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Jodi Picoult, Small Great Things

Wenn mir nicht der neue Stephen King dazwischen gekommen wäre, hätte ich wohl mittlerweile einen weiteren Band von Picoult durch. Nach drei Büchern, die mich alle begeisterten, kann ich mir kaum noch vorstellen, dass mir eins nicht gefällt. Auch dieses hier war wieder packend, anrührend und stimmte sehr nachdenklich. Und traurig, trotz des guten Endes. Es ist noch nicht vorbei mit der Diskriminierung und Benachteiligung. Und wird es noch sehr, sehr lange nicht sein.

How often do you remind yourself how lucky you are that you own your house, because you were able to build up equity through generations in a way families of color can't? How often do you open your mouth at work and think how awesome it is that no one's thinking you're speaking for everyone with the same skin color you have? How hard it is for you to find a greeting card for your baby's birthday with a picture of a child that has the same color skin as her? How many times have you seen a painting of Jesus that looks like you?
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I tell them this: the part of the brain, physiologically, that allows us to blame everything on people we do not really know is the same part of the brain that allows us to have compassion for strangers. Yes, the Nazis made the Jews the scapegoats, to the point of near extinction. But that same bit of tissue in the mind is what led others to send money and supplies and relief, even when they were half a world away.
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(Aus der Author's note)
I knew that I wanted to write from the point of view of a Black nurse, a skinhead father, and a public defender - a woman who, like me, and like many of my readers, was a well-intentioned white lady who would never consider herself to be racist. Suddenly I knew that I could, and would, finish this novel. Unlike my first, aborted foray, I wasn't writing it to tell people of color what their own lives were like. I was writing to my own community - white people - who can very easily point to a neo-Nazi skinhead and say he's a racist… but who can't recognize racism in themselves.
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Just as racism creates disadvantages for people of color that make success harder to achieve, it also gives advantages to white people that make success easier to achieve. It's hard to see those advantages, much less own up to them. And that, I realized, was why I had to write this book. When it comes to social justice, the role of the white ally is not to be savior or a fixer. Instead, the role of the ally is to find other white people and talk to make them see that many of the benefits they've enjoyed in life are direct results of the fact that someone else did not have the same benefits.

(Jodi Picoult, Small Great Things, 2015)