reading assignment  

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Chapter 1

THE IDIOT’S GUIDE TO
CRITICAL RACE THEORY
The legal legacy of slavery and of the seizure of land from Native American
peoples is not merely a regime of property law that is (mis)informed by racist and
ethnocentric themes. Rather, the law has established and protected an actual
property interest in whiteness itself.

—CHERYL HARRIS1

ome of the best and most insightful scholarship on racism is sequestered in a
lively academic field known as critical race theory, or CRT. Predictably, this

revelatory work has been maligned by tin-foil-hat-wearing white supremacists
who believe that the only kind of racism that exists is “antiwhite racism.” But
critical race theory is something everyone needs to know about, not only because
scholars working in this area were on the vanguard of debunking the myth of
color blindness but also because they helped develop powerful theories of white
supremacy as a pervasive system of racial oppression, rather than the narrow
idea that white supremacy can only be found in the beliefs and practices of white
nationalists.
Using the insights of critical race theory, I’m going to break down the “what,”

“when,” “where,” “why,” and “how” of white supremacy, after which you’ll be
well ahead of the vast majority of the population, who have no idea what white
supremacist racism really is, where it came from, or what could possibly be done
about it. I’m going to review and simplify a lot of complex history, but here are
several important things to bear in mind. First: white supremacy is, most
fundamentally, a system of power designed to channel material resources to
people socially defined as white. Second: white supremacy is not just neo-Nazis
and white nationalism. It’s also the way our society has come to be structured,
such that political, economic, and other forms of capital are predominately
maintained by elite whites. Long before op-ed columnists and contemporary

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activists began using the term “white supremacy,” critical race scholars and
radical progressives such as Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Cornel West
were leading the way with strident critiques of structural racism (and its
interconnections with sexism, class oppression, and other forms of domination).
Finally: white supremacy is inextricably linked to other systems of domination.
This is the major insight of intersectionality, a concept I will come back to later.
For now, simply remember that racism goes hand in hand with class oppression,
patriarchy, and other forms of domination.
This chapter will also introduce you to the brilliant work of critical race

philosopher Charles Mills, who has been consistently, eloquently snatching
white supremacist wigs for decades. I’ll spend some time explaining his best-
known concept: the epistemology of ignorance. If many of these terms are new
to you, get ready to have some of your most basic assumptions about race
challenged. Buckle up your seatbelt, baby: this is gonna be a bumpy ride.

If you grew up like most people in the United States (including me), you
probably learned very little about the history and current realities of racism in
school. If anything, you were likely taught that racism, while unfortunate, is
mainly a thing of the past, something to view through the rearview mirror. In his
excellent books Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America, sociologist
James Loewen clearly demonstrates that racial history is routinely minimized
and distorted within our (mis)educational system. Not only is it highly unlikely
that you learned much of substance about race or racism at school; it is also
highly likely that you absorbed racist propaganda. To the extent that our schools
typically fail to teach students how to intelligently connect the racial past to the
present, many of us end up with preracial or color-blind understandings of
history and society. In the introduction, I mentioned that I didn’t grow up
consciously thinking about race or racism. In fact, I was so lost in the sauce in
middle school that when our class read those precious few lines about slavery
and the Civil War in our history book, I thought, “Gee, how sad for those
people.” Those people. As in, the enslaved Africans and their descendants—
some of whom are my ancestors!
Prior to going to college, I don’t recall having any teacher, from elementary

on through high school, draw clear connections between past and present racism,
or even acknowledge that systemic racism was a serious, ongoing problem in the
United States (not to mention the rest of the globe!). In schools across the
country, young people are indoctrinated with a rosy origin myth of the United
States, a lie that frames indigenous people as noble savages who happily sat

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down with the Pilgrims to “celebrate” Thanksgiving over turkey and squash as
their people were being systematically slaughtered through genocide.2 To the
extent that racial oppression is referenced at all, it is generally framed as a bad
thing that happened a long time ago. One of the sad ironies of oppression is that
it’s completely possible to grow up in a society ravaged by multiple forms of
domination and not know that your society is ravaged by multiple forms of
domination, especially when our educational system manufactures feel-good
histories and progress narratives. I concur with Ibram X. Kendi, who argues that
our nation’s emphasis on racial progress has obscured “racist progress”—the
evolution of racist ideas and practices alongside antiracist transformations. The
end result is a society where racism is routinely misrepresented, denied, and
difficult to detect—unless, of course, you experience it directly and have the
political and historical lens needed to know you’re experiencing it.
This is precisely why civil rights lawyers and experts developed critical race

theory: to address and redress widespread racial misinformation and to promote
racial justice. Between the intentional efforts of bigots to whitewash racism and
massive historical ignorance pervading our social institutions, it’s no wonder that
millions of people struggle with racial denial—including the denial of racism
itself. Depending on which racial idiot you ask, the United States hasn’t been
racist since Obama’s election, the civil rights movement, the dawn of the
twentieth century, or ever. In 2017, former NFL player and coach Mike Ditka
proclaimed that there has been “no oppression” of any kind in the last “one
hundred years.”3 And for some misguided minorities, the gains of the civil rights
movement and certainly the election of the nation’s first biracial president were
interpreted as signs that significant racial barriers are no longer with us. In the
wake of Obama’s 2008 election, the conservative African American linguist
John McWhorter went so far as to pen an op-ed in Forbes entitled “Racism in
America Is Over.” In keeping with his long career of minimizing racism,
McWhorter enthusiastically declared the end of “serious” racial oppression: “Of
course, nothing magically changed when Obama was declared president-elect.
However, our proper concern is not whether racism still exists, but whether it
remains a serious problem. The election of Obama proved, as nothing else could
have, that it no longer does.”4
I’m sitting here scratching my head over an author saying that his concern is

not “whether racism still exists” in an article entitled “Racism in America Is
Over.” Now, to be fair, it’s possible that McWhorter did not choose the title of
his essay, as editors often provide the headlines, but let’s be clear: there is a
logical contradiction between declaring the end of racism and then backpedaling
to the more restricted (but still delusional) claim that “serious” racism no longer

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exists.
McWhorter’s position is not postracial, strictly speaking. He predicted that

during the Obama era “a noose or three will be hung somewhere, some employer
will be revealed to have used the N-word on tapes of a meeting,” but racial
oppression, he maintained, was now definitively a thing of the past. McWhorter
gave lip service to acknowledging trivial remnants of racism—an apparently
harmless act of racial terrorism or awkward racial epithet here or there. But,
from his perspective, these acts of bigotry were minor, individual human failings
in contrast to systemic oppression, which he depicted as the relic of a bygone
era. We can think of this line of argumentation as post-really-bad racism. Thus,
McWhorter writes:

It’s not an accident . . . that increasingly . . . alleged cases of racism are tough calls, reflecting the
complexity of human affairs rather than the stark injustice of Jim Crow or even redlining. A young
black man is shot dead by three police officers and only one of them is white. A white radio host uses a
jocular slur against black women—used for decades in the exact same way by black rappers celebrated
as bards. . . . But anyone who wants to take this line from now on will have to grapple with the
elephant in the middle of the room: the president of AmeriKKKa is black. If the racism that America is
“all about” is the kind that allows a black man to become president, then I’m afraid the nature of this
“all about” is too abstract for me to follow, and most Americans will feel similarly. It’s time to change
the discussion.

It’s safe to say that McWhorter didn’t see the Black Lives Matter movement
or the election of a KKK-endorsed president coming (to be fair, very few of us
did). But what I want to point out here is that the denial that our society is
always already racialized can take many forms, from individual proclamations of
color blindness (“I don’t see color!”) and disavowals of significant, systemic
racial oppression to the complete denial of all forms of racism. And nonwhites
are, unfortunately, not immune to absorbing and disseminating distortions of
racial reality.
In many respects, my own discipline of sociology bears some responsibility

for obscuring the maintenance of systemic racism and white supremacy.5
Although sociologists are often framed as “liberal,” the truth is that sociology in
the United States was founded on overtly white supremacist ideas. And, as
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Gianpolo Baiocci argue in their 2007 article
“Anything but Racism,” sociologists from the twentieth century to the present
day have often downplayed the existence of structural racism in their analyses.6
This is perhaps especially true of scholars who emphasize the role of culture or
class in explaining the persistence of group-based inequalities. It’s probably no
coincidence that some of the most revered and highly cited sociologists
responsible for pushing the post-really-bad-racism trope have been devastatingly

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brilliant black sociologists employed by Harvard University, my alma mater.
These include Orlando Patterson (one of my doctoral advisors) and William
Julius Wilson, author of a classic 1978 text, The Declining Significance of Race,
which was met with wide-eyed enthusiasm and nearly orgasmic praise by white
elites.7
While the post-really-bad-racism trope has been long dominant in and outside

sociology, there is a vibrant counter-discourse emerging from scholars working
in the intellectual and political tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-
Barnett. From Joyce Ladner in 1973 to Aldon Morris, Vilna Bashi-Treitler, and
Noel Cazenave more recently, critical sociologists have argued that sociological
analyses purporting to be racially progressive often minimized or masked
structural racism and white dominance. Many sociologists who emphasize the
complicity of sociological research in masking racial oppression and white
domination throughout US history have been heavily influenced by the insights
of critical race theory.

As stated previously, we live in a society where the phrase “white supremacy”
has been traditionally used to refer to neo-Nazis and extremists rather than to the
dominance of people socially defined as white. But legal scholars, social
scientists, and political philosophers working in the robust field of critical race
theory have developed conceptual tools for recognizing and responding to
systemic racism and white supremacy. Critical race theory is an interdisciplinary
body of scholarship that emerged in the aftermath of the civil rights movement
as legal theorists grappled with naming and challenging the persistence of racism
after the fall of de jure segregation. Born in the mid-1970s, CRT boldly
embraced an overtly activist agenda: the promotion of racial justice and the
eradication of racial oppression. Bridging legal analysis with storytelling and
narratives centering the experiences of people of color, critical race theorists set
about to unveil and address the persistence of racism and white dominance. And,
importantly, scholars in this tradition also acknowledge the intersections of
racism with sexism, class oppression, and other systems of inequality. One of the
most important and helpful features of critical race theory is its clear analysis of
white supremacy in the so-called post–civil rights era, a period in US history
when politicians and the majority population increasingly portrayed themselves
as “beyond race” or “nonracist.”
Critical race theory is kryptonite for the myth of color-blindness and helps cut

through the bullshit of postracial propaganda by specifying the role of social
institutions (especially laws and legal practices) in reproducing racism. From a

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critical race perspective, the United States is not (and never was) a benevolent
“nation of immigrants.” Rather, it is a nation of settler-colonialism, genocide,
white nationalism, racial slavery, legal torture, and institutionalized rape. Since
the inception of this country, laws and legal practices systematically favored
whites economically, politically, and socially. In fact, critical race scholar Cheryl
Harris, in 1993, described whiteness as a form of protected “property” within the
US racial hierarchy, a category of privilege tied to the accumulation of economic
resources and the subjugation of racialized “others.” From this perspective, laws
and legal institutions within this country have continually converted white
identity into a valuable, exclusive mechanism for maintaining power.
Few people realize that the nation’s very first immigration law, the

Naturalization Act of 1790, was explicitly white supremacist, restricting
naturalization to “free White persons,” though white women were left out of this
exclusionary understanding of “freedom.” Granting citizenship to free white men
was quite literally a government handout—for whites only. As you might have
noticed, history keeps coming up here, quite simply because critical race
theorists encourage historical consciousness. In order to understand present-day
racial realities, we will have to look to the past. This might seem simple or
obvious on its face, but the sad truth is that most US citizens have never
seriously studied history of any kind, much less racial history. If the vast
majority of the population is ignorant of the racist past, how can they understand
the impact of that past on the present?
Critical race theorists also challenge the liberal logics that have been used to

portray the United States as “beyond race,” for example, by analyzing the
jurisprudence surrounding the country’s affirmative action policies. Scholars
such as Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Derrick Bell (the last of
whom was a professor of Barack Obama’s at Harvard Law School) have shown
that legal assumptions about meritocracy and fairness that are used by
conservatives to undermine affirmative action programs are logically
inconsistent with the existence of institutional racism.8 Other scholars who take
a critical or “systemic” approach to the study of racism have shown that the
nation’s first affirmative action programs and government handouts were
conceived by white Americans for white Americans.9 From using racially
justified mass murder, land theft, and labor exploitation to enacting racist
citizenship laws, people socially defined as “white” have built generations of
wealth and political power by playing the race card and founding an entire
nation on white identity politics. To take just one example, the 1862 Homestead
Act gleefully gave away millions of acres of stolen land almost exclusively to
whites.10 And, quiet as it’s kept, white people continue to be the number-one

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beneficiaries of affirmative action today. Race scholars are aware that white
women are the top recipients of affirmative action, but few have considered that
white women’s primary access to affirmative action helps maintain the racial
wealth gap.11 Because these white women typically marry white men, their
affirmative action benefits are channeled toward their white families. And their
access to affirmative action benefits (preferential hiring and federal diversity
initiatives) not only helps them but also bolsters the socioeconomic status of
white families broadly.
My first serious encounter with critical race theory occurred after I’d already

finished my PhD. Although I didn’t realize it then, I had chosen to undertake my
graduate work in a sociology department that was relatively conservative in
terms of its racial politics—there was little in the way of overlap or exchange
with more radical or progressive elements at the university. Certainly, none of
my professors were intensely collaborating with critical race theorists.
Nonetheless, for most of my seven years of doctoral work, I felt confident that I
was being educated by some of the world’s most insightful experts on race. As
well-meaning as the Harvard sociologists might have been, the truth is that their
work typically downplayed racial oppression or focused on conceptually vague
“cultural elements” of race rather than systemic racism. This was even
demonstrated in how specialty areas were named for our general exams, a sink-
or-swim, high-stakes assessment at the end of our first year of graduate school in
which each student had to absorb information from nearly ten thousand pages of
scholarly articles and books. One of the optional specialties offered to students
was called “Race and Ethnicity”—not “Racism.” And though we studied racism,
the term “white supremacy” was not part of our sociological lexicon. If I had
done my due diligence, I would have known that Harvard has a long history of
producing dubious scholarship on race—and by “dubious,” I mean “racist.”
Consider the fact that Charles William Eliot, university president from the mid-
1800s to the early twentieth century, played a major role in legitimating
eugenics, an ideology first developed by white male scientists for the purpose of
promoting the genetic erasure of groups deemed to be inferior. Harvard has, in
fact, been described as the “brain trust” of the eugenics movement.12
The idea that certain human groups are undesirable and should be removed

from the face of the planet would later find favor with Adolf Hitler, who drew on
eugenics to justify the extermination of millions of Jews and other stigmatized
people. To this day, there is still a student dorm named for Charles Eliot. Worse,
he is not the only white supremacist currently honored and commemorated at
Harvard.13 Unfortunately, the same could be said for many campuses across the
country.

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As a graduate student, I was predominately trained to examine racism as a
“cultural” phenomenon happening “out there” in the social world, not a
structural feature of oppression that shaped what we were taught—and by whom.
And so it was that I spent seven whole years of my life thinking I knew a lot
about race when in fact I lacked any understanding of the racial politics shaping
my own education.
By the time I arrived at Stony Brook as an assistant professor, I had published

an award-winning dissertation on racism and collective memory in France, as
well as numerous scholarly articles on the dynamics of racism in the United
States. But, as painful as this is to admit, I still didn’t have a clear understanding
of systemic racism in the US until I began to break away from the influence of
my old mentors and teach undergraduate and graduate students myself. I also
began belatedly talking with other academics who were more politically
conscious and radical than I was, the kind of people who proudly and
unapologetically framed their scholarship in terms of activism (and, incidentally,
the kind of people I did not often encounter in my Harvard bubble). Slowly—
with a mix of excitement, shame, and relief—I began to realize that there were
entire fields of racial scholarship I’d ignored and brushed aside. As I engaged
with intellectually and politically incisive work that had been pushed to the
margins at Harvard, I finally understood why so much of what I’d been taught to
believe was “important scholarship” actually made me sick. I mean this quite
literally. After I finished my PhD and began to establish myself as a scholar, I
also increasingly noticed how much I disliked (let me keep it real: despised)
research that minimized structural racism, ignored white supremacy, or
marginalized the critical work of people of color and white antiracists. As a
longtime practitioner of mindfulness and meditation, I found that the more I
brought my attention to the present moment, the more clearly I could identify the
tightness in my chest or revulsion in my stomach when reading racist
scholarship. Conversely, I also noticed how invigorated and inspired I felt
reading authors who frankly acknowledged the structural, political, and spiritual
realities of domination.
And then, one fine day, I had the luck of encountering Dr. Charles Mills—an

eminent critical race theorist and political philosopher. Dr. Mills had been
invited to Stony Brook to give a provostial lecture on his famous book The
Racial Contract. Sitting in the amphitheater, I listened intently as the professor
threw around terms like “white supremacy” and “epistemology of ignorance,”
but I confess that I had no friggin’ clue what the hell he was talking about. Back
then, “white supremacy” still seemed, to my ear, like an odd phrase to describe
racism in the United States. How could there be “white supremacy” when the

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president was black? And how could racial oppression be so persistent if I, an
African American woman, held multiple degrees from a prestigious university
and had garnered a highly sought-after tenure-track job?
The more I read of Mills’s work—and the work of other critical race theorists

—the more I began to understand the importance of looking beyond my own
individual circumstances. As I would come to see clearly, dominant discourses
of individualism, exceptionalism, and meritocracy work to sustain collective
denial about racism and other forms of injustice. Paying attention to the
conditions of my own students at Stony Brook, a state university, also sensitized
me to systemic inequalities. The gap between the limited socioeconomic
resources available at a public institution versus the elite private schools I’d
grown accustomed to could not be more stark and morally abhorrent. During my
office hours, I met talented, brilliant students who lacked access to basic
resources, worked multiple jobs, commuted obscene hours, and even struggled
with homelessness. The unfairness of their predicament shocked my conscience.
It’s also clear, looking back, that the death of Trayvon Martin—and the
subsequent emergence of the Movement for Black Lives—opened my eyes to all
that had not changed about race in the United States. I understood, then, that
“white supremacy” was not merely about a few racist extremists but rather about
a system of domination that stretched into the present day and affected every
sphere of society.

But if white supremacy is so widespread, why has it been so difficult for some to
detect? And how could I, as a black woman, have obtained multiple degrees
from elite institutions and studied “race” for nearly a decade without clearly
recognizing the fact that we live in a white supremacist society? In Mills’s view,
white supremacy is a system of power and domination, one founded on racial
oppression and which provides material benefits to people socially defined as
“white.” More broadly, critical race theorists such as Mills emphasize the role of
European colonialism, genocide, and chattel slavery in producing intertwined
ideologies of white superiority and scientific racism in order to retroactively
justify the (continued) exploitation of people socially defined as “nonwhite.”
And here’s the kicker: Mills has convincingly argued that the maintenance of
white supremacy involves and requires “cognitive dysfunctions” and warped
representations of the social world that conveniently serve the interests of the
majority population.14 These distortions and cognitive errors produce “the ironic
outcome that whites [are] in general . . . unable to understand the world they
themselves have made.”

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This brings us back to Mills’s rather esoteric phrase: the epistemology of
ignorance. The word “epistemology” refers to the study of knowledge and its
formation, so an epistemology of ignorance would involve creating “knowledge”
based on . . . a profound lack of knowledge or stupidity. Using fancy academic
language, Mills is basically saying that whites’ ideas “about race” are
fundamentally based on misrepresentations and distortions of social reality, but
their “not knowing,” their ignorance, gets routinely repackaged as credible,
authoritative “knowledge,” even as “science.”15 But racial ignorance is not
restricted to white folks, unfortunately. My sociological interpretation of Mills’s
argument is that racist societies socialize all of us to be racial idiots, insofar as
we are exposed to forms of racial ignorance. Moreover, this widespread
ignorance sustains the racial power structure, and the racial order, in turn, helps
maintain the economic power of capitalist elites. The powerful always thrive on
the miseducation of groups they seek to exploit and control. As long as everyday
citizens are fed a daily mental diet of white supremacist ideology, historical
ignorance, and disinformation, the overall power structure remains difficult to
detect—and oppose. Thus, becoming less stupid about race involves discovering
how we’ve all been socialized in ways that obscure the realities of racial
domination for the benefit of white male property owners. I would eventually
come to see that even something as simple as referring to “race” or “racism”
without describing the overall racial order (the approach I absorbed in graduate
school) could have the unintended effect of reproducing that very same racial
order.
The concepts and words we use to represent (or misrepresent) racism have a

lot to do with how the system perpetuates itself. Imagine if you went to the
doctor for an annual checkup and your physician sat across from you, looking
very somber. Peering over her glasses, she says, “I’m very sorry to break this
news to you, but . . . you have an illness.”
Alarmed and anxious you ask, “What kind of illness?”
But instead of answering your question, the doctor flatly repeats, “You have

an illness.”
Wouldn’t it be helpful to know what the hell kind of illness you have? You

see, a general diagnosis is not especially helpful. You don’t know what exactly is
wrong or what to do. Similarly, using bland, vague words like “race” or “racial”
can often disguise what racism is and how it actually works. In fact, scholars
Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields make this point in their book Racecraft,
which argues that racial domination is reinforced by mysterious references to
“race” that ignore systemic racism.16 Describing the collective, systemic nature
of racism clearly is an oft-overlooked, prerequisite for taking effective action to

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challenge racial injustice.

Now that we have defined white supremacy, we turn to the question of when it
emerged. This bit is super important: white supremacy, as an ideology, would
have you believe that white people have been timelessly dominant. This simply
isn’t true. Remember how long our species (Homo sapiens) has been on the
earth: about two hundred thousand years. White supremacy and European global
domination have existed for about four hundred years. This means that the entire
period of Western colonial power represents an infinitesimal fraction of time—
0.2 percent of our history! Of course, this tiny fraction of time encapsulates our
entire life and the lifetimes of many ancestral generations.
With all of this said, it is important to understand European domination and

modern racism as nestled in a more complex, and longer, history of oppressions.
It’s also important to bear in mind that ethnicity and ethnic boundaries pre-date
the more recent emergence of race. In their 2012 book Race in North America,
Audrey and Brian Smedley demonstrate that modern ideas about racial
(biological) difference were articulated gradually, between the sixteenth and the
nineteenth centuries, in the aftermath of European colonial expansion and the
onset of the transatlantic slave trade.17 Thus, the modern race concept served to
justify the classification (and exploitation) of racialized others. An intersectional
approach to understanding racism specifically, and oppressions more broadly,
makes it clear that racial oppression is one of multiple, interlocking systems of
domination. And—crucially—it’s not the oldest form of oppression.
Certainly the histories of slavery, patriarchy, and class oppression demonstrate

that violence and dominance are human problems, not merely “white problems.”
But in the same way that men invented patriarchy, critical race theorists argue
that we must be clear that Europeans invented (and continue to benefit from)
modern racism in order to combat misrecognition and misrepresentation. But
part of this clear understanding, from my perspective, is seeing white
supremacist racism in its proper context: as a relatively new system of
oppression that was built on (and integrates) prior (and much longer) systems of
oppression including but not limited to class oppression, patriarchy, and gender
oppression. And white supremacist racism can poison the mind of everyone
socialized within its reach, including minorities, who have the most to lose from
internalizing and perpetuating racist ideas.
Let me be clear on this point: I am not drawing a false equivalence between

the racial ignorance of people of color and the racial ignorance of the white
majority. The “ignorance” of a majority group and that of minority groups are

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not the same, especially not the same in their effect. In other words, though
racial stupidity is ubiquitous, it is ubiquitous due to the violence and dominant
discourses of the majority population. It so happens that this majority population
is white but, of course, from an intersectional perspective, almost everyone
belongs to both “majority” and “minority” groups. And though people of color
are subject to being socialized in a racist society and absorbing the biases and
stereotypes inherent within such a society, they are typically not as racially
stupid as their majority counterparts. That’s not because they are fundamentally
better than white people or inherently more insightful, but for the simple reason
that they are more likely to encounter racism and therefore are able to identify it
and oppose it. Of course, to borrow from the language of sociology, these
dynamics are probabilistic rather than deterministic: we can’t know for sure,
based on someone’s racial identity, how she sees the world or how racially
obtuse she is. But it’s indisputable that on average, white people know a lot less
about race and racism than people of color.
Now that we’ve covered the “what” and the “when,” we have to know the

“where” of white supremacy. Well, the first important step is to acknowledge
that white supremacy exists right now within the United States. However, critical
race theory scholars have also argued that global white supremacy has come to
be consolidated and maintained by other Western nations. My own work
examines the politics of white supremacy in France, while scholars such as
Melissa Weiner and Gloria Wekker have unveiled dynamics of white domination
in Scandinavian countries, and France Winddance Twine has analyzed the
maintenance of white supremacy in Brazil.
As for the “why” of white supremacy, that’s easy: Europeans wanted to

exploit other human beings for material profit, take shit that didn’t belong to
them, and feel good about it in the process. The mythology of white superiority
and scientific racism developed over time in the aftermath of colonial conquest
and slavery to justify socioeconomic exploitation and theft. As long as the
endemic, systemic nature of white supremacy is successfully minimized or
denied, as long as “conversations about race” are mainly about individual
attitudes, prejudice, or the actions of a few extremists, then attention is drawn
away from the structures and pattern of racial inequality hiding in plain sight.
Nationwide, white families hold thirteen times the wealth of black families. In
Washington, DC, alone, white households (a numerical minority in this
“chocolate city”) are eighty-one times more wealthy than black households.18
And, so, we come back to class relations—and why Bernie Bros get it wrong
every time they insist that we should talk about class instead of race. The truth is
that these two concepts are intimately intertwined. In fact, modern race and

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white supremacy can both be understood as capitalist inventions. There is
nothing really very original, of course, about creating a system of domination to
monopolize resources. A quick review of history evinces widespread use of
religious ideology to oppress, murder, exploit, and enslave.
Wondering how white supremacy endures? Good news: political scientist

Charles Hamilton and activist Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture)
answered this question fifty years ago in their book Black Power. As Hamilton
and Carmichael noted: “Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely
related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the
total white community against the black community. We call these individual
racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals,
which cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property. This type can be
recorded by television cameras; it can frequently be observed in the process of
commission.”19
One of the outcomes of the Black Power and civil rights movements was a

major advance in our understanding of racial oppression. The key, as Hamilton
and Carmichael point out, is that racism comprises both individual and
institutional components, though most people only think about racism as an
individual, personal trait. But if you’re going to wrap your head around how
racial oppression actually operates, you have to move beyond simplistic
individual notions and grasp how racism becomes institutionalized in the ideas
and routine practices of our social organizations: our families, our laws and
policies, our educational system and decisions and structures shaping the
representation of race we absorb from the media. From mass incarceration to
sentencing laws to racial discrimination in housing and home loans, the
invisibility of institutional racism is maintained by the fact that it is literally hard
to see. Hamilton and Carmichael describe institutional racism as “less overt, far
more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the
acts.”20 For example, most of us are not present when racist decisions are made
in the courtroom or when laws and policies with racist consequences are being
drafted. And the self-imposed racial isolation and social apartheid preferred by
many whites means that most members of the majority population have no
meaningful relationships with people of color and, consequently, no significant
exposure to the realities of systemic, institutionalized racial oppression. Unless
you directly experience the injustice of living in a polluted neighborhood
decimated by environmental racism, unless you’ve being racially profiled or
abused by police, how could you know it’s happening—especially if such
matters aren’t addressed in school? And even if you personally experience the
consequences of institutionalized racism, how could you know it’s occurring on

31

a wider scale? Even the language of “structures” and “institutions” can be a
barrier for understanding and visualizing social relations; the terms are,
admittedly, abstract. Most of us are not used to thinking about society in terms of
historical patterns and distributions of power and resources. Hamilton and
Carmichael are careful to point out that for institutional racism (and, therefore,
white supremacy) to exist does not mean that every white citizen must hold
racist beliefs or engage in individual acts of racism. Because institutional racism
is a systemic power structure, it functions through collective action and systemic
practices. As such, it is “deliberately maintained . . . by the power structure and
through [whites’] indifference, inertia and lack of courage.”21
We can draw an important connection between the invisibility of institutional

racism and Mills’s conceptualization of the epistemology of ignorance. Both of
these ideas point to aspects of systemic racism that are difficult to detect, despite
(and perhaps even because of) their durability and ubiquity. White supremacy
endures, ironically—and chronically—through the widespread erasure of its
systemic and chronic nature. These erasures include covert forms of institutional
racism as well as denial, misrepresentation, and disinformation by those who
intentionally seek to secure resources for “whites,” as well as the “unintentional”
and institutionalized distortions of racial reality that result from vague and
imprecise descriptions of ongoing racialized social and historical realities. In this
way, systemic racism is reproduced and extended through everyday practices
that allow people to live in a racist society but fail to make meaningful
connections between their own observations, their nation’s history, and broader
patterns of domination.
Once established as an ideological and political system, white supremacy

reproduces itself through repertoires of silence, denial, misrepresentation,
disinformation, deflection, willful ignorance, justification, and—when all else
fails—brute violence and force. This is the case no matter how or when white
supremacy is established in a nation’s history. As the racial order takes hold, the
population that benefits from its maintenance is generally socialized in ways that
ensure the system remains in place. Within white supremacist societies, members
of the majority population are socialized to draw upon every discursive and
coercive tool at their disposal to maintain dominance without regard to logical
coherence, empirical evidence, reason, or morality. Ordinary racists and their
extremist counterparts employ liberal, inclusive, and even, at times, “antiracist”
ideas in order to obscure the racist intentions and effects of their actions and
institutional arrangements. The combination of racist and antiracist ideas is, in
fact, one of the most prominent and pernicious methods used to mask or justify
continual white dominance and to uphold the “non-racist” pose that has become

32

politically expedient in the wake of World War II and the US civil rights
movement.

Let me give you a really concrete example of the epistemology of ignorance and
racial denial. After the white supremacist rally and domestic terrorist attack in
Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, I penned an op-ed for The Root about
the origins of white supremacy in the United States.22 The next day, I started
getting emails telling me to turn on CNN, which is normally against my religion
because, my God, CNN is hot trash fire. But it turned out that Ohio state senator
Nina Turner had referenced my work twice on the network’s Sunday morning
politics show State of the Union, hosted by Jake Tapper. The response of her
panelist, noted homophobe Rick Santorum, was white supremacist deflection
101:

NINA TURNER: I want to read a brief quote from Dr. Crystal Fleming. . . . “It is clear that our
nation is in the midst of a very public—and painful—reckoning with the memory (and ongoing
realities) of white supremacy.” And that’s it. That, in other words, what transpired in Virginia
was just a tipping point, but this has been happening in this country all along. And until we go
deeper, showing disgust for and standing up very clearly and unified against racism and bigotry
like the neo-Nazis and KKK inspired, but we’ve got to go deeper to deal with mass incarceration
in this country that locks up more black and brown folks and poor folks. We got to deal with
income and wealth inequality—inequality in our school system. So dealing with neo-Nazis is
one thing, but dealing with systemic racism is another. And this is a day of reckoning for our
country.

JAKE TAPPER: Senator?
RICK SANTORUM: Yes. That kind of talk that really, I think, causes problems for a lot of America

that says somehow or another that if you’re white, you’re somehow racist. And—I mean—
NINA TURNER: Nobody ever said that.
RICK SANTORUM: You talked about—you talked about systemic racism and as opposed to neo-

Nazis, I agree. I mean, I think everybody has stood up and said, you know, that we’re obviously
against white supremacy. I don’t know of anybody who has spoken in favor of . . . Certainly
nobody that I’m aware of, but the idea of then saying, well, this is a, you know, a larger problem
that is that—I just would say that, you know, we have problems of racism in this country. But
that’s not—Tying that to white supremacists, I think, is a —

NINA TURNER: Two hundred and fifty years’ worth of slavery—250 years’ worth of slavery.
Almost a hundred years’ worth of Jim Crow in this country, the fact that the systems in this
country still treat black folks, in particular, African-American folks as second-class citizens. And
part of what the senator doesn’t want to face is also part of the problem. No one has said . . . that
all white people are racists. But we do, in this country, have racist institutions. Look there were
white folks out there, marching against the neo-Nazis and the KKK. But the fact that we can’t
deal with systemic racism in this country, something is wrong with that.23

There’s so much racial stupidity here on Santorum’s part that one scarcely
knows where to begin. But let’s just start with the simple fact that rather than
acknowledge centuries of systemic racism, he immediately denied that white

33

supremacy exists as a system of racial domination. The man literally said that he
refused to “tie” (connect) “problems of racism” to white supremacy. Somehow,
racism, in his mind, apparently exists independent of white supremacy. Instead
of admitting that larger, institutional dynamics exist, Santorum tried to impose
an individualist framing of racism. White supremacists are just a faction of
extremists, floating in the ether, disconnected from structural forces. Senator
Turner successfully pushed back, cogently acknowledging the systemic nature of
racism and the historical legacies of racial oppression.
Just as Charles Hamilton and Stokely Carmichael, referenced earlier, made it

clear that systemic racism doesn’t need every white citizen to be personally
racist in order to exist, so Senator Nina Turner emphasized the institutional,
collective forces that create institutional racism. But to make what should be
very basic points, she was forced to address and counter the pathological denial,
historical ignorance, racial stupidity, and general dumbassery of Rick Santorum.
And the inconvenient truth is that there are millions of Rick Santorums in our

midst.

Repertoires of denial, erasure, and distancing are widespread in white
supremacist Western societies, but the specific discourses and strategies of
deflection (and especially their degree of “success” and hegemony) differ across
national contexts. For example, the fact that whites practiced slavery and
genocide within the geographic confines of the United States means that US
citizens cannot easily pretend that chattel slavery and “race” are irrelevant issues
here without completely disregarding basic history and ongoing social issues.
This does not mean, however, that US citizens (especially whites) do not try to
disregard racial history and present-day racial issues—color-blind discourses
certainly exist here, for sure. But color-blind ideology in the US is frequently
contested and perhaps more easily detected as erroneous given the plethora of
empirical evidence of past and present racism and the long-term, significant
presence of immigrants and racial minorities.
But color-blind racism, though widespread among the US white majority, is

even more hegemonic in European countries, which also practiced racial
violence and developed a white supremacist ideology.24 Because European
nations can more convincingly frame “race” as a distant issue (both
geographically and politically), they have more success imposing racial denial
than their US counterparts. The fact that continental Europeans (1) existed prior
to the elaboration of modern white supremacy; (2) largely practiced racialized
violence overseas through colonial domination of non-Europeans; and (3)

34

managed to prevent the mass immigration of non-Europeans until relatively
recently makes it easier for their majority population to deny the social existence
and salience of race. A fourth geopolitical issue also fosters the erasure of past
and present racism in European societies: the ever-present boogeyman of the
overtly racist United States. As Northern liberals frequently point to Southern
(and/or conservative) racists in order to deny their own racism, so, too, do
Europeans frequently point to the overt evidence of racism in the United States
to portray their own societies as nonracist, racially benign, or “less racist.”
Whites in the United States cannot easily employ this tool of comparative denial,
not only because the global media ecosystem routinely portrays the US as “more
racist” than other nations but also because many whites in the United States do
not know much about racism in other societies.

Becoming antiracist involves developing the historical and sociological literacy
needed to decode the ongoing impact of the racial past on the present. It means
becoming familiar with the typical tropes of minimization, deflection, and denial
that allow racism to persist unrecognized and/or justified on a daily basis. And it
means going far beyond “calling out” your racist friend or family members for
their racist comments and behavior (something the vast majority of whites do not
do). If we are ever to move beyond this racial order, then we will also have to
dismantle the system of unearned privilege attached to being socially defined as
“white.” If being racist is about supporting a system of racist domination, then
becoming antiracist is about recognizing and opposing this system. This
recognition is the very first step to becoming less stupid about race and
developing strategies capable of challenging racism in the present and building a
more just future. Critical race theory and systemic approaches to studying racism
are incredibly helpful for developing this literacy, as these perspectives provide
not only an explanation of the origins and functioning of racism, but also a
theory about how this system of domination is ideologically sustained through
commonplace modes of misrepresentation and denial.
As a system, white supremacy needs people to believe that it (1) doesn’t exist,

(2) has been overcome, or (3) only exists among extremists. White supremacy
can’t tolerate millions of people finally realizing that it is pervasive and
systemic. It needs us ignorant and hopeful. And it needs us to cling to a
particular kind of hope—a hope that reinforces racial ignorance and denial of
white supremacy. A hope that sells you neoliberal inclusion and “feel-good”
tokenism—the kind of hope that cannot threaten the racial status quo.
Antiracists have to learn how to recognize racism in its subtle political,

35

psychological, and sociological forms: the workings of institutions, publications,
laws, families. Adopting a systemic view of racism requires noticing the
cooperation of both major parties (and corporate media) with the economic and
political forces of white supremacy. And you must see how your own
socialization, behavior, and choices are complicit with multiple systems of
oppression, racism included. The fact that racism (and patriarchy, class
domination, and so on) are systemic means that none of us are exempt from
these dynamics. White supremacy continues to persist, in part, due to the
widespread temptation to only see and condemn other people’s racism—racism
is always someone else’s crime.

If it’s not already clear to you, there is also a moral dimension to critical race
theory, for it involves challenging the values and principles that justify
(implicitly or explicitly) racial domination. From a critical race perspective—one
that centers the views and voices of the marginalized—we can (and must) do
better than what the “Founding Fathers” did. We don’t need to mythologize their
moral integrity.
The only way a nation founded on white supremacy, colonial violence, and

hypercapitalism can be framed as a moral entity is to continually devalue the
lives of those it has repeatedly diminished, in our case women, indigenous
populations, and black, brown, working-class, and poor people.
In order to envision and build a more just society, we will have to collectively

recognize the foundational immorality of the Founding Fathers and commit to
creating a world better than the one they conceived. People of conscience must
eventually admit that we do not need to keep making excuses for white
supremacists and enslavers—even those who putatively embraced ideas of
“freedom”—because the freedom they had in mind was not honorable.
As this chapter has explained, the freedom conceived by white supremacists

was specifically crafted by and for white male property owners. It was always
morally abhorrent. For white male supremacists, “liberty” was conceived as
consistent with oppressing marginalized others: women, indigenous people,
Africans, the poor. This should go without saying, but people who base their
concept and practice of freedom on genocide, slavery, and rape aren’t moral
models. A true moral revolution requires letting go of the need to elevate those
who justified exploitation, murder, and oppression.
Some will contend that the founders’ redemptive values of freedom

outweighed their actual practice of oppression. (“Gotta see both sides . . .”) But
the opposite is true: the founders’ actual practice of oppression reveals that they

36

used the language of freedom to justify domination. Others will object and say
that condemning the founders for their moral crimes against humanity is unfair,
because it means using our current values to judge historical figures. But this
narrative—long dominant (and typically invoked by white men)—deliberately
ignores the fact that people spoke out against and opposed white supremacist
genocide and chattel slavery while these things were happening. Unsurprisingly,
the people calling out these moral wrongs were often those being targeted. The
histories of indigenous resistance against European aggression, slave rebellions,
and abolitionism clearly demonstrate that there were people who knew it was
wrong to treat other human beings as if they were disposable. But there were
also European “whites” who spoke against these moral wrongs at every stage of
our history, a very small but important minority among the majority population
who rejected theses of racial inequality and justifications of oppression.
Wouldn’t a more perfect union be a society in which white supremacists,

enslavers, and rapists are no longer honored? A society in which indigenous
people, black people, people of color, and white antiracists who fought against
oppression are held in higher esteem than those who defended the indefensible?
What kind of transformations—social, political, economic, and moral—would
need to happen to build a more perfect union?
There have always been voices challenging racial oppression, pointing out its

horror and moral wrong. But throughout our history, these voices have been
opposed and drowned out. We must not allow these voices to be marginalized
any longer. We must be clear: racism is morally wrong and racists do not deserve
to be honored, whether they were members of the Confederacy or the signatories
of the Declaration of Independence. But we can certainly learn from the past.
And maybe—just maybe—the way to correct the moral errors of those who
came before us is to decide, with conviction, not to repeat them.
If there is anything to learn from the Founding Fathers, it’s that we have the

right to call out tyranny by its name and transform our society. But we don’t
have to remain enslaved to the limited moral imaginations of those who
rationalized slavery and genocide. We can dream better, more inclusive dreams
and create a more just society. And even if we aren’t able to bring about all the
positive change we would like to see in our lifetime, at the very least, we can
begin to imagine it.

37

carlosvazquez
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York: W. W. Norton, 2010), and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).
12. See Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–91;

George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1997). Fredrickson defines white supremacy as “attitudes, ideologies and policies
associated with the rise of blatant forms of white or European dominance over ‘nonwhite’ populations.” (xi)
On global white supremacy and racial domination in France, see Crystal M. Fleming, Resurrecting Slavery:
Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017).
13. See Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social

Control (London: Verso, 1994). In a widely cited formulation printed on the back of his book, Allen
provocatively wrote, “When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in

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9, there were no ‘white’ people
there. Nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years.”
14. On the racialization of European ethnic groups, see David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness:

How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New
York: Basic Books, 2006); Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton,
2011); and Vilna Bashi Treitler, The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions
(Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). See also Eduardo Bonilla-Silva on structural racism
and the emergence of ‘racialized social systems’ in the aftermath of European colonialism. Eduardo Bonilla-
Silva, “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation,” American Sociological Review 62, no. 3
(1997): 465–80.
15. W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the first sociologists to denounce and draw connections between forms

of racial violence directed toward multiple groups. Writing in Dusk of Dawn (1940), he observed:
“Lynching was a continuing and recurrent horror during my college days: from 1885 through 1894,
seventeen hundred Negroes were lynched in America. Each death was a scar upon my soul and led me to
conceive the plight of other minority groups for in my college days Italians were lynched in New Orleans,
forcing the Federal government to pay $25,000 in indemnity, and the anti-Chinese riots in the West
culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1892. Some echoes of Jewish segregation and pogroms in
Russia came through the magazines; I followed the Dreyfus case; and I began to see something of the
struggle between East and West in the Sino-Japanese war.” Du Bois, The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 15.
16. On the racial politics of gaslighting, see Angelique M. Davis and Rose Ernst, “Racial Gaslighting,”

Politics, Groups, and Identities (2017): 1–14.
17. “7 Ways We Know Systemic Racism Is Real,” Ben & Jerry’s website,

https://www.benjerry.com/whats-new/2016/systemic-racism-is-real, accessed March 22, 2018.
18. See Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of

Racial Inequality in America (2003; Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), and Joe R. Feagin, The
White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing (2008; New York: Routledge,
2013).
19. Matt Bruenig, “The Top 10% of White Families Own Almost Everything,” Demos.org, September 5,

2014, http://www.demos.org/blog/9/5/14/top-10-white-families-own-almost-everything.
20. See also David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working

Class (London: Verso, 2007).
21. Emily Badger, “Whites Have Huge Wealth Edge over Blacks (but Don’t Know It),” New York Times,

September 18, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/18/upshot/black-white-wealth-gap-
perceptions.html.
22. See M. W. Kraus, J. M. Rucker, and J. A. Richeson, “Americans Misperceive Racial Economic

Equality,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114, no. 39
(January 1, 2017): 10324–31.

CHAPTER 1: THE IDIOT‘S GUIDE TO CRITICAL RACE THEORY
1. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1724.
2. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, chapter 3.

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https://www.benjerry.com/whats-new/2016/systemic-racism-is-real

http://Demos.org

http://www.demos.org/blog/9/5/14/top-10-white-families-own-almost-everything

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/18/upshot/black-white-wealth-gap-perceptions.html

carlosvazquez
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carlosvazquez
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3. Phil Rosenthal, “Mike Ditka: ‘No Oppression in Last 100 Years,’” Chicago Tribune, October 10, 2017,
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/breaking/ct-ditka-20171010-story.html.
4. John McWhorter, “Racism in America Is Over,” Forbes, December 30, 2008,

https://www.forbes.com/2008/12/30/end-of-racism-oped-cx_jm_1230mcwhorter.html.
5. A number of other scholars have addressed the role of sociology in obscuring racial oppression and

reinforcing the racial status quo. For prominent examples, see James B. McKee, Sociology and the Race
Problem: The Failure of a Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Noel A. Cazenave,
Conceptualizing Racism: Breaking the Chains of Racially Accommodative Language (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); and Aldon D. Morris, The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of
Modern Sociology (Oakland, University of California Press, 2015).
6. See Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Gianpaulo Baiocchi, “Anything but Racism: How Sociologists Limit

the Significance of Racism,” in Handbook of the Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, Handbooks of
Sociology and Social Research, ed. Hernan Vera and J. R. Feagin (Boston: Springer, 2008).
7. William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American

Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Note that Wilson’s argument about the declining
explanatory power of race focused on African Americans’ gains in the labor market. On this point, see
Aldon D. Morris, “What’s Race Got to Do with It?,” Contemporary Sociology 25 (1996): 309–13. Although
Wilson conceptually minimizes structural racism and generally avoids acknowledging white supremacy in
contemporary society, his work highlights class divisions among African Americans as well as the plight of
poor and working-class blacks. See William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the
Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
8. For a review of the key texts that established the field of critical race theory, see Richard Delgado and

Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2001);
Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Annotated Bibliography (Charlottesville,
VA: Virginia Law Review Association, 1993); and Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and
Kendall Thomas, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: New
Press, 1996).
9. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in

Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).
10. See Leslie Picca and Joe Feagin, Two-Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage

(London: Routledge, 2007): “In the North American case, from the

160

0s to the 1960s, whites benefited
greatly from ‘affirmative action’ programs provided by federal, state, and local governments more or less
for whites only. These included the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century provision by the federal
government of hundreds of millions of acres of land for viable farm homesteads in many states. From that
agricultural land many white families built up wealth that they passed to several later generations of whites,
who often translated it into such things as good education, white-collar jobs, and good housing. Tens of
millions of whites today are affluent because of a few large scale federal programs of land allocation. Yet
this land, for the most part, was not made available to black Americans and other Americans of color who
were present in those states during the same decades—because of widespread, sometimes violent, white
opposition and discrimination.” (29–30)
11. Sally Kohn, “Affirmative Action Has Helped White Women More Than Anyone,” Time, June 27,

2013, http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/17/affirmative-action-has-helped-white-women-more-than-anyone.
12. “To Keep Its Stock Pure: A History of Eugenics at Harvard,” WBUR, March 8, 2016,

http://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2016/03/08/eugenics-at-harvard.
13. Jamiles Lartey, “Racism at Harvard: Months After Protests Began, Students Demand Concrete

Change,” Guardian, April 13, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/apr/13/racism-harvard-
law-school-slaveholder-seal.
14. Mills, The Racial Contract, 18.
15. On forms of white racial ignorance, see also Jennifer Mueller, “Producing Colorblindness: Everyday

Mechanisms of White Ignorance,” Social Problems 64, no. 2 (2017): 219–38.
16. Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London:

Verso, 2012).

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http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/breaking/ct-ditka-20171010-story.html

https://www.forbes.com/2008/12/30/end-of-racism-oped-cx_jm_1230mcwhorter.html

Affirmative Action Has Helped White Women More Than Anyone

http://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2016/03/08/eugenics-at-harvard

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/apr/13/racism-harvard-law-school-slaveholder-seal

17. Audrey Smedley and Brian D. Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a
Worldview, 4th ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2012).
18. See Gillian White, “In DC, White Families Are on Average 81 Times Richer Than Black Ones,”

Atlantic, November 26, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/11/racial-wealth-gap-
dc/508631/.
19. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America

(New York: Random House, 1967), 4.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Crystal Marie Fleming, “To Be Clear, White Supremacy Is the Foundation of Our Country. We Won’t

Destroy It by Toppling Statues,” The Root, August 19, 2017, http://www.theroot.com/to-be-clear-white-
supremacy-is-the-foundation-of-our-c-1797990783.
23. CNN Transcript: State of the Union, August 20, 2017,

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1708/20/sotu.01.html.
24. On color-blind racism within the United States, see Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists.

CHAPTER 2: LISTEN TO BLACK WOMEN
1. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzalduá, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of

Color (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1981), 94.
2. If you haven’t heard of the Nardal sisters, let me be the one to suggest that you check out their work.

Jeanne and Paulette Nardal were French Caribbean women who were involved in raising racial
consciousness during the Negritude movement in France. See Tracey D. Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude
Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), and Jennifer Anne Boittin, “In Black and
White: Gender, Race Relations, and the Nardal Sisters in Interwar Paris,” French Colonial History 6 (2005):
119–35.
3. Salma Hayek, “Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too,” New York Times, December 13, 2017,

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/13/opinion/contributors/salma-hayek-harvey-weinstein.html.
4. Amy Kaufman, “Celebration of Women Filmmakers Triggers Heated Debate Among Salma Hayek,

Jessica Williams and Shirley MacLaine,” Los Angeles Times, January 28, 2017,
http://beta.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-female-filmmakers-lunch-race-debate-20170128-
story.html.
5. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984; Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 127.
6. See Felice Léon, “The Real Woman Behind ‘Me Too,’” The Root, October 20, 2017,

https://www.theroot.com/watch-the-real-woman-behind-me-too-1819716901.
7. Women of Color Network, Women of Color Network Facts & Stats: Domestic Violence in

Communities of Color, National Resource of Domestic Violence (Harrisburg, PA: Women of Color
Network, June 2006), 2, http://www.doj.state.or.us/wp-
content/uploads/2017/08/women_of_color_network_facts_domestic_violence_2006 .
8. Vickie M. Mays, “Black Women, Work, Stress, and Perceived Discrimination: The Focused Support

Group Model as an Intervention for Stress Reduction,” Cultural Diversity and Mental Health 1, no. 1
(1995): 53–65, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3650252/.
9. Adrienne Davis, “Slavery and the Roots of Sexual Harassment,” in Directions in Sexual Harassment

Law, ed. C. MacKinnon and R. Siegel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 457–78; Angela
Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” Massachusetts Review 13,
nos. 1/2 (1972): 81–100.
10. Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New

York: Vintage Books, 2017), 21.
11. Linda Goler Blount, “Maternal Health and Black Women,” in Our Bodies, Our Lives, Our Voices:

The State of Black Women & Reproductive Justice Policy (Washington, DC: National Black Women’s
Reproductive Justice Agenda, 2017), 51, http://blackrj.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/FINAL-
InOurVoices_Report_final .
12. Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 285.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/11/racial-wealth-gap-dc/508631/

http://www.theroot.com/to-be-clear-white-supremacy-is-the-foundation-of-our-c-1797990783

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1708/20/sotu.01.html

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/13/opinion/contributors/salma-hayek-harvey-weinstein.html

http://beta.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-female-filmmakers-lunch-race-debate-20170128-story.html

https://www.theroot.com/watch-the-real-woman-behind-me-too-1819716901

http://www.doj.state.or.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/women_of_color_network_facts_domestic_violence_2006

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3650252/

http://blackrj.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/FINAL-InOurVoices_Report_final

• CHAPTER ONE: The Idiot’s Guide to Critical Race Theory