How to Be a Better White Person in 2020
The Root
MICHAEL HARRIOT
January 9, 2020
"If you are truly interested in being a better person, you don’t have to inform a single black person of your intentions.
Black people cannot fix white supremacy or racism. If it were up to us, we would have quashed systematic inequality a long time ago. But white people built this system. White people control this system. It is white people who have tacitly agreed to perpetuate white supremacy throughout America’s history."
Occasionally The Root will interrupt our coverage of black news, opinions, politics, and culture to openly address our white readership. In 2020, we’d like to finally have that oft-discussed “conversation about race” we hear you guys mention so often. To be clear, white people need to have a conversation about race. Black people in America have been actively engaged in an ongoing discussion about race since 1619, when twenty & odd negroes stepped onto the shores of Virginia, looked around and asked furtively in their native tongue:
“Umm...Can we talk about this?”
Whenever anyone raises the prospect of this ballyhooed “conversation,” the best and brightest of the white people (Rachel Maddow, Alex Trebek, a white guy named Tyrone I met once and...umm...I’m sure there are others I can’t quite recall at the moment) will sometimes ask how they can improve race relations.
