eggy McIntosh said it many years ago; the main political tool is silence. About what? We can barely mention its name.

There are reasons for the silence. Sometimes people do not want to disrupt relationships. In a recent book, sociologist Kathleen Korgen describes a study of 40 interracial pairs of close friends. Each pair consisted of one black person and one white person. She concluded these friends seldom discussed race. It was too threatening. In the only pair where it became a topic, the friends were breaking apart. Few people like to disrupt social harmony, so often people bear a burden of inequality rather than speak out.

Speaking out invites reprisals. People who speak about racism and whiteness in the United States are often labeled "pariahs" in mainstream settings. They may lose their social standing, perhaps even their jobs. Extremists may target their property or their bodies for physical assault. Milder forms of reaction are commonplace. When the Washington Post recently ran an article on white studies, our organization received a small shower of emails castigating us for our operation and stance. This is no surprise. At some level, every white American understands if he or she breaks the white cultural taboo of silence on whiteness, these things will happen.

Reprisals aside, there is a concerted effort to keep discussion of whiteness out of public discourse. This begins with mis-education in our primary and secondary schools, and to a lesser extent, even in higher education. Mainstream media engages in a studied ignorance and selective forgetting. This makes it seem like whiteness is not really an issue, so seamless is the lack of attention paid to it. But raise the topic and you will witness a sudden flurry of repair work brought forth by self-appointed guardians of the status quo.

Whiteness is a powerful, unseen, and sometimes vengeful force that permeates every part of our lives. There is an element in all this of not saying the name of god. More than one religion has held their deity so powerful, sacred and unknowable, that to mention the deity by name was taboo. If you wish to play social scientist, we invite you to try a couple of simple demonstrations.

For those who are silent, there are payoffs. White Americans enjoy the privileges of whiteness without having to accept the identity of white-an identity that has accumulated some baggage over time. For people of color who are assimilating to whiteness, collaborating on the silence becomes a key requirement. Even people of color who, by physical appearance, have no hope of acquiring the full privileges of the unnamed white mainstream, can reap rich rewards by promoting "colorblind" policies and attacking civil rights leaders and antiracist activists for playing the race card.

White culture creates the conditions it wants to hear; it makes it so it cannot hear what people of other races are actually experiencing. Through control of the media and suppression of alternate views, it demands unity on white terms and rewards both white people and people of color who police this demand. People of color speak up, as do some white people, but their voices are not heard, or if heard, disbelieved.

Yes, there is unity in protecting the nation from terrorist acts. But there is considerable disagreement as to means and methods. Underlying the superficial calls for unity, our nation has witnessed an increase in acts of individual and institutional racism, a fair portion of which has been brought forward by an anti-terrorist hysteria that does not increase our safety, but threatens our freedoms. This is not true unity. The superficial unity we now have prevents the hard work of building true unity.

Multiracial community is a missing value in white culture. Why is it that Jessica Lynch, and not Lori Piestewa or Shoshana Johnson became the name so familiar to American households. Why not all three?

People who value the white community over the multiracial community do not feel guilty about this. Guilt only exists where community norms are violated. The norms of the white community are upheld when talk of whiteness is suppressed and people, often out of a studied ignorance, bless a "unity" that allows racism to increase and punishes people for talking about it.

Those people who value multiracial community as a core value do not experience guilt. They are active antiracists. Among them are those white people who value multiracial community above and beyond the comforts and privileges of white culture. It is for this group that we will save our final words. Those who feel guilty are the ones who see promise in multiracial community but have not chosen to value it above their own whiteness. Unable to clarify their values, they become immobilized.

White American culture is accustomed to criticism from without, yet it is vulnerable to an organized critique from within. White antiracists are speaking up, but their voices are individualized and thereby discounted. They need to organize. Why? The old standards. Freedom, equality, democracy. The creation of a multiracial, antiracist, democratic community and nation. Working for true unity.

Jeff Hitchcock can be contacted at jhitchcock@euroamerican.org.