It's interesting that obvious moral of your anecdote is supposed to be that no black person would want to change into a white person, even though life would be easier. I mean, I agree it's probably true, but it seems mysterious to me, like something that needs to be explained. One explanation is that a single black person changing to white would in a sense be betraying all her black friends, or legitimizing the idea that being black is worse than being white, but I can think of a contrived scenario where those explanations don't seem to apply.

Suppose that we had a machine that could change people's skin color, physical features, and speech patterns, so that people of one race could be turned indistinguishable from people of another. And suppose we wanted to end all racial discrimination forever by making everyone the same race. So we flip a coin to decide whether all white people have to change into black people, or all black people have to change into white people - discrimination disappears either way, and this way we know it's not a power thing where white people are trying to enforce their own norms.

I'm white, and I don't think I would object too much if the coin came up as "all whites have to change to blacks." I could see some white people objecting on aesthetic grounds, that they've been conditioned to think white people are more attractive and don't want to be in bodies they would view as less attractive. I could imagine a whole bunch of white people objecting just to be contrary. But overall I can't think of any really good objections from the white point of view.

But I know that part of white privilege is the privilege of thinking race doesn't make that much difference, so I predict that black people would want to think much harder about the case where all blacks have to change into whites. They'd probably have the same aesthetics and general contrariness objections as the white people, but if the rest of the thread is any indication there might also be an objection surrounding "black culture".

One could say that whatever black people like about black culture, they could continue to like if they had white skin. I guess the counterargument would be that black culture needs a certain critical mass to survive, and that if there were no artificial division between blacks and whites forcing them into different communities and different "meme pools", it would get overwhelmed by the more common white culture. But this seems like it's also a good argument against any attempt to fight racism or end segregation. And although I am almost sure someone is going to scoff really hard at me for saying this and explain why it's totally not appropriate, lots of white people seem to like a lot of black culture and even be pretty good at some "traditionally black" forms of expression, and vice versa.

I'd be really interested in hearing from some minority - whether in terms of race or sexual orientation or whatever - who wouldn't want her community to accept a coin toss on the principles described above.