I'm Judging You by Luvvie Ajayi

didn’t read” version of imperialism in America. This is why I should teach. Honestly, I wouldn’t do any worse than current textbooks. Like the ones in Texas that used the word “workers” instead of “slaves” in the section about the transatlantic slave trade. As if Black people were at a career fair in Africa where we submitted résumés and asked to be beaten and starved and have our families broken in exchange for a journey across the ocean and NO MONEY. At least I’d try to be a little bit accurate.
    My point is that the United States does not have a legitimate history of integrity and fairness. It’s been run by villains that make Disney’s look like saints. Racism is not a byproduct as much as it’s the foundational stock in the American soup. This is why Black people are still fighting to be recognized in our full humanity. The success of the country has been based on our oppression, so of course it is forever fresh out of dambs to give about Black lives. We are left to grieve for those we’ve lost to the grubby hands of white supremacy, we rage about the perpetual cycle of mourning we find ourselves in, and we wonder what we need to do to be secure in our own skins.
    How do we fight racism and racial injustice? I am not sure, but I think part of it has to be that racists recognize themselves and that everyone sees how they are contributing to the system. Let’s just throw all the cards on the table.
    First of all, even nice people can be racists, because racism does not depend on malicious intent. It is not a requirement for you to consciously hate someone who is of a different skin color for you to be racist. Let me repeat. You do not need to actively hate someone who is of a different race than you to do racist crap and hold racist views. Prejudice can be subconscious, like a reflex to clutch your purse tighter when that Black boy walked into the elevator you were on. Racism doesn’t just look like people in white hoods who are on lawns burning crosses and churches, yelling out “nigger,” and rocking blackface on Halloween for laughs. In fact, the idea that this cartoonish bigotry is what racism looks like is why some people think it is all gone and we have nothing to worry about.
    The real scaffolding of racism is institutions that are so fully entwined with prejudice that to change them would require overhauling entire systems, entire ways of life. When keeping Black and brown people marginalized literally elevates white people, as they use our backs as stairs, why would they want us to stand up? White supremacy is ultimately the point of racism, so it is not something that Black people can will or wish away. We cannot respectably dress it away, un-cuss it away, protest it away. White people have to do it. They have to be willing to come off their (stolen) high horses and fight for change. This is why we need allies who will get uncomfortable. We need people who can look at their friends and family members and stop them in the middle of their racist jokes. It will not be comfortable to speak up, but if allies do not confront those closest to them, how do we progress?

    Racism is not always white hoods and burning crosses. Sometimes, it’s suits and boardrooms.
    We Black and brown people are told to work twice as hard to get half as far, because we never stop auditioning for the jobs we have and we can never stop proving that we belong in the rooms we work our way into. Otherwise, we’re suspected of being beneficiaries of quota systems and affirmative action. Racism is our names on our résumés being perceived as less competent and resulting in half as many job-interview callbacks as others with identical qualifications. It is the fact that Black people with college degrees often make the same as or less than a white person with a high school diploma. For women, we talk about glass ceilings; for Black people, there’s often an