Wow … quite a few exposed nerves you have touched here.

So … would I ever give up my whiteness … The short answer is YES … the WHY is … As a white person I don’t feel I am doing much to improve how people view race and I recognize you are primarily correct that whiteness is power. Maybe giving up my whiteness would motivate me to work harder for a solution because I would be right in the middle of it. As a white person I feel I am just standing 50 yards from a riot and don’t know if I should run toward it or run away.

I might add this is not just an American problem. This is a problem with all of human kind back to the beginning of recorded history. Look at every ancient culture and many had slaves … and those slaves were NOT the light skinned people.

I started becoming aware of the number of shootings of unarmed black people. Then I went to a Trevor Noah concert and he did a comedy bit about being pulled over by a police officer… it was funny and sad and scary. He described being pulled over by a white officer and the thoughts racing through his head as the officer walked toward his car and he watched in the rearview mirror.

He listed a few cases naming each victim and described with some level of detail where a black person had been shot by a police officer. One was walking toward the officer, so he could not do that, one was running away, and he could not do that. Then he described Eric Garner who was choked on a NY City subway platform and noticed he was a pretty big guy and concluded he might be OK and not get choked as he stood tall and thought he “had that one OK”. In his final analysis he concluded that he was going to die because no matter what he did he could remember a behavior got a black person shot.

The office reached his car window and said “do you know your tail light is out?”.

There were a few more details to the comedy bit but I smiled and at the same time felt a little sick … because I knew his description was likely a true story for many black people.

And as one other responder said here this is definitely mass cognitive dissonance. And a few other cognitive disorders probably also apply.

So … Will it get better … maybe but only by degree … It will likely never be cured. But I will keep trying in my tiny and mostly insignificant way to help.