This is an opinion column:

There’s been a lot of talk about race lately.

Good. There ought to be. America never learned to talk about it properly. Especially white people like me. The subject is scary. Filled with guilt and fraught with danger. It’s too easy to offend, or to be misunderstood, to say it badly, and suffer the consequences. So it is easier to say nothing, lest we be thought bigots … or racists.

So silence becomes as big a threat as bigotry itself. Silence is a conspirator in all wrongs, after all.

But what if it’s true?

What if you look deep down into your soul and begin to question your own thoughts and motivations, your past and your station on the planet? What if you don’t like what you see inside, and your worst fears are confirmed? Worse yet, what if you know exactly what you’ll find and don’t care. What if you embrace your inner racist?

That’s what’s scary now. Because we hear overt racism more now than I’ve heard my whole lifetime, and I grew up in Alabama. It’s as if America has dismissed from memory the sins of its past, as if it is unwilling to acknowledge the inhumanity that brought us to this place. It’s as if we have forgotten that the dream of equality is the thing that made the promise of America great in the first place.

No, we don’t talk about race enough. Not really. Not to each other. Not even about each other. Because silence pretends to be safer, and more reassuring. So the distance between us grows. The distance gives comfort to some, and that comfort turns into a buffer, a wall, and it separates and segregates us every bit as well as George Wallace wanted it to when he swore it would last forever.

We don’t talk enough. So we end up speaking different languages, with different histories and different hopes and expectations. We don’t talk enough, so every conversation gets harder. Especially for those who are unwilling to really try,

So here we are in America, with a partisan divide and a racial divide and the better angels of our republic gasping for breath. We point at each other and cry “racist,” or we say racist things and decry “political correctness,” and we miss the only questions that really matter.

Who are we? And who do we want to be? The land of opportunity? Or a lie?

Will we be the fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s Dream? Or Wallace’s?

Give me the former, please. Please.

We don’t talk enough about race. But that’s not all. We don’t think about it enough, either. We sure don’t think about our part in it. And that’s really the only thing we can do something about.

So take a deep, hard look inside and ask yourself the question you don’t want anyone asking. Are you a racist? Really, I mean it. You don’t have to answer to anybody but yourself. But be honest.

Do you see the goodness in all humankind and believe all men and women are created equal, and all deserve the same shot at success? Good. Then live it.

Or do you somewhere inside believe your race is superior? Do you see other races as opposing tribes, to be conquered or oppressed? Are you happy with that? Do you worship a god that would approve?

The real question is not who you are. The question is who you want to be, and what you will do about it.

It won’t change the past, but maybe it can change the future. And it is completely up to you.

John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for Reckon by AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.