Dear Editor:

The good news for nominally liberal white people is that we do not have to display a confederate battle flag, join the KKK or the NRA to be a white supremacist. I know that there are many who might be cringing at the thought that there is such a thing as being a “socially acceptable” white supremacist, but not to worry, your one black or brown friend will not unfriend you and the Southern Poverty Law Center will still accept your donations.

So read on in the full comfort that your white supremacy will not only be “under the radar” but will seem to be completely reasonable and even virtuous to your white friends and neighbors.

The American cult of the individual is one of the primary tools in maintaining white supremacy. It is in focusing on individual responsibility while denying the idea of a collective responsibility that allows us the comfort of the illusion of innocence. When we deny that there is systematic racism at work within our society, masked by the red herring idea of individual responsibility, we allow the machinery of our socio-political apparatus to continue the racial oppression that has long been propagated since the first slaves were brought to our shores.

The pervasive and subtle manifestations of racial oppression are numerous, with police violence being the most visible part of an otherwise invisible and deeply rooted cancer. We must ask ourselves why people of color are filling our prisons, live in neighborhoods where the housing and schools are in deplorable conditions, have high crime rates, high rates of substance abuse, and have poorer health and shorter life expectancies. It is not because they, as individuals, are lazy, stupid or shiftless. We need to recognize the part we play in propagating this massive system of social injustice that we have inherited.

We do not have to have ill intent to promote the kind of racism that is giving rise to this injustice. All we need to do is nothing to allow it to continue. This is how we make our white supremacy socially acceptable.

Fred W. Nehring

Boothbay