Teed Rockwell
1 min readAug 15, 2020

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I enjoyed the gentle eloquence of this piece, and the concreteness of its suggestions for action. I do have one small quibble, however. People without privilege often overestimate the kind of power possessed by those of us with privilege. You say that we created white supremacy. Sorry, that's just not true. There are things I can do to fight and dismantle it and I have moral obligation to do those things. I also benefit greatly from it. But being on the top of the heap does not mean you're in the driver's seat. White Supremacy was created centuries before anyone alive was born, and I do not have control over it now. I can chip away at it, doing the sort of things you describe in this essay. But the fact that my ancestors built it does not give me any more control over it. I have considerably less ability to change it than does a black millionaire who owns a business that could hire black employees, or a black politician who can write legislation to change it.

This history does give me a stronger moral obligation to try to change the present, but it does not by itself give me the power to do so. This may seem like a small point, but I think it disempowers marginalized people if they believe, consciously or unconsciously, that we privileged people get together at regular meetings and plan ways of exploiting the marginalized. If there are such meetings, no one ever invites me to them.

https://medium.com/@teedrockwell/racism-is-not-always-prejudiced-f47ec5511021

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Teed Rockwell
Teed Rockwell

Written by Teed Rockwell

I am White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Male Heterosexual cisgendered over-educated able-bodied affluent and thin. Hope to learn from those living on the margins.

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