Mind of a White Man: A Racial Thought Experiment

 By - Kokayi Nosakhere

Let’s use our historical imagination. It’s like a thought experiment; an intellectual exercise. I make this invitation in order to lower the emotional charge, because thesubject matter is race. Since we now live under an open white supremacy, here in theSecond Trump Administration, I am conscious of how sensitive those who live in white bodies are about their newly experienced characteristic of self: race.

As a Black man living inside the United States of America, I have to deal with race on a regular basis. I do not have theexperience of our society being a meritocracy. It is a racial caste system. Any time I make a plan for myself, to be successful, I have to take into account theracial factor. Meaning, I ask myself how theEuropean Americans I encounter are going to act towards me. Achieving a successful outcome is completely dependent on managing their emotions and intellectual responses without them knowing that I am managing them. White bodied persons treat me best when they feel like I am catering to their right to comfort.

What do I mean by that? If I plan a trip to another city, I normally ask myself a series of questions. The first question is: How many Black people live there? When a google search reveals a small population, I ask myself: Who are the Black people choosing to live there? Is this city a modern day sundown town and are the Black people who live there inside interracial relationships in order to protect themselves?

From what I can observe, millions of European Americans are having an entirely different experience of life itself than me. Because they occupy the oppressor class and can choose how much racial stress they endure, race is not a factor they need to take into consideration every time they leave the house. Literally, they can protect themselves from “race.” I can not. The fact that I can not doesn’t make sense to European Americans. “White people” are not a threat to them. In their lived experience, the “other” European Americans they encounter respect their boundaries when clearly articulated. So, why would European Americans not choose to respect my boundaries? Just because I am Black doesn’t seem like a strong enough reason - intellectually - for the European Americans in their lives to not respect my boundaries.

It is this basic confusion that I wish to explore in this thought experiment. To assist us, I want to reference three books. All three titles remain in print and are easily accessible, by either the commercial market (i.e. Amazon) or the underground market (i.e. used bookstores and “free” online sources.)

The subject of this thought experiment is a 24 year old European American man living in 1970 Chicago. Like Mr. Trump, he was born in 1946. For the sake of our discussion, where exactly in the country he was originally born is irrelevant. Everywhere inside of the United States segregation is being practiced. The only question is how severe Black people are being oppressed. The common theme is: whether born in Mississippi or New York, the European Americans living there sincerely believe theBlack people they encounter are 1) not affected by segregation practices and 2) are not treating said European Americans as “white people.” Every European American in 1946 imagines, just like in 2025, that their individual interactions are just that - their individual interactions - with Black people, and are completely disconnected from any other “white person’s” interaction. Every interaction is genuine and authentic. No racial manipulation is happening. They imagine that in their individual personalities, they have earned “consent” and are considered “safe.”

While you and I, in 2025, may marvel at how this mentality is possible. For Luke - let’s call this young man, Luke - it is all he has internalized. As an individual, he is racially innocent. He is not “white.” He is just an individual, living in a human body. And, by 1970, it had been a chaotic experience.

Remember, his parents lived through World War II, which ended in 1945. It was traumatizing to witness Nazi Germany murdering “white bodied” Jewish persons wholesale. Within his community, a certain pride is felt. “Americans” are the heroes, having stopped European fascism. Thus, Luke’s formative years instill in him a positive self-image.

This self-esteem is reinforced by theelection of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the architect of D-Day, to the Presidency. He perceives the celebration of “diversity,” because ethnic crooners, like Tony Bennet, are rising stars. In fact, a Black crooner named Nat King Cole enjoys wide-spread popularity among European Americans - even if he has to respect segregation laws.

Disney is enriching Luke’s childhood with brand new movies, like the cartoon musical “Alice in Wonderland.” Humphrey Bogart is steaming up the screen in a romantic movie weirdly named, “The African Queen.” Abbott and Costello rule comedy. Isaac Asimov is influencing science fiction with his groundbreaking novel, “Foundations.” On the identity front, S.D. Salinger releases “The Catcher in the Rye,” challenging European Americans to think about their social position in a changing urban environment.

This “challenge” is accelerated by Thurgood Marshall’s successful arguments before theSupreme Court on May 17, 1954 on behalf of a little Black girl named Linda Brown. Theunanimous decision transforms Luke’s life, well, the life of his parents. They have to decide whether to resist desegregation efforts or not.

If Luke lives in Oregon, which was founded as a white bodied utopia, the Civil Rights Movement never came because the Black population there was too small to organize an effective challenge to open oppression. His parents had nothing to resist. If Luke lives in Chicago, New York, Alabama or Mississippi, then, his parents are very, very conflicted.

For the purposes of this thought experiment, let’s imagine that Luke, whether directly exposed to desegregation efforts in his educational career or not, remains completely unaffected. Similar to theconclusions reached by Black psychologist James P. Comer, who lived during this same time period, Luke is socialized as a-racial. In his personality, Luke knows he is “white,” yet, “being white” lacks any real “meaning.”

In his book, “Beyond Black and White,” which he published in 1972, Dr. Comer responds to one of his students who asks if “white people” have a mental illness. It doesn’t make sense that all the racial violence on open display for the 13 years of the Civil Rights Movement would not impact Luke’s psyche.

“When I first began to ponder the meaning of the many bizarre racial incidents I had experienced, I asked myself this same question. I now understand thephenomenon not as mental illness, but as a kind of collective defect in the national ego and superego; a blind spot that permits otherwise intelligent people to see, think and act in a racist way without the expected level of guilt and pain.” (page 117)

This is where my lived experience as a Black man disqualifies me from articulating how Luke remains unaffected. When I look at a lynching picture of a Black man from theJim Crow era, I see myself hanging. When I see Ruby Bridges being escorted to school by national guards, I see my mother, whostarted elementary school three years after Ruby Bridges. What I have learned, painfully, is that my European American friends and family do not have similar experiences. When they look at a lynching photo they do not see themselves reflected in the smiling faces of attendees. When they look at the face of angry white people protesting Dr. King, they do not see their family members. They just see photographs.

The same appears to happen today. When national racial moments happen, European Americans either 1) ignore them or 2) refuse to associate themselves personally with them. Something egregiously violent, like the Derek Chauvin moment, has to happen for European Americans to feel like they have to do something.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. This means Luke was 22. He is a high school graduate and, now, a college graduate. Because of the national riots in response to the assassination forces, Luke chooses to face the reality that “something” is happening, even though it is not happening directly to him. So, he picks up John Howard Griffin’s book, “Black Like Me.” Why? Because he “needs” thepremise.

In 1959, Griffin proposed to his publisher, a series of articles based on him investigating the racial problem from the inside out. “What does it feel like to be a Negro?” (Mind you, as a Black man, this question irritates me. I mean, Dr. King published his first book in 1958 entitled “Stride Towards Freedom.” Why Griffin is confused is amazing to me.) All that I can imagine is: Griffin possesses an internal block towards believing that European Americans want to be oppressors. Something external to their personality must be motivating them, so he wants to go undercover to discover that missing information. Griffin doesn’t know any overt racists whom he believes will tell him the truth. (Such distrust of what a white person being seen through a racial lens by another white person is . . . interesting.) He theorizes that by being treated like a “Negro” by “white”people he will learn what that motivation is. He believes “Negroes” will tell him the truth.

Luke reads Griffin’s words because he is just as clueless. He knows there is nothing within him trying to intentionally harm anyone, let alone Negroes. So, he is struggling to understand how and why racial animosity exists in the first place. For him, racism looks a lot like “hate” and “bullying.” Yet, he keeps being told it is more than that. What is the more? Why can someone not clearly tell him what that “more” is.

Well, since I have read Griffin’s book, I can affirm Griffin doesn’t learn the “more.” Nor, does he ever concede to the horrifying reality: “white people” not only occupy theoppressor class; they need “white supremacy.”

A book explaining this “more” arrives when Luke is 24 years old, in 1970. A marxist-based sociologist named William K. Tabb publishes a small, digestible book entitled, “The Political Economy of the Black Ghetto.” It is not a book for a Black audience. Those who are oppressed do not need their oppression explained to them. Theoppressed need their oppression CONFIRMED to them, which is what a Minister Malcolm X did. It is the oppressor who needs to learn that his/her/their behavior is oppressive. The oppressor doesn’t think his/her/their behaviors are oppressive, instead, it is imagined as NORMAL.

Tabb explains oppression in a way that Luke can understand: economics. Luke has internal references for oppression as rich white individuals vs poor white people.

Luke can understand the pain of poverty and the feeling of unbridled rage at his pain being dismissed by individual managers and individual business owners. Landlords, and their eviction notices, can not be reasoned with. Bankers, who deny loans, are insufferable. CEOs, who call the police on protesters, are psychopaths.

Part of the genius exhibited by the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was to use class as a communications tool. The poor white person understands that if he/she/they lose their job and are unable to borrow enough to pay their rent, theproperty management corporation, wholacks sympathy for their plight, will evict them. If the poor white person attempts to fight the eviction notice by going to court, the corporation possesses enough money to hire a real estate lawyer. The law is written by those with money to retain their power to extract money. So, the judge, who is an employee of the state, has no choice, if he wishes to keep his job and be able to pay rent also, to convict the poor white person. Lastly, if the poor white person refuses to leave the housing unit, the police can be called to use force against them.

Luke can relate to the depression another poor white person feels witnessing theemployees of the property management corporation, the lawyer, the court clerks, thejudge and police officers all allied to make the poor white person’s life a living hell.

The glitch comes when someone like Minister Malcolm X thunders that white supremacy is a system that gives Luke, as an individual, all of that power by virtue of his white skin alone over Black people; not an individual Black person, but all, and any, Black people!

It doesn’t make sense that “other white people” are influenced by his personality to the point they will engage in harm. When someone educated by Minister Malcolm X retorts, “All you have to do is call 9-1-1!” Luke becomes depressed. It doesn't matter that Luke doesn’t want said power or doesn’t feel that powerful. It’s true. And, it is the force of that truth which inspires his depression. He can “protect” himself from Black people by calling 9-1-1.

A poor white person doesn’t need money to oppress Black people. That is the missing “more” that Luke is searching for. The white people surrounding Luke see his white skin as a connecting bond, uniting him to them against Black people.

As Dr. Comer’s book points toward, theaverage “white person” doesn’t want to believe they are a part of a racial community. In fact, for his own mental health, Luke has a vest interest in choosing NOT to believe this. To believe this is to see himself reflected in every racial incident documented in the newspapers of his childhood.

If racism is real, and the power of the police officer’s baton is in his every word, then there is no way for a Black person to feel safe in Luke’s presence. When Luke tells a joke and a Black person laughs, Luke can’t trust that the laughter is because the joke is funny, or the Black person doesn’t want Luke to murder him. When Black people are being nice to him, it is because he is “white,” not because he is being nice back to them.

Such a realization, that he, as a poor white person, has the power of life and death over a Black person due to systemic white racial violence, is stultifying. Especially since Luke knows, as an individual, he lacks thepersonal power to change the behaviors of the white people immediately around him, let alone the millions inside the United States.

Nor, can he ever, reassure a Black person that he would never call the police on them. Luke will call the police to protect himself from physical violence.

So, now, after reading professor Tabb’s book, Luke is depressed. He is depressed in a way he doesn’t know how to address. He is depressed because he is “white” inside of a racial caste system against his will. Every news headline increases his feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. How is he supposed to manage the fact that every interaction he has with a Black person carries with it a life or death power dynamic?

Where are the “other white people” whohave awakened to this reality? How does he even find another “white” person who is racially aware? I mean, he has spent most of his life “unaware.” Aren’t the majority of European Americans in the same purposeful ignorance? Because none of them want to feel the depression he is feeling.

For the first time, Luke understands the“hippie” movement. It was upper middle class European American children wanting to drop out of white supremacy and drop into their humanity. He also understood why many of them choose to return to white supremacy. Why? They could not find another effective way to access resources.

When the hippie got sick, the hippie was dependent on the United States healthcare system. The same system of racist white folks. which denies Black people proper medical care, was the only system available to the hippie. This was true for the grocery store. Or the news media. Or any other good or service.

Luke and the hippies feel trapped. They are complicit in oppression. They know oppression is flowing off their hands and they don’t know how to stop it without hurting themselves. The best solution they could appease themselves to is to soften the severity of the oppressive acts and share, from their hands, some of theresources secured from the rich white people.

That’s it. That’s the end of the thought experiment.

Now, here’s the rub. This is as far as I, a Black man, can take you. Because I do not live in a white body, I can’t help you “mutate” out of white supremacy. It can’t be done alone. You actually have to “connect” to other “white people” and walk out of white supremacy into a pro-humanity community. The “more” that it takes to walk out of white supremacy is something you have to discover.

Discover.

That’s a big word. The beautiful thing is: it can be done.