Great. In my piece, I wrote: “My role in the world — guilty privileged person seeking absolution by helping oppressed people to survive — had been torn apart.”

This is acknowledging that I began my journey with White guilt. That’s when I only saw my personal agency as being accountable for the existence of racism, rather than holding the system accountable for that racism as well.

Then: “I began to see that my “failure” as a teacher was not simply “my” fault, but instead an understandable result given the systemic sickness of our society. That sickness makes comfortable liberal White people like me work our butts off to “save” at-risk children, but puts blinders on us as to why we continue to uphold a system that puts children at risk in the first place.”

I am trying to understand how a reader who understands the difference between guilt and shame could read those words and still respond with a caution against “White guilt.”