Friday Night with a Dose of White Male Certainty

It was Friday night, and I was doing what I often do—mindlessly scrolling social media. That's where I found it—a white man telling me that criticizing ICE for killing people in the streets was basically the same as arguing for making the world more dangerous for his white daughter. Because of the rapists, apparently, that he seemed to think I was defending.

Photo by Ian ODonnell on Unsplash

He was responding to something I'd written about ICE killing people with little to no accountability. His argument, as best I could follow it: ICE—like police—is dealing with murderers, rapists, drug dealers, human traffickers. Removing violent people who came from other countries is why he supports the agency.

I told him I'm against people being shot in the streets. I don't want cops doing that either. And here's the thing—most people ICE detains aren’t violent offenders , and many have no criminal convictions. I told him I'm against how the violence, ICE's and police's both, falls disproportionately on Black and brown people.

What I was really trying to say was this: if it's acceptable to assign criminality to Black and brown people without proof, just to feel safer, then Black and brown people become less safe. Not safer. His stance wasn't a justification for force. It was the thing making unjustifiable force more likely.

He came back with his Mexican friends. Beautiful families. Here legally. People he says he stands with—offered up, it seemed, as evidence he couldn't possibly be part of the problem.

He said this while I was telling him, in the same conversation, that his position on ICE and police accountability makes life harder and more dangerous for my own family. Multiracial. Multinational. Just as real as his friends. People he also says he cares about.

Here's what particularly troubled me about this exchange—this wasn’t some internet stranger. This man knows me. He knows I'm white and female, like his daughter. He knows my partner is a Black immigrant man who speaks with an accent, and that our kids are biracial. He knows they fit the profile ICE is targeting.

He knows we live in a city where ICE has been brutal. That my partner and kids walk the same streets, daily, where people—including U.S. citizens—have been abducted or shot by ICE. He knows my partner, despite being here legally every single day since he arrived, has faced racism from immigration agents, security guards, and police. Legal status hasn't protected him from being read as suspicious just because of how he looks and sounds.

He knows all of that. Or at least we’ve told him all of that. And his response was to tell me that my speaking up is what makes things less safe. Less safe, that is, for women who look like me.

But what actually makes white women like me unsafe? It’s white men. Most violence in this country is not stranger-on-stranger, and it is not cross-racial in the way whiteness taught me to fear or imagine it. FBI and Bureau of Justice Statistics data show that roughly 79–86% of white homicide victims are killed by white offenders—homicide in the U.S. is overwhelmingly intraracial.

The same holds for sexual assault. RAINN's data, pulled from Department of Justice statistics, shows strangers commit only about 31% of rapes. The rest—an acquaintance, an intimate partner, a relative—someone the victim already knew and, often, trusted. Depending on how you count it, somewhere between 60% and 80% of sexual assault is committed by someone familiar.

Put those two facts side by side and the picture gets very clear, very fast—the people statistically most likely to hurt me, or his white daughter, are white men we already know. Not strangers. Not immigrants. Not Black or brown men.

And the "dangerous immigrant" story doesn't hold up any better under the numbers. A Department of Justice–funded study of Texas arrest records found undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of U.S.-born citizens for violent crime. Cato Institute research using census data found the same thing nationally. People here illegally are incarcerated at about half the rate of native-born citizens, and legal immigrants at roughly a quarter of that rate.

There is no immigrant crime wave. There's an old story that says otherwise. And a lot of white people still seem to be telling it.

So here's a white man, handing me wrong information about my own safety, pointing at a danger that isn't real— people like my Black immigrant partner, my brown son—while telling me in the very same breath that he stands with my family.

None of this is theoretical or inconsequential, and that's what makes it so hard to ignore. 2025 was the deadliest year on record for deaths in ICE custody. Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights documented 39 deaths in the agency's first year back under this administration, compared to a handful in prior years. The Associated Press has reported that at least nine people have been killed in enforcement operations since 2025—and not a single ICE agent has been criminally charged.

That's the accountability gap I was trying to name. The one this white man told me was making his white daughter less safe to even talk about out loud.

I can't help but hear misogyny and whiteness braided together in what he said. A white man telling a white woman what really threatens people like her, and expecting her to take his word for it. Over her own lived experience. Over the data right in front of both of us.

This never really felt like it was about protecting his daughter. If it were, I think he'd want the real numbers—not the same old story whiteness keeps handing out. It felt more like protecting himself—protecting white men, and whiteness in general, from having to look too closely. From the discomfort of realizing that the thing he was taught to fear isn't the thing that's actually dangerous.

I grew up white in this country, a lot of it inside white conservative evangelical spaces. That gave me an early, thorough education in trusting white men before I trusted myself. The white men who decided what everyone who wasn't male or white was worth. The white men who were sure they understood my life better than I did, and told me so. I was taught they had my best interests at heart—that trusting them was the safety.

I'm still unlearning that. Whiteness doesn't only show up as slurs or blatant racism. More often, for me, it shows up quieter than that—a steady, often unspoken invitation to defer. To trust a white man's assessment over data. Over the testimony of Black and brown people. Over my own reasoning, knowledge, skills, and experience.

Whiteness taught me to equate Blackness and brownness with criminality, and whiteness with belonging—without ever once being asked to prove either. And it taught me that authority itself—a badge, a uniform, a business suit, an agency like ICE—is trustworthy, because authority in this country has almost always worn a white face and spoken with a white man's certainty. That seems to be a big part of why it feels so easy for so many white folks to take ICE's version of events at face value.

Authority is whiteness, in the sense that many of us white folks have been trained, generation after generation, to hear them as the same voice.

So a lot of white people I know don’t seem to be asking whether the people ICE is targeting, harming, or killing actually did what they're accused of—let alone whether anyone's being held accountable. The assumption that they're dangerous already feels like all the proof anyone needs.

That's the real cost, if I'm honest. Whiteness never taught me how to actually protect myself. It taught me who to fear instead—and it picked wrong. It kept me eyeing Black and brown neighbors with suspicion while the real risk sat closer to home, in the very places I'd been told were safe.

I want to say something directly to the white men I hope are still reading this, I don't think most of you sat down and decided to defend a broken accountability system. I think you were taught, the way I was taught, that danger only ever points outward —and that questioning it might feel like betraying your own people, or your own daughter's safety, or someone you love. I understand it. I learned it too.

But we can't protect the people we love by looking away from what's true. If you want your white daughter safe, your white loved ones safe, the data says look closer to home, not further out. If you want to actually stand with families like mine, standing means believing us when we tell you what we're living—not correcting us with a story that got handed to you and never got checked.

This is a story about accuracy. About who gets to decide who's dangerous and who isn't, and whether that decision gets to go unquestioned. I'd rather sit in the discomfort of asking than keep repeating something that isn't true and isn't keeping anyone safer. Including you and yours.