A Letter to My People:
Reflections on Whiteness Amid a Racial Reckoning in America

The United States is in the midst of a movement for racial justice unprecedented since the 1960s. Conjoined crises – a deadly pandemic, a financial crisis not seen since the Great Depression, and national unrest sparked by a police killing of an unarmed black man – have awakened millions of Americans to racial and social inequities that have long characterized the United States.

People of all colors have protested in large and small cities across the country demanding long overdue structural change. But the change we need is not only in our policies and institutions. We also need to understand whiteness and its role in structuring America and shaping these inequities. What is “whiteness” and why are so many white people clueless about it?

At this year’s Flanigan lecture, Erika Blacksher, the John B. Francis Chair in Bioethics designee, talks about whiteness, its intersection with social class, and its role in shaping people’s lives and health prospects.

Drawing candidly on her own life story as a first-generation high school graduate, Dr. Blacksher will connect pivotal moments in her own journey to ideas about whiteness that we all need to begin to explore and understand