Chances are you found this blog post through a tweet or a Facebook post or Tumblr post or some other wondrous social medium. Social media is everywhere and everything. It has expanded our national conversation and allowed more voices to participate in discussions both frothy and weighty.  But when it comes to the sensitive subject of race, we often don’t know how to speak freely.

Atlanta Magazine describes Jim Grimsley’s memoir How I Shed My Skin — coming out in paperback this month today — as “a welcome addition to our constant, ever-evolving conversation on race.” Indeed, by taking us back to his childhood and the integration of his small-town North Carolina school, Jim helps us examine where we are now.

In both his writing in How I Shed My Skin and in recent interviews about the book, Jim offers some excellent starting points for thinking about and talking about racial attitudes and confronting prejudices. Here are a few:

•In an interview with Kirkus Review: “Nothing’s going to move on this issue until people start talking about it — and I’m not talking about black people, I’m talking about white people. White people have to start talking about this issue to ourselves, among ourselves. We have to confront one another about it. We have to figure out where it comes from. We just have to, or we’re only going to get worse…

“What white people have to see is we’ve incorporated [racism] into our worldview in ways we don’t see.”

•From How I Shed My Skin:  “Good people taught and still teach racism to their children without a second thought. We teach that when people are different from each other, one is better and the other worse.”

•In an interview with Late Night Library: “My own coming out as a gay person began to educate me in the mechanics of oppression.”

•In an interview on NPR: “The child sees difference, marks it — the adult acts on it. I would either learn to be a better bigot, or I would learn to stop being a bigot at all. Two paths. I had a choice to make.”