Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud

Alice Walker:

I made my first white women friends in college; they were women who loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered. That, for instance, at Sarah Lawrence, where I was speedily inducted into the Board of Trustees practically as soon as I graduated, I made my way to the campus for meetings by train, subway and foot, while the other trustees, women and men, all white, made their way by limo. Because, in our country, with its painful history of unspeakable inequality, this is part of what whiteness means. I loved my school for trying to make me feel I mattered to it, but because of my relative poverty I knew I could not.

There's a grievous, entrenched wrongheadedness about this. Which point is more important: that they're all trustees or that Walker alone takes public transport?

What's next, Harvard Law graduates complaining about their lot? Okay, I'm indulging in hyperbole.

Oops.