Thanks, Rosa Parks

Because white people are dumbasses, we tend to have one of two dumbass responses to the Civil Rights movement. Either it's (1) deep, smoldering resentment, or (2) a kind of asinine we-just-luv-the-Civil-Rights-movement wow-we're-morally-elevated let's-all-sing-Kumbaya feeling.

Instead, white people should be deeply grateful to the Civil Right movement—not because it was morally right (though obviously it was) but because it was good for white people. There's a moment in Eyes on the Prize where they show an interview with a white Civil Rights worker in Mississippi soon after Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner had been murdered. The interviewer asks the white guy if he's scared, and he says, "Of course I am. Everybody here is." Then the interviewer asks why he's staying there, and he replies: "Because I think my own freedom is completely bound up with the freedom of every other person."

This sounds like a bunch of high-faluting hoo-ha, but incredibly enough, it's true. Here's how I understand what he meant, from the smallest level to the highest:

1. American racism hasn't just been hideous for African Americans (though obviously that's been its most important effect). It's also crippled the humanity of white people in a profound way. The Civil Rights movement helped heal white people; we should be grateful for this just like we'd be grateful to a doctor who helped us walk again.

If you're white and you don't know what I'm talking about, you're in big trouble.

2. The diminishment of racism has also improved white people's daily lives. I know I've met a wide circle of people that I never would have if I'd lived before the Civil Rights movement, and my life is much, much more enjoyable because of it.

3. Most importantly, the increase in the political power of African Americans—though it's still nowhere near the level it should be—has increased the political power of most WHITE Americans. The great lie of American society is that politics is a zero sum game in which any increase in African American political power is matched by a decrease for white Americans. This is completely wrong. For instance, look at who's led the fight on the Downing Street Memo—mostly it's been the Congressional Black Caucus. They've been the voice for the voiceless, both black and white. (For their troubles, of course, they've predictably been sneered at by appallingly jejune reporters.) This generalizes on a million different issues. If you're white, unless you're a billionaire, you better hope black Americans get more powerful.

It's important to understand all this because people operate out of self-interest. There's nothing wrong with that, and even if there were, there's nothing we can do about it. For political movements to get anywhere, they have to help people see that most moral claims are not contrary to but actually are fused with their self-interest. We can only get what we want for ourselves if we help other people get what they want.

To put it in the coldest, starkest terms, there are a lot of white soldiers who've been killed in Iraq because their parents and other white people didn't work with African Americans for the past forty years to help everyone get better lives. If they'd done so, black people and white people would have had enough power together to stop this war before it began. But they didn't, and we couldn't, and now their children are dead.

Still, in part because of the Civil Rights movement, we may have enough power to stop the war before it kills all of us. So for that—and for much more—white people, black people and every kind of people should say: thank you, Rosa Parks.