Everyone but Not Me: How Racist Friends and Family Reconcile Their Racism With My Brownness
I’m always impressed by the mental gymnastics of people who don’t want to be wrong.
I’ve written before about how people around me minimize the racist experiences I’ve had — or others have had — simply because they’ve never endured racism themselves. They live in a protective bubble, which comes from living in the United States, being of northern European descent, belonging to a Christian denomination, and earning an income above the median. These people aren’t necessarily racist. I don’t think so, at least. They’re just deaf and blind to the experiences of others in this country.
And it’s not that they’ve actively worked to be deaf and blind. Life just made them that way. When you don’t have much diversity in your life, you don’t have diverse points of view. Similarly, when you don’t have adversity, you can only imagine how others should deal with adversity and not how people actually deal with being pushed down by those in power and the systems they’ve created.
