Why White Knight? The first reason is fully self-serving: any week now my first published novel will be announced on Facebook posts near you: White Knight or How One Man came to Believe that He was the One that caused the San Francisco City Hall Killings and the Jonestown Massacre.

The second reason is that I want to own my whiteness. White is a characteristic created by racism just as surely as is Black. Of course, they’re not parallel categories. To be called White, you have to be pure, not a trace of darker blood. But to be Black? A single drop of Blackness and you’re Black. Think about that.

This makes for a hard realization. If you are White, you are racist. The very category of White is racist.

A little history. In the late 1600’s there were two slave rebellions where black slaves and white indentured servants made common cause against the planter class. It was at this point that the planter class hatched is plan to divide the working class by racism, to offer the whites a tiny piece of privilege that enabled them to feel, “Well, at least we don’t have it THAT bad…”

All this history is embedded in our Whiteness. We can’t shake it just because we weren’t alive during slavery. We’re alive now and racism remains rampant. What are we doing about it?

The third reason to call this blog White Knight is because I identify with the Quixote character tilting at windmills.