Ask the Scholars

The most concrete action that any one individual can take is to educate themselves about the ways that race and racism work and to see things in terms of social relations rather than discrete individual acts. Every racial group is always linked to every other racial group. So when you talk about something like white privilege, you have to understand it's a system of inequality that relates groups together. That's a very important part of how institutional racism works: it perpetuates ine...

I always ask my students: "How did you get your first summer job?" And everyone, regardless of what their race is, says, "Well, through a friend of a friend, my uncle's brother," or some other sort of connection they have in their social networks. And, of course, because we live in a segregated society, social networks are segregated by race. And because we live in an unequal society, the ownership and control of industry and jobs is predominantly white. So white privilege and institutio...