“I will state flatly that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long.  They have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long.  The effect in their personalities, their lives, their very grasp of realty, has been as devastating as the lava which so memorably immobilized the citizens of Pompeii. They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history, a parody of theirs and an intolerable violation of myself.”

— James Baldwin

“Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserved what happened to them before.”

– Chris Rock


One of the myriad ways that whites  control the “race relations” conversation is to delegitimize or at the very least minimize analysis of their history of oppression.  A favorite ploy in this exercise is to “flip the script,” as it were, so that all critiques – particularly by blacks – of historical or current white supremacy are immediately condemned and shut down as, at best irrelevant and at worst, oppressive to them.  They thus  not only obscure and deny white agency in black folks’ oppression, but position themselves as the true and still beleaguered victims of racism.

It's not a mental disorder, but damn, it feels good!

What stops white people that hate their history, their culture, and themselves from killing themselves?