Some families transmit knowledge of racial rigging without explicit discussion, through silence and taboo

Evidence

For some of us, we only have to talk to members of our family to get a sense of how things were, or still are, rigged. My great-grandmother Ruby Wilson worked as a domestic for white people in my hometown for almost thirty years. She never talked about that job or the people she worked for. No one told us, but we knew the subject was taboo. She didn’t hate those people; she just understood them for who they were. When I came home from college angry about racism, she simply said, “You better not dwell on that. That stuff will eat you up.” Her pension plan amounted to the dimes she saved—dimes that bought the stove that cooked amazing pinto beans, and the refrigerator, or ice box as she called it, that held the best Kool-Aid in the world. Talking with her gave me a sense that some people had it better in life than others. Not because they had more individual initiative or were more disciplined. She worked tremendously hard. They were simply white. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 113

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Mono-racial parents struggle to socialize children into racial worlds they never inhabited. — Tatiana I. Zamora and Amado M. Padilla, Making sense of conflicting messages of…, 130; Silence about racism among victims limits their capacity to identify and respond to it — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3600; Racist meaning can be conveyed without explicit racial reference (+7 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Mono-racial parents struggle to socialize children into racial worlds they never inhabited. — Tatiana I. Zamora and Amado M. Padilla, Making sense of conflicting messages of…, 130; Silence about racism among victims limits their capacity to identify and respond to it — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3600; Racist meaning can be conveyed without explicit racial reference (+7 more)