giving up the floor

Since I've been going back and forth with commenter Q, I think it is only fair to give her/him the floor without my commentary as a way to wrap up.

Our degrees of optimism and perhaps our assessment of where America is "racially" also seem to differ. You express worry about white people opting out of racial dialogue. I think they already have. I think we're in the middle of the most racist and least racially aware generation since the 60's, and I think a combination of color-blind racism as well as the lack of meaningful correctives to racial consequences has caused a reassertion of whiteness that's striking to me.

I think every single advantage black people have accrued since the 60's is eroded or on the cusp of being eroded, I think most meaningful efforts to combat and societally resist white racism have been undermined and that there's a general assumption that willpower - divorced from political action to remove white power - is sufficient. I think the primary culprit of this collective, societal, white American failure is that what's racist and non-racist, what's racially positive and racially divisive, what's necessary and what's not has been exclusively defined according white terms and in ways that are consistent with white morality. Which is to say, it's been defined in a way that's explicitly comfortable to white premises, white understanding and, mostly damningly, white stability. Morality has been asked to conform to whiteness without an acknowledgment of their incompatibility.

The desire to maintain the racialized reality of that stability, and the efforts to use vocal anti-racist language and solidarity to advance narratives that rearrange but never challenge the fundamental nature of white supremacy is founded on this key fault. You predict a dismal racial reality where whites feel excluded, and that's fine and dandy. But you should perhaps incorporate into your imagination that the open desire to include white perspectives, white opinions and white assent is what led us to a point where black people came a hair away from losing their voting rights, where they lost welfare before they could materially take advantage of it, and where they're losing affirmative action (thanks, largely, to a white Millennial) and where the stereotypes, discrimination and depicted racism is just as prominent but more silent.

I think black people have had enough white input and I think if you're going to prize it and defend your self-serving application of it, you should at least consider that the blanket interpretation of its ends as "positive" is not self-evident.