Thank you for reading and for your thoughtful response. You should check out Anderson’s article “The White Space,” which I quoted in this piece. He delves much deeper than I could with limited scope and space into the cause behind the White space, from the “iconic ghetto” that White people associate Black people with to the cognitive dissonance they’ve experienced post-Civil Rights because Black people are increasingly in historically White spaces.

I think we may be in agreement with you in part. The reason for racism today *does* need to be discussed. I believe it is a combination of colonialism, slavery, segregation, things like redlining and, also the erasure of BIPOC history. But nobody wants to talk about slavery, and few people even know about the later because … erasure. That’s how it works.

Where we perhaps disagree is that I think it is also very, if not equally, important to discuss the ways in which racism is perpetuated today through implicit bias, White fragility, and ongoing psychological and physical violence towards Black people. Recording the lived experience of Black people today breaks the cycle of erasure and ensures a more complete narrative for the future.