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'That undercurrent of violence I felt when I was 6 was there again, present in the easy devaluation of the word "nigger." I knew that it was that very history of violence - my dead great-great-grandfather's ghost and all the young black men who died at the hands of people who thought they were lesser - that was the subtext. This was why I felt so threatened, so overwhelmed, why I was often silenced when people said these things to me. [Violence] in fact exerted a strong undertow in the present. That it could take my great-great-grandfather, but also take young men like Oscar Grant III, shot to death by a transit officer in Oakland in 2009, like Trayvon Martin, like my only brother, killed by a hit-and-run drunken driver who was charged with leaving the scene of an accident but never with the crime of my brother's death. That it could assert they were less in life and deny them justice after death as well. That living in a country where one group of people owned another group of people for some 250 years yielded a culture where one life was worth less than another. Again and again. Then and now.... There is power in naming racism for what it is, in shining a bright light on it, brighter than any torch or flashlight. A thing as simple as naming it allows us to root it out of the darkness and hushed conversation where it likes to breed like roaches. It makes us acknowledge it. Confront it. And in confronting it, we rob it of some of its dark pull. Its senseless, cold drag. When we speak, we assert our human dignity. That is the worth of a word.'

Letter 'trigger': "When we look at someone and automatically think about that person's "race," we must realize that we are not seeing "race" but instead seeing an arbitrary and harmful societal classification imposed on a continuum of physical differences. When we want to ask how someone is classified by the myth, we should always put "race" or "racial" in quotation marks (as I have done here). Such questions still need to be asked, for example, on applications for college or a job, or for the census, for the answers provide the data needed to maintain diversity in education and the workplace and to monitor and remedy the harms the myth has caused and continues to cause. The long-term goal, however, is to make these questions obsolete.