Helping white people engage racism

Here’s an eloquent essay by a pretty famous novelist (Jodi Picoult). She invites white people to see ourselves more clearly as implicated in structures of racial oppression. I think this is more accessible than many such essays, and in this age of Trump we need to do all that we can to invite engagement with these issues.

Here is the grievous mistake I had made for the majority of my life: I assumed that racism is synonymous with bias. Yet you could take every white supremacist and ship him off to Mars and you’d still have racism in the world. That’s because racism is systemic and institutional, but it is both perpetuated and dismantled in individual acts.