My teenage daughter startled me with a Big Question out of the blue while I was working in the kitchen.

“What do you think causes racism in society?” she asked while warming up leftovers in the microwave. We hadn’t been discussing any related topic, and rarely has my opinion been sought so directly from her. So I tried to answer as quickly as I could, unsure how long I would have her attention before someone more interesting texted her.

“Fear, competition for resources, power structures that exploit difference,” I said. A bit later, I texted her that the way people are raised also causes racism to persist.

I’ve spent the past week thinking about her question. I posted the question on Facebook and received nearly a hundred replies from thoughtful friends. Their most popular response was that ignorance or isolation from people of different backgrounds were the root causes. But I’m skeptical about this. If education and personal relationships could end racism, why does it still persist among people with plenty of knowledge and exposure?  

I turned to the work of scholars who study these issues.

Ibram Kendi is a historian and author of “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016. He is also the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. He makes the strong case that we cannot educate and love our way out of a racist society. The root cause of racist thoughts and policies is self-interest, he argues. The group that benefits from the way society is set up resists making it more just, so racist thought is used to justify racist behavior and policies. He shares many historical examples that bear this out: Slave owners needed to justify their economic interest in subjugating other humans, so they claimed Africans were less than human, less civilized. Racist practice supported by racist thinking.

Kendi defines a racist as a person who expresses a racist idea or supports a racist policy. A racist idea suggests that one racial group is superior or inferior to another racial group. A racist policy is one that leads to unequal outcomes, he explained recently on the podcast “To the Point.”

When you look at modern America, you can see evidence of unequal outcomes in wealth, employment, housing, education, health, policing and the criminal justice system among racial groups. Do you believe it’s something innate in blackness that leads to these worse outcomes? By definition, that’s racist.

The nonracist explanation would be to look at which policies lead to those outcomes and work to dismantle those to create a more fair society. In order to do this, we have to be able to hold two competing views in our heads at once. A person can believe in equality and still have some racist beliefs. A country can make racial progress and still have racist policies.

Anti-racist progress in this country has always been met by racist progress, Kendi says. Even those of us who say we believe in equality and are disgusted by those who march in white hoods or with Tiki torches can have unexamined racist views or support policies that uphold racist outcomes. Even the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, who abhorred slavery, for years held the view that blacks should be freed to leave America and set up colonies elsewhere. His thinking about racial equality changed over time, as evidenced by his speeches.

This is where hope lives.

“A racist is not who a person is. A racist is what a person is, what a person is saying, what a person is doing,” Kendi wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times. Once we recognize our self-interest at stake, confront our own biases and counter that thinking, that’s when we move toward a more fair and just society.

I shouldn’t have been so surprised about my daughter’s question. After all, we have recently heard the statement, “I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed” from the highest officeholder in the land, in response to multiple claims that he referred to African nations as “sh-tholes.”

It’s a good time to help our children sort out what these sorts of contradictions really mean.

It will take more than education and love to challenge deeply embedded racist thinking and actions.

It takes honesty.

She wanted him to play with her hair.

In the online essay detailing an anonymous woman’s terrible sexual encounter with actor Aziz Ansari, I kept coming back to this detail: “When she sat down on the floor next to Ansari, who sat on the couch, she thought he might rub her back, or play with her hair -- something to calm her down.”

Instead, he asked her for oral sex. And despite what she really wanted and how shaken she felt in that moment, she consented.

This was the most illustrative and poignant moment of missed expectations in this hard-to-follow narrative.

She wanted intimacy. He wanted sex.

The anonymous account been alternatively described as “a bad date/bad sex” or a sexual violation, depending on how you read the essay. Some feminists have argued that when you are having sex in a sexist culture, when you are socialized to either pursue or be pursued, consent is more complicated than saying yes or no. To be more clear, getting what you want from a sexual encounter is more complicated than saying “yes” or “no.”

The scenario as recounted in the Babe.net essay described familiar and traditional gender stereotypes. He kept trying to have sex with her. He was aggressively persistent. She warded off his advances, gave into some of them and eventually gave up on the date and left, feeling terrible.

Their contrary expectations collided in a way that left one party feeling used and dehumanized. But while parts of this story might seem familiar to many of us, it unfolded in a cultural moment of eroticized aggression, when it’s easier than ever to engage in dehumanized sex.

More than 25 years ago, a small, private liberal arts college in Ohio made national headlines when it tried to reform the idea of consent. Antioch College passed a policy in the 1990s that required students to get “affirmative consent,” which meant that sexual partners needed to ask for explicit consent before proceeding in a sexual encounter. The policy was widely ridiculed -- from an editorial in the New York Times to a “Saturday Night Live” skit lampooning this “overzealous” notion of date rape.

At the height of the media attention on the Antioch Sexual Offense Prevention Policy, I was a freshman in college. I remember thinking how ridiculous it sounded. Who talks that way during a romantic or sexual encounter? Who asks for permission every step of the way?

Twenty-five years of experience later, with children who will be leaving for college in a few years, it seems far more reasonable.

And yet, in practice, perhaps it makes even less sense.

This generation’s first sexual experiences are mediated through a screen. A middle-school boy is far more likely to ask a girl for a nude than a date. Teens see porn much younger and more often. Post-internet pornography is a more aggressive and degrading version of what was widely watched pre-internet. There is endless choice and opportunity in hook-up apps. Technology has not created a more egalitarian sexual landscape; it’s introduced aggression and power imbalance at a younger age than ever before.

And it’s made it more difficult to expect or ask for emotional intimacy. Imagine a profile that says, “I expect to be held.” Or, “I would like a text the next day.”

Even if the ideals of explicit consent are part of the conversations we have with our children, it has to happen in way that works in the tech-saturated sexual milieu in which they are coming of age. Emotional intimacy is easily divorced from sexual intimacy, which for some people feels less satisfying, or even dehumanizing.

Zoe Peterson, associate professor of psychological sciences and director of the sexual assault research and education program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, says images of sex in the media -- not just porn -- don’t show a lot of talking.

“People have an idea that explicitly asking for consent is unsexy because we don’t have many models of it,” she said. It goes beyond asking and responding “yes” or “no.” It’s a bigger conversation of what a person is into sexually and his or her values.

Young people starting to navigate this terrain are just beginning to learn their preferences and how to exercise their agency. It can be difficult to express for those who don’t like to have uncomfortable conversations face-to-face.

“To ask for intimacy is really vulnerable,” Peterson said. “There’s a lot of fear of rejection, especially when there are no good models of, ‘how do you even do that?’”

To me, the allegations against Ansari didn’t suggest that women have lost their sense of agency. It’s that we’ve internalized a very low bar of expectation in such encounters.

Antioch’s explicit consent policy doesn’t sound so radical anymore.

Now, what sounds radical is being able to say, in a moment of vulnerability and sexual openness, “I just want you to play with my hair.”

Who would dare to challenge the killer whale, an apex predator at the top of the food chain?

Scientists have observed situations in which pods of humpback whales have curiously intervened in orca hunts to protect wounded whale calves, seals, sea lions, porpoises and other marine mammals. What would possess an animal to do such a thing?

Researchers don’t know for sure. Humpbacks may mistakenly think a young whale associated with their own pod is threatened, or it may be that interfering in orca hunts eventually pays off for their own species. Humpback whales may even be intelligent enough to have some degree of empathetic response.

Whatever the answer, there’s some instinctive or evolutionary response that prompts these animal bystanders to intervene.

Humans, of course, live in complex societies, with far more evolved relationships. So what makes humans less inclined to stand up to threats far less dangerous than a killer whale?

Researchers who study ways to reduce bullying look at the third party in the bully/bullied interaction: the bystander. He or she often has unutilized power to end a peer’s torment or minimize the risk posed to others.

If a bully, liar or cheat has an emotional or narcissistic wound so deep that he is unable to change his behavior, it becomes the responsibility of those around him to sound the alarm. When those who know better are silent, they become just as guilty as the aggressor.

As we’ve seen, however, people often don’t speak up when they have firsthand knowledge that someone is endangering or hurting others. There are many reasons for turning a blind eye when an insecure person tells outrageous lies or torments others.

They may include:

1. Apathy. The offender’s lies are so ridiculous and over-the-top that any reasonable person knows he is lying, and it’s not worth the fight to challenge it. The default response becomes to tune it out or roll one’s eyes.

2. Rationalization. Some onlookers are unable -- or unwilling -- to see the stakes of a bully’s bad behavior. This is the camp that says, “Fibbing is annoying.” They minimize the damage of antisocial behavior. They focus on how they might benefit, and ignore the reprehensible means.

3. Callousness. Others simply don’t worry about lies or harassment or threatening behavior that doesn’t impact them personally. As long as someone else is the victim or potential victim, they are unbothered.

4. Fear of the bully. Sometimes a bystander does feel empathy and concern, but is simply too afraid of becoming a target of the bully. They lack the courage to speak up or stand up against wrongdoing, even anonymously.

5. Fear of consequences. There are those who fear losing social standing or facing backlash from others aside from the bully. In these situations, the culture of the institution, whether it’s a school or workplace, often enables and empowers the bully. Many systems respond to reports by positioning the bully as the victim, and the whistleblower as the problem.

6. Greed. Other bystanders are more complicit. They want something from the bully, so they are willing to aid and abet unethical or cruel actions. They stand to gain personally from enabling the bully.

7. Protection. Some people, especially weaker ones, are easily seduced by power. They feel protected by association with a bully. It’s easier for them to be part of a protected in-group, no matter how compromised.

8. Desensitization. Those who spend the most time around a bully become accustomed to cruelty and antisocial behavior. They see everyone around them tolerating it, as well.

9. Meanness. There are some who share the same moral defects as the bully. They are just as ruthless, self-centered, greedy, spiteful or nasty. They don’t act out as much as the alpha bully because they are lower in the pecking order and don’t wield as much power. But they take pleasure in the hatefulness committed in their proximity.

Once we understand and identify what prevents bystanders from intervening, we can look for ways to better engage them.

A child may be too timid or scared to speak up around a powerful bully. That’s why parents need to have some awareness of the social dynamics in their child’s environments: Ask if they witness bullying at the bus stop, on the playground, in the classroom or in the school hallway. Let your child know that you would talk to school officials about it -- even if they aren’t the one being bullied -- and why. Children develop the strength of character to be active bystanders when they see it modeled at home.

We can model that for our kids, and we can also reform systems to be friendlier to whistleblowers, both anonymous and named. We need to continue to glorify the courageous, cultivate empathy and shame the complicit.

We can also learn from the mysterious behavior of whales, and choose to band together in the face of danger.