There's a 21st-century argument making the rounds now about why white people shouldn't raise any concerns they might have about racism.

It goes like this:

• People of colour are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves.

• White people don't have moral authority to speak about racial issues relating to people of other ethnic backgrounds.

• White people haven't lived the experience of other people so they really don't know what it's like to experience discrimination.

There is validity to arguments of those who feel they don't need to be rescued by do-gooders. This point can be made by Filipino live-in caregivers, drug addicts, or people with disabilities, to name three marginalized groups facing discrimination.

Similarly, adult pot smokers might say they don't need to be saved by government officials bent on maintaining a ban on growing your own marijuana. Some sex-trade workers are fed up with efforts to charge their clients with criminal offences. One sex-workers advocate, author Laura Augustin, is a particularly vociferous opponent of what she calls the "rescue industry", maintaining that it's just another form of colonialism. Some of her harshest criticism has been directed at New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof.

Here in Canada people of Chinese ancestry occupy prominent positions in society. I can see why they too don't feel any need to have some white saviour come to their defence.

In these matters, I'm guided by Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen. His book Identity and Violence emphasized that all of us are a multiplicity of identities. 

Sen makes the point that we are defined by, among other things, our class, educational level, occupation, hobbies, faith, country of birth, family background, friends and acquaintances, and, yes, ethnicity. Grave danger can arise when people are reduced to one aspect of their identity, be it their religion or skin colour.

Taking Sen's argument about a multiplicity of identies one step further, could a white math teacher born in Toronto have more in common with a math teacher born in Beijing, based on their similar interests and occupation? Or would a Toronto-born businessman of Chinese ancestry have more in common with the Beijing math teacher by virtue of both of them having a similar cultural background?

I recall a Zimbabwean Canadian telling me that he didn't think African Canadian community leaders born in North America did a good job standing up for people who had moved to Canada from Africa. He may have been right. He may have been wrong. But regardless, this was his perception. It's worth noting that he also didn't think white community leaders had any real interest in holding racist police officers accountable for their actions.

I've spoken to immigrants of South Asian ancestry who've felt like minorities within a minority because they're not Sikh and they're not Punjabi. On occasion, they've said they felt smeared when the media refers disparagingly to conduct in the "South Asian" community when it was something only occurring within Canada's Punjabi Sikh community.

Similar arguments might be made by Ismaili Muslims, who are probably pretty fed up with media characterizations of their faith as somehow being linked to terrorism. It's not.

So who really speaks for a community? It's all in the eye of the beholder.

I do know this: racism has been linked to a part of the brain called the amygdala, which is within the area known as the limbic system.

This suggests that racism is not going to disappear just because we're more sophisticated and enlightened in the 21st century than we were in the 20th or 19th centuries.

Those under the illusion that we're in a postracial society are sadly mistaken. 

So do white people have a duty to raise their voices even if they haven't lived the experiences of those who might be on the receiving end of racism? I would argue that they do—provided they keep in mind that not everybody is in a mood to be rescued and that plenty of people are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves.