As a “nice white lady,” I’m going to give you the straight skinny. We are a nation of racists. Oh, it’s not like in the dark ages of my youth. I was born in 1945 into a town divided by a railroad track, the symbolic line in every Southern town, that kept black and white families from mixing, beyond the colored help who made sure the white families were comfortable in our world of make-believe.

Those White and Colored water fountains and restrooms were everywhere, but I never gave them a thought. After all, I was young and white with all the privilege that conveyed. Then when I was three we left Texas for a remote part of Venezuela that was not on the map. My father was an engineer, there to help build an oil refinery. We lived in a walled and gated, even luxurious, housing compound for the ‘white foreigners.’ Of course, there was native help to make sure we were comfortable in another gated land of make-believe.

I grew up moving every two years; back and forth across the Atlantic and into the Caribbean. In every country I took for granted the privilege that went with my color and I never gave it a thought. Finally the AHA moment came at the University of Texas in Austin where I gained an awareness of racial stereotype and discrimination. By then, the White and Colored water fountains and restrooms had disappeared and I still hadn’t given them a thought. It never occurred to me how a human being would feel being defined by a sign, nor why it was necessary.

Then I joined a group of do-gooders, some of the first ‘cross-over teachers’ in Texas. My father, newly retired, was furious. “You have humiliated the family. I’ll have to quit my clubs and leave town.” I ignored the empty threat, naïvely determined as I was to change the world.

Every day I drove across the railroad tracks, that symbolic crossing into another world. We were a handful of brand new, very young white teachers forced on the older, more experienced black teachers. They welcomed us with dignity and respect; the students with skepticism and hostility. Gradually, we made peace and grew together in respect and affection. There were no White and Colored bathrooms or water fountains. There was only a crumbling building and very few supplies compared to the new ‘white’ high school across town. If I had been black during that time, I would have had a huge Afro, worn a Black Power shirt and protested in the streets. Instead, I went home every day to my nice white world of comfort and privilege and didn’t change a thing.

Fast-forward thirty-five years. I left teaching and joined the business world. I worked my way up the corporate ladder to a vice-presidency, the only woman on the team. Then at age 57, I entered prison for securities fraud; once again another world, only this time the line was not symbolic; it was a very real one of nasty, twisted razor wire. It was this environment that led me to the next AHA moment.

I was no longer a woman with a name and identity; I was an inmate with a number; I was an ‘offender.’ There was even a rule. I could no long be called Ms. Allen or even Sue Ellen. I could only be called Allen, inmate Allen or my prison number. Respect and courtesy were left on the other side of the wire.

There was something else that contributed to that AHA moment. There were Staff and Offender restrooms and water fountains, just so we wouldn’t forget that we weren’t people anymore. When I first saw them, I flashed back to the fifties in the South. It made me feel dirty, dirty and untouchable. I remembered those White and Colored signs of my youth and I was ashamed of my blindness and privilege.

Now I’m ashamed again. The Little Rock Nine walked the gauntlet in 1957. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous speech in 1963. The Selma march was in 1965. We have our first black president yet we are still murdering and incarcerating young black men at an alarming rate. Racism is alive and well, even though it is much more subtle.

I’m ashamed but I’m also thankful. I’m thankful that my prison journey woke me up. I’ll never know what it’s like to grow up black in America and all that entails. I only know what it’s like to be diminished, denigrated and humiliated. I know what it’s like to have a label that makes me feel dirty, a label (inmate, offender, ex-con, ex-felon) that will never go away. We don’t do our time, get out and rebuild our lives. The barriers are enormous, whatever your color and background. Society has created PRISON, the gift that keeps on giving. Ironically, it’s like the old Colored and White signs, only now it’s Normal Person and Offender. Since 40% of inmates are Black, it’s just a redesign of those old signs.

Yes, I’ve been in prison and I’m really an ‘offender,’ so you may dispute the ‘nice white lady’ label I gave myself at the beginning of this, but don’t dispute that we are a nation of racists. Sometimes it feels like nothing’s changed since the protests of the sixties. What I know for sure is this, for those of us who are “nice, well-meaning white people,” it’s way past time for us to speak out. We cannot keep our mouths shut when we hear a racist joke or a disparaging remark or see injustice or brutality; we have to speak out whatever the costs. America has been racist since slavery was in fashion and we’ve kept our mouths conveniently shut. Now we don’t have slavery; we have prisons. As Michelle Alexander so aptly put it, “It’s the New Jim Crow.”

We present ourselves as the most sophisticated, technologically advanced, Christian country in the world and yet, and yet. . .we are racists with the largest prison population in the world. But I have seen our power when it suits us, the power to do incredible things. Now is the time for the “nice white people” to do something incredible, to speak up, be heard, and make a difference in our country. Call me crazy but I KNOW WE CAN DO BETTER.