Actually, the definition of "racism" stipulates a belief in the inherent superiority of some races over others or abusive behavior based on such a belief. It can be a person (of any color), a government or an institution that's racist. To suggest, as this teacher did, that having a single racist thought makes you "racist" is like saying that having a single homosexual fantasy makes you "gay": this attitude trivializes and oversimplifies a deeper orientation to the world. The class of educated, liberal, middle-class white suburbanites the author so snidely dismisses are, as a group, the least racist people you’ll meet. They have probably observed and interrogated their own racial attitudes and, if they attended a typical liberal arts school, endured their fair share of derisive swipes about the shortcomings of their own middle-class white American culture. If they’re naïve about the latest trend in white culpability, it's probably because they’re unconflicted about race and, therefore, less likely to seek discourse about it. They’re also easy targets for academics and activists with a philosophical axe to grind because, unlike the racist Latinos, racist Asians, racist blacks and racist Native Americans in Seattle, the white kids’ culture doesn’t come shielded by a narrative of oppression that deflects criticism from outsiders. Speaking from personal experience, the most corrosive racist comments I regularly hear come from Asian immigrants, and the only people I have heard use the so-called “N word” in the past 20 years have been Cubans. So, racism is a much more complicated problem than just the attitudes of whites. I think it’s perfectly natural to notice racial differences and the impact of race on culture and class and, considering our national heritage of discrimination, it’s also natural to entertain ideas of racial superiority or inferiority: whether or not you’re a “racist”, however, depends on whether you stay stuck in those ideas.

Ok, so I shouldn’t call an eloquent African-American person "eloquent" and I shouldn’t call an African American boy a "boy". (I was once instructed by an African American woman that I shouldn’t say "May I help you?" to African American customers because that term was used to scare black people out of white stores). I should tolerate black men walking in the street and refusing to let me pass because they are "claiming ownership". I should scorn certain grocery store chains because they’re "stuff white people like". I should avoid buying or renting in a black neighborhood lest I "gentrify". I should experience my own accomplishments in life through a lens darkened by the shadow of white privilege. I should accept the label of "racist" applied to me by somebody else without objection. I should build a different vocabulary, and use a different set of behaviors and hold to different expectations the African Americans in my life than other groups. Most importantly, since I lack the intellectual integrity to understand and define my own intentions, behaviors and feelings about race, I should accept somebody else’s definition of what I am, what I intend, what I stand for and how I interact in the world. And this is the level of accommodation and self-reproach that white people must voluntarily provide in order to for America to move forward on race??? Really??