So You Want to Talk About Race

Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow.

Originally coined in 1966 by sociologist William Peterson to profile the socioeconomic success of Japanese Americans, the myth of the “model minority” has become a collection of stereotypes about Asian Americans, presenting them as an “ideal minority group” in the eyes of White Supremacy. Included in these stereotypes are presumptions of academic a

I may well have been the most qualified person for the job. But it wasn’t a fair competition, and in acting like it was fair, and accepting my prize without question, I helped ensure that it would stay unfair.

You have to get over the fear of facing the worst in yourself. You should instead fear unexamined racism.

I had started to see myself, and once you start to see yourself, you cannot pretend anymore.

We can get every person in America to feel nothing but love for people of color in their hearts, and if our systems aren’t acknowledged and changed, it will bring negligible benefit to the lives of people of color.

shadeism (a byproduct of racism creating a hierarchy within minority races based on skin tone)

no matter how woke you think you are—and someone will be telling you to check your privilege while you try to battle your own defensiveness as you figure out what the hell they are talking about.

My hair and my lips were not the only part of me that was too much. I had taken on quite a babyish voice a few years earlier, after all of the jokes about how my loudness was so “typical for a black girl”—I didn’t know what that meant, because I was the only black girl at my school, but I knew it wasn’t good. My butt was also too big,