Thanks for the thoughtful response! I am definitely still chewing on your points. It’s been a long time since I wrote this piece. But I remember several revisions and lengths. This piece is challenging. I think the best context I can give is that I come from the “school of thought,” that whiteness, however defined, needs to end. It cannot remain a status of value. There are scholars and historians and activists who are in that camp and that’s where I’ve evolved and fall. You will see that thought in my more recent work repeatedly. I want to understand the examples you provided and address them related to compatibility with democracy. Whiteness is a political identity based on the subjugation of Blackness. Whiteness does not exist without oppression. That’s not the case for nationalities and sexual orientation; they aren’t entirely based on and sustain by subjugation. One reference for this is Baldwin’s essay On Being White and Other Lies. As a matter of practicality, whites can’t stop being white on their own. Whiteness is a policy. Policies have to unmake the status of being white. That’s one way to define ending whiteness — it’s about the status. I think this piece leaves the reader with challenging questions. There’s another side to this: Whiteness made white democracy possible. Whiteness, which is a form of oppression, is the solidarity that made it possible for all these different European populations to come together. Whiteness made white democracy by oppression. And that’s not compatible with democracy by its definition and construction which are active. This essay is extremely philosophical. Policies are the practical part.