Erika Malinoski
Oakland, CA
When I was in college, I ran psychology experiments on volunteer college students, and I was always perfectly comfortable running the experiment late at night alone in the building except for the participant. Until I went to do the exact same thing I’d done a hundred times with a Black participant. All of a sudden, I was afraid for absolutely no reason. This fear of people who look different from me is the other face of the privilege I get for being white, and it’s why I don’t like racism even beyond the harm it does to others.