Quotes about "Diversity & Inclusion"

Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions. ”

A fundamental but very challenging part of my work is moving white people from an individual understanding of racism - i.e. only some people are racist and those people are bad - to a structural understanding. ”

The default of our society is the reproduction of racial inequality. I mean, that's what it does; that's what it's been doing for hundreds of years. ”

While everyone has racial bias, I reserve the word 'racist' to describe the bias that white people have - our collective bias is backed by institutional power. ”

White fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. ”

Mainstream dictionary definitions reduce racism to racial prejudice and the personal actions that result. But this definition does little to explain how racial hierarchies are consistently reproduced. ”

It became clear over time that white people have extremely low thresholds for enduring any discomfort associated with challenges to our racial worldviews. ”

What I do used to be called 'diversity training,' then 'cultural competency' and now, 'anti-racism.' These terms are really useful for periods of time, but then they get coopted, and people build all this baggage around them, and you have to come up with new terms, or else people won't engage. ”

White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress. ”

I do atypical work for a white person, which is that I lead primarily white audiences in discussions on race every day, in workshops all over the country. That has allowed me to observe very predictable patterns. And one of those patterns is this inability to tolerate any kind of challenge to our racial reality. ”