forced socializing or carefully constructed ice breakers, just people coming together.

And I think it’s only appropriate that I end with one of the panelists from my session. After this great discussion about different types of civic work, after this engaging debate about what is fun and whether or not it is required, he turned to me and smiled, saying simply:

That was fun.

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Internal vs External Infrastructure

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After my post from earlier this week, I got into a fascinating conversation about whether social justice work should focus more externally – on shared projects and improving institutions – or internally – on checking your own biases and privilege.

I may have just left it there, but yesterday someone else raised the same point in a conversation about building civic infrastructure to confront racial bias.

There’s nothing in the police manual that says officers need to treat people of color more aggressively than white people, one person argued, so the real need is for police officers to work on removing their own internal biases.

Someone else countered with excellent examples of how the external system really does increase and perpetuate racial bias among officers – they are trained as paramilitary, trained to expect the worse case scenario, and, yes, even trained to treat low-income neighborhoods as more dangerous.

Of course, the external v. internal debate is not really a zero-sum game, though there is an important question as to where we should collectively focus our resources and attention.

Focusing too much on either has its dangers: too internally focused becomes little more than navel-gazing without any real action or systemic change; too externally focused provides policy bandaids which do little to mitigate the day to day biases and microaggressions which people of color experience constantly.

But if the best path lies somewhere in between, it still raises an interesting challenge as to how to navigate that journey.

I imagine creating more spaces for shared work, with more spaces for self-reflection and improvement. I imagine creating structures and institutions which encourage us to improve ourselves by working together for the express purpose of working better together.

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Frontiers of Democracy

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Frontiers of Democracy, a three day conference hosted by the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University, begins this evening. Frontiers convenes practitioners and scholars from a wide range of disciplines, engaging on topics of deliberative democracy, civil and human rights, social justice, community organizing, political engagement, and Civic Studies.

You can follow the conversation at #DemFront, and you can watch featured speakers live streamed on the Tisch College website.

The live stream schedule is:

Thursday, June 25 | 6:30-7:30pm

Tina Nabatchi, Caroline Lee, Harry Boyte

Tina Nabatchi (PhD, Indiana University-Bloomington, 2007) is an associate professor of public administration and international affairs at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, where she also co-directs the Collaborative Governance Initiative for the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration (PARCC). Her research focuses on citizen participation, collaborative governance, and conflict resolution. She is the lead editor of Democracy in Motion: Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement (Oxford University Press, 2012), co-author of Collaborative Governance Regimes (with Kirk Emerson, Georgetown University Press), and co-author of Public Participation for 21st Century Democracy (with Matt Leighninger, Wiley/Blackwell)

Caroline W. Lee teaches sociology at Lafayette College. Her most recent books include Do-it-Yourself Democracy, based on her ethnography of the public engagement industry, and Democratizing Inequalities, an edited volume with Ed Walker and Mike McQuarrie about the dramatic expansion of democratic practices in an era of stark economic inequalities.

Harry Boyte leads the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College. Boyte has been an architect of a “public work” approach to civic engagement and democracy promotion, a conceptual framework on citizenship that has gained world-wide recognition for its theoretical innovations and its practical effectiveness.

Friday. June 26 |  9:30-10:30am 

Abhi Nemani, Brenda Wright, Hahrie Han

Abhi Nemani is currently the first Chief Data Officer for the City of Los Angeles. Formerly, he helped build, launch, and run the national non-profit, Code for America.

Brenda Wright is Vice President of Legal Strategies at Demos.  She has led many progressive legal and policy initiatives on voting rights, campaign finance reform, redistricting, election administration and other democracy and electoral reform issues and is a nationally known expert in these areas.

Hahrie Han teaches political science at Wellesley College. Her two most recent books are How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the 21st Century and Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.1 Million Activists Transformed Field Campaigns in America (co-authored with Elizabeth McKenna)

Friday. June 26 | 4:00-5:00pm

Diana Hess, Ajume Wingo, Denise Merrill

Diana E. Hess is Senior Vice President of the Spencer Foundation and Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her most recent book, with Paula McAvoy, is The Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education.

Ajume Wingo teaches philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder. His last book is entitled Veil Politics in Liberal Democratic States, and he is collaborating with Michael Kruse on The Citizen, a book about how Africans can move beyond where their history has put them and begin to make their own future and secure their own political freedom.

Denise Merrill is Connecticut’s 73rd Secretary of the State. In that capacity, she has focused on modernizing Connecticut’s election process and making voting easier. She also co-chairs the State’s Civic Health Advisory Group, which is responsible for implementing action strategies identified in Connecticut’s 2012 Civic Health Report. She has a longstanding commitment to civic education and expanding democratic participation.

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The Work

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In the wake of the murders in Charleston, in the wake of the constant news of black and brown people dying at that hand of whites, I’ve been surrounded by calls for white people to get engaged in the work.

People of color have been engaged in the work forever. In a fight for their very survival, they have led the work for change and for justice. But its not their job to fix society on their own. White people need to step up and do the work with them.

I was reading one particular essay yesterday, colorfully addressed “To My Fellow Whiteys,” which strongly argued that its long past time for white Americans to get up and get to work. Well, that’s great, except –

I kept scrolling down to figure out what “the work” is. I feel like –

I am ready to get to work, but just what is it I’m supposed to do?

I read lots of lists with titles like “how to be a better ally” or “actions for social justice.” And they almost always leave me feeling flat. I want action, I want change. Advice which basically boils down to “try not to be an a-hole” doesn’t do it for me.

I mean, it’s good advice, but its not enough.

And that, I think, is one of the biggest challenges.

We’ve come to think of social change as something that happens through large movements and policy change.

We know how to get a racist flag taken down.

That is good work, but the work is much more than that. There is so much more work to be done.

Really confronting systemic racism in this country will take more than policy change. There is plenty of policy which could stand to be changed – but that is a symptom, not the disease.

So just what is “the work” that we ought to engage in? Just what is this work that we have to engage in?

It is smaller, it is ordinary. And that’s just what makes it so extraordinary.

The work is about each of us, as individuals. Each trying to be a little better tomorrow than we were today. Each trying to understand each other a little better tomorrow, to appreciate each other a little better tomorrow.

That’s not to say we can simply put large scale change or policy actions aside, but the real work, the hard, gritty, difficult work is improving yourself.

I read an article not long ago where a woman of color reflected on being cut in line by a white woman at an airport baggage check. The woman later apologized, saying “I’m sorry if I cut you earlier. I didn’t see you standing there.”

As author Brit Bennett described, “I spent a four hour flight trying not to wonder about the white woman’s intentions. But why would she think about mine? She didn’t even see me.”

I was struck by that story. That could have been me.

I could have done it thoughtlessly, with no racist intentions or motives. It would have been easy for me. And it would have caused another person anguish.
Regardless of our intentions, that’s not always how our actions are perceived. I imagine that some might argue that the woman who got cut off should simply get over it. That being cut off in an airport is no big deal and you should just forget about it and move on with your life.Well, that’s easy to say when you know the motives weren’t personal.I don’t know what it’s like to be black in America, but I do know what it’s like to not know whether the guy smiling at you is trying to be neighborly or hoping to cop a feel. I know what it’s like to have men talk over you or reject your opinion and not know whether its because you actually weren’t saying anything of value or if its because you’re a woman.It’s exhausting. And for people of color, the microagressions they experience throughout the day can be traumatizing.Getting cut off in an airport once is no big deal. Being discriminated against and oppressed during every hour of every day is.As white people, we have a responsibility, not just to “get to work,” but to understand and appreciate everyone who cohabits this world with us.We have a responsibility to learn, to listen, to do our best to understand another’s experience, to accept their experience as valid even if it conflicts with our own way of experiencing the world. We have a responsibility to educate ourselves and to educate each other. And, above all, at the core of the work – we have a responsibility to be a little better tomorrow than we were today.

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On Confederate Flags and the Long Road Ahead

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In a surprise move, once it became politically expedient, South Carolina’s governor and others added their voices to the call for the Confederate flag to come down from the state house.

With even Walmart and EBay deciding to ban the Confederate flag, it seems like the days of Confederate flag waving might soon be behind us.

And that’s not bad. The Confederate flag has long been a sign of hate. In 1962, at a time of school desegregation and powerful civil rights organizing, it was erected over the South Carolina state house.

A reminder of who was, and who would remain, in power.

Following the murder of nine people in a terrorist attack on Mother Emanuel church, many have wisely decried this symbol, and a growing campaign has organized around it’s removal.

I will be glad if the campaign is successful, and yet, the effort leaves me unsettled –

There is so much work to do, and it goes far, far beyond taking down a flag.

Like a campaign built upon online clicks, the effort to remove the flag feels like little more than slacktivisim – an opportunity for good people to prove they are good before getting back to their every day lives.

Perhaps I paint with too broad a brush here, so perhaps I should only say that that’s how I would feel.

I’ve been told that any good organizing campaign is sustained by little victories, and I can optimistically see how getting a flag taken down might provide such a foothold. Perhaps a victory there will galvanize people to act further – to demand further reforms and to question the deep, pervasive racism that so tragically defines our society.

But the realist in me, imagines a win a signal the caring eyes that have been drawn to issues of racism. Go home, it might say, we’ve won.

Surely, there is a value to accomplishing some simple, tangible victories – but not if those victories signal permission to no longer act, to put off the really difficult work.

And we do have difficult work ahead of us.

Calls for a “national dialogue on race” hardly do the work justice. We need to dismantle and rebuild our systems and institutions, and we need to talk with each other – not just a nation, but as a community of individuals – and we, white people in particular, need to recognize that we’ve got a lot of learning to do.

It’s easy not to engage in conversations about race and racism when you’re the one benefiting from the system, or when you imagine that what others will tell you won’t ring true to your own experience.

White privilege doesn’t mean your life is perfect: it just means that someone else’s is probably worse.

We have real, serious, deep-seated and systemic problems around race in this country. It will take more than a flag to sweep them away.

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