This is the second excellent post-Floyd article with an awful title I have read this week on Medium. Too many articles appear here that scold white people for being poor allies. This is not one of them, but the title cries out that it is. Why not call it "What White People Can Do to Help"? You can put in all the "don'ts" you want, but at least you wont' turn away readers before they become readers.

BTW, Ms. Dockery uses the term "anti-black racism," something for which there definitely needs to be a word. "Racism" alone, as she implies, doesn't cut it. The mistreatment of blacks is unique in our history. Other minorities have prospered despite WASP animosity. Those groups are subject to racist discrimination and attack, but on the macro level, they have achieved parity (at least) with their white neighbors, while black people are still being killed by cops.

Jews have their own word to signal the uniqueness of their history, and it has served them well. Black people need one too. Instead, black leaders have put their effort into finding and promoting new things to make white people call them. I've lived through "colored," "negro," "afro-american," "black", and the current "African-American," which, predictably, white people use to describe black people from everywhere. Rather than a meaningless sylllabification tax, imposed just to prove it can be done, I suggest that the energy go into finding a unique name for anti-black racism, something that carves out one historically driven and odious disdain from the natural, albeit regrettable, urge to protect one's genes from harmless or even beneficial intercourse.

I think a Darwinian, "selfish-gene" case can be made that we are all born "racists," and must learn to behave otherwise. But we are not born with a special antipathy toward black people. Racism per se is arguably innate, but anti-black racism is learned. That message needs to be captured in its name.