A Beginning I Never Planned.

A new year always nudges me toward beginnings.

Toward origin stories. Toward the question: How did I get here?

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Lately, I’ve been thinking about two beginnings in particular. The start of how I came to examine whiteness—and the early days of this blog. Neither of those were inevitable. I wasn’t always interested in what it means to be white in the U.S. And I never imagined myself a writer.

Both arrived quietly and slowly. Through relationships. Through experiences that unsettled me. Through moments where something didn’t quite add up.

Have you ever had that feeling—when you suddenly realize how much you’ve misunderstood something that’s been right in front of you the whole time? Not hidden. Not secret. Just… unseen?

That’s what happened to me with whiteness.

It wasn’t an instant epiphany. More like a slow accumulation of truths that became harder and harder to ignore. Things like: to live in the U.S. is to live inside an unequal system organized by race. That whiteness was the way I learned to move through that system. That while white lives can be deeply painful and hard, they are not made harder because we are white. That learning about race is not a one-time awakening but a continual practice—of remembering, unlearning, resisting. And that this racial system binds all of us, which makes pushing against it exhausting and something we cannot do alone.

That’s not the full list. But this is a story about beginnings.

Looking at me, most people would quickly place me as white. I always knew my whiteness was visible. I just chose not to see it.

Somewhere along the way, I learned that acknowledging whiteness was something to feel bad about. I worried that naming myself as white meant aligning with the people who created whiteness as a position of power. As if saying I am white meant I endorse racism. Add to that the growing awareness that my skin afforded me safety and unearned benefit—and shame took over.

So I ran from whiteness.

I told myself my experience with race was limited. That I wasn’t qualified. That other people were the experts. I framed myself as a novice who didn’t quite belong in conversations about race. I convinced myself I lacked a real racial community or story.

But that wasn’t true.

I know a lot about being white. I’ve lived it my whole life. I just let that knowledge go unnamed and unexamined.

Once I let myself really notice whiteness, other things came into better focus too. The racial inequity all around me. How it’s constantly reinforced—interpersonally, institutionally, culturally. How it feeds me distorted explanations for inequality. How it reassures me that racist ideas aren’t really racist. How it offers white people connection and belonging through an illusion of shared comfort and innocence.

Seeing all of that made me want to do something. And at the same time, I had no idea what that something was.

Talking about being white left me feeling clumsy and exposed. I compared myself to others. I felt overwhelmed. Defensive. Afraid.

Instead of staying engaged, I shut down. Eventually it became clear that if I wanted to do anything meaningful about racial inequity, I had to start with honesty. I had to reckon with my own location in this system. White is my position—whether I like it or not.

That realization was deeply uncomfortable.

I think whiteness unsettles a lot of white people. I see it in the tightening of faces. The shift in energy. The awkward silences. The way conversations pivot or stall when the word whiteness enters the room. I recognize it because I’ve felt it too. There’s still a part of me that instinctively reacts.

But whiteness isn’t a personality trait. It isn’t who I am at my core. And examining it isn’t an attack on me—or on individual white people.

Whiteness is bigger than that. It’s the structure holding our racial system in place. It binds me to a system I didn’t create but still benefit from. And when I refuse to examine it, I help keep that system intact.

I had to ask myself why naming my connection to race felt so threatening. Why discomfort felt like danger. How any of the things I felt about race measured up to the real harm of racism.

I also had to move past my fear of speaking—especially with other white people. And yes, the imposter syndrome was loud. I wasn’t a writer. I still don’t always feel like one. Writing publicly about race felt risky and exposing. But I knew that my inner world couldn’t stay private forever. I needed accountability. I needed relationship. I needed to keep shame from running the show, like it had so many times before.

That’s how this blog began.

I started writing because I couldn’t keep doing this work alone. Whiteness isn’t something we come to understand in isolation. It lives in shared stories, shared norms, shared silences. And so unlearning it has to happen together—out loud, imperfectly, relationally.

Along the way, something surprising happened. There was relief. Even hope.

Acknowledging that I’m white didn’t require me to pledge allegiance to whiteness or fix everything all alone. It didn’t make me a terrible person or have me hating myself. People didn’t disappear from my life en masse the way I feared they might. This work hasn’t asked me to be flawless—I still mess up. I still say racist things. I still have racist thoughts.

And this isn’t about drowning in guilt or trying to become a “good” white person.

It’s about something bigger than me.

My hope is that we do the work that’s ours to do. That white people—large numbers of us—can be counted among those who helped dismantle racism. That we stop recycling the same tired stories about race and especially whiteness. That we learn to stay present to the pain racism causes—without turning away, making excuses, or centering ourselves. That we loosen our grip on the belonging whiteness offers and imagine something truer.

A belonging rooted in shared humanity. In mutual care. In our deep need for one another.

A beginning that moves us toward wholeness.