White Millennials Explain What It Means To Be White In America, And You Should Listen

"We’ve never had to internalize what white people have done in here in America."

In 1955 James Baldwin traveled to Leukerbad, Switzerland, a tiny village nestled in the heart of the Alps. The inhabitants, who had not encountered too many black people, marveled, and often gaped, at his dark skin and gloriously kinky hair. Children innocently shouted “Neger! Neger!” when they laid eyes on Baldwin, who quickly realized his status as a stranger. The trip provoked a reflection on the ability of race to reveal as much about white people as about the black "other."

“What one’s imagination makes of other people is dictated, of course, by the Master race laws of one’s own personality and it’s one of the ironies of black-white relations that, by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is,” Baldwin wrote in his essay “Stranger in the Village.”

Sixty years after Baldwin's voyage, Jose Antonio Vargas is taking Baldwin’s efforts one step further by turning the spotlight onto white people to gauge how whiteness factors into America's racial dynamic.....