A Quote by Robin DiAngelo

Until white people understand that racism is embedded in everything, including our consciousness and socialisation, then we cannot go forward. — © Robin DiAngelo
Until white people understand that racism is embedded in everything, including our consciousness and socialisation, then we cannot go forward.
We hide our racism. We just go on about our lives - may I say, white Canadians go on about their lives. African-Canadians understand racism, Indigenous Canadians understand racism: they see it all the time, they live with it.
One of the most important misunderstandings for white people to get over to move forward is this idea that racism is a good-bad proposition - that if we're good we can't be part of it, that being uncomfortable means you're a terrible person. We have to let go of that and understand it as a system we all live in.
Racism is when you have laws set up, systematically put in a way to keep people from advancing, to stop the advancement of a people. Black people have never had the power to enforce racism, and so this is something that white America is going to have to work out themselves. If they decide they want to stop it, curtail it, or to do the right thing... then it will be done, but not until then.
This film isn't about "white racism", or racism at all. DEAR WHITE PEOPLE is about identity. It's about the difference between how the mass culture responds to a person because of their race and who they understand themselves to truly be. And this societal conflict appears to be one that many share.
I was born in Honduras, that's where I was born. I live in California, where no matter what you say, you're Mexican. You understand that? It doesn't matter what you say. See - you don't understand that, white people, because wherever you go, you're white. You're here, you're white. You go to L. A., you're white. You go to Denver, you're white. You go to Miami, you're still white. In L. A. I'm a Mexican, In Florida, I'm a Cuban. In New York, I'm a Puerto Rican. And when I come to Canada and I find out I'm an Eskimo.
My definition of good is that you understand that this is a question of power. That you be willing to give up some power. That you be willing to give up some resources. That you be willing to pay Black people reparations for our years and years of service in this country. That you be willing to go home and tell your white mother and father about white racism and how it affects and kills Black people in our communities. That's my definition of good white people, and I haven't met any like that.
The way racism works in Canada, it's very subtle. You may feel you're a victim of racism or have experienced racism, but you can't necessarily prove it - unless you get a [white] friend to go check out that rental, go check out that job, whatever. Unless you're willing to really dig to prove you're a victim of racism, it might be difficult to do that. And so what you're dealing with then is feeling, it's emotion.
I mean, let's face it, it's 2000 and people are beginning to wake up on some level. I think that, as I was saying earlier, there's just no denying the impact that showing people the truth can have. It allows people to understand themselves, and when you understand yourself you can understand the people around you. And then you can begin to let go of all the bullshit that leads into things like world wars, racism, stereotypes, and bigotry.
Consciousness comes first; it is the ground of all being. Everything else, including matter, is a possibility of consciousness. And consciousness chooses out of these possibilities all the events we experience.
The problem is that white people see racism as conscious hate, when racism is bigger than that. Racism is a complex system of social and political levers and pulleys set up generations ago to continue working on the behalf of whites at other people's expense, whether whites know/like it or not. Racism is an insidious cultural disease. It is so insidious that it doesn't care if you are a white person who likes Black people; it's still going to find a way to infect how you deal with people who don't look like you.
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.
I find that white people in general, including white liberals and even revolutionaries, are most inclined to call you a racist when they don't want to confront the ugly realities that their racism has created. In their eyes, when you attempt to address those realities from your perspective you become a racist.
In America right now, the people who talk about race the most are people of color - and if we are going to move the needle forward, it's WHITE people who need to acknowledge their role in racism.
The more the years go by, the less I know. But if you give explanations and understand everything, then nothing can happen. What helps me go forward is that I stay receptive, I feel that anything can happen.
There can be no more intimate and elemental part of the individual than his or her own consciousness. At the deepest level, our consciousness is what we are - to the extent that if we are not sovereign over our own consciousness then we cannot in any meaningful sense be sovereign over anything else either.
The core of understanding lies in the individual mind, and until that is touched everything is uncertain and superficial. Truth cannot be perceived until we come to fully understand our potential and ourselves. After all, knowledge in the martial arts ultimately means self-knowledge.
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