What I wanted (and still want—for the writing of this essay has not done it) was to loose and shake off the confining coils of race and the racial experience so that the integration—my personal integration and commitment—can be made to something bigger than race, and more enduring, and truer. For race is a myth: it is artificial; and it is, I hope, at last a dying concept. Meantime, while it lives, it is also a barrier and a terrible, terrible burden. It is a barrier to nearly everyone, white and black, in America. It is a burden to everyone too, but it is a personal burden to the Negro—a burden of shame and outrage imposed on him at the earliest moment of consciousness and never lifted till death, and all his energies, mental, emotional, spiritual, must be held in reserve for carrying it. Though I could not tell it, I saw the whole truth plain, and I think perhaps this seeing helped at least to rid me of the illusion (temporary at best) that there is something ennobling in being able to step aside from the struggle race imposes, and that I would find inner security in doing so. It was a pretty and an attractive illusion. If only I were not Negro!—that, of course, was the impossible dream-wish on which the illusion was founded. But I know now that there is no neutrality in being white in America, and I have at least the comfort of knowing that some white people too suffer from the limitations and frustrations of “whiteness.” This was brought home to me more forcefully than ever since I began this essay. This was the meaning, really, of a newspaper story datelined “Brundidge, Ala., June 21 (1951)”: “An angry, armed band of white farmers shot a Negro field worker today on the false rumor that he had kidnapped a white woman. Forrest Jones ... was wounded ... by a shotgun blast as he returned home after taking a white child, hurt in an automobile accident, to a doctor’s office.” A burden on the conscience and on the soul! This is what the books by both Southern apologists and liberals mean. This is what Lillian Smith and Hodding Carter and Howard Odum mean. I can even believe that John Rankin and Richard Russell and James Byrnes and Strom Thurmond signify this in their acts and in their words, and that Theodore Bilbo signified this too. Whiteness does not mitigate the relentless warping by the race situation in America. White men are half-men too—sick men, and perhaps some of them the more to be pitied because they do not know that they are sick. Some of them—the good, lucky ones, like Lillian Smith—have succeeded somewhat in objectifying it; but neither for them nor for me is there a neutral ground on which to stand. Neither they nor I can resign from the human race. The best I can hope to do is to externalize the struggle and set it in the unconfined context of the universal struggle for human dignity and wholeness and unity.