Tre Giles

“I learned to expect to be the “only” Black person in white rooms, the one who would force a new racial awareness. I know that these experiences of racial proximity and distance profoundly influenced me, for good and for bad—that I had to subtly redefine myself with each move and, more important, often wildly reevaluate what I thought of others.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“I believe that we must have a public reckoning with the history of the full record presented to the Court in Brown, which predicted with devastating clarity the mind-warping harm of segregation on white children.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“In Colfax, Louisiana, for example, when a pro-Reconstruction candidate supported by Black voters won a fiercely contested gubernatorial race in 1872, the following spring, a mob of armed white men attacked the courthouse where the certification of the election had been held, killing about one hundred Black people who were trying to defend the building, and setting the courthouse on fire. The white citizens murdered their neighbors and burned the edifice of their own government rather than submit to a multiracial democracy.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“White children “who learn the prejudices of our society,” wrote the social scientists, were “being taught to gain personal status in an unrealistic and non-adaptive way.” They were “not required to evaluate themselves in terms of the more basic standards of actual personal ability and achievement.” What’s more, they “often develop patterns of guilt feelings, rationalizations and other mechanisms which they must use in an attempt to protect themselves from recognizing the essential injustice of their unrealistic fears and hatreds of minority groups.” The best research of the day concluded that “confusion, conflict, moral cynicism, and disrespect for authority may arise in [white] children as a consequence of being taught the moral, religious and democratic principles of justice and fair play by the same persons and institutions who seem to be acting in a prejudiced and discriminatory manner.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together