‘I Refuse to Listen to White Women Cry’
Washington Post Magazine
Marisa Meltzer
Photos by Marvin Joseph
SEPTEMBER 11, 2019
In April, the activist Rachel Cargle debuted a lecture, “Race 101,” at American University’s inaugural Antiracist Book Festival. Over the course of an hour, Cargle — a 30-year-old undergraduate student in anthropology at Columbia University, who was booked alongside prominent names like DeRay Mckesson, Ijeoma Oluo and Imani Perry — sped through her material: how the conversation around race is really about power; how the realities of race cannot be intellectualized, despite the fact that we were in an academic setting; how race has been defined and changed over history.
“Who has written the books?” she asked the crowd of 100 or so — mostly women, but otherwise split evenly between black and white, millennials and middle-aged, tweedy academics and those wearing floral dresses. “Who gets to be part of the canon? Who are knowers, and who gets to be known?”
Toward the end, she asked another series of questions, this time just for the white people in the room to consider: Whom do I talk to about race? Whom do I not talk to about race? And why?
