I want to thank my son Brian for bringing this work to my attention. I haven't finished reading it, and in fact I've barely started, but the quotation I pasted below really resonates with me and I wanted to share it.

I am more aware of my white privilege than I have ever been before and I am working steadily to understand myself and to appreciate and support people of color in their endeavor to level the playing field.

To my white friends and family, I hope you are experiencing a similar awakening and are evaluating how we can all work together to improve everyone's life without regard to their color, gender, sexuality, religion, or any other category of identification.

To my POC friends and family, bear with me. Please call me out when I stumble. I want to improve and I guarantee I will listen and that your help will be appreciated. We're all in this together and I'm determined to deal with this and to help with a solution.

"White people in North America live in a society that is deeply separate and unequal by race, and white people are the beneficiaries of that separation and inequality. As a result, we are insulated from racial stress, at the same time that we come to feel entitled to and deserving of our advantage. Given how seldom we experience racial discomfort in a society we dominate, we haven’t had to build our racial stamina. Socialized into a deeply internalized sense of superiority that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves, we become highly fragile in conversations about race. We consider a challenge to our racial worldviews as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people. Thus, we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense. The smallest amount of racial stress is intolerable—the mere suggestion that being white has meaning often triggers a range of defensive responses. These include emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation."

DiAngelo, Robin J.. White Fragility (pp. 1-2). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.

Just started it today... been on my work reading list

Raised on a cotton farm, my privilege was apparent and glaring.
I was an arrogant little s***, as expected.
Had an epiphany one day when turned from going to the frat boy clothing store, went past the Jack in the Box and decided to go directly to where I lived. I realized there was a better perspective and I wanted it. It was the Vietnam era.
Have been trying to be better since.

That was my Jack in the Box epiphany. It was not the road to Damascus or whatever.

quote:

Originally posted by CHAS:
That was my Jack in the Box epiphany. It was not the road to Damascus or whatever.

More like the road to E. coli.

quote:

Originally posted by CHAS:
Raised on a cotton farm, my privilege was apparent and glaring.
I was an arrogant little s***, as expected.
Had an epiphany one day when turned from going to the frat boy clothing store, went past the Jack in the Box and decided to go directly to where I lived. I realized there was a better perspective and I wanted it. It was the Vietnam era.
Have been trying to be better since.

That was my Jack in the Box epiphany. It was not the road to Damascus or whatever.

quote:

Originally posted by jon-nyc:

quote:

Originally posted by CHAS:
That was my Jack in the Box epiphany. It was not the road to Damascus or whatever.

More like the road to E. coli.

I think that incident was around that time.

I'm not fragile in conversations about race but maybe I'm an exception.

quote:

Originally posted by Daniel:
I'm not fragile in conversations about race but maybe I'm an exception.

That is a healthy attitude.