Critical Race Theory is being attacked and turned into a “bogeyman”– in other words, something it is not in order to cause fear and division. Privileged white people are demanding they not be made to feel guilty or uncomfortable, with no regard to the suffering of others. Books are being banned, even burned, in an attempt to erase the truth, or even to ever close the circle and erase anything different than conservative Christianity (Harry Potter, along with others, was being burned in Tennessee a few weeks ago, and of course, our own Polk County School District has been asked to remove 16 books that present black history and lbgtq issues).

Widening the circle is hard work when we are up against all this and more. But, we must keep moving forward. Here are some quotes from our SoulMatters resource to help inspire you to speak up. Feel free to continue beyond this page and look up the authors and their work to dig deeper into the ways in which we can widen the circle.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. James Baldwin

You have to love your country the way you love your friends, the way your spouse loves you, right? The people who love you don’t blow smoke up your backside. They tell you hard truths. They love you… my wife, if something’s going wrong, she’s going to tell me… That’s the nature of the relationship… The question really is… can we get to a place where citizens are encouraged to see themselves critically, encouraged to see their history critically?

Ta-Nehisi Coates

We have to change [and widen] our idea of what it means to be racist… When we understand racism as a system that we have been raised in and that its impact is inevitable, it’s really not a question of good or bad. It’s just, “I have it. I have been socialized into it.” And so, “What am I going to do about it?” is really the question… if you change your understanding, but you don’t do anything different, then you’re colluding. Robin DiAngelo

The thing that’s really slick about whiteness, if you will, is that most of the benefits can be obtained without ever doing anything personally… There are a whole set of assumptions that flow from being white, just like there are a whole set of benefits that flow from being male—you know, being a man doesn’t mean that you have antipathy toward women, but if society is patriarchal, which a lot of people say it is, it means that the way resources are distributed in society benefits men. In that sense, men are not innocent, even though they may not personally have antipathy toward women. In the same way, in that sense, whites are not innocent. They’re given the spoils of a racist system, even if they’re not personally racist. john a. Powell

We all get shit wrong. So the question is: Have you built the capacity to care more about others than you care about your own ego? Will you choose to protect someone else over your own ego? Austin Channing Brown