How can white people be awakened to their inherent racism without making them defensive?
That’s the fundamental question of how you do anti-racism work; it’s what’s behind what we do in our seminars. You need to not just focus on whites as bad guys against people of color, but understand that whites are trapped, too, in the prison of racism. It’s not a matter of blaming whites but of seeing that the systems of racism that perpetuate are killing us, too. Racism makes pawns out of all of us. We need to focus the issue on white people and white systems, but without guilt-tripping white individuals. Could people of color theoretically be racist in communities where they constitute the majority? Well, I lived for years in inner-city communities that were more than [majority] African American or Latino or both. The first part of my answer to that question is that as I moved between that community and the white community, I am totally clear that I experienced my white power and privilege more explicitly in that community than amongst whites. The internalized racist oppression of
