Excerpt from Brit Bennett’s 2014 Essay ‘I Don’t Know What To Do With Good White People’

“I’ve been surrounded by good white people my whole life. Good white people living in my neighborhood, who returned our dog when he got loose; good white teachers in elementary school who pushed books into my hands; good white professors at Stanford, a Bay Area bastion of goodwhiteness, who recommended me for MFA programs where I met good white writers, liberal enough for a “Portlandia” sketch.

I should be grateful for this. Who, in generations of my family, has ever been surrounded by so many good white people?

My mother was born to sharecroppers in Louisiana; she used to measure her feet with a piece of string because they could not try on shoes in the store. She tells me of a white policeman who humiliated her mother by forcing her to empty her purse on the store counter just so he could watch her few coins spiral out.”