Concerning 'Dear White America' in the New York Times

By Jeremy Egerer

The great irony of a hunger strike is that it does nothing to prove the morality of the hunger striker.  It does everything to prove the morality of the man he's striking against.  Millions of horrible people have been willing to die for horrible causes, and we have only been the worse for it.  Far fewer have been willing to save the life of a suicidal enemy.  And if you do happen to go on a hunger strike and win, the only thing you've done is proved that your enemy cares more about you than his cause.  You can win a hunger strike only against a person who cares about people.  You can defeat your enemy only if your enemy is actually a saint.  Gandhi may have saved the Indians from the English.  We can only wonder how successful he would have been against al-Qaeda. 

In almost exactly the same way, writing an open letter to white Americans doesn't prove that white Americans are racists; it proves only that black men believe that white men are capable of listening to other races.  And if blacks believe that whites are capable of listening (as their hundreds of open letters implicitly insist), blacks can only believe that white people are capable of society.  The franker and more frequent your pleas to the people you've judged without meeting, the more you have glorified their radical empathy and tolerance.  The fact that a black man can publicly admonish every white man leaves us wondering why black men are largely incapable of taking criticism from whites......To Read More......