More stuff from the floppy disks. From a much longer essay I wrote a long time ago. I noted with some interest that I use the terms “non-white” and “minority” here–which I rarely use now.
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… Although Nancy and I … are both as culturally American as Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup and Wonder Bread, and share a common upbringing and lifestyle that is the foundation of our friendship, one crucial difference separates us: Every day of her life, she walks around as a white person. Every day of my life, I am reminded I am not white, and sometimes I am treated differently for one reason alone.

That day, as we talked, it suddenly occurred to me that Nancy saw racist incidents like these as isolated acts committed by a few bad individuals. Racism did not touch her life. She was occasionally forced to look at it, but she would never feel it. I saw racism as ingrained within our society; I see and feel its evidence every day of my life.

When I heard a black couple was firebombed in Cicero, a predominantly all-white suburb of Chicago, I remembered the time someone tried to set fire in the foyer of my apartment after sending me anonymous threatening letters. I remembered visiting friends who lived in Cicero, only to have strangers tell me threateningly, “Your kind does not come to this side of Roosevelt Avenue,” when I got out of my car.

When I heard [redacted].

The racist incidents that I read about in the newspapers and that I hear in the news are not disjointed, disconnected events to me. They do not exist in a vacuum; they are not things that happen only to other people. They shock and frighten me, not just because they have happened in my own country, in my own state, in my own hometown, but because they embody a reality that I know to be true.

My fear is that racism is not acknowledged, that it is not taken seriously, that it is routinely denied. Even though evidence of racism permeates American society, lack of personal experience has led white people to discount evidence they have witnessed with their own eyes. Their whiteness is a shield that protects them; by the same token, they are unable to see past it.

When I speak of racism to white people, invariably the response is either a complete denial or dismissal, or I am told I am “oversensitive,” I am “injecting a racist slant” into a situation, I am “overreacting.” But I trust my own senses; I am confident in my own ability to interpret events as I see them. Overtly racist acts against non-whites are too numerous in American society to be easily dismissed as hypersensitivity on the part of the victims. More than 25% of the American people wear faces that are not white. Can the collective reality of our 25.9% be so severely distorted as to always imagine slight? Or do we simply see a reality that whites have never experienced and are therefore unable to acknowledge?

I do not believe in “white guilt”; I do not subscribe to the notion that white people must answer to the oppression of minorities because of the whiteness of their skin. Yet I believe that every white person walks around as an individual unencumbered by the preconceptions of others that are based solely on race, and is born with a sense of selfhood that no minority will never achieve. And in the presence of this selfhood, there is no under­standing of what it means to wear a face that marks every non-white person as foreign in the country of his or her birth.