I am sitting on a plane flying from the south of Spain to the Netherlands. Beside me are two men - one Dutch in his early 40s, the other Danish past retirement. They are meeting for the first time. They discuss their businesses, which they each started on their own, and what is meaningful for them in this type of work. The older man talks about the people who have carried him and who he has carried as he climbed the ladder for success. He says his employees are everything to him.

The younger man talks about the measures he has taken to avoid paying certain taxes that he feels would be too onerous on his business. He moved from his home country to Eastern Europe. Life there is less expensive, anyway. The capital city is nice, he says, but elsewhere is not. He talks about his employees, who come from all over the world, and who will never leave his employ because he has offered them one of the only jobs in the region that is in English. He details what he pays each person.

They speak, in English, about types of people. “The Dutch are hardworking, no?” “I think it is too hard to say, what are the Dutch like anymore.” “I think the Dutch are like the Danish, they work hard and do a good job.” “I remember as a child once we tried to have a barbeque in my neighborhood, one street was Dutch, the other was Turkish, the other was Moroccan. One group could eat meat, the others couldn’t eat this, the others couldn’t eat that. The whole thing was a mess.”

There is a particular flavor of depravity that is white men speaking with disdain about non-white peoples. A particular smell comes from their breath when they talk about identity and tradition and its shifts. They somehow conceive of different peoples intermingling as a novel issue of their age. They choose to forget that the wealth of their nations comes forcefully extracted from those other places.

As I listen to them for these three hours, I have a particular thought. Multiculturalism did not fail. It is whiteness that failed. We have a ways to go.