My parents and many others bailed on our inner-city Cleveland neighborhood and moved to the suburbs. It took me many years to truly understand what had happened, because it isn’t anything anyone talks about.

I’m not proud of it. It seemed to me the whole concept was flawed if it disrupted communities and left them looking like a war zone some 40 years later. Instead of integration, we got more segregation. We have closed shopping malls. Three closed amusement parks. Closed schools. Streets and bridges in disrepair. Small enclaves of rich white folk protected by overzealous police forces. I could go on but I don’t have any answers. All I have is an account of the illusion we’re living in, from the perspective of another white guy who had things easy because of my skin color.

Even now, I look at the billboards that show who’s wanted by the police and FBI. I know that criminals are predominantly white, but they always have a black person’s photo on display. It disgusts me that this bias greets me as I cross the border from Cleveland into Parma every day on my way home from work. That the cop car everyone is changing lanes to get around has yet another black person pulled over.

Knowledge of white privilege isn’t anything you can just tell another white person about. They have to want to see it. It certainly isn’t pretty.