Being White (and walking on eggshells) in Philly

Being White in Philly
Whites, race, class, and the things that never get said.

Robert Huber

March 2013, Philadelphia Magazine

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My younger son goes to Temple, where he’s a sophomore. This year he’s living in an apartment with two friends at 19th and Diamond, just a few blocks from campus. It’s a dangerous neighborhood. Whenever I go see Nick, I get antsy and wonder what I was thinking, allowing him to rent there. ...

[one of the neighborhood whites interviewed] 

“Oh,” he says, smiling, “I went home one night from the bar and two guys smashed my face into the cement steps of my house”—that’s what messed up his glasses. “A few days later I got my wallet back in the mail—they had thrown it in somebody’s mailbox.”

He acknowledges that his assailants were black. “Not that that matters,” he says. ...

We’re stuck in another way, too. Our troubled black communities create in us a tangle of feelings, including this one: a desire for things to be better. But for that sentiment to come true—for it to mean anything, even— I've come to believe that white people have to risk being much more open. ...

http://www.phillymag.com/articles/white-philly/2/

     When I started reading this long piece, containing so much admirable honesty about race relations, I knew, to be published in a mainstream publication, it eventually would have to circle back to a position of at least semi-political correctness. But someone once said, "Where there is no solution, there is no problem." 

     Vast numbers of my fellow whites can't get around the idea that there are inherent racial differences with inherent consequences, like drastically differing crime rates, the inability to satisfyingly 'communicate' with each other, and the inability, of course always with exceptions, to live openly and peacefully amongst each other. 

     It has taken us decades of mandatory government-approved education to unlearn the common sense and instinctual gut feelings that different peoples all over the world have known and felt for eons, and what every other race in the world still knows. 
     
     You have to wonder how many of us have died and how many more will die as we continue chasing this utopian fantasy that will never and can never come true. And how many of our kids and grandkids will be sacrificed, as we continue to piously nobly toss them down into the fiery volcano to satisfy the Great Equality God.