Our goal should not be to be color-blind. Our goal should be to understand how color, hair and bone shape all our lives. For whites, I think that means taking seriously not only the task of understanding what it means for people of color to live in a racialized and racist world, but for us to start to see how the privileges that come with being white give us advantages, some subtle and some obvious, some overt and some covert, some material and some ideological. I have worked hard in my life. I believe that, amid all my mistakes and screw-ups, I have done some good things in the world.
Justice starts with the truth.
The truth is we live in a society that was founded on a racist genocide of indigenous people and enriched through a racist slave traffic in African people, and that is maintained in its affluence through an ongoing racist attack on the non-white people of much of the third world. This goes back to the founding of the nation. Like most white Americans, Madison saw the existence of blacks and Indians as the problem, not the attacks on those people and the exploitation of them by whites. It is by now a truism to say that racism is a white problem. But based on my reading and interaction with whites, it is clear to me that most of white American still sees race as a problem rooted in communities of color, one that can only be solved when people in those communities change, not when white people change.