As someone who, when young, developed ideas that were not present in my family, church, or school environments, the idea that people are expected to conform to ideas merely associated with some in-group they cannot help but belong to (and as a kid, there were few opt-outs for me, practically, to family, church, or school) is bizarre. And possibly insulting.

Yet the woke folk insist that the African-American descendants of slaves are only authentic to their true selves when they adopt wokist race theory and some variant of socialism. When a white woke neighbor recently accused non-woke whites of being racist for their skepticism about Black Lives Matter, I mentioned that many blacks hated BLM. One lackwit retiree was incredulous, wanting proof. It is probably one of my many character faults that leads me rarely to provide such evidence. The examples are many and varied, so if you have not seen them, you know you have bubbled yourself in a tightly sealed ideologically secure media container, I typed back. When my white woke interlocutor restated his demand, I responded, Do your own homework.

It had apparently not crossed the mind of this white woke joke of a fool that his very expectation of black uniformity of opinion based merely on a name is the acme of condescension.

I like to joke that White Privilege consists in ONE THING ONLY: the expectation that no opinion inheres to us by reason of race.

But that is a problematic thing to joke about, seeing that we are told incessantly that white privilege does not include the privilege of not being racist.

twv