This is excellent — I recently told some liberal white friends (I am also white) that I consider myself a racist because I’ve been so indoctrinated by pervasive racism that racist thoughts come up in me on a regular basis.

They hastened to assure me that having racist thoughts does not make me a racist.

I wish I had given them a stronger response, but here’s the truth: the thing that allowed me to give in — OK, OK! So I’m not A Racist — to write off their argument as a silly matter od semantics — was our shared white privilege.

Defining terms matters.

The racism I hate the most is my own. The curious thing is that this doesn’t make me all curdled up and writhing with guilt, but rather it helps me feel free — free to dare to leap out of my comfort zone, free to want to love recklessly but with humility, free to be challenged.

To become, as you say, the world — but a much larger, less fear — driven world than the one of uptight privilege I was born into.

(I say “uptight” because good manners were my parents’ sole guide to how to be in the world. We were only allowed white underwear (ha!) and I had to take each pair of undies from the bottom of the excessively neat stack in my drawer so they would all “wear out evenly.”)