I think that was me! It's definitely a good thing. It's a major reason I read your stuff.

As I've said before, all whites, every single one, whether they admit it or not, have old tapes in our heads, no matter how allied we feel to the cause.

Not one of us hasn't been exposed to racial bullshit from other whites. If our parents were enlightened, our uncles weren't, or our grandparents weren't and we had friends that weren't.

The squirming happens when I see an observation I hadn't considered, despite what I think I know. I don't think there's a white person who can honestly say, "I know what you're going through," because there isn't a white person who has gone through it.

I was lucky. I rejected racism at a very early age, but I can't really say exactly why other than it seemed, as a kid might say, "stupid."

But as a white person, I still had the benefits of being white. I saw this first hand for the first time when I was in high school and my Black friend and I went to the Warren Dunes in Michigan. We were in a small trinket/tourist shop and the owner eyed my friend the whole time. When we got out, I told him I could have cleaned her out because she was watching him the whole time, but it bothered me a lot, and I realized that he probably went through some form of that every day, or nearly so.

It made me squirm.