Thread: 'How Whites Think About Race'

"Get away from me!"

People across the ideological spectrum are agitated over this Philadelphia Magazine article by Robert Huber entitled , “Being White in Philly: Whites, race, class, and the things that never get said.” The article centers on anonymous interviews with white people describing their “honest” views about race, often not stated publicly according to the author. Huber describes the genesis of his article as follows:

A few months ago I began spending time in Fairmount, just north of the Art Museum. Formerly a working-class enclave of row homes, it’s now a gentrifying neighborhood with middle-class cachet and good restaurants. I went to the northern edge, close to Girard Avenue, generally considered the dividing line from North Philly, and began asking the mostly middle-class white people who live there, for whom race is an everyday issue, how it affects them.

How Whites Think About Race | ThinkProgress

“We need to bridge the conversational divide so that there are no longer two private dialogues in Philadelphia—white people talking to other whites, and black people to blacks—but a city in which it is okay to speak openly about race. That feels like a lot to ask, a leap of faith for everyone. It also seems like the only place to go, the necessary next step.”

I disagree. I think there is always more truth spoken when whites talk to whites and Blacks talk to Blacks. It creates segregation and the desire for segregation. Getting the races to come together to speak about each other's concerns or biases with open dialogue causes people to water down their opinions so they don't incur wrath.