White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

I was encouraged to read this book by my wife and Amazon's recommendations. The book has been referenced in new stories particularly the ones involving the police actions recently. For me, the concepts in the book are ones that I mistakenly thought were solved. It is hard to recognize the struggles that go on all around me without me having any awareness of them. It opened my eyes and I hope to recognize the struggles that many are going through so that I can be more attune and actively contribute to making things better.

In technology the problem is rampant. The Algorithmic Justice League (https://www.ajl.org/) is working to highlight all the biased training data that we are using to train what we call Ai. If we ignore racism, the hidden kind, and it gets coded into the algorithms that we then turn loose on our society we are going to cause more damage.

Some of my notes from the book include

Exclusion by those at the table doesn’t depend on willful intent; we don’t have to intend to exclude for the results of our actions to be exclusion.

Discrimination is action based on prejudice

When a racial group’s collective prejudice is backed by the power of legal authority and institutional control, it is transformed into racism, a far-reaching system that functions independently from the intentions or self-images of individual actors.

Racism differs from individual racial prejudice and racial discrimination in the historical accumulation and ongoing use of institutional power and authority to support the prejudice and to systematically enforce discriminatory behaviors with far-reaching effects.

The most profound message of racial segregation may be that the absence of people of color from our lives is no real loss. Not one person who loved me, guided me, or taught me ever conveyed that segregation deprived me of anything of value. I could live my entire life without a friend or loved one of color and not see that as a diminishment of my life.

We see it in the compassion toward white people who are addicted to opiates and the call to provide them with services versus the mandatory sentencing perpetrated against those addicted to crack.

We see it in the compassion toward white people who are addicted to opiates and the call to provide them with services versus the mandatory sentencing perpetrated against those addicted to crack.

Here is the LINK to the AMAZON Book