| Back by popular demand, but mostly thanks to an influx of new readers filling my inbox with some pressing questions, I'm re-running part of a column from last year about what it means to be white. It's an overlooked part of the "how to have a difficult conversation about race," dilemma. For one thing, it hits a new note for most white conversation partners: White people tend to think of themselves as people, not as having a race. They certainly don’t think of themselves as “oppressors.” I hope you’ll find the resources below helpful. – E McG. I had a conversation with a middle-school classroom teacher recently, a twenty-plus year veteran who had been given another difficult task to perform in an era of budget cuts: Help fix the school's discipline stats. Like many predominantly white schools, the data showed that black students are being punished at higher rates than white ones are. They had to turn this around. To help the teachers figure things out, they'd been forced to take some well-intentioned but poorly managed bias-mitigation training that has served only to insult them while failing to address their concerns. The big takeaway: You’re punishing the black kids unfairly. "They're calling us racist," the teacher told me, among many other pointed things. Frank Dobbin, a professor of sociology at Harvard, co-conducted research that seems to show that most diversity efforts are similarly doomed. "It always seemed crazy to me that people thought that you could put people in two hours of diversity training and change their behavior," he tells raceAhead. "And when you talk to people after they get out of diversity training, often they're angry and feel like they're being treated like bigots. It just never seemed to me that that was a likely way to change the world." I was able to offer no breakthrough moment to this very angry teacher, but we did talk about something that they had not considered before. Why not start by thinking less about how black students are badly behaved, and think more about how the white ones are being let off the hook for the exact same behaviors? Why is one transgression the sign of normal growing pains in one kid, and evidence of a future thug in the another? Reframing how whiteness is perceived rather than how blackness needs to be policed can sometimes be helpful. It can, however, make white people uncomfortable for different reasons. Sociologist Robin DiAngelo has cornered the market on white people's discomfort with talking about themselves as white. (Here's a terrific review of her book, White Fragility.) Part of the problem, she says, is an inability to truly grasp the vastness of the racist systems in which we all operate. DiAngelo, who is white, reserves her most pointed observations for the white liberals who exempt themselves from criticism and reject the idea that they need to understand how they exist within racist systems. "I believe that ‘white progressives’ cause the most daily damage to people of color." It's not just the unexamined complicity, she says. "To the degree that white progressives think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived." Regardless of ideology, being perceived to be racist is a very, very upsetting thing for most people. That’s why taking a step back can help. And I do mean all the way back. Someone absolutely invented the idea of whiteness, and it's impossible to understand the world we live in now if we don't understand how whiteness came to be. For that, I'd point you to a deceptively mellow podcast from Scene On Radio, the Peabody-nominated joint from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Seeing White is a fourteen-part series on how the concept of race came to be, and how the social construct of whiteness informs a complex caste system that is all around us, all the time. (Hint: It’s linked to colonialism, capitalism, and a desperate attempt to justify enslaving other people.) Refined over centuries, it is now often invisible to the naked, white eye. While the reported pieces are exceptional, some of the episodes are simple conversations between the white host, John Biewen, and his black friend, the journalist, professor, and artist Chenjerai Kumanyika. Biewen has been in public radio on the race beat for a long time, and his expertise shows. But he also shows admirable vulnerability as he checks his own assumptions about race, history, and his life. Kumanyika provides a perspective that's unwavering, honest, and generous. Together they model a simple truth: That it’s possible to acknowledge that you’ve missed something important about how the world works – or how you operate within it – without losing face, friends, or your own future. You just have to put in the time. | 
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