Imagine being shown a two-frame storyboard depicting in the first drawing a white police officer having shot a black man holding a cellphone. In the second frame the officer tells his supervisor that he saw a gun and that he was sure that he fired on a white person if they had made the same threatening gesture. Then you are asked to make a judgement call; “Does this story involve racism?”
This is the approach sociologist Betsy Leondar-Wright and Jessi Streib take in their book “Is It Racist? Is It Sexist?: Why Red and Blue White People Disagree, and How to Decide in the Gray Areas.” They bring the proceeding scenario and others like it to over 120 white Americans of different political stripes, genders, regions, and economic classes.
