Future Here Now: Ow.

Local Learnings: 12 types of white moderates and the damage we can do

I had another piece planned for today, but when Vu Le’s latest hit my inbox this morning, that other thing got pushed aside the way my son pushes aside the piles in his room when he wants to use his chair. Mostly Le’s Nonprofit AF focuses on the travails of community development-type organizations, but this one hits home for… pretty much all of us, wherever we work. It definitely did for me.

Le is focusing on white moderates, the people that Dr. Martin Luther King said were more damaging to the civil rights movement than overt racists (pause and go read King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” if you have not).

That phrasing can be a little misleading — certainly white people are the most likely to become white moderates, but it’s the unwillingness to challenge systems that are perpetuating injustice, rather than skin color alone, that both King and Le are calling to account.

Here’s a couple of the 12 types of white moderates that Le describes in his article. You might not see you…