How to start dismantling racism in 4 (not) easy (at all) steps (for white people)

Circle up, guys, it’s story time. I want to tell you the story of the incredibly racist way that I used to think, how I came to recognize it as racist, and the steps that I’ve taken to make sure that I never think that way again. Grab a drink and a pillow because this is going to be a long one.

I used to be one of the “I don’t see color!” people. I’m not entirely sure where I got the idea. Examining it, I think it came from a misinterpretation of Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” From that, I think I somehow gleaned the idea that it was rude to notice the color of a person’s skin, as though by seeing their skin I somehow negated the value of their character. I thought that if I saw color it meant that I was a racist, and I didn’t want to be a racist so I convinced myself that I didn’t see color.

This makes no sense, of course. I’m not literally color blind, so I obviously noticed Black people’s skin color. I notice it the same way that I might notice facial hair or someone’s height, or that a white person got a tan or looks pale. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous and insulting to both of our intelligences, and yet I pretended that I didn’t notice color for years. I think I sort of equated skin color to weight or financial status — something that everyone knows is disparate, but that you don’t discuss in polite society. The result of which is that I ignored a very real component of people’s identity and glossed over the reality of their lived experience.

Which, when you think about it, is racist as hell.

The most frustrating part of this realization, for me, is that my flawed perspective grew from the belief that racism is deeply wrong. I didn’t want to be racist. I was brought up in an anti-racist household. We weren’t “We’re not racist” anti-racists; we had dialogue in our house when I was young that sounded like, “There are people in this world that think it’s ok to treat people differently because of the color of their skin. They think that some skin colors make you less valuable as a person than other skin colors. In this household, we believe that way of thinking is wrong. We believe that everybody is equal in the sight of God no matter what you look like, so everyone is equal in this household, too.”

When the time came to send my brother and me to school, my parents chose to have us bussed to a historically black school where I was the racial minority, by a large margin, for most of my elementary school years. I was one of two white girls, and maybe eight white kids, in my third grade class. I remember being the new kid that year, an anxious little ball of socially awkward nerves, walking into the cafeteria and thinking, “Will the Black girls will let me sit with them, or do I have to sit with the boys because I’m white?” (The girls did let me sit with them, for the record.)

My parents did their level best to make sure that I did not grow up to be a racist person. I did not want to be a racist person.

And guys, I still got it wrong.

In the midst of all of that, I SOMEHOW still managed to absorb the message that noticing skin color made me a racist, so I tried my hardest to make myself into a person who did not see skin color.

I failed, of course. As I said, I obviously saw color. I’m not an idiot, and I’m not colorblind. Every time that I noticed someone’s skin color, my stomach clenched with this weird secret shame, like I was covertly being a racist and I was afraid to be found out. I didn’t talk to anyone about this because I didn’t want to admit that I was secretly seeing skin color. I definitely didn’t ask anyone Black about it.

Instead, I sat through history lessons that explained that the Civil War was primarily fought over national powers vs. state’s rights, and took dutiful notes. I heard horribly racist words whispered in the school yard and didn’t speak up because noticing those words would mean that I had noticed the color of the person to whom they were referring, and now here I was being tricked into being racist by talking about racist words. I kept quiet, because polite people don’t talk about impolite subjects.

It took me too long, embarrassingly long, to realize that by not acknowledging the color of people’s skin, I was denying the reality of their lived experience.

My roommate my freshman year of college was Black. She was also a laid-back, exceptionally kind person, and basically the perfect roommate for me considering how moody, cantankerous and mostly nocturnal I was my freshman year. We occasionally got invited to “Interracial Roommate” programs that were part of Student Housing’s diversity initiative and we went to a lot of them, not so much because we were on a personal diversity crusade (we were randomly assigned roommates who happened to get along like a house fire) but because there was food at these events and we were both sick of the chicken patties in the dining hall. It was after one such event that my roommate, without realizing it, sort of changed my life.

We were in our dorm room talking about the program. There were a few other girls in the room; I don’t remember how many, but I do remember that I was the only white girl. At some point in the conversation, my roommate kind of half-laughed and said, “I don’t even need the whole world to change. I just want a band-aid that matches my finger.”

Another girl said, “I want a pair of panty hose that isn’t black or peach.”

The girl who lived across the hall from us said, “I just want a nude bra that’s the color of me when I’m nude.” They all laughed.

And I just.

I just.

I can only imagine the look on my face. These were new thoughts to me. This was in the autumn of 1999, when diversity in marketing wasn’t considered a profitable expenditure. I must have looked down at my hands, which couldn’t have been more than two shades off of a standard band-aid, and then looked covertly over at my roommate’s hands. She held up a finger for me to see.

“Yeah, I’m not band-aid colored.” She laughed again because she was a cheerful person who navigated the world lightly, but the laugh wasn’t full-hearted.

“I never thought of that before.”

She shrugged. “White people don’t.”

And I hadn’t. I’d lived eighteen years on the planet and had never considered that more than half of the people in my country couldn’t buy a band-aid that blended in with their skin tone. But more than that, more than the fact that she was right, more than the fact that she absolutely deserved to ask for the entire world to change, in that moment, to me, was the fact that a Black person had given me permission to acknowledge the color of her skin. She showed me through the lens of her skin tone how profoundly different her lived experience was to mine.

I felt so stupid. I shouldn’t have needed her permission. It wasn’t her responsibility to grant me that permission. I should have seen the reality of her experience, and the experiences of every Black friend I’d ever had up to that point. I hadn’t though, and at that moment I did, and I’ll live my life in debt to a generous friend who shared a tiny bit of her life with me and opened my eyes to an entirely new, better way to perceive the world.

Wrongness takes time to undo. I have tried so hard to do better. I hate feeling stupid. It’s humbling to realize that the very thing you tried to get right is the very thing that you got so terribly wrong. “Racism is wrong” is one of my deeply held values, and the slow-rolling reckoning that I’d gotten a fundamental piece of Not Being Racist wrong was a painful, nauseating pill to swallow.

I swallowed it, though, and I’m better for the medicine. It wasn’t instantaneous. It took practice. It takes practice, more truthfully put, because I live in a world with systemic racism baked into its very design.

My husband and I have a thing in our house called “Accidental Racism.” It’s exactly what it sounds like: we call each other out on our accidental racism. It’s based on the idea that nobody in this house wants to be racist, so when we identify something that we say or think that has unintentional racist implications we call it out, root it out and delete it from our framework, like plucking bugs from your garden so the whole bed can thrive.

I’ll give an example of something that I did that got (rightly) called out. Several months ago, my husband reached into the cookie jar to eat the last chocolate chip cookie (that was a good, soft cookie that I had made and was saving for me!). I popped up like a caffeinated meerkat and said, “Get your cotton-pickin’ hands off my cookie!”

And then I paused, thankfully, as I heard the words tumble out, and said, “That’s really racist, isn’t it?”

And he said, “Yeah. Where did that come from?”

I had to think about it. I’m not sure where it came from. I can promise, with God as my witness, that I wasn’t associating anything racial with the phrase, and I certainly wasn’t speaking it in a historical context. I can remember hearing a neighbor say it when I was a kid, but he wasn’t speaking racially or historically either, as far as I know. It’s just something that you hear said when you grow up in the south, when someone grabs something that’s not theirs to grab. I had never, until that very moment, given a second thought to who historically might have used such a phrase, or who historically, in context, might have had hands that picked cotton.

And so I thought for a second, and realized that that phrase is utterly, horrifically racist no matter how innocently I meant it, and I decided then and there to delete it from my bank of phrases forever. We chalked it up to accidental racism and I’ll never use it again. Simple as that.

We did the same thing with “Eenie meenie miney mo,” because you can sanitize it but the original version is terrible and we want no part of that energy. Deleted. Simple as that.

This is the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset, and that’s what I really want to talk about. A fixed mindset says, “I am a certain way.” A growth mindset says, “I have the capacity to change.”

This is the worst problem that we, as white people, have in dealing with race, at least as I see it: we’re stuck in a fixed mindset that either someone is a racist or they aren’t. It’s binary. It’s toxic. More than that, it’s neither true nor helpful.

If someone is either a racist or they aren’t, then whatever they think, do or say is either racist or it isn’t. If someone defines themselves as “I am not a racist,” then they’re not going to recognize their actions, however problematic, as racist. That was essentially my problem for a long time: I didn’t want to be racist, and so I didn’t see myself as racist, and therefore I carried some really toxic racist ideas around with me for a long time, silently feeling that something wasn’t right, maybe, but unwilling to talk about it because I didn’t want to be racist by talking about race.

That mindset is killing people.

What if we tried a different framework? Instead of saying, “I’m not racist,” or, “That person is racist,” why don’t we try:

“Racism bothers me,” … or it doesn’t.

“I believe Black people are telling the truth about the reality of their lived experience,” … or I don’t.

“I believe Black people when they say that they have a fundamentally different experience within our culture, society and systems than I do, and that my whiteness has denied me the perspective to fully understand that experience,” … or I don’t.

“I believe that I have learned everything that I need to learn to be a kind, decent human being to all of my fellow human beings,” … or I haven’t.

“I believe that I have the capacity to change myself for the better, in keeping with my most deeply held values,” … or I don’t.

“I don’t want there to be a single bit of racism in me and I’m willing to do the work to eradicate it,” … or a little leftover racism might be ok.

Try those binary flavors and see which ones taste better on your tongue. If you, white people, like me, decide that racism fundamentally bothers you, that you take Black people at their word when they say that their life experience is different in ways that we are ill-equipped to understand, that you have room to grow and things to learn and want to do the deep work necessary to actually eradicate racism, then I have a couple of suggestions about ways that we can get started, all based on personal experience.

The first step is to listen. This should be painful, or you’re not doing it right. The truth is that if you, a white person, have not had the privilege of being admitted to all-Black spaces for any length of time then there is an entire world of information that you do not have access to. There is A WORLD and it will blow your mind.

Black people talk amongst themselves about history in a very different way than white people talk about it because their lived experience is fundamentally different from white experience. They talk about Jim Crow laws in the context of having been on the receiving end of them; white people talk about how there was once an issue with water fountains and the public transit system, but now that’s all cleared up and we haven’t thought much about it since.

Black people tell stories about slavery that their grandparents heard from their own grandparents who were enslaved; white people learn that slavery was a bad time in long-ago history, but thank goodness we cleared one that up too, and remember that there were also good white people who helped out with the underground railroad.

Black people talk about real discriminations, microaggressions, thoughtless slights, and painful, frustrating experiences of racial bias, conscious and unconscious, that they experience every single day of their lives during which they interact with non-Black people; white people don’t hear these stories because, well, we’re usually the ones who did them.

Black people do not talk about these things in white-majority spaces. Why would they? It hurts to have your truth questioned or dismissed. It’s all so obvious to them, and the fact that it isn’t obvious to us as well shines a blinding light on how wide the chasm really is between both the lived experience of BIPOC and white people in America, and on the empathy gap too. When someone speaks a crumb of vulnerable truth and that truth gets dismissed by someone who claims to be a friend, but who isn’t ready to hear painful truth from that friend, there’s very little incentive to offer another crumb. I think one of the hardest things in the world is to speak a vulnerable truth when you’re pretty sure that your truth won’t be believed.

So back to listening. In the pre-internet world, you would once have had to find a way to make a huge number of black friends to access this hidden trove of information, but we’re alive now, and we have twitter, so the world is your informational oyster. There are brave, brilliant, generous Black people all over the internet telling their stories, and twitter is as good a place as any to start listening to them.

If you’re new to this, start with #BlackLivesMatter. After that, I recommend #BlackInTheIvory, a hashtag under which Black academics are sharing their experiences of racism in their professional environments. There’s some really important, under-remembered history being discussed right now under #Juneteenth2020. Read, and then keep reading. Read the comments, if you’ve got the stomach for it. This will take a while to absorb.

Keep reading when you see someone say “I hate white people.” You’re getting closer to the source. Eventually you’ll see something like “White people have destroyed this world” or “All white people are racist” and then you’ll know that you’re in the right place, the deep work place. You’re in the place where real people are pouring out their pain and outrage that white people haven’t earned the right to hear.

And then — and this is crucial — DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES reply with, “Not ALL white people! :)”

In fact, don’t reply at all. You are not there to defend yourself. You are not personally being attacked. You are there on a reconnaissance mission, and your mission is to figure out WHY.

WHY does this person hate all white people? If you think they’re just being racist, you’re doing it wrong.

WHY does this person think that white people have destroyed this country/town/world? If your brain comes back with, “But black people also….,” you’re doing it wrong.

WHY does this person think that all white people are racist? What part of their life experience taught them that lesson? Keep reading. If any part of you takes this as proof that Black people just can’t be reasoned with, then you’re doing it so very, very wrong.

I started doing this work several years ago, as I came to understand how limited the scope of my apprehension actually was. I sought out a ton of Black people on twitter, most of whom are connected to my other interests — politics, film, books, poetry, sci-fi TV, weird science facts, and then delved deeper into individual feeds as I came across more and more people posting high-quality, important content. There are so many good feeds that it’s kind of overwhelming.
This is an opportunity unique to this period in history in which you can sit still in a space full of people whose life experience is wholly different than your own, and listen to what they have to say. Do this for a while and let it sink in. Stay out of the comment dregs and the bot wars. If you can manage to keep quiet, keep reading and embrace the discomfort that comes with inner transformation, your mind will be blown and your entire perspective will change. You will have the information that you need to tackle step two.

The second step is a deep dive into a place of radical humility. This has to be done just as deliberately and humbly, and it should be just as painful, as step one. We have all been complicit in a system that benefits us and disadvantages BIPOC. It’s not our faults that we were born into this system, but it is our collective responsibility to acknowledge it. To do any less insults the intelligence of Black and Brown people who see our systems for what they are. We can’t claim to be allies if we deny the truth of our own personal complicity, unintentional though it may have been, in the very systems that have done centuries of harm to the friends that we’re claiming to support.

Some examples of little complicities include:

· Hearing the Civil War called “the war of northern aggression” and just sort of rolling with it.

· Hearing someone referring to the confederacy as “those racist southern bastards” while ignoring the Klan chapter in your northern home town.

· Assuming that racism is a problem that exists mostly in rural, white, fly-over, bread-basket America, as though racism isn’t a city problem too.

· Assuming that racial tension is an urban problem that doesn’t really touch your suburb, subdivision, or mini-city with a farmer’s market.

· Hearing terms like “oreo” and “jungle fever” thrown around at school and letting it slide, because it’s not like they said the “n” word.

· Not questioning your racially segregated place of worship.

· Referring to your place of worship as “integrated” because a black family started attending.

· Participating in a white savior mission trip, at home or abroad.

· Referring to your “black friend” as evidence that you’re not racist.

· Feeling a little uncomfortable when you find yourself in a room where you are not the racial majority.

· Not feeling uncomfortable when you realize that your entire social circle is white, or that you regularly spend time in entirely white spaces.

· Taking for granted that Black neighborhoods just somehow have more crime, rather than questioning why that presumption might exist.

· Deliberately sending your child to an all-white school, or not feeling uncomfortable with your child being assigned to an all-white school district.

· Exposing your children to cultural diversity via community service projects, but not through regular social interaction with their peers.

· Imagining Black people as a hive mind or monolith, rather than a diverse group of individuals who share a set of common societal structural obstacles.

I could go on. The point is to dive deep into racial biases, to examine those biases, and to question EVERYTHING. Nothing is sacred. Everything deserves our deepest scrutiny. If we’re serious about cutting the cancer of racism out of our society, then we have to make it personal and we have to be ruthless. We have to be willing to acknowledge, with humility, that we have thought, maybe said, maybe even done things that we can’t be proud of. This is good. This is the work. We can’t cut out the cancer if we don’t know where it is.

Step three is that we’ve got to talk. Really talk. We have to talk from a place of radical humility, softened pride, and the fire-bellied empathy born from that pool of deeply painful information that you’ve now absorbed, assimilated, and incorporated into your updated concept of reality.

If you’re comfortable during these conversations, then you’re doing it wrong.

If your tone in these conversations sounds more like justification than confession, then you’re doing it wrong.

If you’re expressing anger at everyone else, and not frustration at your own inadvertent complicity in the inherently racist construct that is our society, then. you. are. doing. it. wrong.

We’ve all heard how it’s bad to be racist. It’s true, but we’ve run that tired song into the ground. What we haven’t talked about is how we, personally, have perpetuated racism in our own little ways that we didn’t recognize at the time, and aren’t proud of now. We haven’t talked about how we said or did that thing that might have been racist, maybe? How we didn’t see something as racist then but we now do and we feel terrible about it. We haven’t talked about how we identified our own harmful, problematic thoughts or behaviors, and what steps we took to fix them. We haven’t lived up to our stated values. We haven’t held each other accountable.

You can say these things to a Black person if you want, if you have that kind of friendship, but bear in mind that they are not obligated to give you absolution. The important part, I think, is saying all of this to white people, as many of them as you can get to listen. This is a new kind of vulnerability for white people, and we are going to hate it: racism is such a taboo for many of us that we are utterly terrified to even look for it in ourselves, much less acknowledge it publicly. We have to, though, or we’ll never be rid of it.

Racism is a cancer, a slow, insidious sickness that lurks until it kills. It’s a straight, merciless line from Stage 1 at “good schools” and segregated churches right through to Stage 4 where young boys are shot dead in the street holding a bag of skittles and an iced tea for the crime of wearing a hoodie while Black.

It’s on us, white people. We drew that line. No, we didn’t own slaves, but prior white people did and now it’s our job to clean up their mess. We didn’t invent Jim Crow, but it’s on us to handle the fall-out. Like an old, dusty attic full of cobwebs and portraits, there are some lovely elements to our nation’s history, but there’s also pestilence, garbage and rot, and if we don’t clean it up then the rotten parts will destroy everything good that’s worth saving.

I wish my mom was here to talk about this, because she’s the one that I used to bounce difficult thoughts off of before I put them out for public display. She told me about how she grew up hearing the “n” word in regular conversation, and about how it was a hard realization for her to learn exactly how wrong that was. She told me that it was uncomfortable and embarrassing to reckon with the depth of that wrongness, and out of that realization came a determination to make sure that she did not rear racist children.

That is the kind of conversation that we need.

White Boomers, this is your moment: we DESPERATELY need your stories. Like we needed the WWII generation to tell us about the Holocaust and war rations and fascism so we wouldn’t forget, we need you to tell us, your kids and grandkids, what you saw in terms of race when you were young. What did Jim Crow America look like to you? How did it make you feel? What did the changes look like where you lived, and how did your community react? How did you personally react? How about your family? Don’t shield your relatives out of false pride. Remember that we are all guilty because we are all complicit, and we’re all here to learn.

Also, please don’t lead with the “I was a nice white person and I had a black friend” stories — those aren’t helpful right now. We need the hard stuff, the parts of your history that you hate to talk about: what you thought, said and did that you now know to be wrong, what it took for you to see that wrongness, and what steps you’ve taken in your life to correct it. We need these stories because without them it’s going to be so much harder for the younger generations to recognize problematic attitudes in themselves. We need you to light a torch with your hard memories, to show us what you saw and how you learned, to light our way forward.

Young people, do not shame Boomers for these conversations if they’re having them from a place of humility. The young among us may consider themselves more woke, but we’re all complicit in a racist system, even if the exact nature of modern racism is still under taxonomic study. You are a product of your time as much as Boomers are products of theirs, and we’re all cogs in a broken system. We need each other to set this right. Look deep within yourselves for your own implicit biases. Remember that none of us are innocent. This is growth work. If you plumb your depths and find nothing to reproach, it’s probably time to do a little more learning, and then make a more thorough dive.

Fourth, and finally, and the hardest of all: Own your harm.

This one is so hard. We ultimately need to have a reckoning of the soul during which we acknowledge the harm for which we bear responsibility, and seek to rectify that harm. This, when done properly, is terrifying. It was for me, at least. I loathe the idea that I may have hurt someone, that I may be the villain in someone’s story. It’s possible, though. I pray it’s not, but it’s possible. This is the worst place to be, but we can’t collectively clean up the destruction that systemic racism has wrought in our country until we, white people, take an honest look around at the damage, pick up a piece or two of racist shrapnel, hold it up and say, “Yeah, this one is my responsibility. This bit of the mess is my fault.”

Woke white people love to hate systemic racism, and it deserves to be hated. It feels so good to yell at a corrupt system. The cause is just! We’re on the right side of history! That’s the yummy stuff: a righteous cause that’s morally unambiguous, and an enemy so big, so evil that they deserve to be punched by the people. And don’t get me wrong — if you know my politics, you know I’m all in for Big Structural Change. The system needs to be punched, repeatedly.

The problem with focusing on an enormous system is that it frees us from the responsibility of owning our part in that system. Righteous anger feels so good because it lets us ignore our own little complicities. What’s a bit of implicit bias in the face of systemic voter suppression? What’s sending your child to a primarily white charter school compared to segregated public swimming pools? What’s a separate water fountain when compared with institutional, state-sanctioned slavery?

It’s all the same thing. Systemic racism is the natural consequence of unchecked personal racism, and the first line of defense against personal racism is a self-sovereign person in charge of their own thinking brain. If we own the harm we’ve caused, acknowledge it and examine it, then we can come to understand that harm, and work from a place of personal authority to ensure that we never cause that particular harm again. If we can name the harm, we can rectify that harm.

I was once a person who “didn’t see color,” so now I make a point to see color. I look for color bias everywhere. I seek out the voices of people of color who have something that they want the public to understand, and I listen to what they have to say. I listen far more than I speak in these spaces. I owe these people an incalculable debt of gratitude for the education that they’ve given me.

I once blithely glossed over my friends’ lived reality because (for stupid, irrational reasons) I felt uncomfortable acknowledging the color of their skin, so now I actively work to make sure I’m paying attention to Black people’s lived experience. This is empathy work, and it’s not a burden. My life is better, and I am a better person, for having owned this harm and working to correct it.

I search for racist little phrases and idioms that have been handed down and thoughtlessly repeated, so that I can do my part to make those words stop with me.

When I notice that I’m in an all-white space, I question why it’s all white.

I thought we didn’t discuss racism because it would make Black people uncomfortable. It turns out that we don’t discuss racism because it makes white people uncomfortable.

We always want the racist person to be someone else, someone who holds unthinkable, incomprehensible beliefs, someone who could never be like us. The truth is that it is us. It’s all of us.

We want to tear down the racist system, but we’re the system. The system is nothing more than the amalgamation of every individual racist thought that has slipped through our collective consciousness unchecked. We have to do the personal work first, because it’s out of the thoughts of individuals that systems are born. The longer we ignore the tough work needed to acknowledge personal racism, the longer these systems will remain unchanged.

We have to make this personal because racism is personal. When Black people say “Black lives matter,” they mean each individual life, every single one, the lives lived in poverty and the ones lived with plenty, the ones out jogging, or in church, or at home with their families. They mean the lives of every Black person who has ever been passed over for promotion at work because he was so big and tall that he was a little intimidating and couldn’t be that smart; or because she just didn’t understand that she needed to style her hair more professionally for the formality of the workplace. They mean every Black person who has bitten their tongue and held back righteous anger at microaggressions because they know that white ears shut tight when the speaker is both black and angry. They mean every black person who has ever been suspected of a crime, who is entitled to due process like everyone else in this country.

This post is not for members of the KKK or their gross ilk. If you are an actual white supremacist, then God help you because I don’t know how to. This post is for people who fall into the “Racism bothers me” and “Black people are telling the truth” and “I believe that I am capable of growth, and that I have more to learn” camps. This is for the people who are able to say, “I didn’t know then what I know now, and now that I know better, I will do better. Tomorrow I want to know more, and do better, than I do today.”

This is for the people who are willing to own their harm. As it turns out, owning the harm that you have done is one of the most productive, powerful things that a white person can do because when we own it, we have the power to see it, name it, stop it and change it.

If we actually managed to cut out the cancer of personal racism from enough of us, then white supremacy would fall. There are enough of us, I think, to pull this off.

I would love to have been born woke, but I wasn’t. I am a cog in a broken system. I am not innocent.

But racism bothers me.

My harm bothers me.

And I can learn.

— — -

Quick edit to add: A friend suggested that I include a list of resources for you guys for further reading. I think it’s a great idea, but I don’t want to give you books. That might sound odd from me as there are so many wonderful books that would take all of us so much farther on the journey, but I don’t want to turn this into an academic exercise. Books can feel detached. They were published before, in the past, from one voice who managed to make it through the quagmire that is the publishing world and get a book deal. Books are great, but racism is an emergency right now, here, today, and it’s evolving and changing as we speak. Books are important, but I really believe that the start of the vital work is listening to uncomfortable, unfamiliar conversations.

With that in mind, here are some people from my twitter feed that have taught me important things along the way. Some are famous; some have 50 followers. All are saying valuable things in the anti-racism space right now.

If you’re going to start somewhere, start with Levar Burton and Bernice King. From there, feel free to cherry pick from my list and add your own as you find new voices.

@ClintSmithIII
@ColorOfChange
@BerondaM
@The_Acumen
@michaelharriot
@nhannahjones
@FarrellGabriell
@GothamGirlBlue
@FredTJoseph
@iSmashFizzle
@BreeNewsome
@MsPackyetti
@CharlesMBlow
@ashleyn1cole
@mmpadellan
@staceyabrams
@WilGafney
@KamalaHarris
@RepMaxineWaters
@JoyAnnReid
@AyannaPressley
@MichelleObama
@CoryBooker
@levarburton
@BarackObama
@BerniceKing