VIDEO: The Many Problems With, “You Sound White”

This video is not only well articulated, but it hits on topics we’ve learned such as double-consciousness, race-talking, and ascription. Enjoy!

COMIC: White Privilege, Explained

White privilege can be a tricky thing for people to wrap their heads around. If you’ve ever called out white privilege before, chances are you’ve heard responses like “But I’m didn’t ask to be born white!” or “You’re being reverse racist.”

The next time that happens, just show the nay-sayer this succinct comic by Jamie Kapp explaining what white privilege is — and what it isn’t.

Click through for the full comic!

A Look at Race as a Social Construct

Sometimes a picture is truly worth a thousand words. For those of us from the ‘multiracial’ or mixed race community, photos of our population — our people, our families, our children — aren’t as shocking as they are an affirmation of what we have already known: Race is a social construct.

Click here.

 

Remembering Legendary Detroit Activist Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015)

Longtime Detroit activist and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs died this morning at the age of 100.

“She left this life as she lived it: surrounded by books, politics, people and ideas,” said her friends and caretakers Shay Howell and Alice Jennings.

Grace Lee Boggs was involved with the civil rights, Black Power, labor, environmental justice, and feminist movements over the past seven decades. She was born to Chinese immigrant parents in 1915. In 1992, she co-founded the Detroit Summer youth program to rebuild and renew her city.

Here is a Democracy Now! video interview in which she talks about her work in the civil rights, Black Power, labor, environmental justice and feminist movements for seven decades.

Conversations on Philosophy and Race

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Click here to read an ongoing series of interviews with philosophers on race by George Yancy, philosophy professor at Emory University.

LIST: 18 Things White People Seem To Not Understand (Because, White Privilege)

I don’t wake up every morning with the intention of pissing you off, I swear, and whether or not you believe it, I’m here to help you. I want you to recognize that on a daily basis, you hold a set of advantages and immunities that are a direct result of the oppression of people of color. That doesn’t sound nice, does it? Makes you squirm in your chair a bit and maybe feel a little uncomfortable, right?
But here’s the thing – I’m not here to make you feel comfortable, that’s not my job. I’m here to erase the invisibility of the privileges you have that continue to help maintain white supremacy. I’m here to show you what your White Privilege is.
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1. White Privilege is being able to move into a new neighborhood and being fairly sure that your neighbors will be pleasant to you and treat you with respect.

2. White Privilege is being able to watch a movie, read a book and open the front page of a newspaper and see yourself and your race widely represented and spoken for.

3. White Privilege is being able to seek legal, financial and medical help without having your race work against you.

4. White Privilege is living in a world where you are taught that people with your skin tone hold the standard for beauty.

5. White Privilege is never being told to, “get over slavery”.

6. White Privilege is having the prevalence and importance of the English language and finding amusement in ridiculing people of colour/immigrants for their accents and their difficulty in speaking a language that is not their native tongue.

7. White Privilege is arrogantly believing that reverse racism actually exists.

8. White Privilege is being able to stay ignorant to the fact that racial slurs are part of a systematic dehumanization of entire groups of people who are and have historically been subjugated and hated just for being alive.

9. White Privilege is not having your name turned into an easier-to-say Anglo-Saxon name.

10. White Privilege is being able to fight racism one day, then ignore it the next.

11. White privilege is having your words and actions attributed to you as an individual, rather than have them reflect members of your race.

12. White Privilege is being able to talk about racism without appearing self-serving.

13. White Privilege is being able to be articulate and well-spoken without people being surprised.

14. White Privilege is being pulled over or taken aside and knowing that you are not being singled out because of your race/colour.

15. White Privilege is not having to teach your children to be aware of systematic racism for their own protection.

16. White Privilege is not having to acknowledge the fact that we live in a system that treat people of colour unfairly politically, socially and economically and choosing, instead, to believe that people of colour are inherently less capable.

17. White Privilege is not having your people and their culture appropriated, romanticized or eroticized for the gain and pleasure of other white people.

18. White Privilege is being able to ignore the consequences of race.

Click here.

MAP: 37 maps that explain how America is a nation of immigrants

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“American politicians, and Americans themselves, love to call themselves “a nation of immigrants”: a place where everyone’s family has, at some point, chosen to come to seek freedom or a better life. America has managed to maintain that self-image through the forced migration of millions of African slaves, restrictive immigration laws based on fears of “inferior” races, and nativist movements that encouraged immigrants to assimilate or simply leave.

But while the reality of America’s immigrant heritage is more complicated than the myth, it’s still a fundamental truth of the country’s history. It’s impossible to understand the country today without knowing who’s been kept out, who’s been let in, and how they’ve been treated once they arrive.”

Click here.

What White Privilege Really Means

 

Photo by Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
Legal professionals and students stage a die-in to protest police brutality and the decisions by grand juries in New York and Missouri not to indict police officers involved in the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, in Los Angeles, Dec. 16, 2014.

It’s not about what whites get. It’s about what blacks don’t.

Click here.