Yes, very well said dogscoff.
But, where to begin... perhaps a little background.
My parents were born and raised in San Diego, and as far as I can tell, experienced very little in racial prejudice, being in a mixed Caucasian (hispanic and non-hispanic) communities. I, however, was born in San Diego and raised in rural Pennsylvania. As of a few years ago, one of my neighbors openly flew the Confederate flag. Everybody was white, and the only time anyone would usually see a black person is when the juvinile hall in the next county brought their inmates to parades as a drill team. So, from my parents, I got a message of tolerance for all people, and the lesson of not discriminating based on something so trivial as skin color.
From everyone else, though, I got full-on racism. It was a common view that black people should still be slaves. Everyone believed that all blacks are criminals, only some hide it better than others. Everyone felt that whites are superior in everything except violence and basketball. While I lived there, it was easy to just ignore all of the blatant racism that existed there. I just didn't know anyone who was affected by it, and as far as I knew, it didn't matter.
Then I came to school in Los Angeles. I met people that racism affects every day. It is much clearer to me the things that people of other races go through on a daily basis. A friend of mine purposely buys only bright clothing, because if he ever wears anything dark, he is immediately surrounded by suspicion that he is going to steal something, or already has. And if it was me put into exactly the same situation where he would be regarded with suspicion, there would be very different reactions.
A few years ago, there were some laptop thefts in the building where I lived. Basically some people were stupid, and walked out leaving all their doors open. Nobody saw people taking the laptops. But the police got a call from a white girl saying that the thieves were in a specific room, she was sure of it. The "thieves" turned out to be the black friends of a black girl that lived in the room next to the girl who called the police. They had been visiting a few times a week for months previous. They had never been on the floor where the thefts occured. Yet the word of one stupid white girl was enough to warrant an hour long interrogation of these innocent men, and a search of their vehicles. I guarantee that nowhere near that response would happen if the complaint was against a white or an asian male.
As for incidents of minorities becoming violent with white people, the occurance of that which is racially motivated is so small to statistically be considered zero. The black girls beating up the white girl? That doesn't happen without some sort of provokation. After the fact, it's difficult to find out what happened, because the white girl will claim she did nothing wrong and is entirely innocent. The black girls won't say what the provokation was because in hindsight, what most likely was a heat of the moment thing isn't enough to justify what they did, and they believe that nobody will listen to them anyway; and they're probably right.
As things are now, minorities are in a white-dominated culture. I don't know the exact numbers, but I believe fairly soon, whites will not even make up half of the population in the United States, but will still control most of the political and economic power. The cultural celebrations you speak of are an attempt to counteract this extreme power differential. The same goes for things like affirmative action. It's a common misconception among a lot of white people that affirmative action says you must hire a certain amount of minorities, or else some negative consequence occurs. On the contrary, the majority of affirmative action laws on the books simply require that due consideration be given to each candidate, and institutes policies requiring that minorities be given interviews for positions. Laws having quotas have routinely been struck down, and the ones that hold are the ones that will require employers and institutions to interview minorities and then choose the BEST candidate, when before, it would be all too common for all the non-white applications to be thrown out, and never even make it to the interview process. The laws are not there to put whites at a disadvantage, but instead to counterbalance the prejudice held by those in power.
Come back and complain about all this stuff when you have been a minority for a significant period of time, and been subjected to the whims (ranging from indifferent to malicious) of those in power around you. Until then, realize that you have far more advantages than other minorities in the Western world, and keep your complaints about so-called unfairness to yourself, because they aren't valid. When you can see the bigger picture, you'll realize that.
Anyway, that was a bit long-winded, even though I tried to stay clear of the points that have already been made in Kwok's and dogscoff's posts.
And Fyron, it was almost a valiant effort, but you failed
