Jason O'Reilly is of mixed race. His mother is hispanic and his father is white. His mother struggled and so did his father, both of whom won scholarships to prestigious universities by working hard and excelling. They did well and enjoyed prosperous careers; the first in each of their respective families to be so distinguished.
Because of them, their son grew up with various advantages, like having a stable home with two parents who modeled virtue and industry. But his real privilege is his white name and looking mostly white too, a relief and a curse at the same time. Being white-ish has prevented all the traffic stops and glares of disapproval and discrimination with respect to job applications. Nevermind that he lost out on two jobs for which he applied, one to an Asian man and another to a black woman, and another black woman was promoted ahead of him. He is not bitter. As his middle class life has developed, Jason has worked hard, saved, married, had kids, and has done these things with a high degree of constancy in virtuous living. His interactions with black people can only be described as genial, respectful, even boring in their normality.
Jason grew to be a happy professional, whose university, culture, friends, and now even his grown kids, all believe to be a racist, having benefited from generations of illicitly won advantages, and allegedly having done nothing to correct for this abuse. He doesn’t even have a black friend! He is so ignorant that he gives to organizations that care for the human poor and not just the black poor! And he is obviously a selfish custodian of his advantages rather than saying something or doing something about injustice for black people. He even thinks that America is, on balance, a relatively good place. What a racist fool!
Jason is now old, perplexed, and worn down by being called a racist for his entire adult life, though he has never done or said anything to disparage a black person. He is assured that his racism is passive and that it is invisible to him. He has been called a racist for so long that he now wonders what the loss is in actually being one. Before he wasn’t uncomfortable around black people, but now he knows everything that their social media and political and cultural advocates think about him. He doesn't know how to behave around them and walks on egg shells around them for fear that he will say something wrong. He calls them "them” now. Previously he didn't see color. Now he sees it everywhere.
When he was younger, he worked with black people, went to college with black people, did commerce with black people and just thought of them as people, which is his most egregious offence. His own kids keep trying to evangelize him, pressing him to acknowledge the sin of racism, and cudgeling him to offer proper self-flagellation. But Jason still doesn't see the racism in his past, and probably won't because his privilege so blinds him. His kids have decided to cancel him in the winter of his days, withholding his grandchildren from him for fear he might contaminate them by his obliviousness.
Clearly the blossoming of Jason’s privilege and unconscious bias and implicit racism and white washing and murky white id personality--which he doesn't see but everyone else does--have motivated him to keep the black man down. Is there anything more obvious about this guy? Like Oprah says, there is no hope for some people. We just have to wait for them to die, and then make progress with the next generation.
