What Do "White People" Have to Do with Darren Wilson?

I've seen several Internet comments asking what "white people" as a group have to do with Darren Wilson. It's painful but simple: we created him.

We created a culture that devalues black lives, most especially young black male lives. That's us. We created a culture that sees police force against black citizens as acceptable "law and order" but sees force against white citizens as an aberration at best and government tyranny at worst. Look at the responses to Waco and Ruby Ridge. That's us. We created a culture that is reflectively defensive in the extreme, banding together in support of "our own" whenever one of us is criticized, much less actually attacked, by one of "those people." Us again. We created a culture that thinks the answer to racism is for everyone else to stop talking about the existence of racism, while we pretend to "not see color." Us, too. And it was us, as a group, who collected over a half a million dollars in donations to support Darren Wilson BEFORE his legal guilt or innocence had even begun to be tested. THAT's what we have to do with Darren Wilson.

If any given white person wants to NOT be "lumped in" with those "other" white people, we have to start by admitting who and what we have been and continue to be, culturally. And then we have to actively reject and work against those things in white culture that we want to be separated from in the eyes of others. And after that...we have to recognize, understand, and accept that because we always have benefitted and always will benefit from the racial inequalities in this country, we are GOING to be included in any discussions of what white people do as a group and a culture, with at best an occasional mention of us not being "like that".