The scholar Noel Ignatiev had a beautifully simple and hard solution to the problem of whiteness. White workers must simply refuse to be bought off, even when this means, for example, that a union must turn down an informal “first-in, last-out” deal with management. White workers must respond to any attack on Black workers as they would to an attack on themselves. (This is harder to do if you are continually reminding yourself, as white allies are supposed to do, that you could never, ever understand the uniquely horrible pain that is being a Black person.) What white people lost by doing so, they would soon gain back, and more, when the entire working class, undivided, grew strong enough to conquer. In the world that resulted from this overturning, racial categories would dissolve and ethnic differences would assume their true proportions, or at least, different proportions. Microaggressions, since they would no longer carry the reminder of a vast interlocking system that might kill you, would become, at worst, the routine human pain of being misunderstood. Residential segregation would lose on one side its sting and on the other its point.