“…in the effort to live meaningfully and decently in America, a white man cannot learn all he needs to know from other white men.”

The key word in this quote is “all”. I am a white man who struggled beside many mentors (including a fair number of other white men) with defining my proper role in building awareness and bringing change. I feel there are immensely powerful and vitally important lessons that we can likely learn ONLY from other white men.

The only players who can realistically be expected to change the rules of the game so all can play as equals are the ones who continue
to win. Paraphrasing familiar words – a great deal of the work must be expected of the white men, by the white men and for the white men.
The continuation of a system that gives a disproportionate share of the prosperity and political and social power to the white men in spite of evidence that the playing field is still tilted in our favor diminishes us all.
White men who accept our collective responsibilities must be willing to sometimes lead, sometimes follow and sometimes get out of the way. Which position is right for a given situation is often very hard to determine. However, to suggest that our collective past disqualifies us from ever leading is wrong. Sometimes we must be willing to be at the very front. Thank YOU for being there.

Your reader made some assumptions/arguments that I don’t think hold up, and in some ways are offensive.

This “it may come from the head and not from the heart” argument may “feel” right to someone “from the inside”, but doesn’t hold up in my opinion from a logical standpoint.

You can’t care and be fully invested in something you haven’t fully experienced from a personal level?

That is somewhat (albeit not completely) like saying:

Oncologists can’t be passionate about curing cancer because they haven’t had it.
People with professions where they care for animals or protect the environment can’t be passionate about their work because they’ve never been animals or plants.

By that logic diversity efforts by Black people are doomed to fail when it comes to helping Hispanics, Gays can’t help Transgendered people and so on.

It flies in the face of much of what I’ve understood about diversity efforts. It suggests that people of one group can’t put their heart into helping people of another- and that is entirely counter to the concept that we are all stronger by appreciating and leveraging what everyone brings to the table. Someone that an issue or topic hasn’t touched personally may be able to provide a perspective that someone “too close” to a problem or topic can’t see or identify- whether that be on the topics of cancer, animal rights, environmental issues, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. That is a value of diversity that your commenter seemed unwilling to profit from or acknowledge.

My comments don’t ignore or excuse discrimination based on various prejudices, but having heard this argument so many times, I get frustrated by the lack of insight it demonstrates, and feel that often it does more harm than good.