Ironically enough, I'm a white guy who was born in 1954. I've also had the opportunity to live in black neighborhoods, work in majority black settings, and reflect on the white racism of my family, co-workers, and people I've met on the way.

In the final analysis, soulgroove07 is overly generous toward whites. In fact, he doesn't mention police brutality toward African-American men, the tremendous bias of the judicial system, the continual incidents of racial violence, the discrimination against black shoppers, etc. And that's just the overt behavior. Outside the ears of blacks, there's also a non-stop racist banter and social bonding that creates the impression that racism is a primary mode of life among many white people.

Certainly, I can't blame soulgroove07 for looking at whites as the enemy. If I were black, I'd do the same--probably with a lot of vehemence.

But I don't believe that there's a realistic choice other than integration. Segregation was not racial separation, it was a system of oppression and King and DuBois were wrong to think that education could be separated out from the denial of voting rights, exclusion from employment, exclusion from public facilities, and ritual racial violence culminating in lynching. From everything I've read (and seen), racial segregation in the South was more oppressive than apartheid and closer to slavery than social equality. Whites and blacks had always been "integrated" in such a way that all their interactions were defined by white supremacy. What Brown v Board, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and other legislation did was to mandate that whites no longer operate a brutal system of oppression and start interacting with African-Americans as citizens,customers, students, and the like. That's what is meant by "integration."

Martin Luther King wrote in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" that civil rights activism was needed to raise whites from "the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood." Of course, not many have gotten to the "majestic heights of brotherhood," but the path of civil rights has gotten a substantial part of the white population out of the "dark depths of racism" and enabled much of the black population to get out of the "living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next" way of life that characterized segregation according to King.

In many ways, we live in a limbo state between segregation and equality, but that state of things strikes me as better than segregation and I often see things that are signs of hope. The Barack Obama candidacy is one of them.

As disappointing as integration has been, I still think it's the best path.