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Although this article may seem like a condemnation of white people, it has not been written for that purpose. I hope that I can awaken some sense of accountability and sensitivity of my people in this country toward black people. I want to help all of us see, as I have seen, that even in our good deeds, we are sometimes arrogant and condescending and that is what some black people dislike most about us today. Unless we make the effort to know black people as individuals and respect them enough to listen to their experiences with our hearts, we will never even come close to understanding what is like to be black in America.

When we are confronted with the resentment and anger that some black people still feel toward us and the government, we don't seem to even want to try to understand their viewpoint. To the contrary, our prevailing attitude is that they should just get over it or that it's just some ploy for attention that is without merit. We pat ourselves on the back for all the advances we have made in civil rights and the opportunities that now exist and we expect black people to be grateful and proud of the country along with us. We don't see how it's difficult for them to feel grateful for merely being allowed access to what was already theirs or to trust a country that held them back for so long. We ignore the shame of the wrong we did and focus on this pride in ourselves for how far we've come when all we've really done as a nation is to stop fighting what should have always been. Whatever freedoms and rights blacks now enjoy were not ours to give but are the birthright of every American that had been denied to a whole race of people.

When I was a child in the 1960s, I remember being thirsty on a shopping trip with my mom and the whites only fountain was broken. That I couldn't drink from the other fountain made no sense to me but I was told that it would be against the law if I did. Some of us may not realize that the segregation of the South was not only held in place by rabid peer pressure but also mandated by the law. The civil rights movement was not started just to change the attitudes and prejudices of individuals or to get business owners to take down the signs and serve blacks. It was a fight against state and local government laws and ordinances that restricted the rights of all people to freely associate and do business as they chose. Those laws were overturned and amendments passed but to point to them as evidence that discrimination

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