[jaemison]

Believe it or not, one of the worst things that you can do is try to ignore it. Ask any minority why “I don’t even see race, just people” is so infuriating. By ignoring the issue, you are also effectively minimizing or erasing the other person’s experience as not the majority.

Let your coworker come to you as they are. Take them to coffee, get to know them, and ask how you can help them feel welcome and be at their best at work. Sounds like a lot of work and effort on your part, but the burden is on you the majority to earn back the trust broken by lived experience.

This is also not guaranteed to work. You’re fighting against a mindset developed over someone’s lifetime that’s akin to an alarm that you might think is noisy and not tuned properly but has become necessary for this person’s survival and psychological safety because they face threats to those things at a frequency and level you never have to see.

Racism isn’t the act of acknowledging someone’s otherness, it’s letting that otherness drive your interactions with someone and not giving them the opportunity to talk about who they are as a person. Racism is every time you go to lunch, it’s a barbecue place and you don’t invite your coworker because you don’t want them to think you’re stereotyping but you also don’t want to talk to them so you just go without them anyway without asking your coworker if they want to come because it’s easier. Racism isn’t the act of starting the uncomfortable conversations, it’s not giving those conversations a time and place to happen at all.

[38sp]

> the burden is on you the majority to earn back the trust broken by lived experience.

A single person can not be a majority, and claiming someone has a responsibility to treat someone with kid gloves because they are a member of the majority race is pretty extreme. I really have a hard time believing someone actually believes the thoughts expressed in this post. Doing any of this in your workplace is a terrible idea.