The problem of White Supremacy - Spinoff from Buffalo Shooting thread

I have a lot of random thoughts that on the issue that I can't really make into a coherent whole, so I'll just sort of post.

1. On the surface it is very frustrating because people my age and general upbringing (middle class southern educated white family) have mostly been raised to believe that racism is absolutely terrible and a relic of the past. We've been basically been taught that we just need to believe everyone is the same and it will all be ok. And clearly it hasn't worked out that way. So, not only did what we want to believe to be true is in fact not true, but we are also really not equipped to talk about the issue... since collectively we were taught that being racist is terrible and your a terrible person if you're racist, and wait, if in fact racism is baked into everything, does that make us all terrible people? No one wants to believe they're a terrible person.. so whenever the issue comes up we retreat to defensiveness. Basically, we don't even know how to talk about the issue.

2. Lots of things can be true at once, and that can be confusing. You can be white and poor and have disadvantages, and the system can still be set up to favor white people. And that can lead to tons of resentment. If I'm poor, and have poor health care, and tons of debt and poor access to tools to improve my life, it has got to be incredibly frustrating to hear how the system is rigged in their favor and that we need to give more money and advantages to minorities. They might not have anything specifically against minorities, but they sure as heck don't want people to get more help than they are getting when they are struggling. I think a lot of modern day racism and resentment stems from this.

3. Going back to issue one, we've never had an actual discussion on everything that was done to hinder minorities, made a real apology and done anything specifically to redress those wrongs. Those are critical for national healing, but now it has gone on so long without that, that it becomes harder and seems less "just", because the effects are no longer direct, they're in the weeds and pervasive, but not directly obvious.

4. Some of this can be addressed in the near term by creating a more equitable system, where everyone gets similar resources to make their lives better. Black Americans will get more of this help because they are the ones collectively with fewer resources to begin with, but it will also benefit everyone. This means better schools, health care and so on for everyone. Try to actually create equality of opportunity (an impossible goal, but a worthy one).

5. The idea of systemic racism and implict bias seems to be difficult to explain and because of issue 1, I think many people want to ignore.