M’s Reviews > Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America > Status Update

"You never stop to think how the history of whiteness in America is one long scroll of affirmative action."

"One of the greatest privileges of whiteness is not to see color, not to see race, and not to pay a price for ignoring it, except, of course, when you're called on it. But even then, that price pales, quite literally, in comparison to the high price black folk pay for being black."

"If you can't see race you certainly can't see racial responsibility. You can simply remain blind to your own advantages."
"The failure to see color only benefits white America."

"Shriver's grumbling is dressed up as the will to free expression, which should characterize the art of writing in any truly liberated culture. But underneath her gripes are a body of ideas and identities that have been abused, and appropriated, against the will of other cultures, and used at the discretion of writers who pay no kind to the people whose experiences they seek to borrow."

"But just as it was true when, say Ronald Regan was in office, working class whites and their poor kin won't benefit from the economic policies of the conservative politicians they depend on to diss black people and other minorities. What they gain from not being seen as black they lose in real economic terms. It's a Faustian racial bargain."

"And there is a paradox that many of you refuse to see: to get to the point where race won't make a difference, we have to wrestle with the difference that race makes."