Dan Subotnik is a professor of law at Touro Law School.
It’s not me, it’s you.
Owing to pervasive racism, says Asian American Columbia University professor of psychology and education Derald Wing Sue—along with many others—life weighs down oppressively on black people (and other minorities). We cannot probe the roots of this racism with the hope of destroying it, Sue argues in Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race, without fully and honestly addressing relevant issues and without whites admitting their part.
Sue is far from wrong, of course; unless toughened by engagement with contrasting ideas, brains turn to mush. But to what extent is he right? Are whites the proper targets for Sue’s totalizing condemnation, as delivered in this book? Can whites help solve problems facing our black brothers and sisters?
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