ANTIRACISTS CAN’T WORK ALONE

I RECENTLY HAD DINNER WITH A WHITE FRIEND. HE mentioned completing the Me and White Supremacy workbook—Layla F. Saad’s extraordinary tool for people who hold white privilege and want to interrogate it. “How was it?” I asked, sipping my wine. “Exhausting,” he proclaimed. And it is exhausting, the slow, painstaking, write-it-down process of examining how racial hierarchy shows up in one’s beliefs, desires, fears, friendships, and communities. He was doing “the work.” I was happy and, being a person of color, relieved. I also immediately wondered whether he’d insisted that white members of his social circle—friends, spouse, parents, siblings—do the work too. But I didn’t ask. I was afraid to learn that he hadn’t.

I know a lot of white people. Private elementary and high school, an elite law school, a job in