This is what I have come to know about white privilege. The playing fields are nevel level. One can be angry about it, or weep about it. I don’t waste my emotions on bigots. I just try to outperform racists. I subscribe to former US first lady Michelle Obama’s adage - ‘When they go low, we go high’.

As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.

There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing - race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy - serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

My grandparents don’t call themselves white, and neither does my mother. They call themselves Armenian. But America does not agree. To America, they are white. That was precisely what my great-grandfather hoped for. Whatever they call themselves, whiteness has claimed them. Whiteness cloaks them and keeps them safe.

So where does this leave the narrator? Hating whites and wishing them all dead? Of course not. “In order really to hate white people,” he now observes, “one has to blot so much out of the mind—and the heart—that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destructive pose. But this does not mean, on the other hand, that love comes easily: the white world is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and, above all, too ignorant and too innocent for that. One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one’s own reactions are always canceling each other out. It is this, really, which has driven so many people mad, both white and black.