Silver Linings (62) More On How We White People (Even With The Best Intentions) Continue To Uphold White Supremacy Culture And How We Can Educate Ourselves Not To And Take Action

On my run today, I listened to this excellent, revelatory  podcast, entitled “Race Traitor: Who Taught You To Be White?” the first of a miniseries, from The Heart, a community of writers, radio makers, and artists committed to radical feminist artmaking.  I highly recommend it.

And I also recommend this article on the history of the concept of race from Aeon and how race is a late-medieval invention that was seized upon by the modern scientific community to further a racist agenda.

“There are no biological races, and attempts to define race socially inflate the category beyond recognition. Races are not modern, because races do not exist.”

I first learned about the history of the invention of race in this mind-boggling and essential podcast which I’ve recommended before and can’t recommend enough: Seeing White. 

Here’s the description from the Scene on Radio website:

Just what is going on with white people? Police shootings of unarmed African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism by white supremacists. The renewed embrace of raw, undisguised white-identity politics. Unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring. Some of this feels new, but in truth it’s an old story.

Why? Where did the notion of “whiteness” come from? What does it mean? What is whiteness for?

Scene on Radio host and producer John Biewen took a deep dive into these questions, along with an array of leading scholars and regular guest Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika, in this fourteen-part documentary series, released between February and August 2017