I grew up a few hours down the road from Wellesley in New Haven, Conn. The summer before my freshman year, I was talking to a middle-aged white man at a barbecue he was hosting when he asked where I’d be going to school in a few weeks. I told him. His bonhomie evaporated immediately: “Wellesley，” he sniffed. “My daughter wanted to go to Wellesley. She didn’t get in.” He paused. “Of course, that’s when you had to be所以聪明进入。“

留下了不言而喻的，但几乎明显暗示：黑色就是有什么让你进去的，你取代了一个不是黑色的人，应该在那里。像我的女儿。

多年来，我没有想过那个男人，但是当我开放时How to Be Less Stupid About Race通过社会学家Crystal Fleming '04，内存弹出起来。Like a lot of the examples in Fleming’s book, the disgruntled father in my story did not consider his remark racist, would have denied that intent completely, and perhaps would have told me I was imagining things, or too defensive, or one of the many other responses people who are stupid about race say. And a lot of black readers will nod their heads as they leaf through this book, and feel heard and validated.

Readers who believe in a post-racial America, in being color-blind in racially diverse situations, who are hoping for a kumbaya moment, are not going to have those needs met by Fleming’s book. But if they’re willing to let go of what they think they know about race and prejudice, Fleming will provide a bracing trip through how we do—and don’t—discuss race. She begins by explaining the origins of racial stupidity with a salient truth: “Hundreds of years after establishing a nation of colonial genocide and chattel slavery, people are kinda-sorta-maybe-possibly waking up to the sad reality that our racial politics are (still) garbage,” she writes. Nooses are still being left in workplaces. Black and brown people are consistently and shamelessly questioned by white ones about the right to be where they are—a Starbucks in Philadelphia, the neighborhood pool, a common room at an Ivy League university—followed by a call to the police to send them back where they belong.

弗莱明潜入一些白色女权主义者实际上听到他们的黑色女权主义同事（因为他们不认识到黑人女性一直没有标签的女权主义者）。她在他的第二学期审查了她最终与巴拉克奥巴马幻产的原因。（“奥巴马之间的令人惊叹的对比对黑人社区的发言和对暴力警察的调解反应是痛苦的，因为它是镀锌。”）并且她需要任务New York Times’和主流媒体的关注with covering both sides of white supremacy. “The existential question that white folks keep struggling with—‘Should we listen to the white supremacist side now??’—only ever has had one answer: No.”

弗莱明的无意义的方法（她真的做want us to do better) is just the guide we—all of us—need. Because with race, ignorance isn’t bliss—it’s dangerous.