I think that one of the most important things we can do in trying to deal with racism is to try and identify within ourselves where our racist system has shaped our views. I think that only in being honest about the racist ideologies that live within ourselves can we change and let them go. Racism isn't about individual acts of meanness; racism is a system of inequality that affords some people privileges that allow them to live better lives than others. As white people are privileged, the conversation has to shift from calling people out as racists (though some clearly are), to identifying how we, as white people, are benefitting from a racist system and how our behaviours contribute to a lack of change because we are too afraid to acknowledge that racism lives within us.

I'd like to propose we all share how racism might live within ourselves, whether we believe in it or agree with it. For example, I was chatting with a Jamaican woman, the mother of my stepdaughter's friend. She was telling me about her maternity leave that had just started and, for some reason, I assumed she was a nurse and asked her if she was. She wasn't. She was a social worker. Why did I assume she was a nurse? Because, at least where I'm from, many Carribean women became nurses and it's a steretypical professional job for West Indian women. I immediately recognized my assumption, but the damage was done. I don't know how she felt about being asked that, but I felt like a dumb ass. 

The point here is not that I made a mistake, but that I was able to recognize and admit it and grow from it. I didn't try to justify it or make some kind of excuse so that I would t feel like a racist. I owned up to it and I grew.

Does anyone else have any example of times they were confronted with the racism that lives within us? I believe that, as a systematic problem, racism lives in everyone, no matter their colour. I've seen some of the most racist coMoments and behaviours out there within black people themselves because a racist system will always teach the oppressed to oppress themselves.