AVReading Newsletter April: Silence
In Brandon Taylor’s novel Real Life, he describes a scene where the main character Wallace, a black man, at a party is confronted by a racist comment made by someone there. He says, “No one said anything to him (the person making the racist comment). No one did anything. . . There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down. It is easier for them to let it happen, to triage the wound later than to introduce an element of the unknown into the situation. No matter how good they are, how loving, they will always be complicit, a danger, a wound waiting to happen”. The passage is a painful one to read, but it puts voice to the all-too-common experience where white people consciously ignore acts of prejudice for fear of disrupting the racial order of a group. This is my str...