Beverly Daniel Tatum Quotes
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The task of resisting our own oppression does not relieve us of the responsibility of acknowledging our complicity in the oppression of others.
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Resisting the stereotypes and affirming other definitions of themselves is part of the task facing young Black women in both White and Black communities.
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The relevant question is not whether all Whites are racist but how we can move more White people from a position of active or passive racism to one of active antiracism.
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I wrote the first version of this book in 1996, in the closing years of the twentieth century. Now, almost two decades into the twenty-first, it seems we are still struggling with what W. E. B. Du Bois identified in 1906 as the “problem of the color line,” even though the demographic composition of that color line has changed quite a bit since then.
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In order to prevent chronic discomfort, Whites may learn not to notice.
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In a situation of unequal power, a subordinate group has to focus on survival. It becomes very important for the subordinates to become highly attuned to the dominants as a way of protecting themselves from them.
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White people who are doing this work need to make their stories known to serve as guides for others.
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Most of the White people I talk to either have not thought about their race and so don't feel anything, or have thought about it and felt guilt and shame. These feelings of guilty and shame are part of the hidden costs of racism.
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To work effectively as an agent of change in a pluralistic society, it is necessary to be able to connect with people different from oneself.
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We all get misinformation growing up about people who are different from ourselves.
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To say that it is not our fault does not relieve us of responsibility. However, we may not have polluted the air, but we need to take responsibility, along with others, for cleaning it up. Each of us needs to look at our own behavior. Am I perpetuating and reinforcing the negative messages so pervasive in our culture, or am I seeking to challenge them?
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Sometimes the assumptions we make about others come not from what we have been told or what we have seen on television or in books, but rather rom what we have not been told. The distortion of historical information about people of color leads young people (and older people to) to make assumptions that may go unchallenged for a long time.
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Despair is an act of resignation I am not willing to make.
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Regardless of your subject matter, there are ways to engage students in critical thinking about racism which are relevant to your discipline.
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If young people are exposed to images of African American academic achievement in their early years, they won’t have to define school achievement as something for Whites only. They will know that there is a long history of Black intellectual achievement.
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The social pressure from friend and acquaintance to collude, to not notice racism, can be quite powerful.
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It is important to understand that the system of advantage is perpetuated when we do not acknowledge its existence.
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For many people of color, learning to break the silence is a survival issue. To remain silent would be to disconnect from her own experience, to swallow and internalize her own oppression.The cost of silence is too high.
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Many white people experience themselves as powerless, even in the face of privilege. But the fact is that we all have a sphere of influence, some domain in which we exercise some level of power and control. The task for each of us, White and of color, is to identify what our own sphere of influence is (however large or small) and to consider how it might be used to interrupt the cycle of racism.
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While I think it is necessary to be honest about the racism of our past and present, it is also necessary to empower children (and adults) with the vision that change is possible. Concrete examples are critical.