How to Distinguish From White Racism

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Shannon Sullivan explores strategies that some white folk use to distance ourselves from white racism. One of the strategies is colorblindness, insisting I don't see race. This can overlap with northern superiority towards southerners who are often stereotyped as lower class and poorly educated whether they are or not. She thinks sometimes working class and southern white folks are responding to this kind of condescension when they hurl back the words politically correct.

When it comes to America’s racial sins, past and present, a lot of us see people in one region of the country as guiltier than the rest. Host John Biewen spoke with some white Southern friends about that tendency. Part Six of our ongoing series, Seeing White. With recurring guest, Chenjerai Kumanyika.

Image: A lynching on Clarkson Street, New York City, during the Draft Riots of 1863. Credit: Greenwich Village Society of Historical Preservation.

Shannon Sullivan’s books, Revealing Whiteness and Good White People.

Thanks to Chris Julin, whose 1991 NPR report on the Wisconsin fishing rights dispute we featured.