“And then there is this niggling little problem: under a capitalist regime, what does parity between “blacks” and “whites” entail? It means that you end up with a section of “blacks” who relative to other “blacks” have been elevated into the managerial and property owning ranks of capitalist society, that is to say, into the privileged and governing sections of the bourgeoisie. The overwhelming majority of “blacks,” like the overwhelming majority of “whites,|” will remain in a condition of rank servility, exploitation and oppression. Or am I missing something?”
Plenty, unfortunately. You seem to keep circling back to a position wherein you equate exploitation of black and white workers with black and white workers being EQUALLY oppressed and exploited. What you’re saying is tantamount to saying “Affirmative action isn’t a revolutionary initiative and won’t overthrow capitalism. Therefore, let’s not bother with it.” Even though it could have enormously beneficial benefits for black people in the here and now. I just can’t understand this attitude. Revolutionary work doesn’t just mean organizing to build a mass base. It also means listening to and struggling for the rights of workers, especially the most marginalized and oppressed, including for reformist gains within capitalism.
Yes, I know you acknowledge the need to tackle both the structural and the ideological expressions of racism, but you vacillate on this. For example, you haven’t rescinded your claim that for whites to side with blacks in struggles centering around anti-black racism is itself an instance of “racism”. This is in spite of your own realization that not everything can be done at once (yet if not everything can be done at once, why take such a puritanical stances towards initiatives that, while not capable of fully achieving parity between blacks and whites, at least can alleviate many of the extra oppressions faced specifically by people of color? WHEN, exactly, is the time to fight for that? AFTER the revolutionary seizure of power?).

Is this a point that I actually argue, that before all else, “. . . we have to change ou[r] thinking first[?]”
I’m clarifying the nature of racism in both its structural AND psychological manifestations as I understand them.
I’m not saying that you have to necessairyly attack the one BEFORE the other, be it the structural or the psychological (i.e., the ideological) component.
Different activists will be more keen on and effective at one task or the other, with some dedicating themselves only to the one while largely neglecting the other, and others will want to tackle both simultaneously. What is certain is that you cannot have social change that is not both structural and ideological (i.e. also psychological).
Social change is a complicated affair: sometimes you push for structural change when circumstances produce conditions propitious to such change; at other times, circumstances dictate that the battle can only be fought on the terrain of the ideological or psychological; and other times, the push can happen in both domains simultaneously.
And then there is this niggling little problem: under a capitalist regime, what does parity between “blacks” and “whites” entail? It means that you end up with a section of “blacks” who relative to other “blacks” have been elevated into the managerial and property owning ranks of capitalist society, that is to say, into the privileged and governing sections of the bourgeoisie. The overwhelming majority of “blacks,” like the overwhelming majority of “whites,|” will remain in a condition of rank servility, exploitation and oppression. Or am I missing something?

“This contending awareness, then, if it is to be other than racist, cannot conceive of people as being either “colored” or “white.” To the degree that it does, it remains a part of the disease it wants to cure, and if it partakes of the disease, it perpetuates the disease, because modes of thinking and seeing among humans are literally viral and contagious.”
There are multiple shortcomings here.
Firstly, even if we stop talking of “black people” or “white people”, we still need to talk of “people typically designated as black” and “people typically designated as white” in order to be able to explicitly and consciously deal with (and hence rectify) the accumulated wrongs that drive the relative social positions of these groups. If, for example, we want to deal with socioeconomic wrongs that disproportionately afflict “black people”, the way to have an immediate impact on that is to initiate programs that seek to address the inequality that has accrued by directly channeling resources to people who are “typically designated as black”. Otherwise, the risk is that the afflicted group is maintained in a position of inequality while we wait for “white people” to get their thinking in order. Blacks cannot achieve true parity with whites in the socioeconomic realm if their attainment of parity is being delayed through appeals to “but we have to change out thinking first”. For one thing, this will breed discontent, which will itself fuel racial animosity from blacks who would feel that whites are erecting yet another stumbling block rather than just cutting through the bullshit and doing what needs to be done. For another, it will continue to reproduce the conditions that sustain subjective racism by whites (seeing blacks continuing to fall behind in economic terms will feed into white notions of black inferiority and unworthiness). Oftentimes, the best remedy is to just cut through the crap and institute something that sets up a condition of equality. And blacks shouldn’t have to wait for that or for that waiting to be contingent upon whites having an epiphany. Nor should it be contingent upon blacks having an epiphany. It’s simply something that needs to be rectified, right now.
The other problem is that many white people, especially liberals, already imagine themselves to be “post-racial” in their thinking. But such people are often the ones who harbor implicitly held biases that are never checked. Thinking that one is “post-racial” can actually be a boon to racism, and certainly to structural racism.
Thirdly, even if we rectify our own biases as individuals, the structural racism and inequality out there will still be going on while we congratulate ourselves, and to address that structural racism most immediately and most effectively, we cannot be beholden to the hope of a grand spiritual awakening of humanity in general that may or may not transpire at some undisclosed point in the future. We have to actively build the concrete material basis for that by ditching all excuses and resolutely addressing historical legacies of inequality by initiating programs that instantiate “people typically designated as black” and directing resources towards them to help them overcome the negative historical legacies they currently suffer due to their designation as blacks. In other words, we direct resources and help to people on the basis of their characteristics that have hitherto been used to discriminate and marginalize them. There’s nothing whatsoever “racist” about that; it’s simple common sense.

Good morning to you,
I’ll try to summarize my view on racism as succinctly as I can:
Racism has, broadly speaking, two facets or dimensions: it is structural and it is psychological.
The structural aspect conditions the psychological, but the psychological also conditions the structural. The relationship is dialectical. If there is change in one of the terms of the relation, there is change in the other.
Social structure manifests as inertial practice, either formally or informally institutionalized, that is to say, as predictable social practices that taken together confront the individual as a set of imperatives over which (s)he has little influence and to which by and large (s)he must submit.
To keep to our specific instance, America is a racist society and discriminates against people of color in favor of light complexioned individuals.
This discrimination will not only result in greater numbers of people of color relative to whites finding themselves in economically and socially straitened circumstances, but will spontaneously condition the minds of the people caught up the web of discriminations that result in the injuries that very specifically afflict only people of color, injuries compounded by all the other injuries of class that are part and parcel of the structural imperatives of capitalism as such.
That spontaneous conditioning will manifests as an awareness of discriminations that have color as their basis and this awareness will tend to reify itself into imagos of personal and shared identity: I am “balck” or I am “white,” and being “black” is in countless subtle and flagrant ways to be objectively condemned to a status of inferiority relative to being “white,” just as being white is in countless subtle and flagrant ways to be objectively conferred a status of superiority relative to being black.
What then ensues are all kinds of neuroses and psychoses that play out in all kinds of different ways and at varying intensities, both culturally and individually, consciously and unconsciously, as species of complexes of inferiority and superiority for both “blacks” and “whites.”
What we end up with is then a social cleavage or division experienced by everyone as the racist antagonism between “blacks” and “whites,” a structural imperative in its own right, helping to sustain the practices of discrimination that play out through overt group animosities and individual psycho-social dynamics. The movement that is racism in its two dimensions In this way completes and sustains itself.
Now to combat racism, two things must happen: the institutionalized practices of discrimination, the social structure that is racist and that confronts each individual as an insuperable reality, must be dismantled AND the individuals caught up in the dynamics of the structure must “cure” themselves of the neuroses and psychoses that have already been inflicted on them by those dynamics.
Individuals alone cannot challenge institutionalized practices. They must come together with others in order to do that. If you are alone in the world to want to defeat an entrenched and widespread social practice, it ain’t gonna happen. But as numbers of individuals increase who do want to defeat such a practice, the more likely it becomes that the practice will be defeated by eventually being submerged under or swallowed up by new practices that gradually find their legs, so to speak, and become entrenched and widespread and culturally hegemonic in their turn.
As you yourself acknowledge, however, unless an awareness emerges that transcends racism and sets out to challenge both the practices and the outlooks that make for racism, racism goes unchallenged. Just as you cannot challenge capitalism without being truly anti-capitalist, you cannot really challenge racism without being truly anti-racist. And as you know all too well, some who think themselves to be anti-capitalist, are actually at bottom anything but; and so it is with many who think they aren’t racist, but very much remain so if unconsciously.
And so the awareness that does the challenging cannot itself be racist. It must be other than racist if it is to birth sets of practices that do not discriminate along differences of skin color.
This contending awareness, then, if it is to be other than racist, cannot conceive of people as being either “colored” or “white.” To the degree that it does, it remains a part of the disease it wants to cure, and if it partakes of the disease, it perpetuates the disease, because modes of thinking and seeing among humans are literally viral and contagious.
It is at this point that the individual must play her part in developing and nurturing the awareness that must eventually see the light of day if racism is ever to be transcended: the individual must examine her own socio-cognitive structures, to sift them for the racist elements that they will inevitably have derived from her social context(s), and becoming aware of them, deliberately counter them by developing and adopting new habits of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that affirm the single humanity of all men, women and children.
To my mind, then, you cannot as an individual effectively contribute to the solution for getting past the socio-psychopathy of race if you do not endeavor to stop thinking of yourself in terms of the color of your skin, and as for bigotry, similarly, to endeavor to stop privileging ethnicity as essential to your or anyone else’s identity.
This doesn’t solve the very real structural issues in which both racism and bigotry are embedded by dint of past and current discriminatory practices, but it is nevertheless essential, if admittedly only on the smallest of scales, which is the only scale on which any individual as an individual can effectively act, to break down otherwise insuperable barriers to unity, to working class unity, a unity that will eventually have to be made real if that other system of discrimination, of exploitation and murder that is capitalism, is to be overturned.

I goofed up the last part: I meant to say “Cannot wait FOR the mindset of white Americans to be totally emancipated.” Black South Africans would still be third-class citizens if they had been content to wait for white South Africans to emancipate their own thinking. To have insisted on the latter would itself have been an expression of white privilege: that the freedom of someone else should be contingent upon how well white people have grasped the situation.

“But if I refuse to acknowledge “white privilege,” then what in the world am I acknowledging if not the very fact of “white privilege” when I write things like: …”
Yes, but you keep scare quoting it.
On the issue of discrimination: true, white privilege couldn’t exist without discrimination. It is in fact an instance of it, often unconsciously held and manifested – and often all the more insidious because of that. It is impossible to combat something if one is not aware of its presence.
“The nub of his remarks is that the struggle of the “black man” in America, although certainly about discrimination (that is to say, about “white privilege”), is not really in its essence about “color,” about “race,” but about a “mindset” to be overcome.”
Yes, it’s about a mindset to overcome: overcoming racism. But overcoming that is not the only way this struggle manifests. The other part is to defend, empower and if necessary to arm the people against whom the mindset is being directed. Protecting and helping black people – or, to put it closer to what you’re talking about, people designated as “black” – cannot wait until the mindset of white American has been totally emancipated.

That’s an excellent rejoinder — well-put and entirely true.

“Dear Mr. Engdahl”
😉