Undoing racial habits requires surfacing white advantage and disrupting normalizing accounts of black suffering

Evidence

Changing policies and addressing structural racism are the first steps toward undoing our racial habits. We also have to bring our ideas about black folk out into the open. We have to disrupt those accounts of black suffering that make us okay with the sad fact that some Americans—black Americans—are more likely to languish in poverty, to attend bad schools, to not have work, to lose their homes, to go to prison, or to bury their children killed at the hands of the police. We must remove our mask to call attention to white advantage. That may help us understand one another a bit better. It may bridge divides, disrupt assumptions and stereotypes that block empathy and get in the way of serious efforts to achieve our country. As it stands, we don’t really talk frankly about race. And too many people are too damn scared to say so. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 190