If gay means racist then this is literally us

I'm Emanuele Berry in for Ira Glass. So today's show starts with an email that was sent in the summer of , from a man named Dr. James Whitfield. And if you remember that summer, everyone was sending out emails and tweets about race and racism in America, statements of unity from corporations.

I blinked. The place was the size of a postage stamp but it was all mine and it had an extraordinary view. Below me was a lush courtyard where weddings took place. If I stood on my tiptoes, carefully leaned over the wooden dish rack with mismatched dishes and looked out my tiny kitchen window, I could see the Mississippi River.

Check out my safety pin. This nation was erected by and for white folks. The bedrock of US colonialism and capitalism was codified to satiate the interests of whiteness at the expense of all those who fall outside this means of categorization. Whoa, hold on.

In this post I want to do more than simply consider progressive racism as a specific genre of racism that we can document by documenting the form it takes. I want to do more than simply show how racism can be structuring in movements that understand themselves as progressive: the very idea that we need to show this or to convince anyone of this is more than politically naive; it is an instance of how progressive racism functions. In other words, it is progressive racism that makes progressive racism surprising. I want instead to discuss progressive racism as a way of identifying a mechanism that is central to how racism functions.