When I was a kid, I'd always sink into myself just a bit whenever the issue of racism would come up among my white peers. Of course, I was used to talking about racism in other contexts, specifically with my family; growing up as a black kid in South Carolina, I would've found totally sidestepping the issue largely impossible. For instance, I remember talking with my family about racism when, in 2000, South Carolina lawmakers removed the Confederate flag from the state's capitol dome. I remember talking about racism even when it came to barbecue sauce. My parents promptly forbade my siblings and me from going to Maurice's Piggie Park, a popular barbecue chain, after it was disclosed, also in 2000, that the restaurant's owner, Maurice Bessinger, had been distributing pro-slavery literature at his headquarters in West Columbia, under the Confederate flag he'd hoisted outside. There was no thought of avoiding the conversation—but there also wasn't much guidance, more broadly, for how to have it.
The crux of my unease back then was that I didn't know how to talk about racism. It was supposedly enough that I knew that racism was "bad"; beyond that, people told me, "race shouldn't matter." That's one I heard everywhere, particularly among my white friends and in popular culture of the early 2000s. More to the point, I didn't yet have a vocabulary that could help me name the central planks of American racism, things I'd eventually learn to identify as state power and a protected, centralized whiteness. Instead, the only words I had were ones like "colorblind," which even at the time felt like a maudlin sentiment, and which I now recognize actually does the work of racism, simply by pasting over the depth of America's indefatigable commitment to preserving whiteness, whatever the cost.
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