To my beloved white community, Lists are circulating: what white people can do about Ferguson, Eric Garner, Reneisha MacBride, about racism and white privilege.  There are so many possible, powerful steps. This is my list of seven essential actions for white people:...

African American culture is a familiar phenomenon. We have African American inspired styles of dress, personal names, cuisine, speech, music, literature and art. The black church is a well-known institution, as is the black media. Black History Month is a staple of...

I have been devoted to a white anti-racist path for close to a dozen years, but I still stiffen with fear and a state of heightened awareness when I find myself alone on a darkened street with one or more Black men nearby. As a dedicated student of anti-racist facts...

Guilt matters.  Guilt must always matter.  Unless guilt matters, the whole world is meaningless.  – from the play JB by Archibald MacLeish Over the past decade that I have been active in the Movement for Racial Justice I have heard, countless times, the claim by some...

My friend Jim Edler, who posted in June, is a pioneer.  In the early 1970s, Jim and colleagues were leading anti-racism trainings for white people in tandem with trainings for people of color.  Jim’s unpublished dissertation of January 1974, White on White: An...

White people in the United States share a common history of immigration from Europe and assimilation into United States society. As a group we share a common language, and a common understanding of normative values, aesthetic preferences, and many other things. In...

Yesterday one of my summer students stayed after to talk about Ralph Ellison’s short story “Battle Royal.” We talked for two hours, each of us leaving with assigned reading or viewing. I agreed to read some of the sources he’d used for a high school paper he’d written...

There is something important and precious about white folks genuinely struggling for clarity and understanding about our common culture and the inescapable cognitive and emotional poison we’ve ingested by growing up here.   Even more important is what we...