Resonating Quotes from the book
"Only by coming to realize how thoroughly racialized our white lives are can we begin to see the problem as ours, and begin to take action to help solve it. By remaining oblivious to our racialization we remain oblivious to the injustice that stem from it, and we remain paralyzed when it comes to responding to it in a constructive manner."
"As a white man, born and reared in a society that has alwasy bestowed upon me adantages that it has generally withheld from people of color, I am not expected to think the way I do. I am not supposed to speak against and agitate in opposition to racism and institutionalized white supremacy. Indeed, for people of color, it is often shocking to see white people even thinking about race, let alone challenging racism. After all, we don't have to spend much time contemplating the subject if we'd rather not, and white folks have made something of a pastime out of ignoring racism, or at least refusing to call it out as a major social problem to be remedied. But for me, ignoring race and racism has never been an option."
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"Once born, I inherited my family and all that came with it. I also inherited my nation and all that came with that; and I inherited my race and all that came with that too. In all three cases, the inheritance were far from inconsequential. To be Wise meant something; to be born in the richest and most powerful nation on earth meant something; and to be white, especially in the United States, most assuredly meant something... What does it mean to be white in a nation created for the benefit of people like you?...Whiteness becomes for us, the unspoken, interrogated norm, taken for granted, much as water can be taken for granted by a fish."
"Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot. Genealogy offers a sense of belonging and connnectedness to others with firm, identifiable pasts--pasts that directly trace to the rise and fall of empires, and which correspond to the events we learned about in history class, so focused upon were they on the narratives of European people...simply knowing whence you came has the effect of linking you in some greater chain of mutuality. It is enabling, if far from ennobling. It offers a sense of psychological comfort, a sense that you belong in this story known as the history of the world."
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"I say this not to suggest any guilt on my part for having inherited this legacy. It is surely not my fault that I was born, as with so many others, into a social status over which I had little control. But this is hardly the point, and regardless of our own direct culpability for the system, or lack thereof, the simple and incontestable fact is that we all have to deal with the residue of past actions. We clean up the effects of past pollution."
"What I had learned was the fundamental redeemability of even the most distorted human soul. Staring at these folks, looking deeply into their eyes and witnessing the pain only barely concealed behind them, I had come to know that although David Duke had not changed, those who thought as he did were capable of transformation; that even the most vicious of racists is damaged, before ever joining such a movement, and even more once there. And if people such as that can be redeemed, then perhaps anything is possible -- even justice and the end of white supremacy altogether."
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"So often, the way in which qualifications requirements are used favor those who have been in the pipeline for the best opportunities previously. Because of historic white privilege, relying on so-called experience indicators or seniority -- as is normative on the part of most companies -- will almost always screen out people of color who, through no fault of their own, haven't been afforded the same opportunities to accumulate credentials over time. It's not unlike having an eight-leg relay race, in which one runner has had a five lap head start, and then when the runner who started out behind fails to catch up and surpass the one with the unfair advantage, blaming that second runner for not being as good as the first."
"That's what it means to be white: the murderous actions of one white person do not cause every other white person to be viewed in the same light, just as the incompetence or criminality of a white person in a corporation... does not result in other whites being viewed with suspicion as probable incompetents or crooks. Whites can take it for granted that we'll likely be viewed as individuals, representing nothing greater than our solitary selves."
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"The ability of whites to deny nonwhite reality, to not even comprehend that there is a nonwhite reality (or several different ones), indicates how pervasive white privilege is in this society. Whiteness determines the frame through which the nation will come to view itself and the events that take place in it. It allows the dominant perspectives to become perspectivism: the elevation of the dominant viewpoint to the status of the unquestioned and unquestionable truth."
"We can say we believe in multiculturalism and integration, but if we send our children to monoracial, monoculturalism schools, live in monoracial, monoculturalism neighborhoods and expose them to social settings in which everyone looks like them, they will see the inconsistency...children tend to be egocentric, they commonly presume that their stuff is the best: their school, their neighborhood, or their circle of friends...If those schools, communities, and friendship circles are overwhelmingly white, it becomes natural for those children to conclude that the reason black and brown folk are not to be found in them must be because they aren't as good as whites."
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"There is something to be said for confronting the inevitable choice one must make in this life between collaborating with or resisting injustice, and choosing the latter. Indeed, it is among the most important choices we will ever be asked to make as humans, and it is a burden uniquely ours."