I struggle with White Privilege and White Guilt because a lot of White people think there is no reason for it. The Civil Rights movement won the battle. It is illegal to discriminate against anyone — Black, Brown or White. Now, can you kindly stop talking about it.

Why stop talking about? Do we stop talking about other historical events? Say the Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Civil War (battles only) and any other historical event. We don’t. Why is it so important for people to stop talking about Racism?

I was reminded of the reason the other day when a friend posted the following picture to Facebook.

The picture of Black teenager surrounded by a crowd of angry White women reveals everything. White people don’t want to think of Grandma as some racist thug. They want to think of her baking apple pies and reading bedtime stories. Don’t you dare take that memory away from me. The truth here is very difficult for white people because our ancestors are the villains. And that means acknowledging that Grandma might have been a racist thug.

The founders of the country, by and large, shared this prejudice. Anyone studying this country’s history needs to study this. An ideology of racial superiority was created that enabled white people to enslave Blacks and deprive them of their rights. This too is important to study. Millions of White people for hundreds of year either actively stopped Black people from being treated as their equals or did absolutely nothing to change this situation. This means, particularly for any white whose family arrived before 1965, that unless their family were known civil rights activists, their family is in some culpable in this racist enterprise. To understand our history, this too has to be examined.

I know for certain that my ancestors, all who arrived before 1870, are suspect. I know of no civil rights activists in my family’s past. I have no record of them being KKK members or belong to any racists organization so they are in that large group of Whites who did absolutely nothing to help Blacks win their rights. Their silence allowed racism to flourish. Why were they silent while Blacks were lynched and deprived of rights? This is a question worth pursuing. This means looking at racism and how it affected White people’s behavior.

It is painful. I get why people don’t want to look at it. It doesn’t fit into our nice tidy story of hardy European immigrants braving the Atlantic and hostile natives to settle our country. But, unfortunately, that story, in no way, will help you understand American History.