Hi John. Your article touched me a lot. I am classified as white (I learnt I was when I first came to the US; in my country, France, there is no racial classification, even though there is harsh but very subtly institutionalized racism -even harder to fight that in the US) and I realized that I started the work you ask “us” to do many years ago (I “have to” imagine that I am part of that “us” group even though I know “whiteness” is a state of mind, not a “race”, so let’s say “us”). I started that work when I was 20, and a Teaching Assistant in the US: as the conclusion of my intervention at a Forum on Racism organized on campus in Columbia, South Carolina (yes, that same place… I even met KKK members near the State House one day, while heading to Main Street…)
I said: “If white people don’t change, nothing is ever gonna change”.

Ever since that time, I have tried to do my share, with the intelligence nature has bestowed on me (I wish it was more), I have tried to teach and change people around me. I became a English teacher in France, and am still trying my best because I HATE to read that: “Living every single day with institutionalized racism and then having to argue its very existence, is tiring, and saddening, and angering. Yet if we express any emotion while talking about it, we’re tone policed, told we’re being angry.”

I cannot stand that. I do not accept it. There is NO reason to close our eyes and shut our ears to this (racists — most white people have this strange ability to shut their EARS when racism is the topic…). It’s INADMISSIBLE.

People, human beings should NEVER have to have to go through that. It’s quite simple. I don’t understand why “they” don’t understand that.