This discussion makes me want to give up. I think Cary did the best he could given the things that it's simply not possible to say without losing your job or worse in this fucked up country, where political correctness is a tyranny exercised mostly by people who've never experienced any real oppression against people who've never done any serious oppressing. Stereotyping may be unfair, but it has a lot of survival value in daily life, and you make judgements about groups of people based on your experiences with them, not on how you wish things were. That's just human. Why don't people who identify as members of minority groups take some responsibility for the fact that it's so often easy to jump to the conclusion that they're inferior. Equality is not an economic situation, people, and two wrongs don't make a right. I hate it that so many of you assume that racism is something whites have a monopoly on, when there are more and more situations where straight, white men are the people who are the objects of prejudice from empowered minorities.

Thrasher, my point is that in the few places where white privilege ceases to be the standard, like some universities, somebody else generally assumes privilege, and treats whites the way they feel they've been treated, as if that was going to do anything except perpetuate divisions. I've seen this over and over again where I work, and read about it, e.g. in J.M Coetzee's Disgrace. If whites complain about this they're dismissed as just being sore about losing their privilege, but that is frequently not the case. They are in fact victims of exactly the kind of prejudice that the people victimizing them claim to be fighting against. Meanwhile white people who do get sore about losing their privilege only condemn themselves further by asking the kind of ignorant questions they need to ask to educate themselves about the things minorities are up in arms about, and so what passes for activism is just a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Nobody has a monopoly on racism or stupidity, was my point, and people are at their most dangerous when they're in the right, which was Cary's point, I think. Your response to my letter is typical of what happens when anybody questions the new orthodoxies being established in places like Salon and the aforementioned universities. I have a point of view, and while you may disagree with it, it's the opinion of a fairly intelligent person based on the data available to him. I'm open to having my mind changed, but I sense that you, and many others who write letters to the editor here, are not. None of you has the right to assume, as you seem to do, the burden of your forebears' pain, any more than it's fair to assume that just because they've been born into a system of privilege, the unconscious racism of whites makes them assholes.

all you have to refute my 'rant' with is personal insults. You're the problem, not the solution.

I don't see how the phrase implies that. It implies that there is a usual order for racism in this country, not a natural one, though I agree that it's a misleading phrase if it implies that racism is more usually practiced by one particular group.

What Lobelia said. I try not to be a self righteous vegetarian, because I'm not perfect, but there's no excuse, in my opinion, for eating meat in rich societies like ours. The innocent suffering of animals who have no words to express their pain is the most terrible fact I know about the world. It disturbs me more than the suffering of men and women, which I can sometimes make a kind of sense of because it is never completely innocent.

I have a different but somewhat similar situation. There are places I want to go that I don't go because of the presence of someone who hurt me badly, who has no remorse for what they did, and who will hurt me again if given the opportunity. I've lived with my anger about this for a very long time. The anger hasn't disappeared, but it has become easier to live with since I accepted that it's a no-win situation. If I avoid them completely I lose a community that is important to me. If I assert my membership of that community by showing up to events where they are also present, I have to live with the discomfort of being around them, of trying to avoid eye contact, of the internal battle not to engage with them and try to make them feel bad for what they did to me. I can't win. This is the world I live in now.

I don't know for sure what I'd do in your situation, but I think that since it's a one off event, I would go to it. I don't know if you're likely to get the kind of closure that Cary hopes for for you, but you never know what it might trigger. If you don't go I suspect nothing will happen except that you'll feel angry about not being able to go. If you go and it's awful, well, you tried something and it didn't work out that well, but it's over now and you live far away from those people. Either alternative hurts. You can't win. Deal with it.

And maybe buy yourself some flowers.