As others have pointed out more delicately, there is no reason to think your experience as a white "minority" in Japan and India gives you any special insight i

As others have pointed out more delicately, there is no reason to think your experience as a white "minority" in Japan and India gives you any special insight into the black experience in America. I don't know your life story except from the small bit you have shared, but I do know that Japan was conquered by the US roughly seventy years ago, and India gained its independence from Great Britain fairly recently. So in both societies your caucasian ethnicity mirrored that of foreign invaders and conquerors in their recent history. This does not parallel the experience of blacks in America. Quite the opposite. I suspect the ostracism and discrimination you experienced, while no doubt real and burdensome, was drastically different in almost every way from the racial disparities in America. Frankly, you are comparing apples and oranges. You say that the biggest problem for black people isn't white privilege but their victimhood mentality. I'm assuming that when they worked the fields in slave camps, you would agree their mentality, victimhood or no, was the least of their problems. I would allege that remained the case under Jim Crow, which lasted for 90 years after slavery was abolished. When did their oppression stop being mostly externally imposed and become majority self-imposed through a victimhood mentality? Perhaps the shift occurred after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Discrimination officially became illegal, so the playing field was now level, mostly. Sure redlining would continue into the 80's in many cities, and it would take years to integrate schools. Legislation was not able to extract racism from people's hearts. But after 1964, would you say the bulk of black's problems stopped being racial persecution and started being an endemic victimhood? A third of black men are in prison today. Could it be that the same system that refuses to indict a police officer for shooting a black boy carrying a toy gun in his waistband in an open carry state would also unjustly funnel blacks into prisons, or is that incredible statistic the manifestation of an errant mentality in the black community? A further question. If hundreds of years of slavery followed by decades and decades of open racism and oppression followed by years and years of subtler but systematic discrimination has somehow caused blacks to internalize a self-defeating hopelessness, who should be held to account? I say the society which created hopelessness can and must replace it with hope. The nation which brought a race to expect adversity can also take the steps necessary to share the sense of careless ease they enjoy. Blacks want to be treated fairly and justly, and to have an equal opportunity to succeed. They believe the world owes it to them, and they're right. We do owe it to them, even if, nay, especially since we have such a long history of depriving them of it. As you say, they "want [it], [they] think that the world owes it to [them]." I would argue that they don't think they necessarily will get it, at least not anytime soon. But they will not stop demanding it, and that spirit driving them is not irrational cognitive dissonance as you would have it, but the same irrational hope that drives every struggle for equality and dignity. I don't think your views are maliciously racist, but they are woefully ignorant and lacking empathy and understanding of the black experience in America, as is the case for so many whites. If you are up to the intellectual task of attempting to truly understand what it is like to live as a black person under the legacies of racism and slavery I highly recommend the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates. You can find many of his essays online. I particularly recommend his Atlantic article, "The Case for Reparations," for a fresh attempt to show the continuing reverberations of racism in the black community. His book, "Between the World and Me," relates his personal experience of racism as a black man who grew up in the Baltimore ghetto.