The pandemic further emphasizes the racial disparities that people are protesting, with Black, Latinx and Indigenous communities disproportionately affected by COVID-19. These experiences were a tiny window into the reality of violence and oppression that Black people endure. Some white Americans attended Black Lives Matter protests for the first time-the movement has been active since 2013-and saw up close the police brutality they previously only read about or witnessed through short video clips on phone screens. The killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and others sparked protests against systemic racism and police violence that have drawn multiracial participation. Over the past year, America has been reckoning with racism on a scale that has not been seen since the civil-rights movement. Having been marginalized myself, I thought I was sensitive toward other groups who faced discrimination. Hearing racism described as a power hierarchy was eye-opening for me. To undo racism, they said, we need a common language that ties together individual and systemic factors. Not having a simple or agreed-on definition of racism makes it easier to keep racism in place. People's responses were all over the map, from “a mean-spirited, close-minded way of thinking” to “discrimination based on someone's skin color or ethnic background.” The trainers validated each of our responses before pointing out how varied they were and explaining that few of us had identified racism as a web of institutional power and oppression based on skin color.

Our leaders-a Black man, a white woman and a Latina woman-called on each of us to share our definitions of racism. The workshop was hosted by the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB), an organization that was founded 40 years ago by community organizers who wanted to create a more equitable society by addressing the root causes of racism. Growing up in a small town in upstate New York followed by an even smaller, more rural town in Georgia, I was picked on and often felt “othered.” My yearning for answers came from personal experience with discrimination as a Jewish woman and the daughter of immigrants my parents fled to the U.S. That's why I had signed up for the Undoing Racism Workshop, a two-and-a-half-day antiracist training that analyzes race and power structures in the U.S.: I wanted to gain a better understanding of why some people have so much contempt toward those who are different from them. I-a white, able-bodied, cis-gendered woman in my 30s-thought that racism was prejudice against an individual because of race or ethnicity. In February 2016 I sat in a conference room on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with about 35 other people attempting to answer what seemed like a straightforward question: What is racism?

The reckoning beverly lewis book