Transcript: I remember Diana Dunn saying to me one time– she's a trainer and one of the founders of The People’s Institute with Jim and Ron and Barbara and others–she would say, you know, there are millions of white people in this country who are poor. She said that to me and I said, well, you know Diana, I know that. I got an analysis. She said, no, no, no, no. That's not what I'm saying. She says, but not one of us is poor because we're white. Damn, that's deep. You know, that's true. I'm poor for a whole lot of reasons. There are all sorts of things that can happen to me and sometimes I’m the object of discrimination, but never on the basis of race. It might be because I don't have the right credentials, or somebody might be prejudiced against short men, or whatever it might be. But the society doesn't work against me, it works for me. 

And that's why we'll hedge our bets. That's why the working class–who for centuries has internalized a certain message–when asked to join Black, brown, and red brethren or sisters, will hesitate. They might not know what that voice is. What that voice is saying is, wait a minute now. If you go too far, you're going to lose that which is the reason why you have advantage in the first place. 

And all white people know this. Some of us are guilty and feed ourselves over it, some of us will deny it and say, but I don’t see myself as white, and we always joke and say, well, you better, because everybody else does! Or white people will say, I don't see color. We say all sorts of things, and those are genuine, very human expressions, but in fact, it doesn't help, it hurts. When the whole world sees you a certain way, but you're in denial, you get out of touch with reality. And the white supremacist culture that we live in—I'm not making an ideological statement with that; it just means that the culture is dominated by how white people think—makes it so I have what I have because of my relationship to these sanctioned systems. I gotta understand that. 

That does not mean that I can't fight racism, that I can't be against oppression and I can't speak on this. I can speak on it if I'm organizing. If you're not organizing, someone can challenge you and say, why do you go around speaking about this? Shouldn't somebody else get asked that all the time? But if I'm organizing with other whites, I'm organizing in coalitions of accountability to people of color, to deny our voice and say you shouldn't speak out is to keep everything the way it is.