…Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered
We have come treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out from the gloomy past,
’Til now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
When we finished singing “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” the Black national anthem, Vanessa, a white girl in my sixth-grade class, turned to me and whispered, “I wish I was Black.”
this must have seemed like the inevitable conclusion to the morality play we’d just seen. Who would want to be one of the bad guys? Compared to freckle-faced Vanessa, my darker skin would afford me little privilege in life, except in one arena: the privilege of being born among the heroes in the American story of social progress, not among the villains. While watching Eyes on the Prize’s indelible footage, I never had to see people who looked like my parents with their faces contorted in fury, hurling abuse at a little girl walking to school. But Vanessa had—and the clear moral contrast made her want to switch sides. What’s often forgotten, however, is that the bad guys on-screen believed that what they were doing was morally right.
It’s just human nature: we all like to see ourselves as on the side of the heroes in a story. But for white Americans today who are awake to the reality of American racism, that’s nearly impossible. That’s a moral cost of racism that millions of white people bear and that those of us who’ve borne every other cost of racism simply don’t. It can cause contradictions and justifications, feelings of guilt, shame, projection, resentment, and denial. Ultimately, though, we are all paying for the moral conflict of white Americans.
Over the years that I have sought answers to why a fairer economy is so elusive, it has become clearer to me that how white people understand what’s right and wrong about our diverse nation, who belongs and who deserves, is determining our collective course. This is the crux of it: Can we swim together in the same pool or not? It’s a political question, yes, and one with economic ramifications. But at its core, it’s a moral question. Ultimately, an economy—the rules we abide by and set for what’s fair and who merits what—is an expression of our moral understanding. So, if our country’s moral compass is broken, is it any wonder that our economy is adrift?
to free themselves from the debt of responsibility for racism past and present would be liberating. But there isn’t an established route for redemption; America hasn’t had a truth-and-reconciliation process like other wounded societies have. Instead, it’s up to individuals to decide what they need to do in order to be good people in a white supremacist society—and it’s not easy.
In the absence of moral leadership, there are just too many competing stories. For every call to become an activist for racial justice, there’s a well-rehearsed message that says that activists are pushing too hard. For every chance to speak up against the casual racism white people so often hear from other white folks, there is a countervailing pressure not to rock the boat. If you want to believe that white people are the real victims in race relations, and that the stereotypes of people of color as criminal and lazy are common sense rather than white supremacist tropes, there is a glide path to take you there. And when your life trajectory has taught you that the system works pretty okay if you do the right things, then it’s easy to wonder why whole groups of people can’t seem to do better for themselves. Whichever story you choose to believe, nobody wants to be the villain, so there’s an available set of justifications for why your view is morally right.
To understand how this dynamic works, I decided I needed to go all the way to one end of the spectrum, to talk to someone who had fully given herself over to white supremacy’s alluring lies. I tracked down a woman named Angela King, who spent most of her life as a neo-Nazi.
Angela grew up in a rural all-white area of South Florida. She had learned pretty much every form of prejudice from her parents—“homophobia, racism, stereotypes, racial slurs,” she told me. “I grew up thinking that was normal. And I grew up with an abnormal fear of people who weren’t like me.” I wondered about how she went from being afraid of people her parents had taught her were foreign to organizing her life around hating and terrorizing them.
Angela told me that she was bullied in school, and when she was twelve, it turned physical. “The school bully ripped my shirt open in front of the entire class, and here I was,” Angela recalled, “this pudgy little girl in her training bra. And it did something to me. It provoked this rage that I really didn’t know I had inside. So, I fought that bully back, and unfortunately that day, I became the bully.” She told herself, “If I’m the one doing those kind of things, no one can ever humiliate me like that again.”
In high school, Angela sought a place to fit in. She eventually chose a group that displayed swastikas and Confederate flags. “And honestly, I wasn’t attracted to them because of the beliefs,” she said. But “they were the one group I found that never questioned my anger or my aggression or my violence. They just accepted it. I never had to explain it or account for it. And that began my life in the violent far right.” She was fifteen years old.
When I asked her how she justified her actions, she explained that she simply accepted the opportunity that the story of white supremacy has always offered: a way to shift the blame. Regarding slavery, for instance, she said, “I found a way to blame [it] on those who were enslaved…[saying] things like ‘Africans sold their own people, so they deserve to be enslaved.’ ”
Angela discovered that Nazism gave her not only a justification for the race-based hierarchy of human value she believed in, but also a ready scapegoat for every disappointment in her life. At age twenty-three, she wound up in a federal detention center, sentenced for taking part in an armed robbery targeting a Jewish store owner. “And I not only didn’t feel responsible,” she recalled, “but [I] was at a place where…nothing was my responsibility. It was my parents’ fault. It was Black people taking my good jobs, even though I was a high school dropout, a drunk.”
But inside prison, her all-white world was gone. “Oh, shit,” she recalls saying aloud. “Now I’m the minority.” One day, Angela was smoking by herself in the recreation yard when a Black woman looked over at her. Angela, who was covered in racist tattoos, thought, “Oh, she’s gonna start something.” But instead, the woman invited her to play cards.
“And from that point on, we started a friendship,” Angela said. “We didn’t really talk about why we were there for a long time…about the fact that I came in there as a skinhead for a hate crime….Even knowing that, this group of women treated me as a human being. I had no idea how to react to that. I couldn’t find justification in the usual aggression and violence that I used.
“They didn’t let me slide for long, though. Eventually, the very hard conversations started to happen.” The woman who had first befriended her “would just out of the blue ask me questions like, ‘So, if you met me before we came to prison, and I was with my daughter, what would you have done to us? Would you have called me the N-word? Would you have tried to kill my daughter? Would you have tried to hurt me?’ And being in prison, and with the friendship I [had] forged with some of them, I couldn’t get up and run away and not answer the questions. So, I was forced into not only being honest with them, but…with myself.”
When she was released from prison at age twenty-six, Angela put her former life behind her and threw herself into education. She ended up earning three degrees. “I learned a great bit about history and systemic racism and oppression and got a clear understanding of the true history of our country. When I was growing up, I didn’t get facts about how this country really began. I got the white version.”
Angela became an activist, giving speeches around the country to share her story and cofounding an organization called Life After Hate, which helps people get out of violent white-supremacist groups. But the audience for her message is broader than neo-Nazis. She doesn’t want the existence of violent, racist gangs to let white people in the political mainstream off the hook. “[We are all] socialized into a society where racism is normal, and it’s built into every aspect of our democracy, our government, and our social systems….There are so many white people that have no clue,” she told me.
“And when…you try to give them a clue, they become very defensive. Because no one wants to think that they are benefiting from a system that hurts other people. It’s much easier just to pretend like you don’t know.”
White supremacy had given Angela something she desperately needed in order to feel better about herself: scapegoats. I thought about the function that immigrants, particularly from Latin America, are playing in today’s racial theater, being blamed for the loss of jobs and even the more diffuse “way of life.” Fox News host Laura Ingraham told her audience of millions, “In some parts of the country, it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore,” and blamed it on immigration. Tucker Carlson raged, “Our leaders demand that you shut up and accept this. We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided.”
It’s incumbent on all of us to understand how people with the privilege of being born citizens make moral sense of the deservingness of 11 million undocumented people in the United States, or the refugees seeking to become Americans every day—because fierce anti-immigrant sentiment has shifted our politics to the right on a whole host of issues. The baseline moral teaching about immigration is somewhere along the lines of the Bible’s “Therefore love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” or the more secular version (emblazoned on the base of the Statue of Liberty), “ ‘Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ ” So how do folks justify the opposite? Prominent white nationalists are clear they want to maintain a white America, but most people justify having animus toward immigrants in a “nation of immigrants” in moral terms: it’s not the immigrant part; it’s the “illegal” part. They broke the law; they’re criminals.
As history shows us, once a group is criminalized, they’re outside the circle of human concern. This moral story of law-abiding citizens and criminal immigrants hinges on people having, as Angela said, “no clue” about the racist structures that let the ancestors of many white Americans arrive with no restrictions or requirements save their whiteness, which extended them ladders of opportunity upon arrival that were the exact opposite of the walls and shadows today’s immigrant workers face. This story blames some of the least powerful people on the planet for a problem created and sustained by the most powerful—corporations profiting from sweatshop labor and policy makers unwilling to update our immigration laws. Nonetheless, as it has for centuries, racism makes an immoral view of the world into a moral one. The elite adds in the urgency of the zero-sum story—they are taking what you have; they are a threat to you—and it’s enough to keep a polity focused on scapegoats while no progress is made on the actual economic issues in most Americans’ lives.
I thought about Melanie, a white woman I connected with on my journey via a mutual friend. Melanie is in her forties and grew up mostly in the rural Appalachian region of North Carolina amid her mother’s large family, which she describes as “very conservative and very racist.”
Melanie’s family struggled financially and often lacked the money for heating oil or a telephone. “We knew the sick feeling of what a car breaking down felt like,” she said. Melanie left her small town for college at age seventeen and never returned; her world, and her worldview, expanded. As an adult, she took it upon herself to help educate her mother out of the racist beliefs she had absorbed in her family and then cemented by listening to conservative talk radio.
“She used to tell me that it says in the Bible that there was a reason that Black people were inferior,” Melanie recalled. “And I basically got out the Bible and made her show me where it said that.”
Melanie remembered a breakthrough moment when she was talking with her mother and stepfather. “They said something about ‘the Mexicans,’ and ‘they all live in that house together,’ you know, ‘There are thirty-five people in that house.’
“And I sat down with them and had a conversation about what that looks like.” They discussed the social and economic forces that might compel a large extended family, like their own, to live in one house. “And it’s completely infuriating to me,” Melanie said, “because we…didn’t have any money….We know economic pressures and the discrimination of being poor. And so, I just sort of laid it out for them like that, and they got it, you know? In a way that I don’t think they had ever really thought about it before.”
was a skinhead, she saw race everywhere. But then again, so does everybody. The first thing you take in when you see someone is their skin color. Within a fraction of a second, that sight triggers your ingrained associations and prejudices. If those prejudices about a person’s skin color are negative—as they overwhelmingly are among white people regarding darker skin—they alert your amygdala, the section of the brain responsible for anxiety and other emotions, to flood your body with adrenaline in a fight-or-flight response.
But when I was growing up in the 1980s, we were taught that the way to be a good person was to swear that race didn’t matter, at least not anymore. We had all learned the lessons of the civil rights movement: everybody is equal, and according to the morals of the sitcoms we watched after school (Diff’rent Strokes, Webster, Saved by the Bell), what was racist was pretending that people were any different from one another. Furthermore, the most un-racist people didn’t even see race at all; they were color blind. We now know that color blindness is a form of racial denial that took one of the aspirations of the civil rights movement—that individuals would one day “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”—and stripped it from any consideration of power, hierarchy, or structure. The moral logic and social appeal of color blindness is clear, and many well-meaning people have embraced it. But when it is put into practice in a still-racist world, the result is more racism.
The sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of the groundbreaking book Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, describes how once we stop seeing racism as a factor and treat equality as a reality rather than an aspiration, our minds naturally seek other explanations for the disparities all around us. Color-blind racism is an ideology that “explains contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of nonracial dynamics…[W]hites rationalize minorities’ contemporary status as the product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and blacks’ imputed cultural limitations.” Such explanations “exculpate [white people] from any responsibility for the status of people of color.”
In a way, color blindness makes the civil rights movement a victim of its own success: legal segregation is over, so now it must be up to people of color to finish the work themselves. As Bonilla-Silva puts it, if racism is no longer actively limiting the lives of people of color, then their failure to achieve parity with whites in wealth, education, employment, and other areas must mean there is something wrong with them, not with the social systems that somehow always benefit white people the most. Social scientists look to this question—whether you believe that racism is to blame for disparities or that Black people just need to work harder—to help them determine what they call racial resentment. And racial resentment, in turn, is a predictor of opposition to policies that would improve the economic security of millions.
For two generations now, well-meaning white people have subscribed to color blindness in an optimistic attempt to wish away the existence of structural racism. But when they do, they unwittingly align themselves with, and give mainstream cover to, a powerful movement to turn back the clock on integration and equality. What my former University of California, Berkeley, law professor Ian Haney López calls “reactionary color blindness” has become the weapon of choice for conservatives in the courts and in politics. Racial conservatives on the Supreme Court have used the logic to rule that it’s racist for communities to voluntarily integrate schools, because to do so, the government would have to “see” race to assign students. Well-funded political groups mount campaigns to forbid the government from collecting racial data because isn’t that what a racist would do? Instead of being blind to race, color blindness makes people blind to racism, unwilling to acknowledge where its effects have shaped opportunity or to use race-conscious solutions to address it.
still exists; denial that, even if it does exist, it’s to blame for the situation at hand; denial that the problem is as bad as people of color say it is—these denials are the easy outs that the dominant white narrative offers to people. Wellesley College professor Jennifer Chudy’s research finds that only one in five white Americans consistently expresses high levels of sympathy about anti-Black discrimination.
Color blindness has become a powerful weapon against progress for people of color, but as a denial mindset, it doesn’t do white people any favors, either. A person who avoids the realities of racism doesn’t build the crucial muscles for navigating cross-cultural tensions or recovering with grace from missteps. That person is less likely to listen deeply to unexpected ideas expressed by people from other cultures or to do the research on her own to learn about her blind spots. When that person then faces the inevitable uncomfortable racial reality—an offended co-worker, a presentation about racial disparity at a PTA meeting, her inadvertent use of a stereotype—she’s caught flat-footed. Denial leaves people ill-prepared to function or thrive in a diverse society. It makes people less effective at collaborating with colleagues, coaching kids’ sports teams, advocating for their neighborhoods, even chatting with acquaintances at social events.
Nor is denial easy to sustain. To uphold the illusion of effortless white advantage actually requires unrelenting psychological exertion. The sociologist Dr. Jennifer Mueller explains that color blindness is a key step in “a process of knowing designed to produce not knowing surrounding white privilege, culpability, and structural white supremacy.”
But it was a white poet, novelist, and farmer named Wendell Berry whose words brought home to me most poignantly the moral consequences of denial. In August 2017, I traveled to Northern Kentucky to meet with a multiracial grassroots organization called Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. After a day of workshops, one of the members gave me a dog-eared copy of a book by Berry, a local hero who had grown up in rural Kentucky during the Jim Crow era. The book was called The Hidden Wound—Berry wrote it in 1968, in the midst of widespread protest and unrest—and that night in my hotel room, I read it from cover to cover.
By denying the reality of racism and their own role in it, Berry explained, white Americans have denied themselves critical self-knowledge and created a prettified and falsified version of American history for themselves to believe in, one built on the “wishful insinuation that we have done no harm.” Of course, he understood the impulse of white people—himself included—to protect themselves from “the anguish implicit in their racism.”
A few years before Berry published The Hidden Wound, James Baldwin, as keen an observer of human behavior as there’s ever been, wrote his own account of what happens when white people open their eyes to racism. “What they see is a disastrous, continuing, present condition which menaces them, and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility. But since, in the main, they seem to lack the energy to change this condition, they would rather not be reminded of it.” Baldwin went on to observe that white Americans “are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence.”
Wendell Berry calls this suffering “the hidden wound.” He counsels that when “you begin to awaken to the realities of what you know, you are subject to staggering recognitions of your complicity in history and in the events of your own life.” Of this wound—this psychic and emotional damage that racism does to white people—he writes, “I have borne it all my life…always with the most delicate consideration for the pain I would feel if I were somehow forced to acknowledge it.”
Berry’s book in that Kentucky hotel room, I thought about what it must it be like to be part of the dominant group in an unfair “meritocracy” that denies its oppressions and pathologizes the oppressed. “I think white folks are terribly invested in our own innocence,” says the scholar Catherine Orr. The belief that the United States is a meritocracy, in which anyone can succeed if only they try hard enough, also supports the notion that anyone who is financially successful is so because they’ve worked harder or are somehow more innately gifted than others. Both ideas operate as a justification for maintaining our profoundly unjust economic system. Recent research from social psychologists at Yale and Northwestern finds that “Americans, on average, systematically overestimate the extent to which society has progressed toward racial economic equality, driven largely by overestimates of current racial equality.” Wealthy white Americans, they find, have the most unrealistic assessment of how much progress the United States has made in terms of economic equality (and thus how fair the competition has been that they seem to have won).
In a 2019 public opinion survey, majorities of both Black and white people said that being Black makes it more difficult to get ahead in America. Yet only 56 percent of white respondents believed the corollary: that being white helps you get ahead. And of those who recognized the obstacles Black people face in terms of economic mobility, Black respondents attributed this to systemic discrimination, such as having less access to good schools and high-paying jobs. White people, on the other hand, were more likely to blame problems such as the lack of good role models and family instability—group pathologies, in other words, that ultimately lay blame at the feet of Black people themselves.
Morally defending your position in a racially unequal society requires the fierce protection of your self-image as a person who earns everything you receive. From the tradition that trade unions make a place for members’ sons, to legacy admissions at colleges, to college students who can choose career-building but unpaid or low-paying internships because families can support them, to employers who seek “a good fit” by hiring younger versions of themselves, the deck is stacked on behalf of white people in ways that are so pervasive we rarely notice them. Within this context, many white people both resent affirmative action and imagine that it is vastly more widespread than it really is. The share of Black and brown students at selective colleges has actually declined over thirty-five years despite stated affirmative action policies, and the overwhelmingly white categories of children of alumni, faculty, donors, or athletes made up 43 percent, for example, of students admitted to Harvard from 2010 to 2015. Meanwhile, according to a 2016 study by Harvard Business School professor Katherine DeCelles, Black job applicants who removed any indications of their race from their résumés were significantly more likely to advance to an interview. Many other studies bear out similar findings, including an economic research paper that traced improved job prospects to whether applicants had names like “Greg” or “Emily” as opposed to “Lakisha” or “Jamal,” and a sociological study in New York City that found that “Black applicants were half as likely as equally qualified whites to receive a callback or job offer.”
Still, the idea that people of color are taking jobs from white people is another zero-sum belief that lumbers on from era to era. As Ronald, a middle-aged white man from Buffalo, New York, told the Whiteness Project, “I think affirmative action was nice. It had its time, but I think that time is over with. Are we going to keep this up another one hundred fifty years? ‘Oh, we gotta have so many Asians in the fire department, we gotta have so many Blacks in the fire department.’…The white guys will never have a chance to be a fireman or a cop anymore.” Although using such numerical quotas to achieve affirmative action in employment was outlawed in 1978 by the Supreme Court, Ronald’s grievance is evergreen, as is his certainty that white guys getting all the public service jobs was the natural order of things, not its own form of white affirmative action.
economic resentments and justifications has the life-or-death consequences of the most powerful morally inverting force in our society: white fear of people of color, particularly Black people. In the American moral logic—and, increasingly, with “Stand Your Ground” laws, in the legal system—when you fear someone, no matter how objectively real the threat, you can be justified in doing them harm. If you have a badge, that moral and legal license has been seemingly without limit. In 2019, police officers nationwide shot and killed more than one thousand people; there were only twenty-seven days that year when no civilians died from police shootings. Black people constituted 28 percent of those killed, more than twice our presence in the population. Although 1.3 times more likely than white people to be unarmed, Black people were three times more likely to be killed by police. Indigenous Americans are killed by police at shocking rates as high as or higher than those for African Americans.
But we may actually have reached the moral limit. For eight minutes and forty-six seconds, people around the world watched a white police officer kneel on the neck of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis, until he died. In his dying moments, Floyd called out for his “Mama,” who had already died two years before. White Americans had seen and explained away videos of police killings before, but this was too much. After months in isolation and fear from a callously mismanaged pandemic that disproportionately sickened and killed people of color, it was too much. On the heels of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, chased by white men in a pickup truck while jogging and then gunned down, it was too much. After the police killed Breonna Taylor, an emergency medical technician in Louisville, Kentucky, who had been asleep in her own bed before a botched raid, it was too much. An estimated 15 to 26 million people demonstrated to protest police brutality in the summer of 2020, a tidal wave of recognition about the reality of systemic anti-Blackness that prompted dozens of laws reforming police practices.
Maureen Wanket is one of the many white people who has joined the Black Lives Matter movement. She’s a middle-aged teacher who once worked at Sacramento High, the school where a young man named Stephon Clark used to play football and ace his first-period history tests. On March 18, 2018, two Sacramento police officers responding to a vandalism call shot at Stephon twenty times, killing him before identifying themselves. Many of those rounds were fired into Stephon’s back. The twenty-two-year-old father of two was killed in his grandmother’s backyard. The only “weapon” police found was a cellphone. Yet the officers faced no criminal charges because they could claim that they had been in fear for their lives.
In the days following the shooting, when Sacramento was roiled by protests and recriminations, one of Maureen’s colleagues at the majority-white Catholic school where she now teaches approached her with sympathy. “You care more because you…taught there at Sac High, and so it’s like when someone visits the zoo, they get really used to the animals.”
The woman’s words knocked Maureen breathless. Recalling that moment, she said, “This woman has been so kind to me since I first started working there. She thinks she’s being cool.” Yet she was likening Black students to animals and suggesting that Maureen needed a reason to care about them.
This wasn’t the first time Maureen encountered fellow white people who assumed she shared their racial fears. She recalls with overwhelming fondness her years teaching at Sacramento High, the public charter school whose students were all from working-class backgrounds and mostly African American, with a small percentage of Hmong and Latinx kids. “These were the best students of my career,” she said. “If I gave the students something to read, they read it in three days. I would sometimes plan a lesson [unit] to go on for four or five weeks, and they were done in two weeks and wanted to write the paper because they were excited.” Yet the most frequent question Maureen received from her white friends about the school and its students was “Are you scared?”
Her response: “Scared of what? Don’t be scared of Black kids. Be scared for them.”
white people called the police on Black people for engaging in such menacing behaviors as napping in a common room of their own dorm; standing in a doorway to wait out the rain; cashing a check in a bank; using a coupon in a store; waiting for a friend in a coffee shop; and (that most American of activities) going door to door to canvass voters. And in a taped encounter that went viral in 2020, Christian Cooper was bird-watching in Central Park when Amy Cooper (no relation) called the police on him for asking her to follow the law by leashing her dog.
When I was in Maine (the whitest state in the country), Peg, a white volunteer with the grassroots group Maine People’s Alliance, told me how strong and automatic racialized fear could be. “I see people cross the street in front of my car,” she said, “and I can feel my amygdala, which is that part of the brain, it’s like, ‘Oh. Foreign. Other.’ And I, for a long time, have seen myself as a progressive person. But I…very quickly recognize it, and I identify it and call it into question, give myself some grace about it. And then puzzle about why, at my age and stage, is that so powerful still?”
Peg told me a story about leaving her friend’s flower shop one day just as “three large Black men” were entering. Sheer terror struck her, out on the sidewalk. “I thought, ‘I need to go back, because Debbie’s in there by herself.’ And when I realized that [I was experiencing racial fear,] that’s where I stayed….I just felt so bad. And it would not go away.” Her voice got soft. “It would not go away.”
Peg paused for a moment, seemingly lost in wonder about the stubbornness of her fear. She looked up at me. “So, I’m sad about that. And I talked to her about that the next time I went in. And she said, ‘They came in to buy the biggest bouquet you have ever seen for someone they love.’ Duh. They were coming to buy something for someone they loved.”
Where does this fear come from? Segregation breeds unfamiliarity; strategic disinvestment of many neighborhoods of color makes them economically depressed and appear to many white people like no-go zones. Then there’s the news. Tuning in to your local news, you could easily reach the conclusion that far fewer white people than Black people engage in criminal behavior, even though the opposite is true. Among those in the United States arrested for criminal activity, the vast majority, 69 percent, is white. Yet white people constitute only about 28 percent of the people who appear on crime reports on TV news, while Black people are dramatically overrepresented. Yes, violent crime rates are higher in disinvested neighborhoods of color than in well-resourced white enclaves, but once you control for poverty, the difference disappears. Crime victimization is as prevalent in poor white communities as poor Black communities; it’s similar in rural poor areas and urban poor ones. In addition, less policing in middle-income and wealthy neighborhoods means that their violent crimes often go unreported.
White fear isn’t just determinative of one-on-one interactions; it’s a social force that can be manipulated through the media and politics to change voting and economic behavior. At the start of the summer of mass demonstrations against police violence in 2020, the moral contours of the struggle were crystal clear to the majority of Americans. A sea change in public opinion happened virtually overnight, and 95 percent of the counties where Black Lives Matter demonstrations were held were majority white. But as law enforcement escalated against some of the bigger protests, the media coverage was drawn to scenes of conflict. Right-wing social media began to proliferate images of chaos, and the White House Twitter account rhetoric about “law and order” increased. A new political narrative emerged: the protestors are dangerous, in the wrong, and menacing. The specter of violence in the streets—even, as it was, between unarmed demonstrators and militarized police—managed to turn white public opinion as the summer wore on.
By early August, pollsters were showing a roughly even split between people who believed that the protests were mostly peaceful and those who believed they were mostly violent. As a result, support for the goals of the movement was down among conflicted, or swing, voters by 28 percent from June. “I am pretty moderate in my views, but I believe in law and order,” said a typical white male focus group participant. The perception was that violence was as common as ordinary protest, but the most complete record of the summer 2020 racial justice protests shows that 93 percent of the events were peaceful, with no conflict, violence, or property destruction. As overblown as the fears might have been, the impact on solidarity with Black people was real. The share of white Americans who said that racism was a big problem fell from 45 percent in June in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death to just 33 percent in August, an abandonment of the 75 percent of Black Americans whose concern about racism remained constant throughout.
Vanderbilt University professor of sociology and medicine, health, and society Jonathan Metzl has identified a way that white fear is also creating a death risk for the very people who feel it most. As he pointed out in his book Dying of Whiteness, white gun ownership skyrocketed during the Obama presidency and the early days of the Black Lives Matter movement. America’s unhealthy obsession with guns—four in ten adults live in a household with a gun—has always been intertwined with our history of racial violence, but in recent years, right-wing media and an increasingly radical National Rifle Association have aggressively marketed to white fear: of terrorists, of home invaders, of criminal immigrants, and of “inner-city thugs.” Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, told a New Republic reporter, “They have to make Americans afraid of one another. They’re exploiting fear in America to sell guns.” All this fear has come in an era of record-low crime rates nationwide. The fantasy of marauding hordes is unlikely to materialize, but in the real world, white men have been increasingly and disproportionately turning the guns on themselves in a tragic increase in gun suicides. As suicide experts now know, having a gun handy during moments of frustration or despair can turn a passing feeling into a death sentence. Suicide attempts with a gun have an 85 percent success rate, compared to a 3 percent rate for the most frequently used suicide method, drug overdose. White men are now one-third of the population but three-quarters of the gun suicide victims. And twice as many people die from gun suicides in America each year as from the gun homicides people have been so conditioned to fear.
was born in 1950, grew up with a healthy fear of white people. A white person would have been able to roll up beside her in a truck and kidnap her, and probably nothing would have happened to him. A white person could have denied her a house—and did—and nothing happened to them. For the life of her, she could not understand why white people always professed to be so afraid of people of color.
“It’s so strange,” my mother used to tell me, “because we’re the ones who live in terror of what white people can do with impunity.”
It dawned on me as a teenager that many white people must fear, at some deep level, that given half a chance, people of color would do to them what they have long been doing to us. Later I would learn that this dynamic of assigning others your own worst attributes has a name: projection. The legal scholar Richard Thompson Ford writes, “In order for the concept of a white race to exist, there must be a Black race which is everything the white race is not.” It’s not real, of course. We are all complex individuals. But the total white power over laws and culture has mapped these ideas onto our minds.
I grew up unwittingly devouring tales of racist projection. My dad would take me to watch the epic, sprawling Westerns I loved on the big screen whenever there was a revival: The Searchers; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Stagecoach. They were morality plays, all of them, and they taught generations of Americans not just about “how the West was won,” but also about good guys and bad guys. There was just one problem: in a land where white Americans had committed one of history’s greatest genocides, the white cowboys were the stoic heroes; the interchangeable, whooping Indians, the villains.
White fear can exist only in “a world turned upside down,” writes Abraham Lateiner, a white man born into wealth who has become an activist for equality. “Because white people stole two continents and two hundred years of the backbreaking labor of millions, race reassures us that Blackness is related to thievery,” he wrote. “Because white men have raped Black and Brown women with impunity for centuries, race comforts us with the lie that it’s Black masculinity that is defined by hypersexual predation. Because white people penned Black people in the ‘ghetto’ via redlining, race tells us that this ‘ghetto’ is an indictment of Black pathology. People of color weren’t the ones who created whiteness or violated my spirit with it. That was my own people. That is my peers. That is me, too.”
One summer day in 2018, I was getting a ride from one interview stop to another with a white retiree I’ll call Ken. The miles passed beneath the tires of his white SUV, and an oldies station played quietly beneath our chatter. The conversation turned to Colin Kaepernick, the professional football player who knelt during the playing of the national anthem to protest police brutality against Black people. Ken had spent much of the car ride telling me how much he hated the racism and police brutality that seemed to be on the rise in the country and that he supported Black Lives Matter, so I expected him to agree with me when I praised Kaepernick’s courage. Instead, he told me he felt attacked by this symbolic act.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “You agree that cops getting away with killing unarmed Black people is wrong.” To me, that put Ken on Kaepernick’s side. Why would he feel attacked by someone with whom he agreed?
“I do. I do,” he said, nodding, thoughtful. Then he smacked his hand on the steering wheel. I swiveled in my seat to stare at him. “But it’s like he’s using a shotgun instead of a rifle,” he said, “it’s spraying too wide and hitting innocent bystanders.”
I turned my gaze back to the road, unnerved by the way his analogy placed a gun in the hand of a kneeling, peaceful protestor. My thoughts were roiling. Who were the innocent bystanders? Not the Black victims of police violence. Not the football players whose silent protest fell squarely in the democratic tradition. No, the innocents in Ken’s mind were white people like him, people who may not approve of police officers killing the Black citizens they were sworn to protect but who did not think it was fair to be reminded of those killings during a football game. The innocents were those who found more outrage in the act of protesting violence than in the violence itself. And why did Ken feel personally attacked—wounded, even? What part of Ken was so tightly woven into the flag that he perceived a protest against American injustice as a protest against him, even when he agreed with the message?
I found it hard to relate. I didn’t share Ken’s reverence for the pageantry, the performative love of country with no room for the truth about that country. But I do love America. I love its ideals: equality, freedom, liberty, justice. It’s what Langston Hughes meant in 1936 when he wrote, “Let America be America again, for it has never been America to me.” It is how Dr. King could say that his dream was rooted in the American Dream. It’s why Kaepernick’s protest says, “Not so fast. This America isn’t living up to the bargain, so I won’t shake hands until she does.”
Wanting someone to stand for the national anthem rather than stand up for justice means loving the symbol more than what it symbolizes. Ken’s attachment to American innocence made him take the side that opposed his own stated beliefs, just as our nation has done time and time again. It’s the moral upside down of racism that simultaneously extolls American virtues in principle and rejects them in practice.
America’s symbols were not designed to represent people of color or to speak to us—nonetheless, the ideals they signify have been more than slogans; they have meant life or death for us. Equality, freedom, liberty, justice—who could possibly love those ideals more than those denied them? African Americans became a people here, and our people sacrificed every last imaginable thing to America’s becoming. The promise of this country has been enough to rend millions of immigrants from their homes, and for today’s mostly of-color immigrants, it’s still enough, despite persecution, detention, and death, to keep them dreaming of finding freedom here. The profound love for America’s ideals should unite all who call it home, of every color—and yet America has lied to her white children for centuries, offering them songs about freedom instead of the liberation of truth.
something that Robin DiAngelo said to me: “It’s actually liberating and transformative to start from the premise that of course I’m thoroughly conditioned into [racism]. And then I can stop defending, denying, explaining, minimizing and get to work actually applying what I profess to believe with the practice of my life.”
That’s also what I heard from many of my white colleagues during the Racial Equity Transformation process I led at Demos. When I became the organization’s president in 2014, I was the only person of color on my executive team, and the staff was about 75 percent white. We were all do-gooders who had made careers out of fighting inequality, but I knew that we were also all people conditioned by American culture and educated in our schools. So, somewhat naively, I decided that we could give every staff member—from the economists and lawyers to the accountants and office managers—what our country hadn’t: the unvarnished truth about our collective inheritance and the skills to work together across race without papering things over.
To do this, we designed an original curriculum of books, articles, speeches, and videos and identified core competencies the staff should have to function well in a diverse environment (self-awareness, the ability to make authentic relationships across difference, direct communication skills, and a strong racial equity analysis). We overhauled our hiring process and employee handbook to minimize implicit bias in recruitment, retention, and promotions. We thought anew about all the work we did and asked critical questions about how racial equity intersected with our issues. People often talk about putting a new racial lens on your work, but I found it was more like taking off blinders to see what we’d been conditioned not to see. We expanded whom we partnered with and raised a stink about the racial power dynamics in lots of settings, from advocacy coalitions to philanthropy. At the end of my tenure, my three-quarters white organization had become a majority-people-of-color think tank.
When I started the Racial Equity Transformation process, it was important to me that we transform not by gaining a whole new staff—I actually liked my colleagues, a lot—but by growing, and proving that it was possible for white people to become moral and strategic partners in the fight for a racially just America. It wasn’t perfect, and it certainly wasn’t always easy, but the final report from our four-year process read, “One of the most common refrains from staff members about the Racial Equity Transformation at Demos was that it felt like a ‘gift’ to people who had, no matter their color, rarely received explicit investments in what may be the most important set of knowledge and skills a person can have to contribute and flourish today.”
Everything we believe comes from stories we’ve been told. I’ve become acutely aware of the massive platform that the people who are selling the story of racial resentment have, from television to the internet to talk radio. Fox News is the most-watched cable news network and the most profitable; it’s become the leading source of meaning-making for its overwhelmingly white audience. But Fox is not just news; it’s a propaganda outlet owned by a right-wing billionaire, and it uses anti-immigrant and racist stereotypes to undermine white support not just for progressive policies but for basic societal norms, from democracy to social distancing during the pandemic. The right-wing message machine has also overtaken social media, particularly Facebook, where content from conservative meme factories predominates—so much so that, in June 2020, seven out of the ten most-shared Facebook posts about the biggest social movement in the country were anti-BLM, many of them containing disinformation.
Our classrooms don’t do much better: a 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center report examined the curriculum standards in fifteen states and found that “none addresses how the ideology of white supremacy rose to justify the institution of slavery; most fail to lay out meaningful requirements for learning about slavery…or about how [enslaved people’s] labor was essential to the American economy.” What’s more, the organization surveyed high school seniors from across the country and found that only 8 percent knew that slavery was a primary cause of the Civil War. I’ve got to admit, my jaw dropped when I read that statistic. Eight percent! Two-thirds of seniors didn’t know that a constitutional amendment was required to outlaw slavery. Nor could the vast majority (78 percent) explain how slaveholders benefited from provisions in the Constitution.
Even with the racial consciousness-raising of the summer of 2020, there are massive gaps in knowledge about our racial past and present…and a massive gulf between how American people of color see racism impacting our lives and how much credence the majority of white people gives to that idea. Most people will never get the kind of process that my colleagues and I went through at Demos, and now there’s a backlash telling white Americans it’s unpatriotic even to try. Like so much in this country, resetting our moral compass is something we have to do on our own.
Julie Christine Johnson has taken it on herself. A white woman with light brown hair, blue eyes, and a thoughtful gaze, Julie lives in the town of Port Townsend, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula, where she writes novels and works at the local School of the Arts. The easy way she carries herself reveals her hours spent in the wild, hiking and biking, and in the yoga studio, where she is a master practitioner. She was born in 1969 and grew up in what she describes as a strict Christian family in a community in Washington State that was rural, white, and geographically isolated. The only Black people she came in contact with were on television, like the Huxtables. As an adult, she was politically progressive and of course supported racial equality, although she had never thought much about it. But by 2015, two things had happened to change that. One was the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which reached her even in her largely white harbor town. The other thing was Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
“That book just broke something open inside of me,” Julie said. “It made me realize this entire paradigm that I had been raised in…I had somehow never questioned that mythology, and never questioned what we had done as a society to people of color, and to the young men of color that have been forced into this prison industrial complex that we’d all looked to [as] the savior. The rage that consumed me, and the sense of helplessness that consumed me, propelled me into looking for answers of what I can do.”
She found a way to begin: a month-long online seminar designed to serve as an introduction to racism, particularly for white people. Led by a white southerner named Patti Digh, the program is named (and requires) Hard Conversations. Through the assigned readings and challenging discussions in the seminar, Julie realized “that I’ve never just stopped and shut up and listened….I’d been seeking out ways to address [racism] before I’d really even looked at my own behavior.
“There was just a massive awakening,” she recalled. She felt she was having a common experience with other white people, who were realizing, “ ‘Wait a second. This is our problem to solve….We created this.’ ”
Julie and her cohort in the program discussed what she called “some really touchy issues.” She thought some people approached the discussion with the sense that “ ‘I feel everything I say and ask is just loaded with ignorance, and I’m going to come out of this feeling attacked or feeling stupid. I just don’t even know what’s safe to talk about anymore.’
“That’s a very vulnerable place to be,” Julie observed. “But think about how it’s felt for people of color, who [have] never felt and never will probably feel safe to have a voice and be visible. And that’s a place to start.”
As promised, the experience was not easy. “Uncovering some of my own biases and things that have been ingrained in me…[these] were really hard for me to examine, and for me to let go of. And that’s an ongoing process.”
She was exhilarated to participate in the Women’s March in January 2017, then the largest one-day protest in U.S. history. “And within days of that came…articles from women of color, saying, ‘Where have you all been?’ And I just felt my heart so open to that,” Julie said. “Instead of feeling defensive, I was like, ‘Yeah, just stop and listen. Listen to these voices.’ ”
But some of her white women friends were not so open to women of color calling them out. “I got into a really uncomfortable conversation with a group of women whom I’ve known for a very long time and really treasure….I got pounded into the ground for raising my voice and saying, ‘I agree with them, that “Where have we been?” ’ That feminism has not given space to women of color, and we’ve turned away from these voices….Where were the throngs for Black Lives Matter rallies? Where have people been?…And I thought, where have I been?
“The very people that I would think would be open and get this are still incredibly resistant.” Julie does not exempt herself from this assessment. “It’s every day,” she said. “It’s every single day that you have to be aware of your own behavior…and the choices that you make.” Though she doesn’t pat herself on the back for her newfound racial awareness and activism, Julie knows that now she’s freer, and truer to her own values, and not afraid to venture into honest conversations about race. It’s a liberating feeling.
to figure out how the country’s moral progress had stalled, I finally realized that I should ask people whose job—or, rather, calling—it is to guide us morally. But there was a quandary, and that is the role that the largest religion in America has played in perpetuating American racism—and the way racial hierarchy seeps into religious institutions of all faiths. When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was leading the Birmingham antisegregation campaign in 1963, a group of white clergy signed on to a letter urging him to stop. The civil rights activists, the white clergy said, were breaking the law with their nonviolent demonstrations, and so were in the wrong. From jail, Dr. King famously wrote, “I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being….We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
The African American Christian tradition is almost synonymous with social justice in America, from abolition to the civil rights movement to contemporary leaders like Rev. William Barber, who led the Moral Mondays Movement in North Carolina and now leads a revived Poor People’s Campaign. But white Christian leadership is still grappling with its role in acknowledging and dismantling racism. To talk to one of those leaders, I visited an Evangelical church in Chicago called River City, founded by a pastor named Daniel Hill. I sat in the back of the large, unadorned room for services so as to observe and not intrude, but this inadvertently put me in the families and children section. I was surrounded by row after row of the largest group of interracial families I’d ever seen in one room. I asked Pastor Daniel about it after services. River City is a strict Evangelical church in that its congregants believe in the literal word of God as recorded in the Bible—and that Word, Pastor Daniel told me, compelled them to create a deliberately multicultural church.
“Well, Revelations 7:9 is a vision of heaven that is every tongue and every tribe that God’s ever created.” Furthermore, Pastor Daniel told me, “It’s impossible to have a meaningful relationship with Jesus and not care about the evil in our day and age. The ideology of white supremacy is, if not the premier form of evil, it’s at least one of the clearest forms of evil on a large scale in our day and age.” So he uses his ministry to teach the antiracist lessons of the Bible, confront white privilege in Christianity, and create a multiracial church in the heart of segregated Chicago.
But Pastor Daniel and River City are the exceptions to the rule, and it took a conversation with someone I’ve known for years, Reverend Jim Wallis, to explain why. Jim is a white Evangelical minister in his seventies with the warm blue eyes and smiling face of a Little League coach (which he has been for more than twenty seasons). In a conspiratorial tone over a long phone call, Jim told me the story of ruffling feathers at a gathering of the small circle of primarily white men who head the major Christian denominations in America.
“Now,” Rev. Wallis told the men, walking around the circle and making eye contact with each one, “you all have been told or taught or learned how slavery was common, and slavery was all over the world. But we uniquely did something. We Christians, in fact—British and American—were the ones who decided that we couldn’t do to Indigenous people and kidnapped Africans what we were doing, if they were indeed people made in the image of God.
“So, we said they weren’t. They weren’t humans made in the image of God. What we did is we threw away Imago Dei. We threw it away to justify what we’re doing….white supremacy was America’s original sin….At the heart of the sin was a lie,” he said.
It’s this history of the American church’s complicity with white supremacy that explains why, today, white Christians are about 30 percentage points more likely to hold racially resentful and otherwise racist views than religiously unaffiliated white people, according to a new analysis by Robert P. Jones, the founder of the Public Religion Research Institute. In his 2020 book White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, Jones writes, “The unsettling truth is that, for nearly all of American history, the Jesus conjured by most white congregations was not only indifferent to the status quo of racial inequality; he demanded its defense and preservation as part of the natural, divinely ordained order of things.”
Jones goes on to explain that “perhaps the most powerful role white Christianity has played in the gruesome drama of slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow, and massive resistance to racial equality is to maintain an unassailable sense of religious purity that protects white racial innocence. Through every chapter, white Christianity has been at the ready to ensure that white Christians are alternatively—and sometimes simultaneously—the noble protagonists and the blameless victims.”
On the phone with me, Jim Wallis’s voice grew deeper and fuller as he leaned into his point. “As long as white people—even, you know, good-hearted, well-meaning, progressive white people—think that the issue of race is mostly about people of color and minorities and what has happened to them and what happens to them that we could help with—as long as that’s the mindset, they’re still stuck,” he told me.
And they will remain stuck “until we understand as white people that the problem of racism is about us.” Jim doesn’t take this call lightly. He says that “to confront this and change this is necessary for our salvation. To confront racism is not a question of charity or virtue for white Christians,” he declared. “This is to save our souls.”
The same way that Pastor Daniel preaches about the many antiracist messages in the New Testament, Rabbi Felicia Sol, senior rabbi at the large New York City Jewish congregation B’nai Jeshurun, revealed how the spiritual imperative against racism is located deep in the foundational texts and stories of her faith. “For the leitmotif of the Jewish tradition, we have a redemption narrative at our core. The Exodus from Egypt is a Jewish story. And that story has been utilized for liberation movements throughout history.” But, she said, many religious scholars consider that “redemption isn’t a miracle. It’s actually built into the structure of the world….And therefore, racism is an impediment to the structure of the world, of a redeemed world.
“The story goes that God was trying to make the world, and the world wouldn’t stand up until teshuvah—‘repentance’—was created….And I find that a deeply compelling narrative. The structure of the world understands…it would have to repair itself at its core. But that repair is on us, you know.”
Rabbi Sol made the religious case that racism cuts both ways. “Racism actually has a dehumanizing aspect not only for those who experience racism, but [also for] those who perpetuate it….Jewish tradition articulates…that everyone is stamped in the image of God.” And in some Jewish traditions, she said, “there’s a notion that God is not a hierarchical God, but that God is the oneness of all of us….There’s no difference between me and God. It’s all the same. God is one. And so, racism is another way that divides that divine connection…because then we’re not only inflicting pain on others, but we’re maligning our purity.”
Many of the leading lawyers, philanthropists, and student activists supporting the civil rights movement were Jewish, including a disproportionate share of the white youth who volunteered in the 1964 Freedom Summer. And while there have been powerful waves of solidarity between white American Jews, African Americans, and today’s persecuted immigrants and refugees, the relationship between Judaism and American racism is complex. Yavilah McCoy has experienced how white supremacy stands not only between a person and God, but also between the Jewish people and their full, rich history. Based in Boston, McCoy is an Orthodox-raised, yeshiva-trained Jewish educator, activist, and spiritual leader who is also an African American woman, one of the approximately 12 to 15 percent of American Jews who are people of color. We talked on the phone for almost an hour in 2019, and Yavilah’s Brooklyn-accented speech was comfortably familiar to me, even peppered as it sometimes was with Hebrew phrases.
“All of that stuff about whiteness came into the Jewish community pretty strategically as a result of the way white European Jews came to the U.S.,” she said. “And the way in which white supremacy couldn’t really grapple with what a Jew was, outside of trying to assimilate them into whiteness.” This, she said, resulted in “the stripping away of the history. All the [early] rabbis…came from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Jerusalem….These are brown people, right?” Atrocities such as the Inquisition in the fifteenth century and the Holocaust in the twentieth century took Jews of varied national, racial, and ethnic backgrounds and made of them one “race”—a race to be exterminated.
At the spiritual level, Yavilah believes, racism interrupts the human connection with the divine. When Yavilah was a child learning the prayer book, a phrase in Hebrew was posted high on the wall at the front of the classroom. In English, it translates to “Know before whom you stand.” She recalled, “The teacher would say, ‘Before you start to pray, you have to acknowledge that you’re in the presence of something bigger than yourself.’…How could we act out white supremacy, or any other realm of oppression, if I feel like what I’m standing before is something that is essential, something that is sacred, something that is human?”
Islam also espouses a theology of equality and fraternity among all humankind, and certain interpretations of its teachings about self-reliance and equality have appealed to many generations of African Americans, including but by no means limited to civil rights icons like Malcolm X. Among non-Black Muslim Americans with immigrant backgrounds, the shared experiences of suspicion and surveillance—especially after 9/11—have been a source of solidarity with antiracist struggles. When I spoke with Zaheer Ali, a Brooklyn-based oral historian, he pointed to the line in the Quran in which Allah proclaims to humankind that “we…made you into nations and tribes [so] that you may know each other, not that you may despise each other.” Ali was born in Trinidad, the Caribbean island where the descendants of Indian laborers (Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh) and enslaved Africans commingled for over a century, and he has spent much of his career documenting the oral history of American Muslims. He painted a complicated picture for me of a religious doctrine that was profoundly anti-hierarchical and has attracted many Black Americans away from the Christianity so entangled with white supremacy and slavery. But he also talked about the anti-Blackness that many South Asian, Persian, and Arab Muslim immigrants adopt as part of their assimilation process in America.
Just hours after my conversation with Zaheer, Minneapolis police officers killed George Floyd. Zaheer wrote me an email the day after the city of Minneapolis and the country erupted. “That it was a Muslim/Arab-owned store that called the police on George Floyd throws some of what we discussed into sharper relief (and even greater urgency): the need to speak to anti-Black racism within Muslim communities.” I had taken note of that fact as well, but replied asking him if he’d seen the news story of a local Bangladeshi Muslim family whose business, a restaurant named Gandhi Mahal, a few doors down from the Third Precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department, had caught fire in the protests. After losing his family’s business, the father, Ruhel Islam, reportedly said, “Let my building burn. Justice needs to be served.” I had read Mr. Islam’s next words with tears in my eyes: “We can rebuild a building, but we cannot rebuild a human.” Racism taught generations of white Americans that we were no more than property. I didn’t know how much I needed to hear someone say that even if it cost them everything, they knew better.
differences among the world’s major religions, they all hold compassion and human interconnectedness as central values; they all subscribe to a sacred vision of a world without racism. As I traveled the country engaging with people about the costs of racism, I often began our conversations discussing laws and policies, wealth and income—but in the end, many of the talks settled into a quiet, personal place. People brown, Black, and white revealed a moment of confession, of frustration, or of hope, and it all came from an emotional, even spiritual sense that this just isn’t how we’re supposed to be. It made me think more deeply about my own spiritual beliefs. I believe in a divine force to which we are all connected, and I admire the rituals and community building that organized religion offers, but I didn’t grow up as a churchgoer. (My mother, a deeply spiritual woman and a feminist, could never really accept a religion that figured the divine creator as male.) Yet I realized that I pursue my professional calling not only to improve our economy, but also out of a belief in the unseen: a promised land of a caring, just society. Across my conversations for this book, I heard a unified yearning for a society like that.
Racism destroys every path to that promised land, for all of us. As Wendell Berry writes, “If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost has been greater perhaps than we can yet know.”