Can Whiteness Be Good?

“Mommy, your skin is white and you are good to us… and other white people love us too…”

Image of the author’s young daughter

She looks at me, her eyes filled with worry and I hope she doesn’t see me wince. A familiar ache fills my chest. It’s the pang that comes each time my biracial kids look to me for help in understanding the anguish they meet around race.

I don’t have to teach her about whiteness, she already knows. At 7 years old, she’s aware of how, in our culture, the worth of white people like me was grown and preserved by devaluing and cheating those who look like her. Her years have shown her that her humanity and worth are not a given, but are subjects for debate. In her brown skin, she knows the sting of being counted as less and other than white.

But, she also knows the goodness of the white people in her life. She is confident of the love and tenderness she’s known from us. She asks me, can whiteness be trusted? Can it be good?

I’ve wrestled with this too. It isn’t that I question my potential to do good and it’s not that I doubt whether white people generally have the capacity for it. Just like my 7 year old, my lived experience tells me that we do.

My query is rooted in the way power is structured and who gets access to resources. It’s situated in the how and why white was created as a racial category and in the stories we tell of whiteness. I’ve long been trying to work out what to do with whiteness — something designed to exploit and exclude and something that my white skin tethers me to.

Lately, though, I’m finding that maybe I don’t need to ask whether whiteness can be good. I’ve begun to wonder if putting energy towards inquiries like this keeps me from deeper transformation. Maybe, I don’t need to redeem whiteness.

Let me back up. I know how to tell a story where white people are good. Who wants to be the bad guy, right? The grand narrative I’d developed about who I was in the world, includes a story of virtuous whiteness. Being white was about coming beside, of standing with the oppressed no matter our difference. It was informed by the story I learned of my country, influenced by my faith, and shaped by my understanding of heritage.

I imagined myself, with my reddish hair and dramatically fair skin, having a strong Irish lineage. Paying little attention to the rest of my genetic ancestry, being Irish was a central piece of the story I told about being white. My people knew persecution at the hands of those with power. It was a story of the underdog, of resistance, and of overcoming. I pictured myself akin with luminaries like abolitionist and Irish freedom fighter Daniel O’Connell.

I come from Quakers — some of the first white people to collectively stand for racial equality. Going to Quaker meetings with my great grandma, I witnessed a markedly different space and community from the hierarchical structure and restrictive participation I met in other faith traditions of my childhood. The Quakers first introduced me to the idea that God is for and in all people, that the divine in us binds us to one another. I attached tenants of Quaker belief to principles and characteristics I saw in my family — they became a part of my story about who we were.

I am a child of the north, born and raised in the north eastern region of the U.S. We northerners fought to end slavery and were a different sort of white people than the white people of the south. Even within my family, I sensed a distinction between our relatives who lived in the south and those of us from the north. I felt pride in this difference, it shaped how I viewed our whiteness. I was kin to those who fought for the ideals of our democracy — we were the good white people.

It was a flawed story, it was my creation, and it served a purpose — I needed my whiteness to be good. The good white person story that I wrote for myself was possible because it fit with a larger social narrative about the purity and individuality of white skin and white femininity. It’s a narrative that supports me cultivating a positive view of who I am and what I can achieve and one that is woven throughout U.S. history and culture.

At heart, though, maintaining this story came at an expense. I struggled to reconcile truths I witnessed about whiteness with what I’d told myself about my whiteness. I was blind to the ways that my story and the stories I told of my people did not match up with lived truths and structural realities of our world.

With my claim on Irish heritage I left out how, because of our white skin, the Irish in the U.S. were granted entry to privilege and resources in ways that people of color aren’t. The parts of my story that leaned on faith and a Yankee upbringing, didn’t involve how racism and separation are present and shape all of communal life and locale in the U.S. My story lacked mutuality — it positioned me as spectator but not participant in the problem of racial inequity. It let me escape the pain I felt about being white in a world where whiteness divides and dominates.

Instead of facing and working against marginalization, exclusion, and my part in it, my story reaffirmed whiteness. This story let me believe that my whiteness was superior — that I’d figured out how to be white in a way that aligns with my values of wholeness, human worth, and interconnectedness. It’s been a colossal waste of time and energy — creating and sustaining a story about my whiteness being good.

In lieu of this, I wish that I would have done the work of being vulnerable about my connection to race and told myself the truth about what my white skin means in the context of my country. I wish that I had developed patterns of questioning the racial status quo rather than practicing how to defend it. I wish that I hadn’t created a way for me to set aside the oppression of whiteness and offload responsibility onto others.

I was charmed by fragmented truth and distracted with comparison. My story said race was salient for some people and that whiteness was mostly inconsequential to my life’s course, relationships, and understanding of who I am. But, my creation and preservation of a story about my whiteness, points to just how inescapable race is for me. Though it’s often unacknowledged, whiteness is an ever present part of our social story and of my unique story.

Even if I didn’t establish categories of race or purpose for white people to gain at the expense of others, for as long as I’m racialized as white, I’m tied to how whiteness harms. Before I could begin to answer for whiteness, I had to release my need for my whiteness to be good. As this yearning dulls, I’m better able to resist the impulse to defend or justify whiteness. Whiteness never needed a defender anyway.

My hope is that I’ll remake my connection to whiteness so that it’s no longer about me being a good white person. I’ve found freedom in this. Being linked to whiteness doesn’t feel like a judgement or an attack against my person like it once did. It’s a statement of my social position. White is how my people fit into the larger story of race in my country. This small realization frees me up so that I can actually be accountable to whiteness.

What does that mean? Well, for today, it means that I no longer fool myself into believing that being a good white person is an effective response to racial inequity. It’s pushing through the fear that I’ll get things wrong, accepting that I’m going to mess up and taking care as I do it anyway.

Here I am — in my own mind decidedly not a writer — composing publicly about my reckoning with race. I’m working out my relationship with whiteness in the open because I’m not white by myself but through relationship and social identity. I’m doing it in this way because I’ve found this work around shared story better done in community. Being vulnerable here helps ensure that shame and fear don’t get the last word — like they did when I made up a story about my whiteness being good.

What I’ve found is, what I’m doing right now — taking apart whiteness — it doesn’t have to involve whiteness being made good. I’d rather see my work as striving for mutual liberation and the establishment of a culture where collective care is the norm. I work to free myself as I work to free others — because the racial structure we live under is crushing to all of humanity.

I hope too that white people can come together to free ourselves from the ways we might be deluded as to our entanglement in the system of race. The way I see it, this work is about pursuing truth, establishing mutual obligation, and nourishing connection, belonging, and wholeness. The goal is creating new meaning and new ways of being together which brings more freedom and wholeness for everyone.

I let a story about being a good white person get in the way of my working towards what really matters to me. I’m still unsure how to tell my story of being white, but I know it’s got to be one that doesn’t need for whiteness to be good. That kind of story hasn’t benefited me and doesn’t make things more equal. I’ve found something truer and richer in letting it go.