"White Anxiety and the Futility of Black Hope"

“What really strikes me now, as I think about your question, is how old I was — around 30 — before I ever engaged whiteness philosophically, or personally, for that matter. Three decades where that question never came up and yet the unjust advantages whiteness generally provides white people fully shaped my life, including my philosophical training and work..

I think that white people have a small but important role to play in combating white domination. Small, because the idea isn’t that white people are going to lead that work; they need to be following the work and leadership of people of color. But important because, given de facto racial segregation, there still are many pockets of whiteness — in neighborhoods, businesses, classrooms, philosophy departments – where you need white people who are going to challenge racism when it pops up. Which it often does.

But I think I have to add that this role is absurd. I mean absurd in the technical existentialist sense that, for example, Kierkegaard and Camus gave it. I don’t have a lot of hope that our white-saturated society is ever going to change, and at the same time it is crucial that one struggles for that change. Those two things don’t rationally fit together, I realize. It’s absurd to struggle for something that you don’t think can happen, and yet we (people of all races) should...
James Baldwin said it best when he argued that white people will have to learn how to love themselves and each other before they can let go of their need for black inferiority."

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/white-anxiety-and-the-futility-of-black-hope/

hmmm, “philosophy of race/whiteness”. There is a lot in this interview. The piece about violence and options for change.