Ah, thank you, that’s much clearer. I was wondering why you were seeming to include the people who I would have thought were a lost cause. Because you kept coming back to it without caveats or restrictions, I had mistakenly assumed that you were extending to them also the invitation to build a hopeful future. But the rock-in-the-shoe analogy (that’s great, by the way!) is very fitting. There are a lot of white people who are very hard to reach because they’re emotionally invested in playing their side of identity politics. It makes sense that you wouldn’t be reaching out to them, but only the people already easier to reach.

I do think it makes the piece rather less audacious than I had originally thought. It originally seemed to me like you were trying to one-up MLK Jr. and Douglass on inclusiveness and vision for a better future, and were doing a good enough job that one might almost believe it was possible. But, okay, no, not that. The piece is still moving, still paints a compelling picture of a better future, even if you plan to get there by having an identity politics and a class politics fight at the same time.

So, given that my original reply (and the follow-up) were based on a misconception, what would you like me to do? Two possible options are (1) do nothing and anyone who cares will read through to this point, or (2) I can edit my posts to say at the top that I had misinterpreted the stance and inviting any readers to continue on to see the resolution. Or something else.

If I hadn’t been under the impression that you actually were trying to invite everyone inside the tent, I probably wouldn’t have commented at all, just left a bunch of claps. It’s a well-delivered perspective that more people should consider, even if they end up rejecting it.

I’m invested in the well-being and flourishing of people, not identities, because people feel things and identities don’t. Countries don’t go, “ow, ow, my GDP hurts so bad!”. Asian identity doesn’t weep because yet again it wasn’t cast into all the movies. These things matter not for their own sake but because of the impact they have on actual people. But I still think your identity-heavy message deserves a broad audience, not least because when people of a particular identity are mistreated, it harms the well-being of a lot of people. People are not disjoint from their various identities.

I won’t directly address your comments on whiteness (though I appreciate the effort that went into them) except to say: white supremacy has been used to justify a ton of inhumane behavior (especially after everyone was forcibly converted to Christianity, so the whole “heathen/pagan” thing was out as justification), but viewing history only through that lens provides such a restrictive view that it is very difficult to understand many important trends. Given what you ascribe to whiteness, I’m not surprised that you think it’s the key adversary to be ousted. But it’s a huge and important topic, worth being addressed with thoughtfulness, and this isn’t the place. You make some great points, some iffy ones, some bad ones, and it would take pages and pages of writing to dissect it all and try to build adequate historical perspective and coherence with modern thinkers about race relations (e.g. whether the benefits of whiteness are invisible or not has profound implications for how attached we should assume white people are to the institutional support for specifically that identity).

However, I have been reasonably polite and thoughtful, if a tad snarky at times. You’ve called me racist, immoral, a soft white supremacist, said I’m making assumptions about your anger, charged me with presenting false dichotomies, and apparently doubled down on it after I had a chance to make clarifications in areas that could reasonably have been misunderstood (c.f. “yes, I was talking to you. Yes. You.”). And you did so without a single other specific charge being called out — all just general statements of strong negative affect.

I have an active subscription to the “sticks and stones” camp of discourse, so I can view baseless or inaccurate charges as simple mistakes, not cause for outrage. Nonetheless, if that’s what you think “opening our hearts to our neighbors” looks like, I’ll pass.