The racist argument has always been so simple as to need no comprehending. It simply divides the two categories, white people and black people, by a line theoretically straight, and opposes one category to the other. The actual history of the races, as their stories divide and converge–as they both, for instance, move from farm to city, suffering the same uprooting, burdened by their old division–is complicated enough, questionable enough, and interesting enough to keep us reading and writing, asking and answering, talking to one another, and thus enlarging the possibility of friendships among us. That is why it is distressing to see the antiracists resort to the same categories and draw essentially the same straight line as the racists. These simplicities are dissolved by any unpresuming, earnest conversation between a black person and a white person. Or they are dissolved by friendship or affection between a white person and a black person, as they were for me in my childhood and have remained.
Wendell Berry, The Need To Be Whoe, 348-49.