I recently read an article encouraging readers to buy and read more books by writers of color. And to be honest, even though I’ve ready many authors of color, when I went to my bookshelf, I clearly had many many more books by white authors. Since my right arm will be immobilized in a sling…

Back in July, I wrote a newsletter listing organizations that work to combat racism, with hotlinks to the websites of each organization (a partial list at best). If you missed that newsletter, you can find it here. Now I’ve thought of additional ways we can use our dollars to combat racism. The five ideas below are thought…

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” ~ Frederick Douglass For the past two weeks, I’ve written about the disparities in our educational systems between Black and White children in an effort to share some of our history and make a case for integrating schools. But what about the curricula…

MAKING THE CASE FOR INTEGRATION According to an article in the American Educator, researchers who have studied school integration have documented similar benefits for both students of color and white students. We now have a vast body of empirical evidence that many of the Black and Latino children who participated in the METCO program—a voluntary…

Large racial differences in health persist in the U.S. Eliminating these health disparities is another public health challenge of our time. Racial residential segregation is the cornerstone on which black-white disparities in health status have been built in the US. Racial groups characterized by legacies of social exclusion, economic disadvantage and political or geographic marginalization have…

When I set out to learn more about systemic racism, I quickly realized how ignorant I was. Ignorant about how systemic racism came about, about how our laws enabled segregation, how we have perpetuated racism through the generations. The more I read, the more the books opened new areas of unawareness. For example, I learned…

A recent rationale for not inviting a Black man to join a group of white women to discuss racism was: “Black people shouldn’t have to do the work of educating whites about racism.” The comment took me back to an early June article in The Washington Post entitled “I’m your Black friend, but I won’t educate you…

The biases I wrote about last week (here), can lead to microaggressions. Racial microaggressions are brief and commonplace verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative slights and insults toward people of color. They have also been defined as “acts of disregard that stem from unconscious attitudes of…

Explicit Biases Explicit biases are those conscious attitudes and beliefs we have about a person, a group, or a situation. We are aware of these biases. An example of an explicit bias would be, “I hate Brussels sprouts.” (I don’t actually but I’m using that as an example) You can provide justifications for why you hate them, you…