I'm Done Apologizing For Being White, And You Should Be Too

I’ve often been told I have no right to write about race.

I’ve also been told that I pompously “think I have a right” to write about race just because I married a Mexican.

And you know what? Often I find myself second guessing nine-tenths of what I say because, undoubtedly I’ll say something that someone somewhere will scream about how I have no right to say for one simple fact:

I’m white.

Even as I sit here writing this, I’ve stopped and started at least a dozen times, thinking about the right way to put all this to mitigate the inevitable backlash.

But you know what? That’s actually the entire point.

We need to stop apologizing for being white.

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No—there aren’t millions of white people running around with scarlet letters on their clothes in shame and embarrassment, but they might as well be.

When our education system peddles workshops like “Deconstructing Whiteness” (Northwestern University’s latest offering), that’s exactly what’s going on.

They’re helping the next generation of young white Americans affix that proverbial scarlet letter for the rest of their lives.

Here’s how it works: students at Northwestern University who “self-identify as white” can participate in a six-week course that guides them through “terminology used in conversations of race, the history and meaning of whiteness, white guilt and the difference between intellectualizing and feeling racism.”

(Oh, and it’s voluntary—except once you begin it you can’t leave until you’ve finished all six weeks.)

Ok, so let me ask you this:

What problems are solved by raising entire generations of Americans to hate the color of their skin?

What problems are solved by rewriting history and teaching millions of young people to believe that white people are the only perpetrators of ill the world has ever seen?

What problems are solved by dictating how and who may have conversations about race?

What problems are solved by furthering the fallacy that skin color is the only determining factor in issues of injustice?

Instead, conditioning people to hate who they are because others who look like them did terrible things only deepens the disgusting (and ever growing) racial divide in this country.

Conditioning society to believe racism only goes one way just gives a free pass to people like the despicable group of black teens who surrounded a Marine at a McDonald’s and beat him up after he didn’t react to their racial harassment.

Conditioning society to believe that success in life is the result of “white privilege” does nothing to fix the brokenness in the African American family, where so many children grow up fatherless and impoverished.

“Whiteness” does not inherently cause oppression. Spreading this fallacy that whiteness alone has causes and continues to cause racism is no less logically flawed than insisting that spoons make you fat, or gas pedals get you speeding tickets.

We’re completely ignoring the human element. We’re flawed. We ALL make the very same mistakes—from hate to slavery to superiority complexes and everything in between.

And no amount of white-hating, white-shaming propaganda is going to fix that.

So, want to help heal the racial divide? Start by ditching the ridiculously one-sided racial reeducation workshops.

And stop apologizing for your race.

Mary Ramirez is a full-time writer, creator of www.afuturefree.com(a political commentary blog), and contributor to The Chris Salcedo Show (TheBlaze Radio Network, Saturday, from noon to 3 p.m. ET). She can be reached at: afuturefree@aol.com; or on Twitter: @AFutureFree

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