On this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I’ll say it plainly: I do not feel guilty for being white. I also recognize that my race comes with built-in privileges — and that privileges for some should be transmuted into rights for all. I consider my small piece of that effort to be part of my life’s work.
There’s a popular talking point that claims honest conversations about race exist to instill guilt or self-hatred in white people. I reject that idea. Guilt is not a useful engine for justice. Responsibility is. Curiosity is. Action is.
Knowing our unvarnished history never made me feel guilty for being born the color I am. None of us got to choose a color swatch before our first breath. But learning that history — and continuing to learn more — has made me want to say something. It has made me want to do something.
What I learned growing up wasn’t complete, but it was enough to know our country’s past includes profound racial injustice, and that its present still carries echoes of it. I knew about enslavement, Jim Crow, beatings, lynchings, and the assassinations of leaders who lived under constant threat.
After George Floyd’s murder, I learned more — about Juneteenth, about the Tulsa Black Wall Street massacre. My understanding deepened. As I absorbed more history throughout life, I never felt guilty. I felt angry. Angry that it happened, angry that it was defended, and angry that its effects are still with us. And that anger has always felt like something to use, not suppress.
This is What I'm Doing with My Voice
As an independent musician with a small but growing audience, I use my platform to speak my values and connect with people who are open to conversation. Some of my audience shares those values fully. Others overlap in places and diverge in others. When a story resonates deeply with me, I follow it.
The latest such story is a true one: in 1964, Garry Tallent — later the bassist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band — was a white teenage musician newly arrived at the Jersey Shore. Drawn to soul music, he crossed the railroad tracks into the predominantly Black west side of Asbury Park to play with musicians he admired.
Garry was a small part of a much larger story. But his easygoing willingness to cross those tracks helped normalize the act. In time, Black saxophonist Clarence Clemons made the more challenging crossing in the other direction — into the white, east-side boardwalk scene — becoming the first Black musician in a white-led band there.
That story moved me enough to write “Come Across the Tracks.”
The song distills the story into a gentle invitation: engage your curiosity, and spend real time in the presence of people different from you. When a town has dozens, hundreds, or thousands of meaningful cross-racial bonds, it becomes more resilient. When racism surfaces — as it inevitably does — there are more people willing to stand up and say, this is not who we are.
So on this MLK Day, without guilt and without self-hatred, I recommit to crossing whatever tracks I can — to leading by example through simple, undramatic acts, like Garry did in 1964. And I’m not doing it alone. “Come Across the Tracks” is intentionally a duet, because it’s a conversation. I’m grateful to ROSTAFA for crossing those tracks with me.
Dr. King reminded us that progress is made not just through speeches, but through everyday choices rooted in courage and empathy.
What are you willing to do to advance racial justice where you are?