This racist rant is a textbook case of what I’ve described elsewhere as “white masochism”:
You’re completely right when you say that white people need to speak up, but what we and black people and people of all races need to speak up about is articles like yours, which are unfortunately a dime a dozen now, and which insist on categorizing and dividing us all by race and then simplistically and cartoonishly casting one race as a sinful oppressor and the other as a sinned-against oppressed. This is a comic book version of history in which we have heroes on one team and villains on the other.
It’s not the way history or reality works, of course. Individuals of every race come in many moral gradations, and we are not responsible for the historical mistakes of some of the people who had the same skin color as we do any more than we are responsible for the historical mistakes of people who had the same eye color or blood type that we do. If my great-grandfather was an axe murderer, that’s his fault, not mine. And the truth is that most of our ancestors weren’t oppressors of any sort. I, for instance, happen to be what you’d call “white” in your narrow-minded, racialized view of the universe, but I’m also an immigrant who came here at the age of four from a country (Russia) where the entire population suffered through communism, massive loss of life in two world wars (my grandmother’s entire family but for her died of starvation during the Siege of Leningrad, my grandfather came back from the war an alcoholic with major PTSD, my great-grandfather lost a leg in WWI, etc.), and, before that, centuries of serfdom. My family came to this country with a grand total of $400, because that’s all you were allowed to take out of the former Soviet Union back then. In no possible sense were we “privileged.” But the reality is that most of the people who look “white” around you have stories like this to tell, if you actually cared enough to hear them instead of taking refuge from the complexity of reality behind your reductive racial labels.
Reality is not skin-deep. Race is just a sociological category that has very little scientific validity to it and which has been unfortunately amplified in recent years by sensationalizing journalists, opportunistic politicians and simple-minded bigots like yourself and your mirror images on the far right fringe. If we want to make progress, we need to move BEYOND race. The same level of thinking that created the problem (of racism and racial oppression) isn’t going to solve it just because you invert which category is your favorite. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s had the right idea of forging a society in which people are no longer judged on the basis of their skin color. We’ve taken a giant collective step backwards in that in recent years, as we’ve again started amplifying and emphasizing racial divisions, leading to an upsurge in both black and white racism. Articles like yours don’t help. They hurt. They dig the hole deeper. Eventually, good people are going to help us climb out of that hole. But in the meantime, I’d implore you to stop digging.
