Fine, you only meant it as a conditional statement, but you chose to bring up the idea that he might have nothing else going on. Yeah, that’s an asshole move all right. It’s odd that you either don’t see that or don’t care about that. Hard to tell which.

Back to the point… Being white, it’s super hard to understand but being “directly involved” in terms of not being shot at and such isn’t good enough to avoid being deeply hurt, and that’s what’s happening with the author and so many others. Someone such as yourself who is displaying unusually low empathy here will find it additionally hard to understand, but I’ll try.

Do you know about the Tuskegee study in the 1930s through 70's? I was born around when it ended, so to me it wasn’t all that long ago.

A parent can say, “do as I say, not as I do,” but that doesn’t really work. A child absorbs what parents and extended family act like. A child absorbs his place in the word from his family’s understanding of their own place in the world. Rare individuals forge their own destiny and it’s beautiful to see when it’s a good life, but it’s not to be relied upon.

Those black men in Tuskegee had children and extended families who learned a very strong lesson about their nation, as did everyone who heard about it, whether they were “directly involved” or not. Not a new lesson. Just one more recent reinforcement of old lessons.

Those white men and women who worked there had families too, who learned things too, about how to see black men. Do you think those black and white children some of whom are now in their 50s, just forgot those lessons? I doubt it. Scars like that will continue for generations, for blacks and whites.

That’s one place and a lot of years. Each place has its history, no doubt. Some better and some worse than that example. I doubt something like that would happen in a vacuum. I think this country has been just what it sounds like it’s been, pretty recently, pretty deeply, racist. I think it’s gotten a lot better, but in some ways I can also see how it’s gotten worse. My point is, deep hatred like racism doesn’t just disappear from one generation to the next, so to keep calling it almost nothing is comfortable but just not realistic.