You know what I'm going to say to that, but let me just say this. It's not an “us” and “them”, actually, believe it or not. One of the reasons I started doing this work.... For years, I experienced things as a Black woman that I didn't know were because I was a Black woman, until I married a white man, and they said, “What?” Then I realized it was related to my identity.
I went to all these sessions that talked about things that happened to racialized people, and it was all about lived experience. As a scientist, it did not convince me. What convinced me was the literature. The literature shows, experimentally, that if you think someone is a Black woman, you judge the same stuff really differently.
I have that same problem. I did an implicit association test, which tests whether you associate certain things with certain racialized groups. I have a mild to moderate tendency to associate positive things with whiteness and negative things with Blackness. I grew up in suburban Vancouver. The only Black kids I knew were my family members.
It's the media. It's not evil people twirling their mustaches in the bushes. It's not just white men. It's everyone. It's society. That's why we need to put up acknowledgements that this stuff exists, that it happens and that we can have processes that make sure it doesn't influence our decision-making.