So there’s always this dilemma of “I don’t have to educate you” versus worrying what a person will find if left to their own devices, right? For me, there’s also the problem of having knowledge built up from lots of personal interactions, reading tumblr posts, or whatever… nothing that’s a great concrete resource for explaining things to people who do genuinely want to learn and aren’t just arguing in bad faith. And I do try to help others learn where I can, but it gets hard when my mind is full of half-remembered analogies and stats that I think are correct.
So! Do you have a resource you use to help people explain about different identities, or why the wage gap is not a myth, or great examples of systematic discrimination against POC that white people would not have even imagined ever happening because they just never considered it? Let’s pool some resources.
It’s on the academic side of things, but good for people who want stats about racial perceptions of crime and the overestimation of crime in specifically black and Hispanic communities.
Educating people on this type of stuff is part of my sister’s job, and one book she often recommends for people to learn the basics of racism in the United States is White Like Me by Tim Wise. She likes it for white people because the author identifies as such which she finds helps people swallow the bitter pill.
i was looking around for a good primer on the ways society extorts the poor, and i found this article that’s a good introduction to topics like transportation costs and the ways police function as toll collectors when they write traffic citations.
i see both of these as playing to a crowd that is more likely to tone-police or lean on respectability politics.
