It is important for white people to look at their experiences and deconstruct them, look into events and find their meaning, in order to become conscious of how race operates, writes anti-racist activist Chris Crass in this essay. 

One way race operates is through social media; through feeds and neighborhood listservs we find out about some restaurants and not others, some dentists and not others. Absolutely we hear the news about a white man shooting nine black people in a church, but we will, if we are white, not usually hear about a black-owned house painting or landscaping business. It's not that the people in our feeds are racist or discriminatory, but that race is a factor in the computer algorithms that create our feeds—it is one of the subtle ways race operates. 

Just a day late, and all of the stories are up. We've worked around the clock to interpret the data and upload the words and images of all who participated. We are thrilled to finally launch the 100 stories of One Large.

Things we worried about: 

• being white artists making work about the black  economy
  
• whether anyone would participate 
  
• how the project might be misinterpreted
  

Things we discovered:

• each participant became a site of performance/art/engagement, and that is inspiring
  
• each business became a site of performance/art/engagement, and that is complicated
  
• while we are not the authors of the stories on the site, we feel a great deal of responsibility for the voices here. How do we resolve our role and theirs? As much as we learned about ourselves making this work, the work still isn’t about us
  

We trusted participants to carry out their agreement. They trusted that there was no subterfuge on our part. Those who pushed back believed we were listening. Participants assumed good intentions. This fact seems stunning in its unlikeliness, given the mistrust on all sides of our current national conversation about race. It makes us feel hopeful, excited.