As W.E.B. Du Bois has noted and many other black scholars and a very minuscule number of white scholars, white supremacy certainly has hindered people of color but it has harmed whites even more and what it did to the white workers was convince them not that they should want brotherhood and community, but they who have power over others and hate blacks. And actually the word he used was "hate niggers."

Lillian Smith, a famous southern writer, coming out in a book that led to the end of her career in publishing, that the white man's burden was essentially his childhood and it is the level of hypocrisy that that childhood contained in learning how to treat blacks as pets and believe that they were still Democrats and Christians.

The famous autobiography slave narrative of Harriet Jacobs, she points out why was it that the slave masters could talk so eloquently about the blight of their cotton crops and not see what the evil system was doing and the blight it put on the children's soul? So how can those of us like me who are impatient with repetitive conversations about the same old same old, put our energy towards eliminating these foundations of white superiority and elevate human rights as the program of political action and introduce social, economic and political justice into lives of ordinary Americans who do not enjoy the privilege of whiteness and how could we as people on the verge of the new millennium discuss these things such as whiteness and then they can point the finger at others who are a race.

I, for one, would like to pass conversation into action into throw right wing would have you believe was the worst thing that ever happened to America. In any case, we are going to have a conversation about this profoundly human problem I think we have to get clear about what is at the root of the problem first.