From poet, playwright and Yale professor Claudia Rankine, the author of Citizen: An American Lyric, in an interview with The Guardian in December 2015:

Racism is complicated. White people feel personally responsible for racism when they should understand the problem as systemic. It is interfering as much with their lives as with the lives of people of colour. And racism can lodge in them. It isn’t them yet it can become them if they are not taking notice.