Being anti-racist

As a white person, I make a conscious decision every day to recognize my privilege and to live in a way that reflects my commitment to being anti-racist. This decision is not a single moment of awakening. It is a lifelong journey shaped by experiences, conversations, discomfort, and meaningful turning points. My understanding of privilege, racism, and leadership has evolved over my entire life, and that evolution continues every day. I return often to where this awareness began and examine how it has deepened. There was no single awakening. There was a series of moments that opened my eyes and expanded my heart.=

One of the earliest moments that shifted my understanding of the world happened when I was seven or eight, growing up on my family's farm. The story itself is simple. The lesson is not.

The farm, the labor camp, and an early lesson in humanity

To set the context, my grandparents and parents ran a small to medium-sized farm. Like many farms of that scale, we relied on seasonal workers who came from Puerto Rico or Mexico. They lived in a place we called the Labor Camp, which was the original homestead where my grandparents raised their children. Every Friday was payday, and this was long before direct deposit existed. My father would bring handwritten checks to the Labor Camp to pay the individuals who worked for us. Without fail, they would invite us in for dinner.

Looking back, those dinners were not simply meals. They were a celebration of community, hospitality, and love. There was always a beautiful aroma in the air. Some nights it was chicken. Other nights, it was pork chops or some other dish prepared with a level of care and generosity that felt like a celebration. Conversations flowed in a mix of English and Spanish. These individuals were not strangers who worked for us. Over time, they were woven into the fabric of our family. My grandparents treated them with genuine love and respect. My father did the same. Without naming it, the adults in my life were modeling dignity.

What I understand now, which I could not have understood as a child, is what those Friday evenings actually were. Many of the workers had left their families to come work on our farm. Some were relatives of one another. Some were simply friends who had traveled together. Those dinners were how they continued to celebrate life away from home. It was the community they carried with them, rebuilt every Friday around a shared table. What an honor to be invited into that celebration. I did not know it was an honor at the time. That is what makes what happened next so important.

However, children absorb messages from the world around them, even ones that are unspoken. And one Friday evening, I unknowingly revealed a message I had internalized.

One Friday night, as my father and grandfather prepared to deliver checks and share dinner, I refused to go inside with everyone. My grandfather asked me why. With full confidence and without hesitation, I pointed toward my grandparents' house and said, "We eat over there, and they eat here." To my young mind, it seemed so obvious. In my world, the white people ate in one place, and the dark-skinned people ate in another. The white people owned the land, and the dark-skinned people worked the land. In a child's mind, that arrangement felt normal because it was the pattern I had observed, unaware of the deeper forces at play. Even now, as I write it, I feel the discomfort of how clearly that division lived in my mind. I had not chosen it. I had absorbed it. And on that particular night, I refused the invitation to a community I did not yet know how to see.

My grandfather was furious, and I can still remember the look on his face. He told me, "Christopher, the reason we get to eat over there is because of them. They are not beneath you. You are not better than them. You get to experience all the joys in your life because of what they do for our family."

That moment shook me. It was one of the first times I learned that the world is not structured as a child might perceive it. It was the first time I realized that a belief I held was rooted in a false sense of superiority I had not consciously chosen; however, I had absorbed it from the environment around me. My grandfather's words were not simply a correction. They were a profound lesson about humanity, gratitude, and dignity. He helped me understand that every person deserves honor and respect. He showed me that our successes were possible because of the labor and sacrifice of others. His message became one of the earliest seeds of my understanding of privilege.

After that night, sharing meals in the Labor Camp became something I loved. I noticed the laughter, the stories, the way people cared for one another, and the genuine, strong sense of community. I began to understand humanity more fully. Even though I could not articulate it at the time, that moment became a grounding point for the awareness that would continue to grow throughout my life. I was learning, without yet having words for it, that belonging does not sort itself along lines of land ownership. Belonging is what happens when people choose to make room for each other.

Growing up and seeing the world with new awareness

As I got older, I became more aware of how race, identity, and privilege shaped everyday experiences. At school, I began to notice the natural divisions among students, especially in the cafeteria. I came across research exploring how racial groups often gravitated toward one another for comfort, safety, and understanding. I realized that my early instinct to categorize people or draw lines between groups had been absorbed rather than chosen.

I also learned that I should not claim to be colorblind. Colorblindness is not inclusive. It denies a vital part of a person's identity. When someone says they do not see color, they are saying they choose not to see the fullness of another human being. Recognizing people for who they truly are requires seeing all their identities clearly. That recognition is essential for understanding and connection. A person's race is part of their lived experience, their history, their joy, and their pain. To erase it in the name of equality is not inclusion. It is erasure.

Over time, I learned that my whiteness afforded me freedoms that others did not receive automatically. I had the privilege to move through life without questioning how my skin color might threaten my safety, limit my opportunities, or shape the assumptions others made about me. My early awareness grew into a deeper understanding as I entered adulthood.

A transformative experience at Rutgers University

My understanding of privilege expanded significantly when I attended Rutgers University. I became involved in social justice-oriented student organizations and leadership opportunities that allowed me to explore issues of race, equity, and identity. Through the Robeson Scholars program, named after Paul Robeson, I learned more about the courageous work he did to challenge inequality. Robeson was the first Black football player at Rutgers, and the third Black graduate of the university, earning his degree in 1919. Both of those facts matter. In 1919, Rutgers was an almost entirely white institution. That Robeson not only graduated from it, though he did so while starring on its football field, while facing hostility, while becoming one of the most consequential voices in the history of racial justice, is a story worth naming in full. His story opened my mind to the power of leadership in the fight for racial justice.

It was during this time that I participated in one of the most impactful activities I have ever experienced: the privilege walk. For those unfamiliar, the privilege walk is an activity designed to help participants visualize how privilege manifests in real life. Everyone lines up across the room. Facilitators read statements, and participants either step forward, step backward, or remain still, depending on how each statement applies to them.

Some statements were simple.

• "Most of the people on television look like me."

• "I can walk into a store without being followed or questioned."

• "I can walk down the street holding hands with my partner without fear."

Other statements cut much deeper. The room shifted in ways that were hard to ignore. At the front of the room, one would most often see white, male, able-bodied, heterosexual individuals from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. At the back, one would often see Black women, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, individuals with disabilities, or individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Everyone else existed somewhere along the continuum in between.

Each step made the invisible visible.

Each step revealed an unearned advantage or barrier that shaped people's lives in ways many had never considered before.

As a white man from a higher socioeconomic background, I often found myself toward the front. For a while, I felt ashamed. I wondered if I had done something wrong to earn this privilege. However, the truth is that privilege is not something one earns. It is something one is born into. There is no moral weight to privilege itself. The moral weight lies in what one chooses to do with it.

I learned that my responsibility was not to feel guilty. My responsibility was to take action. 

Privilege becomes negative when it is used for self-advancement. Privilege becomes powerful when it is used to challenge the system that created it.

That workshop changed the way I moved through the world. I grew up on a farm, and there is something about farming that trains a person to look past the surface. You learn early that masking a symptom does not save a crop. If a plant is failing, you do not spray it and hope. You dig down to the roots and find the actual problem. Because sometimes the same symptom appears for ten different reasons, and if you treat the wrong one, you lose everything. The privilege walk gave me that same instinct about race. I stopped coasting. I started looking at who was in the room and who was not, at who was making decisions and who was most affected by them, at what systems were producing outcomes that nobody was naming. I am not comfortable putting a bandage over something that needs surgery. After that workshop, I had no more excuse to pretend the wound did not exist.

Using privilege in action

A vivid example of how I learned to take action happened at a large LGBTQIA+ equality conference. After the keynote speaker finished, the floor opened for questions. I was somewhere around the tenth person in line. A few people ahead of me, a Black woman took the microphone. I cannot remember her exact words; however, I remember the profound truth she shared. Her words were powerful, insightful, and important. Everyone in the room should have heard them with full attention. The keynote speaker responded with, "Thank you for sharing," and moved on to the next person. The depth of her message went unacknowledged.

I stood in line, stunned. I felt anger, disbelief, and disappointment. Her courage had been met with minimal engagement, and the moment seemed to slip away.

When it was my turn, I faced a choice. I could ask my planned question, or I could use my privilege to address what had just happened. I chose the latter.

When I took the microphone, I said we needed to recognize the truth the Black woman had shared minutes earlier. I said that the room had glossed over her contribution. I said that her voice mattered. I used my voice to amplify hers.

I wish I had gotten her name. I have thought about that moment many times since. As I stood in line, what she said landed hard on me and made me question a great deal. I do not remember her exact words. However, I want her to know that she moved me in ways I did not fully comprehend at the time. I hope that by standing up for her, I gave her some measure of courage to keep speaking out.

That moment taught me something essential about leadership. This was not charity. This was accountability.

Leadership is not about giving up a seat at the table. Leadership is not only about offering my voice. Leadership is also about using my platform to lift voices that have been ignored or dismissed. Leadership is about moving a chair over, inviting someone to the table whose voice has not been valued, and ensuring that their voice is not only heard however respected.

The lesson was clear. Using privilege for good requires intention. It requires action. It requires the courage to interrupt patterns of disregard and inequity.

George Floyd, driving while Black, and a aation in pain

Another significant turning point in my journey came during the racial reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd. His murder was not an isolated incident. It was part of a long and painful history of violence against Black men and women. However, something about that summer forced many people, including myself, to face the reality of systemic racism in a new and deeper way.

During that time, I had the opportunity to work closely with Black colleagues as they organized a Black employee resource group. Listening to their stories changed me. They described the conversations they needed to have with their children to keep them safe: drilling their sons on what to do if they were pulled over, how to hold their hands, how to speak, how to survive an encounter that could be misread in an instant. These were conversations I would never need to have with my own children. My white sons would not be viewed as a threat simply because of the color of their skin. It became real. It became human. It became heartbreaking. Their stories reminded me that the world I had always moved through without fear was the same world other parents were working every night to protect their children from.

I thought about Trayvon Martin. I thought about Breonna Taylor. I thought about the names that fill the pages of our recent history. These individuals were not threats. They were human beings whose lives were cut short because of racism. That reality was devastating.

I came to understand more fully the responsibilities I held as a leader and as someone with privilege. Awareness was not enough. Empathy was not enough. I needed to act in ways that challenged the systems and structures that uphold inequity.

Leadership and the Anti-Racist Organization

As my understanding grew, I often reflected on a powerful question posed by Shereen Daniels in her book The Anti-Racist Organization: was not diversity and inclusion supposed to solve this?

The question is both honest and revealing. For years, many organizations have celebrated diversity and promoted inclusion, yet the root causes of inequity remain intact. Diversity and inclusion initiatives do not automatically dismantle white supremacy. They do not automatically challenge systems of power that benefit some and harm others. They do not automatically create equity.

I want to make that concrete, because principle without practice is not leadership.

Early in my role at one organization, I attended my first Black employee resource group meeting. I had been in the role for roughly two months. The ERG had an executive sponsor who was a white man. In that first meeting, he dominated the entire conversation. What I heard from him were microaggressions, some of which bordered on full-on aggression and, at times, crossed that line. I remember sitting there thinking, "This is a space designed for Black employees.” This community exists because these individuals needed a place to be seen. And the person who was supposed to be their advocate was making them invisible.

The first thing I did was go to the leaders of the Black ERG and ask them, simply, what their experience was. Initially, they said they were not sure they saw it the same way I did. That response surprised me. However, I took the time to share my professional assessment of what had been happening in that room. A few weeks later, they came back to me. They said: We thought about what you said, and, if we are completely honest, we have become so desensitized to his behavior that we have simply assumed this is the way things are. We had stopped believing it was something that could change.

My response was straightforward. He does not deserve to be your executive sponsor if this is how he treats you. You deserve a sponsor who values what you bring to this organization.

So, I went to work to have him removed from the role. I faced significant pushback, including from my own leadership. I was told he was a long-tenured, well-respected employee. I understood that. I stated that his tenure does not make his behavior acceptable. What do I need to do to earn your support for this change?

Eventually, we removed him from the role. His replacement was a woman of color who had lived experience of exactly what those employees were navigating every day. That transition was not just an administrative change. It was a signal to the entire organization that a new standard was in effect. Microaggressions are not acceptable. The people most affected by a space get to have a say in who leads it.

That is what anti-racist leadership looks like in practice. It is not a statement of values on a wall. It is the willingness to use your position, absorb the discomfort, and make the structural change.

In order to build anti-racist organizations, we must do the deeper, harder work. We must challenge the structures that reinforce inequity. We must create environments where psychological safety is available to everyone, not only those who already hold privilege. We must recognize that the comfort of the majority cannot come at the expense of the minority's well-being. We must be willing to feel discomfort and take risks to evolve our workplaces, our communities, and our society.

Leadership is not neutral. Leadership either reinforces inequity or challenges it. Leadership that is not actively anti-racist is passively complicit. There is no middle ground.

Anti-racist leadership requires us to go deeper. It requires examining power, not simply representation. It requires naming inequity, not merely acknowledging diversity. It requires courage, risk-taking, and the willingness to disrupt the comfort of the majority. It requires humility and demands that we take action that reflects clear values.

There is something else worth naming here. Racism is an accessibility issue. When we think about accessibility, many people default to thinking about disability accommodations. However, accessibility is about who can reach opportunity, and racism has been one of the most powerful barriers to that access in the history of this country. White-only water fountains. Seats at the back of the bus. Theaters, schools, and neighborhoods were designed to keep Black Americans and other people of color out of economic, educational, and political participation. Redlining kept Black families from building generational wealth through homeownership. Hiring discrimination prevented qualified people from advancing into leadership roles. These were not incidental. They were engineered. And the effects are not historical — they are structural and ongoing. An anti-racist commitment requires seeing those barriers as accessibility failures and treating their removal with the same urgency we would give any other systemic harm.

For me, the commitment to being anti-racist is inseparable from my commitment to being a leader. Awareness helps me understand the harm that exists. Action helps me intervene in that harm. Leadership requires me to use both awareness and action to influence systems, relationships, and decisions in meaningful ways.

A continuing journey of awareness and responsibility

My awareness continues to evolve. I continue to learn and unlearn. I continue to name systems when I see them and challenge them when I can. I continue to refine my understanding of how privilege works and how I must use it for positive change. It requires openness, curiosity, and a willingness to be uncomfortable.

I often return to my grandfather's lesson at the Labor Camp.

I revisit the privilege walk in my mind — not as a fixed memory, however, as a living exercise. I ask myself whether I would answer those questions differently today. Society does not stay in one moment in time. Privilege shifts. The questions that revealed something in 1996 may need to be rewritten for 2026. What has changed? What has evolved? What are the forms of advantage and disadvantage that we have not yet learned to name? I am not interested in using a past standard to understand a present problem. I want a standard that pulls us forward.

I think about the Black woman at the LGBTQIA+ conference.

I remember the stories shared by my colleagues during the summer of George Floyd's murder.

These stories shape me. These stories guide me. They remind me that privilege can be a tool for justice when used with intention.

To be an anti-racist leader is to recognize that the world as it exists is not equitable, and that each of us has a role to play in changing it. It requires listening, learning, speaking up, and using whatever privilege we hold to make change possible. It requires us to build environments where every individual is valued, respected, and able to thrive.

Reflection

As you reach the end of this chapter, I want to speak directly to the white men and women reading this. Most of us did not create the system of privilege. However, we benefit from it. And that means we have a responsibility to dismantle it. Ask yourself: what has come easier in your life because of the color of your skin? What rooms have you entered without being questioned? What doors opened without you ever having to wonder why? Those are not rhetorical questions. They are the beginning of the work.

To every reader: It is not the responsibility of people of color to fix racism. It is the responsibility of those who have benefited from and perpetuated a racist system to take it apart. That is not a burden distributed equally. It is a burden distributed according to what we have received. The more access you hold, the more of that weight is yours to carry.

I also want to name one more thing before the reflection questions. Claiming to be colorblind is not a virtue. It is an avoidance. When you choose not to see a person's race, you are choosing not to see a vital part of their lived experience, their history, their identity, and their joy. Seeing the whole person means seeing all of who they are — not flattening them into a convenient sameness that makes your discomfort easier to manage. Belonging requires witness. You cannot honor what you refuse to see.

My hope is that this chapter invites you to reflect on your own journey, your own privileges, and your own opportunities to lead with courage. Every person holds the potential to contribute to a more just world. Those with greater access hold greater responsibility for doing so.

As you reflect on this chapter, I invite you to pause and turn inward. Anti-racist leadership begins with awareness, continues through action, and deepens through reflection. Your story, your identity, and your lived experiences shape how you lead. They shape how you show up for equity, for justice, and for the people around you.

Take a moment to consider the experiences that have shaped your understanding of privilege, race, and responsibility. 

What early messages about identity, belonging, or difference did you absorb from the world around you, and how have those messages shaped the leader you are today? Think about the beliefs you held before you chose them — and the moments that first made you question them.

Where have you experienced a shift in awareness that opened your eyes to inequity or privilege? What created that shift? Shifts rarely arrive as arguments. They arrive as moments. Name yours.

How have you used your voice, your access, or your influence to challenge inequity or to amplify a voice that deserved more space? Not as a declaration. As a specific act. What did you actually do?

What part of your identity gives you access that others do not have? What have you done with that access? This is the question the chapter has been building toward. Take it seriously.

Which systems, habits, or assumptions in your life or work deserve deeper examination so that you can lead with greater intention? Name one. That is where the work begins.

This chapter is a reminder that the journey toward anti-racist leadership is active, ongoing, and deeply human. You are not expected to have all the answers. You are expected to stay awake, stay curious, and stay accountable.

Reflect with honesty.

Reclaim what matters.

Redefine who you choose to be.

Show up in ways that honor your values, your humanity, and others' humanity.