I appreciate your willingness to engage in discussion about these complex issues without resorting to ad hominem attacks. I agree that it's important to hold space for individuals to achieve their best but think we differ with regard to how we conceptualize and understand selfhood and autonomy. The notion of an individual self that acts freely and has the capacity to achieve anything on its own is a feature of white privilege that cannot be generalized to other social groups because these groups do not have the structural power to succeed as easily as white people given white supremacy's differential allocations of resources to privileged communities. In other words, part of what allows us white folks to suceed is the fact that social systems have been designed to benefit us at the expense of racialized others. We cannot give our privilege to Black people for the same reason a heterosexual couple cannot give safety to a gay couple who holds hands in public--systems are beyond individual control and there is nothing marginalized bodies can do to evade punishment for existing. Some marginalized folks do indeed succeed but this doesn't mean that they weren't punished or that the same kind of success is therefore equally possible for everyone else. It's easy to think that jurisprudence exists and the system is fair as possible when that system has been designed to protect you. The system is neither fair nor just from marginalized perspectives which is why sometimes politics are arranged around marginalized identities so that something can be done to address what would otherwise continue as systematic exclusion from the resources needed to live happy and healthy lives.

Individual existence is always in reference to something else, so "pure individuality" does not exist. The person is inseparable from the environment and it's also physically impossible to pull oneself up by their bootstraps--doing so would involve violating a few laws of physics in a miraculous display of the American dream. White people can easily feel like their successes are due solely to their own efforts because they do not confront or have to navigate strucutral barriers to their success. In fact, white communities actually benefit from maintaining the structural forces that abuse and profit off of non-white bodies. Individual lives cannot be understood in isolation from environments in the same way that no word can be defined independently of other words.

I actually wrote an essay about individualism and whiteness here that I would love to hear what you think of it:

https://medium.com/@dlshultz/on-whiteness-and-individualism-5cf8f8367d35

It's unclear what white people should do with our privilege, but I think we should use it to have discussions like these with other white people. I want to reiterate that I am grateful for your willingness to engage in respectful discussion and wish that these kinds of white-on-white dialogues occurred more frequently. All humans exist in relation, and I think the better we understand each other the more healthily we can relate to ourselves.